At the risk of biting the hand that feeds, it’s kind of weird to see how a different news organization would report this story. I don’t think it’s correct to portray a Scott Ritter comment on CNN as somehow a factor in prompting the Eikenberry leak. And it’s way, way too simple to portray the Afghanistan debate as unfolding between military officers who want more troops and civilians who don’t. Actually, it’s not just “too simple,” it’s wrong. Clinton and Gates favor additional troops, as best I understand their positions.

But it’s a much more in-depth view of the question of media strategy than you see on cable news typically, and that’s why I like going on al-Jazeera. And not every presentation has to reflect the way I see this stuff. One of the great strengths of al-Jazeera English is how throughly they treat international policy questions. There’s a way of doing a story about leaks as pure pageantry, and they avoided that pretty much altogether. I also like the idea of opening up the segment at the end to viewer comments a great deal.

Maliki arrests a prominent Awakening leader named Adil Mashhadani. There was a gun battle in Baghdad. Now Mashhadani has been sentenced to death. And this is one of the reactions:

Other Awakening leaders had mixed reactions to Mr. Mashhadani’s sentencing. “Nobody is above the law,” said Nabil Ahmed, an Awakening leader in the Adhamiya neighborhood.

You simply would not have heard that in 2006 or 2007.

But if Eikenberry is the interlocutor for the day-to-day and Clinton is the interlocutor for the biggest crises, then Holbrooke’s interlocutory role is rather less than clear, and now Karzai knows that if he doesn’t like what Holbrooke tells him, he gets a second bite at the apple with Clinton. Perhaps Holbrooke’s more durable role in the administration is to coordinate the interagency team that he’s assembled to get diplomacy, development work, intelligence, communications and finance for Afghanistan and Pakistan all rowing in the same direction. But wait! If Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations goes forward — and a formalized proposal for it is coming very soon — Holbrooke will lose that role as well. So where would that leave Holbrooke, the premiere diplomat of his generation?

– Utah State Sen. Chris Buttars, who is lying like a goddamn bearskin rug on the floor next to a crackling fire warming a gay Aspen orgy.

Even more disgusting, as Yglesias and I were IMing, is how openly homophobic the Utah local newschannel is here, discussing how Buttars is “worried about the homosexual lifestyle becoming accepted or sanctioned in Utah public life.” Would a newschannel ever get away with framing a story that way about any other cohort of Americans? I favor robust federal action to forcibly integrate homosexuality into Utah public life.

* development of a U.S. government strategy to address conflict minerals;

* support for further investigations by the U.N. Group of Experts;

* mapping of which armed groups control key mines in eastern Congo;

* inclusion of information on the negative impact of mineral exploitation and trade on human rights in Congo in the annual human rights reports;

This is hardly my strong suit, so I recommend reading Mark. I’ll be curious to see what the Natural Security team makes of the bill. Brad Plumer too.

Obama creates this new top-level-detainee interrogation task force. It’s called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group or the HIG. (Now is not the time to discuss precision in acronyms! This country faces ruthless enemies, damn it!) The idea is that they use the best legal – i.e., non-torture — interrogation practices, based on copious amounts of social science, to elicit information relevant to preventing terrorist attacks or rolling up extremist networks in a manner that doesn’t get crosswise with potential prosecutions. FBI is the lead agency here, not CIA, although it’s a hybrid team with FBI, CIA and the Defense Department components.

But I learned they’re not going to be talking to Major Hasan. Now, I know, I know — we don’t even know if we ought to consider Hasan a terrorist, and he sure as hell isn’t Usama bin Laden. So maybe it’s a category error to even point out that the HIG won’t be getting involved here. But at the same time, even if Hasan is what the evidence so far suggests he is — a disturbed criminal murderer who turned to a very perverted understanding of religion as a pretextual accelerant for his pathologies — nevertheless his contacts with Anwar al-Aulaqi might be able to tell us something about how someone like Hasan tries to connect back to the broader, online-enabled takfiri infrastructure. In other words, I thought there was a story here, but a subtle one. As someone who’s been writing about the importance of not lumping Hasan into an improper terrorism construct and certainly not stigmatizing American Muslim communities, I had, and have, a lot of concerns about the pirouetting I needed to do to make this piece non-hysterical.

I think I succeeded. But you tell me. I did, in any case, extract a previously unreported fact: the leader of the HIG is an FBI special agent named Andrew McCabe. I wrestled with just peeling that bit off and blogging it, but it was kind of tweet-sized & I wasn’t able to build enough around it. Anyway, check the piece out and tell me if I succeeded at writing what I describe in this post. How could I have done this better?

And it’s true. But now it needs to be put to the greater test. Petraeus, or one of his disciples, needs to come to Washington D.C. — not to testify, but to lead the police force.

Over the past few weeks, my adopted city has fallen into some seriously dire circumstances. A 9-year old — think about that for a moment — was shot and killed on Columbia Road NW this weekend, about four blocks from my house, and only a few blocks further from where, further down Columbia, several old and new friends of mine were gathering for a party. To say this ought to provoke outrage is an understatement. Sam Youngman, who covers the White House for The Hill and lives nearby, sent out a moving and impassioned tweet about the non-leadership shown by Mayor Adrian Fenty: “I’ve never been partisan. I’ve always been a straight reporter. That ends with Fenty: Time to bring this guy down. No more murder next door.” The murder rate in D.C. is astronomical compared to the rest of the country, and has ticked upward since Fenty’s 2007 inaugural. The Left in LeDroit blog implores its fellow citizens: “We feel that we as a city have become too used to this savagery, which is actually abnormal.”

Yes, but we need security to be re-established before more stable patterns of civic behavior can re-emerge. Luckily, we have had a movement in defense circles arise that has learned these lessons at wartime: there is no real security that ignores the “root causes” that allow crime to fester; there can be no real security that doesn’t enlist the population as an active partner; and so expensive jobs programs and other forms of productive enterprise have to flood into areas cleared of criminals. Oh, and make sure your incarceration programs are heavily geared toward rehabilitation.  There’s even a manual that spells all this out.

For years — decades, even — a strain of highly-politicized urban-policy thinking has sneered at any proposal that even approaches dealing with “root causes,” calling that an excuse for pathological behavior. Well, if you believe Petraeus’ population-centric counterinsurgency approach in Iraq led to valuable security gains, you have no excuse to continue believing that. The “soldiers aren’t cops” argument isn’t going to fly here. I’ve attended a seminar at the Army/Marine Corps COIN Center at Ft. Leavenworth in which a talented Army lieutenant colonel explicitly instructed his fellow officers to view neighborhood security as if they were running Kansas City police patrols. The counterinsurgents understand that thinking like an occupying army without asking why neighborhoods give in to insecurity is a blueprint for accelerated destabilization. In urban-policy circles this is considered, for some bewildering reason, unacceptably left-wing. In the Army and Marine Corps, it’s becoming received wisdom.

My friend Ezra thinks that Bill Bratton needs to come to D.C. to reinvigorate the police. I was a Brooklyn teenager during Bratton’s term as NYPD police commissioner and will never say an unkind word about the man. But let’s aim higher.  That CENTCOM gig won’t last forever. We need David Petraeus to change uniforms.

That would be Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey, the Bush Justice Department officials who stood up for the Constitution during one of its darkest hours. Read every word of their statesmanlike op-ed, as it provides a measure of balance, sanity — and, let’s be honest, political cover — to the Obama administration’s efforts at cleaning up the dreck bequeathed to it by the people Goldsmith and Comey battled.

But it’s cool, conservatives. You guys still have John Yoo and Andy McCarthy!

I get credit for not headlining this “Born Against Is Fucking Fed.” But you tell me in comments what my headline references and why.

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Spc. Joseph M. Lewis, 26, of Terrell, Texas died on Nov. 17 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.

The incident is under investigation.

For more information the media may contact the Fort Lewis public affairs office at 253-967-0147 or 0152.