Today Scott called on everyone else in the first four rows of the briefing room, some of them multiple times, but he didn’t call on me. I’m a little frustrated about not getting to ask my question (what it something I said? was my last post to cruel), but knowing that the White House hates me and/or is afraid of me is some compensation. Nevertheless, it was a pretty interesting day. The place was jammed, and the first twenty questions dealt with Patrick Fitzgerald’s late Wednesday night bombshell revelation that, according to Lewis Libby, the president authorized Libby’s leak to Judy Miller of information from the top secret National Intelligence Estimate. . . . → Read More: Briefing room follies, Leaker-in-Chief edition

Today I finally got another chance to get Scott McClellan riled up. Ever since the last time I did it, back in January, he’s been lucky enough or tricky enough to avoid having to call on me, but today, the briefing room wasn’t quite as crowded as it has been, and I got my chance to ask a question that has been puzzling me ever since the Director of National Intelligence ,John Negroponte, testified to the Senate on February 2 that, “Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices with explosively formed projectiles similar to those developed by Iran and Lebanese Hizballah.” . . . → Read More: More blogging from the White House: Bush & Negroponte vs. Pace & Rumsfeld on the ‘Iranian IEDs’

Nobody paid any attention a couple of weeks ago when I reported last year’s rather startling increase in worldwide terrorism. The data, compiled by the RAND Corporation and available to the public at tkb.org, showed that, worldwide, the sum of “international” and “domestic” terrorist attacks increased by more than 50% between 2004 and 2005. So, I went to the White House today and asked Scott McClellan for his take. . . . → Read More: White House: Skyrocketing terrorism = “great progress”

There have been some interesting recent developments in the CIA’s Italian kidnapping caper. The case came to light last June, when an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents for nabbing Egyptian Muslim cleric Hassan Nasr (aka ‘Abu Omar’) off a street in Milan on February 17, 2003, and shipping him, via an American airbase in Germany, to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. Egypt wanted Nasr, 42, because of his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, an organization dedicated to establishing an Islamic government in Egypt. During a crackdown on Jemaah Islamiah in the early 1990s, Nasr fled Egypt and eventually received asylum in Italy in 1997. . . . → Read More: Spy vs. spy: the CIA’s Italian kidnapping caper gets out of hand

Today, I asked both Press Secretary Scott McClellan and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley about recent reports that the Italian government was involved in the Iraq-Niger hoax. . . . → Read More: White House denies “Italian Connection” to phony Iraq-Niger intelligence