nytimes.com:

September 9, 2007
F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

The community of interest data sought by the F.B.I. is central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American counterterrorism officials have turned more frequently to the technique, using communications patterns and other data to identify suspects who may not have any other known links to extremists.

The concept has strong government proponents who see it as a vital tool in predicting and preventing attacks, and it is also thought to have helped the National Security Agency identify targets for its domestic eavesdropping program. But privacy advocates, civil rights leaders and even some counterterrorism officials warn that link analysis can be misused to establish tenuous links to people who have no real connection to terrorism but may be drawn into an investigation nonetheless.

Typically, community of interest data might include an analysis of which people the targets called most frequently, how long they generally talked and at what times of day, sudden fluctuations in activity, geographic regions that were called, and other data, law enforcement and industry officials said.

The F.B.I. declined to say exactly what data had been turned over. It was limited to people and phone numbers “once removed” from the actual target of the national security letters, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a continuing review by the Justice Department.

The bureau had declined to discuss any aspect of the community of interest requests because it said the issue was part of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into national security letters. An initial review in March by the inspector general found widespread violations in the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, but did not mention the use of community of interest data.

On Saturday, in response to the posting of the article on the Web site of The New York Times, Mike Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said “it is important to emphasize” that community of interest data is “no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy, was used infrequently, and was never used for e-mail communications.”

The scope of the demands for information could be seen in an August 2005 letter seeking the call records for particular phone numbers under suspicion. The letter closed by saying: “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”

The requests for such data showed up a dozen times, using nearly identical language, in records from one six-month period in 2005 obtained by a nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The F.B.I. recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group. The boilerplate language suggests the requests may have been used in many of more than 700 emergency or “exigent” national security letters. Earlier this year, the bureau banned the use of the exigent letters because they had never been authorized by law.

The reason for the suspension is unclear, but it appears to have been set off in part by the questions raised by the inspector general’s initial review into abuses in the use of national security letters. The official said the F.B.I. itself was examining the use of the community of interest requests to get a better understanding of how and when they were used, but he added that they appeared to have been used in a relatively small percentage of the tens of thousand of the records requests each year. “In an exigent circumstance, that’s information that may be relevant to an investigation,” the official said.

A federal judge in Manhattan last week struck down parts of the USA Patriot Act that had authorized the F.B.I.’s use of the national security letters, saying that some provisions violated the First Amendment and the constitutional separation of powers guarantee. In many cases, the target of a national security letter whose records are being sought is not necessarily the actual subject of a terrorism investigation and may not be suspected at all. Under the Patriot Act, the F.B.I. must assert only that the records gathered through the letter are considered relevant to a terrorism investigation.

Some legal analysts and privacy advocates suggested that the disclosure of the F.B.I.’s collection of community of interest records offered another example of the bureau exceeding the substantial powers already granted it by Congress.

“This whole concept of tracking someone’s community of interest is not part of any established F.B.I. authority,” said Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provided the records from its lawsuit to The New York Times. “It’s being defined by the F.B.I. And when it’s left up to the F.B.I. to decide what information is relevant to their investigations, they can vacuum up almost anything they want.”

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and a former researcher for AT&T, said the telecommunications companies could have easily provided the F.B.I. with the type of network analysis data it was seeking because they themselves had developed it over many years, often using sophisticated software like a program called Analyst’s Notebook.

“This sort of analysis of calling patterns and who the communities of interests are is the sort of things telephone companies are doing anyway because it’s central to their businesses for marketing or optimizing the network or detecting fraud,” said Professor Blaze, who has worked with the F.B.I. on technology issues.

Such “analysis is extremely powerful and very revealing because you get these linkages between people that wouldn’t be otherwise clear, sometimes even more important than the content itself” of phone calls and e-mail messages, he said. “But it’s also very invasive. There’s always going to be a certain amount of noise,” with data collected on people who have no real links to suspicious activity, he said.

Officials at other American intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, have explored using link analysis to trace patterns of communications sometimes two, three or four people removed from the original targets, current and former intelligence officials said. But critics assert that the further the links are taken, the less valuable the information proves to be.

Some privacy advocates said they were troubled by what they saw as the F.B.I.’s over-reliance on technology at the expense of traditional investigative techniques that rely on clearer evidence of wrongdoing.

“Getting a computer to spit out a hundred names doesn’t have any meaning if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “If they’re telling the telephone company, ‘You do the investigation and tell us what you find,’ the relevance to the investigation is being determined by someone outside the F.B.I.”

-----------

see previous entires, folks . . .

nytimes.com:

September 9, 2007
The Nation
A Legacy Bush Can Control
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON

EVERY president comes into office complaining about the 11th-hour judicial appointments and midnight regulations left on the White House doorstep by his predecessor. And every president turns around and does the same to his successor.

Adams did it to Jefferson. Teddy Roosevelt did it to Taft. Carter did it to Reagan. Bush I did it to Clinton. Clinton really did it to Bush II.

And now President Bush has his cabinet and staff busily writing far-reaching rules to keep his priorities on the environment, public lands, homeland security, health and safety in place long after the clock strikes midnight and his presidential limousine turns into a pumpkin.

With Congress in Democratic hands and his political capital all but spent by the Iraq war, Mr. Bush has scant hope of pushing significant domestic legislation through Congress. But he still controls the executive branch and can still accomplish much through regulation and executive edict.

Mr. Clinton found himself in much the same position in 1999, after surviving an impeachment trial but still facing a hostile Republican Congress. He put his minions to work scouring the federal rule books looking for ways to leave his imprint.

That led to a flurry of last-minute rule making that included declaring nearly 60 million acres of national forests off limits to logging and road building, significantly tightening the standards for arsenic in drinking water, increasing energy efficiency of appliances, reducing tolerance for lead in paint and soil and setting new rules for privacy of medical records.

“Starting in early 1999 we had people down in the White House basement with word processors and legal pads making lists of things we wanted to get done before we left,” said John Podesta, the White House chief of staff from late 1998 through the end of Mr. Clinton’s term.

“They’ve probably got people down there right now with chain saws and drilling rigs doing the same thing,” he added with a laugh. “I’m sure they’re going to want to have some impact as they walk out the door.”

One of Mr. Bush’s first official acts as president was to withdraw the Clinton regulations that had not yet been published in the Federal Register and delay the effective date of those that had. Some Clinton rules are still in dispute in the courts, but most eventually took effect unchanged, in part because the process of unwriting a federal regulation is as complex and time consuming as writing one.

The Bush White House has already issued new rules on an important environmental matter. The federal Office of Surface Mining last month announced regulations that it says clarify the rules on so-called mountaintop mining, in which the tops of Appalachian mountains are dynamited away to get at coal seams beneath. The new rules allow mining companies to continue to dump the excess rock and soil into valleys and streams.

Earlier this summer, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers issued regulatory guidance to field officers that officials say brings some certainty to wetlands standards, after a confusing 2006 Supreme Court ruling. But critics say the move will lead to the destruction of thousands of acres of wetlands. The government guidance will be reviewed early next year after a period of public comment.

THE E.P.A. is currently contemplating a rule that would modify the Clean Air Act’s procedures for measuring emissions from new power plants in areas with the cleanest air, including park and wilderness areas. Democrats in Congress and environmentalists say it would allow soot and smoke from coal-burning plants to muddy the air in and around many national parks. The agency is also working on two other major air quality rules to be issued next year, regarding ozone and airborne lead particles.

The E.P.A. also recently issued a study concluding that the health and environmental dangers from toxins emitted from oil refineries are low enough that no further controls are needed.

The administration is pursuing some actions that are widely seen as pro-environment as well, including the creation of a marine reserve in the Hawaiian Islands and a multibillion-dollar program for enhancement of national parks.

On health care, the administration issued guidance last month that will make it more difficult for states to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover children in middle-income families. The policy has no expiration date, but Congress could override it and allow states to apply for waivers to set more generous coverage standards.

The administration is also preparing new regulations likely to be published next year on airline security, mine-worker protections and automobile safety and fuel efficiency, White House aides said.

Although many of these new rules may not take effect until the last days of the Bush administration or the first days of the next presidency, White House officials say they are the result of a deliberate and patient process, not the “Cinderella syndrome” of rushing to act before the next Inauguration Day.

“Every administration does it,” said Susan E. Dudley, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House agency that oversees rule making throughout the executive branch. “It doesn’t matter the party the president comes from or who controls Congress. While I’d like to say this administration won’t, I have to accept that we’ll likely see an increase in activity toward the end of our time here.”

Ms. Dudley came to the White House this spring from the pro-business Mercatus Center at George Mason University under a recess appointment. Her appointment was vigorously opposed by Democrats in Congress and many environmental and consumer groups.

Ms. Dudley, an expert on government who has studied the midnight regulations phenomenon, said that she hoped to avoid what she called the “slapdash” approach of the Clinton administration after the 2000 election.

“It may be that an increase in regulatory activity is inevitable at the end of an administration,” she said, “but we’re determined to do it right, based on the best science and the best technology, with ample opportunity for the public to get involved.”

Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a conservation group, said that the Bush administration is working on both formal regulations and a series of arcane procedural changes that have the effect of centralizing executive authority and making it difficult for Congress or a subsequent president to undo them.

“If you want to have the regulations in place when you leave office in 2009, you have to start now, “ Mr. Clapp said. “It’s a way for an administration to have life after death.”

-----------

nytimes.com:

September 9, 2007
Editorial
Hiding Behind the General
The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage — not maximum clarity on Iraq’s military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn’t looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general — then in charge of training and equipping Iraq’s security forces — rhapsodized about “tangible progress” and how the Iraqi forces were “developing steadily,” an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

And just last week, senior military commanders in Baghdad who work for General Petraeus entered the political fray by taking issue — anonymously — with the grim assessment of Iraq’s politics and security by non-partisan Congressional investigators.

As Congress waited anxiously for General Petraeus’s testimony, a flurry of well-timed news reports said that he told the White House he could go along with the withdrawal of about 4,000 American troops beginning in January but wanted to maintain increased force levels well into next year — just like Mr. Bush. Democrats who once demanded a firm date for the start of a troop pullout immediately started backpedaling.

Withdrawing 4,000 troops and dangling the prospect of additional withdrawals is a token political gesture, not a new strategy. If it proves enough to cow Congress into halting its push for a more robust and concrete exit strategy, that would be political cowardice at its worst.

We hope that General Petraeus can resist the political pressure and provide an unvarnished assessment of the military situation in Iraq. He is an important source of information, of course, but he is only one source — and he is not the man who sets American policy. If Mr. Bush insists on listening only to those who agree with him, Congress and the public must weigh General Petraeus’s report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagon’s claim that things in Iraq are substantially better.

The Government Accountability Office found that the Iraqi government has not met 11 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress and that violence remains high, despite the White House’s disingenuous claims of success. And a commission of retired senior military officers determined that Iraq’s army will be unable to take over responsibility for internal security in the next 12 to 18 months. That is four years beyond what the Pentagon predicted in 2004. It is too long.

Nothing has changed about Mr. Bush’s intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq’s chaos from spreading.

----------

washingtonpost.com:

Pet Projects' Veil Is Only Partly Lifted
Lawmakers Find Other Paths To Special-Interest Funding

By John Solomon and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 9, 2007; A01



Rep. Rahm Emanuel was extremely proud when the House passed a major spending bill early this year that contained not a single special-interest project. "This is an earmark-free bill," the Illinois Democrat jubilantly declared on Feb. 1.

A week later, however, he and 18 other Illinois lawmakers signed a letter to the Energy Department to "express our strong support" for a bio-energy project at the University of Illinois. Emanuel also sent his own letter to the department seeking "support and assistance in securing" $500,000 for Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago and $750,000 for the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Such requests for specific institutions are commonly known as earmarks. But Emanuel, a member of the Democratic House leadership, declines to call them that. "Letter-writing is not an earmark," he said in an interview.

In the wake of last year's controversy over the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" and other notorious legislated programs, Democrats in Congress have made "earmark" into an epithet -- the E-word that they are reluctant to say aloud. But the taboo has not stopped either Democrats or Republicans from continuing to seek these expenditures while calling them something else.

Members of Congress are now resorting to less obvious tactics that allow them to get money to favored beneficiaries without acknowledging support for what others consider to be earmarks:


? Lawmakers are holding hearings meant to cajole or pressure executive branch officials into providing money for their pet projects -- even when those agencies already have rejected the requests.


? Congressional chairmen are writing favored projects into their committees' spending bills, exploiting a loophole in the rules that enables those expenditures to avoid being counted, and therefore disclosed overtly, as earmarks.


? Like Emanuel, a growing number of lawmakers are asking executive branch officials to use their authority to send tax dollars into congressional districts or states, effectively financing projects they desire but do not wish to accomplish with specific, and highly public, legislation.

Government watchdog groups and a few dissident lawmakers have noticed these sleights of hand and have begun to complain. They say the approach deceives the public about how many special spending projects are being handed out, noting that lawmakers' contacts with agencies usually are conducted out of public view. The Washington Post learned of Emanuel's requests by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

"Going to agencies outside the congressional process avoids any measure of transparency or accountability," said Ellen Miller of the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. "Earmarks remain and are just called by a different name."

So tainted is the word that lawmakers now tend to eschew it, using a more antiseptic phrase instead: "congressionally directed spending."

"They are trying to change the whole vernacular so that earmarks aren't earmarks anymore," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

To be sure, Ellis and Miller have lauded recent changes in the rules that govern special-interest spending. Congress has agreed to prohibit the once-common practice of dropping unaired, anonymously backed projects into House and Senate spending bills. In addition, expenditures identified as earmarks must be both clearly explained and publicly linked to their authors.

Congress appears to have reduced its hunger for earmarks this year. Member-disclosed earmarks passed by the House have fallen to about 6,000, with a cost of $8.5 billion -- less than half the number and total amount of two years ago, Taxpayers for Common Sense estimated.

But more legislating lies ahead, especially in the Senate, and "things don't tend to get smaller," Ellis said.

What's more, plenty of projects slip through the new disclosure requirements and cannot be easily accounted for. Programs inserted into spending bills at the request of executive branch officials, for example, are generally not considered earmarks, so lawmakers often try to persuade agency officials to request the pet projects they want -- thus avoiding that pejorative label.

In addition, if projects are included in legislation by the primary author of a spending bill -- usually the chairman of a committee -- those projects do not have to be as clearly marked as other earmarks. This is because formal earmarks are requested by members; if they appear in the starting-point bill, they are not considered earmarks.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) confronted David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, on the House floor in March over this practice, noting that a spending bill then under debate contained $35 million for a risk-mitigation program at a federal space-exploration facility, even though the measure had been certified to contain no earmarks.

"We have passed some good rules with regard to earmark reform and transparency," Flake said. "But we have found a way around them already." Obey said that the provision was not an earmark under the rules. "An earmark is something that is requested by an individual member," Obey said. "This item was not requested by any individual member; it was put in the bill by me."

Two months later, Obey again rebuffed Flake when Flake pointed out that a supposedly earmark-free bill on the House floor contained an allocation of $8.7 million to ward off floods in New York. The provision was not called an earmark, Flake noted, but Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) put out a news release applauding the provision and its potential benefit to her district.

Other lawmakers have ginned up support for narrow spending proposals through hearings. Two subcommittees of the House Science and Technology Committee pressed Energy Department officials in hearings this year, for example, about the department's decision to end its funding for the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, near Aiken, S.C.

Energy officials offered the committee written proof that there was agreement between the administration, Congress and the lab to end its funding after 2007, but lawmakers still demanded more money.

"The Savannah River Ecology Lab served the Department of Energy, the communities affected by the site and the nation for more than 50 years," Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said at a hearing last month. "It was, by any financial measure, a very inexpensive lab to operate. It would be hard to find a better return on investment anywhere in the federal science complex."

Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Tex.) added: "There is simply no reason for DOE to discontinue funding. There are funds available. There is work to be done."

The tongue-lashing did not persuade the department to cough up the money, however, so Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the full committee, added a new threat. Gordon told the department's chief financial officer in a letter that he would not approve funding that the department requested for a bio-energy lab unless it allocated $2 million to help keep the ecology lab afloat.

"We have received no follow-up from DOE to the letter as yet," said Alisha Prather, the committee's spokeswoman.

Other lawmakers do not play as roughly to get the money they want. Sometimes they just write a letter and then make a phone call.

Emanuel, who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and was a major proponent of making earmarks in spending bills more transparent, said he followed up his letters with a call to Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman.

"I'm on bended knee," he said of the call. "I have to go to an executive in another party and ask for resources, but the people in my district elected me to fight for these things."

Energy Department spokeswoman Megan Barnett said Emanuel's requests have not been funded. "We regularly hear from members of Congress for support on various projects, and this year was no different. We look at each of these projects on the merits," she said.

Emanuel defended his requests as "a good public investment" and added: "If I think it is good, I'm going to use all the tools to fight for it, whether it is an earmark, letter-writing or lighting myself on fire. I may even go on a hunger strike."

But he declined to say whether he and other lawmakers ought to disclose their private contacts with federal agencies when they seek money for projects. "Let me just say that I'm a big believer in transparency," Emanuel said.

---------------

washingtonpost.com:

Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting

By Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers and Researcher Julie Tate
Sunday, September 9, 2007; A01



For two hours, President Bush listened to contrasting visions of the U.S. future in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus dominated the conversation by video link from Baghdad, making the case to keep as many troops as long as possible to cement any security progress. Adm. William J. Fallon, his superior, argued instead for accepting more risks in Iraq, officials said, in order to have enough forces available to confront other potential threats in the region.

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.

One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it."

For Bush, the eight months since announcing his "new way forward" in Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of delivering what he needs.

Although the administration has presented a united front, senior officials remain split over whether Bush's strategy will work in the long term. Bush gambled that a "surge" of 30,000 troops in the streets of Baghdad and the western province of Anbar would establish enough security to give "breathing space" to Iraq's sectarian leaders to find common ground.

But as Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver progress reports to Congress tomorrow, the questions they are likely to face are the same ones asked internally: How long should the troop buildup last? When should U.S. forces start to come home? Should the United States stand by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or seek another leader? What are the hidden risks of the emerging alliance with Sunni tribal leaders? What is the best outcome Washington can hope for at this point?

Amid the uncertainty, the overriding imperative for Bush these past eight months has been to buy time -- time for the surge to work, time for the Iraqis to get their act together, time to produce progress. In Washington's efforts to come to grips with the war it unleashed, the story of these months is one of trying to control the uncontrollable. And now as a result of a casual idea by Petraeus that hardened into an unwelcome deadline, the administration finds itself at a pivotal moment.

"All the outreach and consultations did not reset as much time on the Washington clock as we had hoped," said Peter D. Feaver, who was a National Security Council strategic adviser until July. "Rather than buying us more time, the D.C. clock seemed to accelerate after the president's speech."

A Strategy With Few Supporters

The president was somber as he took his place behind the lectern in the White House library the night of Jan. 10. It was an awkward address. He stood alone in the corner talking into a camera. His subdued tone, appropriate for ordering thousands more men and women into battle, worried some aides who feared it was not persuasive.

It did not take long to figure out just how unpersuasive it was. As Bush said good night and headed upstairs to bed, the reviews came in heavily negative, even among Republicans. The notion that the president was sending even more troops to Iraq after an antiwar public turned control of Congress over to the Democrats exasperated many in the capital. The visceral reaction induced near-panic among some in the White House.

"The concern of some people -- me -- was the floor was going to break politically," said Peter H. Wehner, then White House director of strategic initiatives. "We put all our eggs in the surge-Petraeus basket. The speech just didn't seem to move anything, and, if anything, it seemed to deepen the problem."

The surge was born of a review Bush launched after the midterm elections. Over the weeks that followed, the president came to agree that his strategy was heading to what he later called "slow failure." But rather than heed calls for withdrawal, he opted for a final gambit to eke out victory, overruling some of his commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ushering in a new team led by Fallon, Petraeus, Crocker and a new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.

The logic escaped many. The day after Bush's speech, Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were pummeled during hearings on Capitol Hill. The two tried to assure lawmakers that the troop buildup would be short-lived. "We're thinking of it as a matter of months, not 18 months or two years," Gates testified. Asked about Maliki, Rice said, "I think he knows that his government is on borrowed time."

So was Bush. "There was a real question about whether we'd be able to do this at all," said a White House aide. Within five weeks, the House had voted to oppose the troop buildup, and Democratic leaders were vowing to tie Bush's hands. Most worrisome was the discontent among Republicans. "It could have potentially strangled this strategy in the crib," Wehner said.

Early Turning Points

While Bush played defense in Washington, he also needed to turn up the pressure in Baghdad. The strategy would never work, Bush aides knew, unless Maliki stepped up. National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had outlined in a memo last fall the deep White House skepticism about the prime minister's intentions and abilities to take on Shiite militias.

Bush instituted videoconference calls with Maliki every two weeks, prodding him to seek accord among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. At first, the Americans noticed some change. Maliki, who previously had blocked U.S. forces from taking on the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, gave Petraeus the green light to go after anyone responsible for attacks. He also deployed three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad, as promised.

Sadr fled for Iran in February, concerned that U.S. forces would target him. It was a "very personal" decision, not a strategic one, said a senior U.S. intelligence official. "He fled because he feared for his safety." With Sadr out of the picture, his power base weakened, and supporters began fighting among themselves. Some decided to become more politically active and stop mobilizing against U.S. forces. Others began attacking Sunnis.

More striking was the emerging shift in Anbar; al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents had grown so dominant in the western province that military intelligence had all but given up on the area months earlier. Bush benefited from good timing. As he introduced his new strategy, Marine commanders had already made common cause with local Sunni tribal leaders who had broken with the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, also called AQI.

Why the sheiks turned remains a point of debate, but it seems clear that the tribes resented al-Qaeda's efforts to ban smoking and marry local women to build ties to the region. "Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done," Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a Petraeus adviser, wrote in an essay.

The sheik who forged the alliance with the Americans, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, traced the decision to fight al-Qaeda to Sept. 14, 2006, long before the new Bush strategy, but the president's plan dispatched another 4,000 U.S. troops to Anbar to exploit the situation. As security improved, the White House eagerly took credit.

The "Anbar Awakening" represented perhaps the most important shift in years, but it generated little debate at the White House. Long before the tribes switched sides, the administration conducted a policy exercise on how to team up with former insurgents. But when such an alliance occurred, it bubbled up from the ground with no Washington involvement. "We're not smart enough to know the course that these matters might take," Rice conceded to an Australian newspaper last week.

The alliances generated angst among Maliki and other Shiite leaders in Baghdad, who wondered whether such groups would turn against them. "There were a couple times we got from Maliki very, very alarming, 'What are you guys doing?' " messages, recalled another top official.

Buildup Expands; Concerns Grow

As Petraeus settled into his new command, he decided to press for 8,000 additional support troops beyond the 21,500 combat forces the president had committed. Just a week earlier, Gates had told Congress that only 2,000 or 3,000 more might be needed. As he reviewed a briefing sheet in preparation for more testimony, Gates was annoyed to see a larger request buried on the page. He fumed that "this is going to make us look like idiots," said a defense official. But Gates got Petraeus the troops.

More critical was the defense secretary's decision to extend deployments in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months. The generals told Gates that the extra brigades flowing to Iraq had stretched the military close to the breaking point. "We ran out of forces, that's what happened," said a senior Army official. To keep the buildup going, and to offer predictability for troops and families, Gates approved the longest overseas combat deployments since World War II.

In doing so, Gates -- who three months earlier said no one thought the surge would last 18 months -- enabled it to last almost that long. Although that was not the stated reason for the deployment extension, in effect the change redefined the buildup into a longer mission than first envisioned. Bush aides and U.S. military planners in Iraq then began assuming that the extra forces would remain at least through April 2008 -- even as Congress was trying to force a timetable for withdrawal.

Lawmakers were not alone. Fallon, who took command of Centcom in March, worried that Iraq was undermining the military's ability to confront other threats, such as Iran. "When he took over, the reality hit him that he had to deal with Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and a whole bunch of other stuff besides Iraq," said a top military officer.

Fallon was also derisive of Iraqi leaders' intentions and competence, and dubious about the surge. "He's been saying from Day One, 'This isn't working,' " said a senior administration official. And Fallon signaled his departure from Bush by ordering subordinates to avoid the term "long war" -- a phrase the president used to describe the fight against terrorism.

To Bush aides, Gates did not seem fully on board with the president's strategy, either. As a member of the congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group before his selection to head the Pentagon, Gates embraced proposals to scale back the U.S. presence in Iraq. Now that he was in the Cabinet, he kept his own counsel.

But he consulted regularly with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a noted critic of the Iraq war; told Army audiences privately that a troop decrease was inevitable; and tried to avoid Sunday talk shows during the fight over the war spending bill to preserve relations with lawmakers, according to administration sources. "With Fallon, it's pretty much in your face," said a senior official. "Gates is quieter."

A Pentagon official said Gates is "very concerned about all of our energy" being devoted to Iraq, an "overcommitment that is consuming and distracting us from everything else. On the other hand, he knows there can't be another Saigon. There's this balance."

He was not the only skeptic. More than half a dozen retired four-star generals turned down Hadley in his search for a "war czar" who could knock heads and make sure requests from the field survived the Washington bureaucracy.

At the same time, in late April, Gates visited Petraeus as Congress was about to pass war-funding legislation mandating troop withdrawals, a bill Bush would veto. Under pressure to show results, Gates and Petraeus played for time. A day after Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) declared that "this war is lost," they decided that Petraeus and Crocker would give an update in September.

They hoped that would buy them another five months. What they didn't anticipate was that a simple progress report would become a make-or-break moment.

Increasing Pressure on Maliki

By that point, there was not much political progress to report in Iraq. Bush became aggravated by Maliki's inability to forge agreements to address grievances fueling sectarian strife, such as allowing low-level members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party back into government, passing a law governing oil revenue distribution and setting provincial elections.

Bush had been using his biweekly videoconferences with Maliki to shore up the Iraqi leader, but he also used the calls to make clear that U.S. patience had grown short. He pressed Maliki several times on the oil law in particular, irritated that the Iraqis had told him repeatedly that they had a deal, only to see it unravel.

Amid heated congressional debate last spring, the White House again confronted the question Hadley had raised in his memo in the fall: Could Maliki deliver? "There were some who argued that Maliki was not the best guy for the job," said a State Department official. "But the answer came back that if you change the prime minister, then any prospect of progress on the political front stops completely while they try to form a new government."

Bush rejected suggestions to help oust Maliki, reasoning that he was the product of a democratic system that the United States helped establish in Iraq, aides said. Moreover, as officials contemplated alternatives, they concluded there was no better potential leader. "There's no Nelson Mandela in Iraq," Crocker, the ambassador, told colleagues back in Washington. "Saddam killed them all."

But Bush agreed to increase pressure on Maliki by codifying 18 benchmarks set in war-funding legislation, such as the oil law and de-Baathification changes, and asked deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan to go to Baghdad to help the prime minister and other leaders reach consensus.

Meanwhile, the Maliki government pressed the Americans to sit down with Iranian officials in hopes of stopping Tehran from funding and arming Shiite militias. Bush had rejected proposals by the Iraq Study Group and others to talk with Iran, but Rice decided it was time.

When Rice told Crocker to get ready for talks with Iran, he asked her the "blindingly obvious" question of whether Vice President Cheney would allow it, a U.S. official said. Rice, according to the official, told Crocker that it "wasn't your lane," adding, "I'll work it back here. That's not your problem."

Rice overcame resistance from Cheney for talks with both Syria and Iran, and Crocker met an Iranian envoy in Baghdad. In the end, the talks led nowhere. Around the same time, Sadr, the cleric, decided to leave his seclusion in Iran and return to Iraq, arriving in a showy motorcade to deliver a trademark anti-American sermon. But he has been unable to assert as much control as before, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Anbar now looked even more successful, and while Americans had originally considered the situation unique, they began considering ways to replicate it. As part of the new Bush strategy, Rice had established 10 provincial reconstruction teams around Iraq to work with local officials rather than rely on the ineffectual central government. In speeches, Bush began hailing "bottom up" reconciliation.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Petraeus's deputy, sent a memo to U.S. commanders in Iraq urging them to seek local deals similar to those in Anbar through reward money and nonlethal aid such as radios, clothes and telephones. "Reconciliation is local," he wrote, "and there is no one-size fits all solution to this complex problem."

A Skeptic Takes Charge

By the time Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute arrived at the White House as the war czar overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan, the president's aides were in the throes of writing an interim report on the benchmarks, due to Congress on July 15. Like many of his former colleagues at the Pentagon, Lute had been a skeptic of the surge. Now he was charged with making it successful.

He showed up the first few days wearing his uniform before realizing that it would be better to switch to a suit. Unlike his predecessor, Lute briefed the president at 7 a.m. every day, giving him clout to resolve thorny matters. He told his staff to narrow their priorities from 100 issues to the top 20.

His first task was the draft report to Congress, which he deemed excessively positive. It said twice as many benchmarks had satisfactory progress as had unsatisfactory, despite the Iraqi government's failure to meet most political and economic goals.

On one benchmark, the State Department wanted to say the Iraqis were making satisfactory progress spending their own money on reconstruction, while the Treasury Department disagreed. Lute deemed that the goal was not being met. "He said we've got to call a ball either out or in, and this one was out," recalled one official involved. The White House eventually split the difference, judging that benchmark as "partially met."

Lute also arrived at a time of renewed political alarm inside the White House, as leading establishment Republicans, including Sens. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), Pete V. Domenici (N.M.) and George V. Voinovich (Ohio) broke with Bush's policy. Aides urged Bush to emphasize that the troop buildup would lead to eventual withdrawals once security was established. The president rejected that, concluding that if he "showed leg," as one aide put it, it would only encourage more Republicans to defect.

Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit hard-wired into Petraeus's shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.

From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories -- "Myths/Facts" or "Setting the Record Straight" to take issue with negative news articles, and "In Case You Missed It" to distribute positive articles or speeches.

Gillespie arranged several presidential speeches to make strategic arguments, such as comparing Iraq to Vietnam or warning of Iranian interference. When critics assailed Bush for overstating ties between al-Qaeda and the group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, Gillespie organized a Bush speech to make his case.

"The whole idea is to take these things on before they become conventional wisdom," said White House communications director Kevin Sullivan. "We have a very short window."

Eight Months Later

Petraeus was doing his part in Baghdad, hosting dozens of lawmakers and military scholars for PowerPoint presentations on why the Bush strategy had made gains. Many Republicans and even Democrats came home impressed, and suddenly even critics were agreeing that Petraeus had made some progress in security even though the Iraqi political situation remained a mess. Petraeus also persuaded intelligence officials to revise some key judgments of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to reflect security gains.

Some visitors suspected a skewed picture. "We only saw things that reinforced their message that the surge was working," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

But Bush understood that the "breathing space" had yielded little political reconciliation. As summer wore on, Bush grew blunt in his conference calls with Maliki. As one aide recalled, "He would say, 'Hey, you told me you were going to do X, Y and Z. What happened? Are you going to get agreement on these key pieces of legislation or not?' "

In Baghdad, Crocker and O'Sullivan pressed Maliki to reach consensus with four other Iraqi leaders representing Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. In late August, the five announced agreement on a path forward on stalled legislation such as de-Baathification. A week later, Bush made a surprise visit to Anbar where he met with Maliki and the others to congratulate them, then met with the sheiks to highlight the success of the U.S.-tribal coalition.

The trip energized Bush and his team. Even Gates said he was more optimistic than he has been since taking office. While the secretary had been "cagey" in the past, a senior defense official said, "he's come to the conclusion that what Petraeus is doing is actually more effective than what he thought."

But the trip did not end the debate. Fallon has made the case that Petraeus's recommendations should consider the political reality in Washington and lay out a guide to troop withdrawals, while Petraeus has resisted that, beyond a possible token pullout of a brigade early next year, according to military officials. The Joint Chiefs have been sympathetic to Fallon's view.

In an interview Friday, Fallon said he and Petraeus have reached accommodation about tomorrow's testimony. "The most important thing is I'm very happy with what Dave has recommended," he said. As for the earlier discussions, he begged off. "It's too politically charged right now."