A group of 27 foreign policy, security, and Middle East experts sent a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama on this week criticizing the administration's counterterrorism-focused approach to Yemen and urging the White House to heed policy recommendations geared toward "achieving a successful democratic transition" in the war-torn Gulf  country, which experienced a popular uprising last year that ousted longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Although the United States has "drastically increased the number of drone strikes" against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the letter states, this strategy "jeopardizes our long-term national security goals." A comprehensive focus on Yemen's economic and political problems, it continues, "will better serve the stability of Yemen and, accordingly, our national security interests, rather than ... direct military involvement."

The letter, spearheaded by the Yemen Policy Initiative, a dialogue organized by the Atlantic Council and the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), outlines several diplomatic, political, economic, humanitarian, and security policy recommendations that include increasing assistance to democracy-building institutions, working with the international community to immediately address Yemen's "food security needs," sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Yemeni capital Sanaa, and rethinking the strategy of drone strikes, which the signatories argue "could strengthen the appeal of extremist groups."

"The real essence [of the letter] was that we have a new government in Yemen, and what we need to do is recalibrate or rebalance the relationship to make it clear to both the Yemenis and to the American people that our interests and the focus of our efforts there are not solely AQAP," former U.S. ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine told The Cable. "Al Qaeda is a short-term, immediate issue ... we need to took to the medium-term and long-term."

Stephen McInerney, executive director of POMED, argues that while U.S. policy in Yemen is "shortsighted" and "too narrow," AQAP is still a real threat.

"By no means are we downplaying counterterrorism issues," he said in a short interview with The Cable.

U.S. diplomats were actively involved in negotiating the power transfer agreement that resulted in Saleh's official ouster in November 2011, and President Obama signed an executive order in May green-lighting sanctions against parties that try to disrupt the transition. In April, the White House authorized a campaign of stepped-up drone strikes against terrorists in Yemen. The Yemeni military, under new President Abd-Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi, has recently concentrated on routing AQAP militants from their strongholds in southern Yemen and claims to be making progress.

There are also indications that the Obama administration is taking a broader approach to its Yemen policy. Earlier this month, a delegation from the U.S. House of Representatives visited Sanaa, where congressmen met with government officials as well as businesspeople, NGO representatives, and civil--society leaders. Last week, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) director Rajiv Shah also traveled to Sanaa and announced that the agency would give an additional $52 million to Yemen in 2012.

It's a start, the letters' signatories say, but they'd like to see more.

"The U.S. does have a broad policy of engaging both in security cooperation and development assistance, but unfortunately most Yemenis don't perceive U.S. engagement to be that way," Danya Greenfield, deputy director at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council, told The Cable. "We need to clearly articulate that the U.S. is really invested in their long-term development ... to ensure that there is ongoing sustainable security both for Yemen and the U.S."

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."

The Obama administration and Congress are working busily but separately to update the nation's export control regime, which regulates the export of sensitive technologies abroad and hasn't seen real reform since the Export Administration Act (EAA) was last rewritten in 1979. Today, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) will unveil a comprehensive bill to update laws on how technology exports are regulated.

"The current export control statute is an out-moded relic of the Cold War that focuses on economic warfare against old adversaries and fails to account for today's threats," Berman said in a statement sent to The Cable. "Updating this law is essential to our national security and necessary to sustain our cutting edge technology sector and create new, high quality jobs. A new export control law is necessary to preserve our competitive advantage."

Berman's bill, which can be found here (PDF) would alter the list of dual-use technologies -- those export items which have both military and civilian uses -- to reflect the changes in technology and the marketplace that have taken place over the last 30 years.

"The U.S. still controls -- unilaterally -- high performance computers and machine tools that are now freely available in global commerce," Berman said. "We need to re-focus our licensing and enforcement resources on items that we can control effectively."

There a bipartisan consensus that the export control regime needs to be updated but no real consensus on exactly what to do. The EAA technically lapsed once from 1994 to 2000 and again from 2001 to the present but the White House has been able to keep the provisions in force by using what's known as emergency presidential authority to extend its provisions every year since.

But those reauthorizations haven't taken into account changes in what particular technologies should or should not be regulated, Berman argues, and restrict the competitiveness of U.S. industries in the evolving global marketplace.

A key feature of Berman's bill is that it "modernizes the definition of national security to include sustaining U.S. leadership in science, manufacturing and our high-tech workforce, and requires the president to balance traditional security goals with maintaining U.S. academic and manufacturing leadership in applying controls," according to a fact sheet (PDF) provided to The Cable.

In some ways, the bill would allow more U.S. technologies to be exported to all countries, such as industrial production machine tools, industrial lasers, high performance computers, some computer chips, and night vision and infared technology, which are now available globally.

In other ways, the bill would tighten controls by adding threats that didn't exist in 1979, such as technologies pertaining to internet crime, cyber warfare, bioengineering, and certain aspects of nanotechnology.

"Berman's bill just doesn't seek to remove things, but it also directs the president to keep the control system current with what technologies need to be restricted," a committee aide said.

Berman, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, knows his bill isn't the only game in town. Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) is also said to be preparing a bill, but her legislation would be more of a reauthorization of the current law with specific tweaks, as opposed to Berman's more comprehensive overhaul.

The White House also has its own ongoing initiative, an intensive interagency process led by Mike Froman, the senior director for international economics at the National Security Council. There have been principal-level and deputy-level meetings on the issue; the technical working group includes representation from Eric Hirshorn's shop at Commerce, Ellen Tauscher's bureau at State, and Jim Miller's staff at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The White House is said by congressional aides to be considering a major government reorganization on this issue, which would potentially merge the export regimes under the EAA and Arms Control Export Act, which is not covered in Berman's bill. The White House is also working with former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who co-chaired a National Research Council study on export controls.

"The national security controls on science and technology are broken. They weaken national security and reduce [economic] competitiveness," Scowcroft testified in 2009.

Berman's staff knows their bill isn't fast tracked to become law but sees it as a way to spur the discussion.

"We're at the stage legislatively of putting ideas on the table against a backdrop of high-level interest in the Congress and in the Obama administration," the committee aide said.

Much has been written about the State Department's intensive effort to deal with the release of secret diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks, but there is also a separate, massive effort to deal with the crisis by the embassies of foreign governments, aided by the paid lobbyists and consultants who represent them.

Working as a Washington lobbyist for a foreign country is usually a pretty sweet gig. These hired guns keep governments informed on anything in town that could affect their country's diplomatic or political interests -- for a hefty monthly fee, of course. Lobbyists apply added elbow grease when relevant legislation needs cheerleading on Capitol Hill. Consultants work harder when foreign officials are in town or there's a pressing bilateral issue. But overall, crises are relatively rare.

Not this week, though: It's all hands on deck on K Street, as firms are fielding frantic and constant requests from diplomats in foreign capitals, trying to make sense of the released and soon-to-be-released WikiLeaks State Department cables.

"When was the last time that every embassy and every consultancy in town went into crisis mode simultaneously," one consultant with clients in Europe and Asia told The Cable. This consultant said that his firm has been totally swamped since Sunday's initial document dump with panicked emails, rushed conference calls, and requests for information.

"Basically you have governments that have absolutely no idea what's in these documents. And everybody from senior officials to embassy personnel to Washington consultants are in a mad scramble to go through each new batch of documents as they come out to identify items that are potential vulnerabilities, paint their bosses in an unflattering light, or reveal some sensitive information," the consultant said. "The entire chain of command is in panic mode with every new release."

Compounding the difficulty of the damage control effort is the fact that nobody knows what new revelations are coming down the pike: Only 291 of the WikiLeaks promised 251,287 documents have been released thus far.  

At the embassies themselves, foreign diplomats are working day and night to try to collect as much information as possible about the coming leaks that reference their own country. One European diplomat said that his embassy had set up an around-the-clock monitoring system to make sure that if something breaks, they will be ready to handle it immediately.

"We are in 24-hour mode, somebody is always watching and waiting. When we [at the embassy] sleep they [back home] watch, and when they sleep we watch," the diplomat told The Cable.

Embassies have been getting apology phone calls from the State Department directly, but they aren't waiting for the U.S. government to explain it all; they are working to figure out their exposure themselves or with their hired help.

One of the main tasks asked of diplomats, lobbyists, and consultants dealing with the crisis in Washington is to try and collect cables that haven't been officially released yet, but are nonetheless being circulated inside the diplomatic community. Nobody knows exactly where all the extra cables coming from, but WikiLeaks has said it would give country specific cables to local foreign media outlets.

One Washington lobbyist who represents countries in the Middle East said that local press in several countries he works on is reporting on cables that haven't yet been reported on by the media outlets who had advance access to the documents. The lobbyist speculated that foreign governments may also be selectively leaking cables they've come across in order to spin them in their own favor before WikiLeaks or local media has a chance to weigh in.

"New leaked cables are coming from weird sources, think tanks, the countries involved. There's a lot of stuff being quoted in local press from cables that haven't been released yet and I have no idea where they are coming from," this lobbyist said.

Getting out ahead of stories that are using information in unreleased cables is a big part of what Washington lobbyists and consultants are struggling to do this week. "It's really hard to counter something that nobody has seen," the lobbyist said.

There's some agreement among the beltway bandit community, however, that the disclosures in the cables, while perhaps embarrassing, aren't likely to have significant effects on foreign embassy interactions with the U.S. government. "Our analysis is not whether it will have an effect on bilateral relations, but more what the impact will be on the public perception of that country," said one consultant who represents an embassy that was highlighted in the first tranche of leaks.

That said, the lobbyists and consultants interviewed for this article all had different ideas of how aggressive embassies and their Washington hired hands should be in mitigating the damage.

One consultant who represents countries not in the immediate line of fire right now argued that best approach is to lay low and let the media focus on the most salacious items.

"You just keep your head down and hope that there's so much of it that you don't get the worst of it," the consultant said.

One lobbyist was recommending to her clients not to try to use the leaked information in their dealings with the State Department going forward. "No sane government can use this to their advantage because it would hurt their relations with the U.S.," the lobbyist said.

Another consultant advocated a more aggressive approach. "There is a treasure trove of information and making strategic use of the information will be the job of thousands of people in Washington going forward," said this consultant, who represents a Latin American foreign government not yet implicated in the crisis.

It's only day three of Cablegate and the WikiLeaks revelations show no signs of slowing down as of yet. And though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Kazakhstan for the OSCE summit, in Washington, the foreign embassies and their paid representatives are working overtime to unearth and mitigate documents that might be damaging. The levels of concern are all over the map, one lobbyist said.

"The spectrum goes from panicked to intrigued, optimistic to ape shit."

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates sat down with French Minister of Defense Herve Morin Feb. 8 in Paris, he had a harsh assessment of the Russian government and some severe differences with his French counterpart on several issues of international security.

"SecDef (Gates) observed that Russian democracy has disappeared and the government was an oligarchy run by the security services," read a cable about the meeting classified by Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow and leaked to the self described whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The website posted Sunday just over 200 of the over 250,000 sensitive State Department documents it claims to have in its possession.

"President [Dmitry] Medvedev has a more pragmatic vision for Russia than [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin, but there has been little real change," Gates told Morin, according to the cable.

Gates was pressing Morin to rethink the French sale of the amphibious assault ship the Mistral to Russia, a sale that several NATO member countries and the country of Georgia loudly protested around the time of the meeting. The cable details how strongly Gates pressed the French on the issue and how strongly he was rebuffed.

Gates' comments about the Russian leadership were an attempt to explain why he and many central and eastern European countries couldn't accept Morin's statement that the West must trust the Russians when they claimed the ship would not be used for aggressive purposes. In fact, Morin told Gates that he personally pushed hard for the sale, despite that Russia has not lived up to its agreements following its 2008 war with Georgia. Ultimately, the sale of the Mistral went through and U.S. officials never publicly condemned it.

Gates' frank analysis of the Russian government matches the take of top Russian opposition leaders, such as Russia's former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who told Foreign Policy last month that, "We have no democracy at all. We don't have any future of a democratic state. Everything has been lost, everything has been taken from the people by the authorities."

But the comments go far beyond what top U.S. officials have said in public about their concerns of the retreat of democracy and good governance in Russia. In a separate cable sent in late 2008, the U.S. embassy in Moscow reported that Medvedev "plays Robin to Putin's Batman," the Guardian reported.

In their February meeting, Morin told Gates that expanding NATO to include Georgia would weaken NATO Article 5, which provides for a common defense. In response to that remark, Gates "stated his preference for NATO to focus its efforts in the Euro-Atlantic area, perhaps extending into the Mediterranean," the cable stated.

The cable also reveals how strongly the French defense minister opposed U.S. plans for missile defense in Europe, especially the drive to link the plans with NATO, as was codified at the Lisbon summit only last week. Morin said the Obama administration's new plan would "give publics a false sense of security," and argued for a system based more on deterrence. He asked Gates who the system was aimed at and told Gates European countries don't have "infinite" funds to spend on such a system.

Gates replied that the system did add to deterrence and would have increased the capability as opposed to the Bush administration's plan. The new scheme also allowed Russian participation, which was impossible under the previous design, he said.

On Iran, Gates told Morin that Israel had the capability of striking Iran's nuclear facilities, but "he didn't know if they would be successful." He also told Morin that even a successful Israeli strike would only delay Iran's nuclear program "by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker."

Read the full cable after the jump:

Read on

In a stunning rebuke to members of his own caucus, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking Republican Richard Lugar (R-IN) said on Wednesday that the GOP is intentionally trying to put off a vote on the New START treaty with Russia, and avoiding a serious discussion about the treaty within the caucus.

"At the moment, the Republican caucus is tied up in a situation where people don't want to make choices," Lugar told reporters in the hallway of the Capitol building Wednesday. "No one wants to be counted. No one wants to talk about it."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a big show on Wednesday morning of doubling down on the administration's drive for a vote to ratify the treaty during the lame duck session of Congress. Committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA) expressed confidence that a deal with Republicans and their leader on New START, Jon Kyl (R-AZ), was close at hand.

But according to Lugar, the Republican leadership is preventing a debate on the treaty for the rest of the year because they don't want to force their rank-and-file members to take a position on the agreement.

Kerry and Kyl continued to meet on Wednesday, ostensibly to work out a deal based on the $84 billion the administration is promising Kyl for nuclear modernization in exchange for his support of the treaty. Kyl told The Cable that negotiations were going forward "in good faith," but Lugar suggested that's all a smoke screen and that the Republican leadership is committed to avoiding completion of the treaty for the foreseeable future.

"Every senator has an obligation in the national security interest to take a stand, to do his or her duty. Maybe people would prefer not to do his or her duty right now," he said. "Sometimes when you prefer not to vote, you attempt to find reasons not to vote."

Lugar argued that the intransigence within the Republican caucus is a result of the leadership's unwillingness to put current GOP senators in the crosshairs of the debate before the political terrain shifts in the Republicans' favor when the new Congress is sworn in.

"If you're a Republican, you anticipate that the lay of the land is going to be much more favorable in January and therefore would say, ‘If we do not have to make tough choices now, why make tough choices?'" Lugar explained.

Lugar wants the Democratic Senate leadership to cut off negotiations immediately and force a vote on New START now, to compel senators to get off the fence and to end the endless stalling coming from his own side of the aisle.

"I'm advising that the treaty should come on the floor so people will have to vote aye or nay [even if there's no deal]," he said. "I think when it finally comes down to it, we have sufficient number or senators who do have a sense of our national security. This is the time, this is the priority. Do it."

Delaying until next year is a worst case scenario that could delay the treaty's ratification for months or even years as new senators request additional time to study the issue, and the committee process begins all over again, he said.

"Endless hearings, markup, back to trying to get some time on the floor... It will be some time before the treaty is ever heard from again," Lugar said.

Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation -- especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the former Soviet Union.

If START fails, the cooperation between the United States and Russia on securing loose nukes could be imperiled, representing an even bigger risk for national security, Lugar said.

"There are still thousands of missiles out there. You better get that through your heads," he said, directing his comments to members of his own party.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's seven-hour marathon meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday in New York could signal a turning point in the effort to revive the stalled Middle East peace talks, as the administration works to resolve the dispute over Israeli settlement building by turning the focus to borders and security.

The Obama administration's latest strategy seems to have two main elements, according to a senior official's read out of the meeting and analysis by current and former officials on both sides.  First, the Obama administration is offering Netanyahu as many security guarantees as possible in order to give the Israeli government increased confidence to move to a discussion of the borders that would delineate the two future states. Second, the administration wants to work toward an understanding on borders so that both sides can know where they can and can't build for the duration of the peace process.

"If there in fact is progress in the next several months, I'm confident people will look back at this meeting between Secretary Clinton and Prime Minister Netanyahu as the foundation of the progress. It was that important," former Congressman Robert Wexler, now the president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, told The Cable.

Wexler said that President Obama had long been asking both the Israelis and the Palestinians for clarity on the territories they envisioned being part of their future states. The recent meeting, he said, could be an important step in that direction -- at least in clarifying Israel's position.

"I am hopeful that yesterday's meeting was the beginning of clarity in terms of Israel's visions about her own borders -- where does Israel want Israel's borders to be," said Wexler. "Because ultimately, we can't help our close friend until they share with us their own vision."

The meeting was the highest level interaction between the U.S. and Israeli governments since the last round of direct talks in September. Wexler said that while the two leaders didn't sit down with a map and draw lines around particular neighborhoods, the administration's switch to a focus on borders as a means of getting at the settlements problem was clear. "It's the only rational, sane way to proceed," he said. "Talking about borders and territories will by definition minimize the impact of the settlement issue."

Wexler said that by virtue of the fact that the meeting was seven hours, it's reasonable to assume that significant progress was made. "I think we're very close to creating that magic formula that satisfies both the Israelis and the Palestinians to come back to the table."

The head of the PLO mission in Washington, Maen Rashid Areikat, wasn't so sure. He pointed to the boilerplate statement that Clinton and Netanyahu issued after the meeting as evidence that no real breakthrough was achieved.

"Prime Minister Netanyahu and Secretary Clinton had a good discussion today, with a friendly and productive exchange of views on both sides. Secretary Clinton reiterated the United States' unshakable commitment to Israel's security and to peace in the region," the statement read.

But Areikat endorsed the idea of discussing borders ahead of the settlements issue, saying that's what the Palestinian side has been advocating all along.

"The conventional wisdom is that if we deal with the issue of the borders then we will be able, by default, to deal with the issue of settlements -- and if you can define the borders of the two states and agree on these borders, then each party can build in its own territory without being contested by the other party," Areikat told The Cable. "This is what everybody is aiming at.... Now whether the Americans are going to succeed in convincing the Israelis to do it, we have to wait and see."

Of course, the two sides disagree over the order of events even when discussing the border issue.

"The Palestinian position is that we need to agree on the borders, then we will discuss in parallel the security arrangements. The Israelis are saying no, we need to define first what the security arrangements are to project what the final borders will be," Areikat explained.

In what appears to be a recognition of the Israeli position, Clinton and her team apparently spent a good deal of their time with the Netanyahu team spelling out a long list of additional security guarantees the Obama administration is offering to Israel.

In a Friday morning conference call with Jewish community leaders, notes of which were provided to The Cable, the National Security Council's Dan Shapiro described several of the ways America has been advocating on behalf of Israel's security in recent months. They included increased U.S. diplomatic opposition to efforts to delegitimize Israel in international fora, continuing to block efforts to revive the Goldstone Report at the United Nations, promising to block condemnation of Israel at the United Nations for its raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara, and defeating resolutions aimed to expose Israel's nuclear program at the IAEA, and increasing pressure on Iran and Syria to stop their nuclear and proliferation activities.

The U.S. position on settlements has not officially changed, Shapiro said. The United States still believes that the Israeli settlement moratorium should be extended, but that Palestinians should stay in peace talks even if it is not. He said that President Obama -- who said Monday that Israeli settlement construction was "never helpful" to peace talks Israel announced further construction plans in East Jerusalem -- wasn't trying to publicly criticize Netanyahu with his remarks. He simply answered a question put to him in a direct way, said Shapiro.

The Clinton-Netanyahu meeting was the culmination of several days of intensive, personal attention to the issue by Clinton herself. On Tuesday, she held a joint news conference with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to announce $150 million in new U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority. On Wednesday, she met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit and Lieutenant General Omar Suleiman to discuss the Middle East peace process.

But in the Washington press, the seven-hour conversation was somewhat overshadowed by Netanyahu's meeting with incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). Unlike Clinton, Cantor publicly disclosed what he told Netanyahu.

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," read a statement from Cantor's office on the one-on-one meeting. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

Wexler said he didn't see a problem with Cantor's remarks or stance. "It's a perfectly natural, appropriate meeting to have," said Wexler, who pointed out that Netanyahu also met with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). "I don't believe he intended to play the president, the prime minister, or anyone else against one another."

But Areikat saw Cantor's stance as extremely unhelpful.

"This amounts to undermining the efforts of the U.S. to achieve peace," he said. "People like Eric Cantor who blindly oppose the Palestinians, they think they are helping Israeli interests but he is hurting Israeli interests. By making these statements they are hardening Israeli positions."

UPDATE: This story was updated to reflect that Shapiro was describing a list of ways America was already working on behalf of Israel's security, not a new list of incentives discussed in the Clinton-Netanyahu meeting.

Jim Jones was preparing to leave his job as national security advisor in early 2011, according to Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars. Ironically, controversy erupting from that very same book may have contributed to Jones speeding up that schedule by several months; President Obama will announce his departure today, and that his replacement will be his deputy, Tom Donilon.

Immediate reaction within the administration to Jones's resignation was consistent with the long-held view that Jones was never able to be effective as national security advisor because he was outside of Obama's inner circle and was intellectually and sometimes physically cut out of major foreign policy discussions.

"Jones always carried an ‘emeritus' air about him and appeared removed and distant from the day-to-day operations," one administration official told The Cable. "In six months, you will be hard pressed to find anyone in the administration who notices that Jones is no longer there."

In fact, Jones's distance from key White House staff was reported as early as May 2009. But the Woodward book, which included several salacious quotes that allegedly came from Jones, vividly described his tenure as one that was rocky from the start and only continued to deteriorate as he became more and more frustrated with all of the White House staff he was supposed to be working with.

Jones apparently didn't get along with most of the White House political advisors, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, senior advisor David Axelrod, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and NSC staffers Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert. Woodward reported that Jones called them the "water bugs," the "Politburo," the "Mafia" and the "campaign set." Jones almost quit once when one of the "water bugs" denied him access to Obama during an overseas trip to Europe.

The book revealed that Jones confronted Emanuel for dealing with Donilon instead of him, telling him once, "I'm the national security advisor. When you come down there, come see me."

Jones chose Donilon as his deputy at the insistence of Emanuel, despite having no personal connection to him, and later came to regret the choice. Woodward reported that Jones also worked to oust Lippert, whom he accused of leaking information about him to the media.

According to Woodward, Jones was shocked to be selected for the NSA post in the first place because he had no prior relationship whatsoever with Obama. But the president saw Jones as someone who could help him navigate the military, and perhaps even provide a counterweight to the Pentagon leadership due to his experience as Marine Corps commandant and head of NATO.

But if Obama wanted Jones to help him deal with the military, that also didn't bear out. Woodward details several instances where Jones finds himself in open conflict with the military brass, led by Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen. In the administration's debates over increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, Jones often raised the prospect of sending far fewer troops than the 40,000 requested by Mullen and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, arguing that the military hadn't proven its need for so many new troops.

The last salvo against Jones from Woodward came during the author's Oct. 5 interview with Charlie Rose, where he said that Jones had failed in his fundamental duty to give frank advice to the president because he held back on his assessment that only 20,000 additional troops were needed in Afghanistan.

Woodward heaped praise on Donilon, saying that he ran at 100 miles per hour compared to Jones' 35 mph. But not all of the characters in his book agreed. Woodward quotes Defense Secretary Bob Gates as saying that Donilon would be a "disaster" as national security advisor.

According to all accounts, Donilon has been the machine running the NSC for some time, chairing the crucial deputies committee meetings and making the trains run on time throughout the NSC. But Donilon is not viewed as a strategic thinker along the lines of someone like former NSA Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

"Donilon will represent continuity and I can't see any major shifts in policy stemming from the changeover," one administration source said.      

On one major issue, Jones and Donilon seemed to agree. Donilon is skeptical about the prospects for success in Afghanistan, for reasons similar to Jones's. Just after Obama announced the decision to add 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Donilon said to the NSC's Gen. Doug Lute, "My god, what have we got this guy into?," according to Woodward.

When the results of the international investigation into the sinking of the South Korean ship the Cheonan were released in May, the U.S. State Department was adamant that it believed North Korea was responsible -- and that the country would have to face some actual punishment for killing 46 innocent South Korea sailors.

"I think it is important to send a clear message to North Korea that provocative actions have consequences," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said May 21 while visiting her Japanese counterpart in Tokyo.

Fast forward to today, when the United Nations released a presidential statement which not only does not specify any consequences for the Kim Jong Il regime, but doesn't even conclude that North Korea was responsible for the attack in the first place.

The statement acknowledges that the South Korean investigation, which included broad international participation, blamed North Korea, and then "takes note of the responses from other relevant parties, including from the DPRK, which has stated that it had nothing to do with the incident."

"Therefore, the Security Council condemns the attack which led to the sinking of the Cheonan," the statement reads.

The White House's spokesman on such matters, Mike Hammer, issued a statement clearly stating that the Obama administration believes North Korea was responsible and arguing that the U.N. statement "constitutes an endorsement of the findings" of the Joint Investigative Group that issued the report blaming North Korea.  

So the U.S. and the South Koreans believe North Korea was guilty but the U.N. isn't willing to go that far. But what about the next step? Will there be any follow up, any "consequences" for North Korea, as Clinton seemed to promise in May?

"I think right now we're just allowing North Korea to absorb the international community's response to its actions," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday.

North Korea's representative to the U.N., Sin Son Ho, called the statement a "great diplomatic victory."

"That doesn't sound like a lot of absorption," one member of the State Department press corps shot back at Toner.

When asked what comes next, Toner said there were no plans to pursue additional measures, other than enforcing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, and there were no outstanding requests from South Korea for additional measures. "We'll wait and let the statement stand," he said.

So what happened between May and now? According to both South Korean and U.S. officials, the countries pushing for actual penalties were serious about it at first, as is shown in the June 4 letter from South Korea, endorsed by the U.S., which urged the Security Council to "respond in a manner appropriate to the gravity of North Korea's military provocation in order to deter recurrence of any further provocation by North Korea."

But as China, ever the defender of the Hermit Kingdom, stalled on making any definitive statements about the incident, officials in Seoul and Washington began to worry that they might not be able to get any U.N. action whatsoever.

Then, toward the end of June, Beijing became nervous about the mounting international pressure and decided to try to wrap up the U.N. discussions as quickly as possible. They calculated that it was a losing game, so moved to get a statement out quickly with a small concession as a means of getting the whole issue behind them.

"This is less than we expected from the beginning," a South Korean official told The Cable, "But it clearly says the Cheonan was sunk by an attack, cites the five-country international joint-investigation result, and condemns it as a deplorable behavior. Even though it did not clarify it was North Korea's torpedo attack, it theoretically points the finger at North Korea as being responsible."

The South Korean official pointed at Russia and China as being responsible for the weakness of the statement.

"Definitely there has been a tough negotiation, especially to persuade the PRC and Russia, and this is result," the official said, "All the other countries except [China and Russia] strongly supported putting pressure on them."

Korea experts and former officials in Washington are sympathetic to the Obama administration's compromise in terms of the statement, but strongly lament that this administration seems not to be in any rush to do anything to engage North Korea or get back to tackling the problem of its growing nuclear arsenal.

"This is a glass one third full, with an explanation to convince you that it's not two thirds empty," said former North Korea negotiator Jack Pritchard, now president of the Korea Economic Institute. The statement was meant not to identify winners, but to allow everyone to avoid being named losers, he said.

"It's not clear cut and it's unsatisfactory, but it may have been the best that we could do," Pritchard acknowledged. The problem as he sees is it that now the Obama administration is back to the status quo, which means no discernable progress on North Korea nuclear discussions, something referred to as "strategic patience."

Joel Wit, another former negotiator who is now a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said the time is way past overdue to find some way to get back to talking with North Korea.

"The key issue here is, are we ready to turn this corner and try to return to some sort of negotiation, some sort of dialogue that tries to deal with the problems between us, or do we just continue with strategic patience?" Wit said.

Pritchard warned that because Pyongyang has backed off its promise to move towards denuclearization and the Obama administration can't accept a nuclear North Korea, the only way to move forward would be to get North Korea to change its calculus... and that can only be done with Chinese help.

"It requires at least a perception that the Chinese will abide by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 and that's not currently the case," said Pritchard. "Strategic patience is an attitude, not a policy."

When U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday that she believed the attempt to bomb New York's Time Square was a "one-off" event, she wasn't making a judgment about the suspected bomber's associations with other terrorists or groups, according to a DHS official. If she was, she would have called him a "lone wolf."

Napolitano made the new claim to ABC News on Sunday, stating that there was no evidence the failed attack was "anything other than a one-off," based on the information she had at the time. Conservative critics, opinion writers, nonpartisan experts, and even Democratic strategists are comparing the statement to her now-infamous remark just after the attempted underwear bombing on Christmas Day that "the system worked," a statement she later retracted.

By saying publicly that the current view of the incident was that it was a "one-off" event, Napolitano was signaling to local law enforcement groups all over the country that the federal government did not expect an imminent follow-up attack, a Homeland Security official told The Cable.

"She was referencing that at that time, there was no evidence to suggest that there were other trucks parked with explosives in other parts of New York or other cities across the country," the official said. "Law enforcement expects that kind of threat assessment from us."

That's quite different from saying that bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad was acting alone. Leading critics are already complaining that Napolitano's "one-off" comment has been proven wrong by revelations that he has admitted to having trained in Pakistan, according to a complaint (pdf) filed Tuesday in the Southern District of New York, and that he received "a series of calls from Pakistan" after he bought the Nissan SUV that he later used to carry the failed bomb.

If she were alleging that, she would have used the term "lone wolf," according to the official.

"She not afraid to use the term lone wolf and has many times," the official said. "But in this case that was not what she was talking about."`

Making any "definitive statement" about a fresh attack or attempt is unwise, according to Frances Townsend, a former top DHS official and counterterrorism advisor in the Bush White House. Townsend nonetheless praised the overall government response to the incident, as did Napolitano in a press briefing today touting Shahzad's arrest.

"Immediately after an attack you've got to be careful," said Townsend, noting that the New York Police Department took a more cautious tone. "She thinks she didn't go further than the facts at the time. What she made was a very definitive statement and inevitably those statements turn out to be wrong."

"She went through this once before," leading Democratic strategist Paul Begala said on CNN. "The first reports are always wrong. You just don't know where, you don't know how. ... She seemed not to have learned that lesson. We don't know if this is a one-off, yet."

The Senate is preparing to bring up and pass a short-term extension of some key provisions of the Patriot Act, setting aside changes to the law that were carefully negotiated by a Senate committee last fall.

The Judiciary Committee approved a bill last October that would extend key provisions of the controversial law but add new restrictions to the use of so-called national security letters, a procedure used by the FBI to demand records from U.S. businesses. But according to leading senators, those new restrictions might have to wait for another year.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, explained the move in an exclusive interview with The Cable.  She said it would be a one-year straight extension of the three Patriot Act provisions set to expire at the end of the month.

"I obviously preferred the Judiciary [Committee's] version, it surprises me that Republicans won't let it pass ... We made a number of changes to accommodate them," she said. "The committee version is much better, it's much more precise," she said, adding that she was ultimately OK with just extending the old version.

Senate Judiciary Committee ranking Republican Jeff Sessions, R-AL, confirmed to The Cable that the current thinking was to extend the Patriot Act provisions in their current form, ignoring the changes his own committee approved.

"The Patriot Act has worked and the last thing we should do is weaken it. So I think it's a good development that we are going to continue it as is," said Sessions. "That's the right direction."

Here's the scope of the three provisions that will be extended, according to Congressional Quarterly:

One of the expiring provisions allows the government to seek orders from a special federal court for "any tangible thing" that it says is related to a terrorism investigation. Another allows the government to seek court orders for roving wiretaps on terrorism suspects who shift their modes of communication. The third provision allows the government to apply to the special court for surveillance orders involving suspected "lone wolf" terrorists who do not necessarily have ties to a larger organization."

The extension is expected to come up with a package of other extensions today in the Senate to be passed by unanimous consent. One aide said the extension could be for 30 days and then later this week, the Senate could begin consideration of a longer-term extension that could be for the rest of the year, but no final decisions have been made.

If Senate leaders ultimately want to push for the Judiciary Committee's version, they will face stiff resistance that could complicate passage.

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Kit Bond, D-MO, when asked by The Cable if the extension would be the Judiciary committee's version, said, "It better not be!"

UPDATE: The extension did not come up on Tuesday but is expected to come up Wednesday. The one-year extension would still have to pass the House, so a one week extension is expected to cover until then, aides said.

The State Department's Nov. 19 reporting on underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab through its Visas Viper cable might not have met the regulatory requirements for such a communication, withholding from the National Counterterrorism Center information that could have flagged him before he boarded his Christmas day flight to Detroit.

The State Department has been pointing to the NCTC as being to blame for not going back into the database and checking on Mutallab's visa status after being sent the Visas Viper cable from the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria.

"Based on what we know now, the State Department fully complied with the requirements set forth in the interagency process as to what should be done when information about a potential threat is known," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday.

But a close look at the rules for compiling Visas Viper cables shows that the information supplied about Mutallab might not have met the existing requirements, leaving out some crucial pieces of information.

A State Department official told The Cable that the Viper cable on Abdulmutallab only had a short bio and one line stating that his father had raised concerns. An intelligence offical told Spencer Ackerman that State provided “very thin information” and “definitely not enough” to yank Abdulmutallab’s visa and put him on the no-fly list.

According to the relevant section of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual, Viper cables should include detailed information about the suspect sufficient by itself to allow State or DHS to make the determination to deny (or presumably lift) a visa.

Also, the regulations mandate detailed reporting about the source of the information, including:

1) An evaluation of the credibility;

2) The applicability of the information submitted;

3) A general description of the source; and

4) An assessment of the source's reliability.

Such reporting might have given more weight to the cable, considering the source was Alhaji Umaru Abdulmutallab, not only the attacker's father but one of the richest and most prominent bankers in the country. Apparently that didn't happen.

"The embassy in Nigeria did everything they were supposed to do," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Monday, while saying that the State Department was looking at beefing up the reporting in the cables, including whether or not the suspect already had a visa.

Last week, Kelly told reporters, "The information in this Visas Viper cable was insufficient for this interagency review process to make a determination that this individual's visa should be revoked."

Kelly also said that the fact that the UK denied Abdulmutallab a visa was not a red flag for the U.S. interagency process because there was no terrorism related connection.

"He was denied a visa because he provided false information on his visa application, the kind of thing that happens hundreds of thousands of times all over the world," Kelly said, adding the UK decision, "was not on terrorism grounds. It was on immigration grounds."

Clinton will be among those meeting with the president Tuesday to go over the various agency contributions to the administration's overall review of the incident.

Since President Obama has now come out and blamed the security breach that resulted in a near successful attack by underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on "systemic failures," the question becomes: How do we go about fixing that?

For some answers, The Cable turned to Jim Locher, the president and CEO of the Project on National Security Reform, a nongovernmental organization with ties to National Security Advisor Jim Jones that has been sounding the alarm about America's dysfunctional national security infrastructure for years.

"While President Obama said there were systemic failures, our problem has been that we haven't done systemic reform," said Locher. "We've had lots of reforms in the past but they've been marginal adjustments, ad hoc in nature."

"Here we're seeing play out that lack of integration, that lack of cooperation, that lack of collaboration."

Information sharing across the intelligence agencies is just not occurring to the degree necessary, as evidenced by early reports on the Obama administration's forthcoming review of the incident, which point the finger somewhat at the CIA and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence.

Some of the problem is cultural. For years the mantra has been to move from a "need to know" to a "need to share" mentality, but many in the intelligence community still operate from a risk-avoidance perspective. The fact that the CIA had information from Abdulmutallab's father that it failed to pass on is suggestive of that. In the past, the CIA has been criticized for privileging the protection of its sources and methods over sharing intelligence with other agencies.

But on a bureaucratic level, the reforms that Congress has passed have fallen short and succumbed somewhat to the struggles between the actors, Locher said. Meanwhile the Obama administration, which has yet to come out with a National Security Strategy, hasn't matched its rhetoric with results.

"The Obama administration came in and has been talking about collaboration across the national security system, they've talked the need for integrated effort, for the need to make use of all the instruments of national power and influence, but that's not been translated into action," Locher said.

There aren't incentives for people in the system to get on board with cooperation. Interagency mechanisms have been slow to materialize and where they do exist there is confusion over roles and authorities, he added.

Prime examples are the recent conflict between CIA and ODNI over responsibilities, as detailed in this LA Times piece, as well as longstanding conflict between the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center (State sought to shift blame this week to NCTC).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Locher is calling for more authority over missions and budgets for the ODNI, which is headed by his ally Adm. Dennis Blair. The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created ODNI, made too many compromises and created confusion as a result, he said.

Overall, the underwear bomber incident "just proves why national security reform is so important," Locher said.

Unfortunately, PNSR's work on the issue was significantly complicated this month, when House Appropriations Defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha, D-PA, moved to completely defund the organization in a move to protect his own bureaucratic turf.

The White House has now confirmed that President Obama will announce the addition deployment of 30,000 new U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as well as a plan to start withdrawing troops in July of 2011.

Two administration officials briefed reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon ahead of Obama's Tuesday evening speech at the West Point military academy. The officials called the increase a "surge" and said that while the withdrawal would begin in July 2011, the pace and end point of the withdrawal would be determined by Obama at a later time.

"This surge will be for a defined period of time," one of the officials said, "What the president will talk about tonight is a date ... by which he will begin to transfer the leadership role to our Afghan partners."

"He will not tonight specify the end of that process or the pace at which he will proceed. That date and process will be determined by conditions on the ground."

The idea of a time frame for withdrawal of U.S. forces is a controversial one, especially among lawmakers, who reacted strongly to reports of a three-year time frame Tuesday morning. The White House later denied those reports to The Cable.

One of the administration officials sought to preempt criticisms of a set date for withdrawal by saying that leaving the withdrawal endpoint flexible would prevent Afghans from simply stalling until American troops leave.

"If the Taliban thinks they can wait us out, they are misjudging the president's approach," the official said, while adding, "It does put everyone under pressure to do more, sooner."

Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, has already come out against the White House plan to begin withdrawal in 2011.

The 30,000 figure includes two or three full combat brigades plus one full brigade-sized element focused exclusively on training Afghan security forces. All new combat troops will be partnered with Afghan forces in some fashion.

The new strategy will also include a beefed-up commitment to Pakistan, although the administration officials declined to give specifics. More on that later....