By Steve Clemons

There is a lot of crime in the world, too much — but sometimes misfortune hits close to home and needs to be highlighted.

I have been arguing for years that Vice President Cheney had done more than any other single person in the government — including the President of the United States — to plant acolytes and followers of his throughout the national security bureaucracy.

I’m attending the launch conference today for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that is headed by two former CSIS senior staffers, Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy. The conference has pulled together a real who’s who of the Democratic national security establishment into this invite only confab at the Willard Hotel.

Johanna Mendelson Forman is a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and was previously Senior Program Officer for Peace, Security and Human Rights at the UN Foundation.

Michael Moore is making quite a splash in Washington with his new film, Sicko. I have yet to see the film, but I think that one of the key takeaways from the documentary on the sorry state of American health care is that in Cuba, comprehensive quality health care is considered a human right.

Representative Jane Harman (D-CA-36) blogs in her spare time and reads The Washington Note frequently. She also occasionally guest blogs at Huffington Post.

It is rumored that tomorrow during a “Principals Meeting”, the administration will decide to shut down the Guantanamo military detention facility and transfer prisoners there into the American legal system.

CSIS Strategic Analyst Anthony Cordesman didn’t use that metaphor exactly.

Seymour Hersh has just published in The New Yorker a major interview with Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Pentagon’s investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The piece is titled “The General’s Report.

I’ve received a mountain of email lately — some of it has asked for some more pics of Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner and his kid-sister Annie. Well, here’s one above of the pups sleeping which they do a lot of after some wild romps, runs, and walks that they get into on a daily basis….