TNR's Piece on Pakistan

Before continuing, I strongly recommend you read this article over at TNR.

The allegations of this article are significantly distressing. Most specifically:

What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] H[ighV[alue]T[arget] were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

This charge is so outrageous, I have trouble believing it, even in the case of Bush - a man who has consistently lowered the bar of plausibility when it comes to scandalous abuses of office. However, I consider Spencer Ackerman a reliable source, so let's take a quick look at the various pillars of the story's credibility. First, the reporters:

• Spencer Ackerman - A liberal, editor at the TNR, and a hawk. Was in favor of the Iraq War, and started his blog Iraq'd when he felt that Bush had fucked up an otherwise noble venture. I give him props for pegging Allawi early as a potential autocrat in the making (scroll to 5/29, "Zipless Coup")
  
• John Judis - I don't know too much about Judis, but I consider him a bit of a goofball on the grounds of what others have said of his book The Emerging Democratic Majority co-authored with Ruy Tuxeira. I'd have to read it before I could say more, but I get the sense that he sees demographics as the forecaster of Democratic Party ascendance, which strikes me as reading political preference backwards... parties evolve to suit demographics, not the other way around.
  
• Massoud Ansari - I know nothing about him.
  

Now, the major sources of the article are ISI agents. There is no corroboration from current American officials (go figure), and it's important to take their testimony with a grain of salt. It is unlikely that the Pakistani intelligence services are the first not to have a disinformation/psy-ops unit, and it's possible that their snowing the journalists to advance some ulterior motives. It seems possible that Pakistan could have a motivation to swing the upcoming U.S. election results. It's also possible that this information could be used to sweat the Administration for some kind of political favor (say F-16's?). I'm not saying the story should be disbelieved, but it is important to at least bear in mind the possible profit that the "leakers" could see from this story...

Also, I would suspect that "Anonymous" (CIA Agent Michael Scheuer) could be the man behind the curtain in this story. He has been a source of Ackerman's in the recent past and it seems quite possible that he could have set up the journalists with their sources. It's foolish to speculate upon his possible motives for doing so, but I'm a fool. A disgruntled retiring CIA agent could conceivably be motivated by animus, or again by a political agenda. Again, I'm not saying that the presence of such motives should be taken as automatically discrediting the story. But they should at least go into the skeptical appraisal of the story's claims.