Hmmm….I wonder why the White House would need “refresher courses”?

White House staff members began attending mandatory briefings Tuesday about ethical conduct and the handling of classified information in the wake of the CIA leak investigation and the indictment and resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In the coming weeks, some 3,000 employees in agencies under the Executive Office of the President will attend the hour-long sessions conducted by the White House counsel’s office. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the classes were refresher courses and that the first attendees were staffers with security clearances.

I wonder which definition of “mandatory” the White House is employing here? Is it in the “The President directed the White House to cooperate fully” form of the word, or the “synonymous with ‘obligatory’ and ‘required’” form that the rest of us use?

And speaking of ethics, you’ll never guess who’s coming into town just in time to learn about the ins and outs of leaking classified information…

Ahmed Chalabi comes in from the cold today, arriving in Washington to meet senior Bush administration officials for the first time in two years – despite lingering allegations that the Iraqi politician provided bogus pre-war intelligence, and a continuing investigation into whether he passed US secrets to Iran.

The investigation began 17 months ago, after US intelligence officials alleged that he or his aides had informed Tehran that Washington had broken Iran’s spy codes. Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, raided Mr Chalabi’s offices in May last year, and the Baghdad authorities issued an arrest warrant for his security chief, Araz Habib, accusing him of being an Iranian agent.

Mr Chalabi and his organisation, the Iraqi National Congress, denied all the charges and claimed that the CIA was out to smear him. At the time Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, promised a criminal investigation into the charges, but it appears to have made little progress. Mr Chalabi, now Iraq’s deputy prime minister, has offered to give evidence, but, his lawyer has said, the FBI failed to respond; nor have his closest supporters in the Pentagon been questioned. After a few months as a fugitive, Mr Habib is reported to have returned to Baghdad.

For those of you who find this news troubling, don’t worry. The White House is already putting together plans for their staff to attend meetings about why it’s wrong to mislead the nation into a bloody quagmire and spread state secrets to theocratic strongmen while we’re at war. And this meeting is mandatory, unless you’ve already made lunch plans that you just can’t reschedule.