My test on this is easy: Would George C. Marshall have accepted such payments? I doubt it. (Remember, he declined to write a memoir that would have made him wealthy because he thought it would have been improper to get into the failings of some of his comrades.)

“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost,” Mr. Obama told CNN in an interview at his hotel in Beijing. Most important, he said, is that he is asking “what’s the end game on this thing, which I think is something that unless you impose that kind of discipline, could end up leading to a multi-year occupation that won’t serve the interests of the United States.”

One of the more interesting things about Gen. McChrystal’s August strategy review is that it doesn’t evidently presume any limited costs. That’s not to say it’s cavalier with those costs. Far from it: practically every page underscores the importance of Afghan civilian lives and sensibilities. But what it doesn’t contain is a sense that the war has to operate within certain parameters. The closest McChrystal comes to a timeline is writing that “failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” But that’s not the same thing as saying the war will end if those 12 months pass with Taliban momentum intact. And nowhere does it say that the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan that he commands has to operate within a budget of X billion dollars. Meanwhile, pretty much every other policy discussion operates within precisely that framework of time and expense.

This is not McChrystal’s fault. It’s a structural problem: defense discussions, and especially wartime defense discussions, do not typically feature fulsome discussions of timelines or constrained budgets. Indeed, for practically the entire Bush administration, officials solemnly intoned that it would be folly to put war strategy on a timeline — that is, until the Iraqi government forced the Bush administration to sign an accord specifying deadlines for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq. It’s a curious feature of U.S. politics, and something that bothers Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who last month asked why, if the Congressional Budget Office had to measure the cost of every health care proposal, “Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan?”

Despite what the president says, there is no guarantee that Obama’s strategy review will actually impose the clarity he’s promising here. “There’s got to be an exit strategy,” he told ‘60 Minutes’ in March, before unveiling a strategy that didn’t have one. And he needs to clarify which goal he’s seeking – a stable Afghanistan or a destroyed al-Qaeda, which are not the same thing. But his acknowledgment that a kind of resource drift will occur absent clear presidential guidance is a reassuring sign.

“Due to the high visibility of the issues surrounding the tragic event at Fort Hood, the President has instructed the National Security Council to assume control of all informational briefings. The NSC has directed that the leadership, as well as the chairmen and ranking minority members of the relevant congressional committees receive briefings first.

“I have been told that the Director of National Intelligence is still committed to providing the full membership a briefing on the activities within the jurisdiction of this Committee. I believe that this will occur, and I will push to schedule a briefing before the end of this week.”

Just yesterday, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) postponed the Senate Armed Services Committee’s scheduled briefing on Fort Hood in accordance with President Obama’s request for Congress to await the results of military and law enforcement inquiries.

That would be the same religion that members of the U.S. military practice, to say nothing of about one-fifth of the world’s population. Who knows, there are probably some practitioners of that “savage religion” in Manzullo’s own congressional district!

“I think a lot of different places are leaking. I’m confident that the Department of Defense is one of them.To have details or options that are being considered out there in the middle of the president’s deliberative process I think does not serve the country and it does not serve our military.’’

Mr. Gates then added a threat. “And frankly if I found out with high confidence anybody who was leaking in the Department of Defense, who that was, that would probably be a career-ender,’’ he said.

Noah Shachtman sums this up very well with an acronym I’m told I’m not allowed to use on this blog. I wonder if we’ll ever find out who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan assessment to Bob Woodward now!

Pentagon officials said the low-end option of 10,000 to 15,000 more troops would mean little or no significant increase in American combat forces in Afghanistan. The bulk of the additional forces would go to train the Afghan Army, with a smaller number focused on hunting and killing terrorists, the officials said.

The low-end option would essentially reject the more ambitious counterinsurgency strategy envisioned by General McChrystal, which calls for a large number of forces to protect the Afghan population, work on development projects and build up the country’s civil institutions.

It had been my understanding that a troop infusion of this size was not greeted with much enthusiasm at the White House. But if President Obama is really telling all factions to get much more specific about how the war ends, then perhaps it really is on the table.

If it is, the question becomes whether McChrystal stays in his command. While we may not actually know what McChrystal himself desires, his friends in the Joint Special Operations Command, I’ve been told, favor a troop increase far above 10,000. If he does, he’ll be blessing whatever Obama decides. But very, very few commanders ever actually resign. If McChrystal proves to be the exception, it will be a political debacle for the Obama administration, and so it’s a safe bet that the White House will do whatever it can not to force the general’s hand.

[T]he federal authorities dropped an inquiry into the matter after deciding that the messages from the psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, did not suggest any threat of violence and concluding that no further action was warranted, government officials said Monday.

Major Hasan’s 10 to 20 messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Major Hasan worshiped, indicate that the troubled military psychiatrist came to the attention of the authorities long before last Thursday’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but that the authorities left him in his post.

The Times quotes an FBI statement:

“At this point, there is no information to indicate Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot.” The statement concluded that “because the content of the communications was explainable by his research and nothing else was found,” investigators decided “that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning.”

Bring on the congressional inquiry.

My favorite response to that comes from VetVoice’s Richard Allen Smith:

A dumb f—— idea, not the least of reasons being that Major Hasan’s records indicated he had no religious preference”, so he wouldn’t have been screened anyway.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

Update: Via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter, conservative writer David Frum provides an elegant and moving illustration of this point.

Well, today is the day! From Blair’s office:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair released today the fiscal year 2009 budget figure for the National Intelligence Program (NIP).  The Director disclosed that the aggregate amount appropriated to the NIP for fiscal year 2009 was $49.8 Billion.

OK, then, per Blair’s September disclosure, that means the MIP, last year, totaled $25.2 billion. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder tweeted that he thinks Blair was “lowballing” and the real intel budget is around $130 when you take into account “IT spending, DARPA intel stuff, infrastructure, shared costs” and “half of [the Department of Homeland Security]’s activities (even enforcement ) serve intelligence purposes, domestic or otherwise.”

From a release:

“Law enforcement organizations across the nation understand that we collect the best intelligence and protect both the interrogator and the person being interrogated by requiring recordings,” Holt said. “This bill continues the process of putting our detainee policies back on a sound legal footing while maintaining our ability to get actionable intelligence,” Holt said.

In addition to requiring videorecording of detainee interrogations, Holt’s provision would require the Secretary of Defense to develop guidelines for ensuring that the required videorecording is expansive enough to prevent abuses of detainees’ fundamental human rights under U.S. and international law. To ensure the safety of U.S. troops, the provision would not require troops in combat to record interrogations.

The Senate is expected to take up the measure soon.