Le Blog Présidentiel

As the French elections heat up, I'm putting a good deal of time into organizing and editing Newsweek's new feature, Le Blog Présidentiel.

I will begin posting again on this site more regularly after the French have chosen their new leader in May.

Homeland Security: Drug-Running Recruiters

"The Tucson recruiters, trained to sell people on the military, often used those skills to recruit for the drug ring, helping the sting to mushroom, court records show."
-- Carol Ann Alaimo in The Arizona Daily Star.

Shortly after 9/11, the FBI investigated complaints that an Arizona Army National Guard recruiter at a strip mall in Tucson was taking bribes for fixing test results. The undercover officer who went to question the suspect recruiter was offered not only the chance to pay for the grades needed to join the service -- but to buy cocaine from the back of the recruiter's car.

So began the sting operation named "Operation Lively Green" -- as in uniforms, as in dollars, as in "the color of their authority," according to a Justice Department press release last year which named "16 current and former U.S. soldiers and law enforcement officers" who copped pleas for "participating in a widespread bribery and extortion conspiracy."

This is the way the DOJ laid out the case:

In documents filed today in federal court in Tucson, Arizona, each defendant agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to enrich themselves by obtaining cash bribes from persons they believed to be narcotics traffickers. Those individuals were actually Special Agents from the FBI, and the defendants used their official positions to assist, protect and participate in the activities of what they believed was an illegal narcotics trafficking organization engaged in the business of transporting and distributing cocaine from Arizona to other locations in the southwestern United States.

In order to protect the shipments of cocaine, the defendants wore their official uniforms and carried their official forms of identification, used official vehicles, and used their color of authority, where necessary, to prevent police stops, searches, and seizures of the narcotics as they drove the cocaine shipments on highways that passed through checkpoints manned by the U.S. Border Patrol, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and Nevada law enforcement officers. Many of the defendants also accepted additional cash bribes in return for recruiting other public officials they believed to be corrupt to further facilitate the activities of the fictitious narcotics trafficking organization.

According to court documents, all of the defendants escorted at least two shipments of cocaine from locations such as Nogales, Arizona and Tucson, Arizona to destinations which included Phoenix and Las Vegas, Nevada. The defendants pleading guilty today transported a total of over 560 kilograms of cocaine and accepted over $222,000 in cash bribes as payment for their illegal activities.

In one instance, on Aug. 22, 2002, several of the defendants drove three official government vehicles, including two military Humvees assigned to the Arizona Army National Guard (AANG), to a clandestine desert airstrip near Benson, Arizona, where they met with a twin-engine King Air aircraft flown by undercover agents of the FBI. Those defendants, while in full uniform, supervised the unloading of approximately 60 kilograms of cocaine from the King Air into their vehicles. They then drove the cocaine to a resort hotel in Phoenix where they were met by another undercover agent of the FBI, posing as a high-echelon narcotics trafficker, who immediately paid them off in cash.

In another instance, on April 12, 2002, defendant John M. Castillo, 30, while on duty as an inspector for the INS at the Mariposa Port of Entry located on the U.S. border at Nogales, Arizona, twice waved a truck he believed to be carrying at least 40 kilograms of cocaine through the border without being inspected. On or about Aug. 1, 2002, Castillo also sold an undercover FBI agent INS documents which fraudulently provided for the entry of undocumented aliens into the United States.

The article in the Arizona Daily Star looks at the fact that the recruiters involved made frequent visits to local high schools to persuade the kids they had a future in the military. So far as the paper was able to determine, they did not recruit any students into the ranks of abusers, dealers or traffickers. - C.D.

Taliban Rule Book in Pashto

Sami Yousufzai and Ron Moreau brought to light the Taliban Rule Book earlier this month, and a full translation is now available on the Newsweek site. For those who read Pashto, these photographs show the original pages. Click to enlarge.

Policing: "Guns Gone Wild"

The most informative article I've read on the Sean Bell killing outside the Kalua Nightclub in New York City is Sean Gardiner's piece in The Village Voice. The bottom line: cops appear to have more firepower than they know how to manage these days. Commissioner Ray Kelly, during his first tour, had tried to limit them to six-shooters. Then he brought in semi-automatics but limited them to ten shots. His successors upped the fatal ante to 15. In the Sean Bell killing, one cop, who'd never fired his gun in the streets before, went through two clips and one round in the chamber -- 31 bullets -- in less than 20 seconds. Obviously this wouldn't have been possible with a Smith & Wesson. But, that said, a lot of policing has to do with the psychological environment. One part of that is creating a sense of security for the public -- the approach laid out by Wilson and Kelling years ago in "Broken Windows." But another part is creating a sense of security for the cops. Now that they're used to their Glocks, it's all but impossible, and could be deeply demoralizing, if they had to give them up. - C.D.

Paths to War - and Out of It

These last two paragraphs from the cover story of Newsweek's U.S. edition this week are worth reading closely:

It is not out of the question that Bush 43 will be brought around by the so-called Realists. Fantasies of a liberal democracy in Iraq are long gone. The most Bush can reasonably hope for in Iraq is some measure of stability, which is what the Realists want, too. Bush's situation—and petulant tone—are not unlike Lyndon Johnson's in 1968, when the Vietnam War was getting no better, despite troop levels' reaching a half-million men and a heavy bombing campaign. Johnson's new secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, was a clever fixer/statesman, just like Baker. Johnson ranted to his advisers, "Let's get one thing clear! I'm telling you now that I'm not going to stop the bombing!" (Bush last week: "There's one thing I'm not going to do: I'm not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.") But Clifford and the other Wise Men he brought into the White House did persuade LBJ to halt the bombing and open peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Baker & Co. might still nudge Bush onto a track that involves more diplomacy and less force.

There is, however, a cautionary coda to the Vietnam comparison. The revolt of the Wise Men in 1968 did change administration policy—but it did not end the war. The peace talks dragged on until Richard Nixon became president in 1969; he then re-escalated the war, which didn't end until another five years had passed and 25,000 more American soldiers had been lost. Iraq has not cost nearly as many American lives. But Vietnam fundamentally shaped America in ways that reverberate even today, and no matter what happens between George Bush and Jim Baker in the coming days and weeks, it is likely that Iraq will be with us for as long as Vietnam has been—or longer.

Evan Thomas, who wrote the story, was also the c0-author of a fascinating book called "The Wise Men," in which Clifford played a major role. I'm happy to see it's still in print.

The lessons of Vietnam are complicated, but they're certainly worth studying today. If you want a quick short course, I'd suggest watching the HBO movie "Path to War," which came out in 2002 and is now available on DVD. It was John "The Manchurian Candidate" Frankenheimer's last film. Donald Sutherland plays Clifford. Alec Baldwin is McNamara, and Michael Gambon is a convincing LBJ. It presents a vivid picture of Johnson Agonistes, and gives a disturbingly accurate sense of how good intentions and bad advice can suck the United States into a quagmire.

One final note: all "ground combat troops" had been pulled out of Vietnam by 1972, on the eve of that year's presidential elections. The war went on for three more years, and ended in disaster after the U.S. Congress finally decided to pull the plug. But the outcome was inevitable in any case. - C.D.

More on the KGB, UFOs, Po-210 Coffee Mugs

Articles suggesting that the isotope used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London last month can be had on the Internet for $69 are, to say the least, misleading. A piece by Jessica Bennett on Newsweek's Web site goes some way toward clearing up the confusion about Polonium 210 and its availability. The stuff -- or what purports to be the stuff -- is being marketed by Bob Lazar, who formerly claimed he worked at Area 51 where UFOs are stored. Nobody we've found has actually tested the product he's selling to see if it amounts to more than the trace elements that can be discovered, for instance, in cigarette smoke. Or if the isotope is present in his samples at all. According to the Newsweek article, you pay $69 for one microcurie, which is one millionth of a curie, which is already a very, very, very small amount.

According to the nuclear experts I talked to for my column earlier this week, the assumption based on animal experiments is that 525 microcuries of Polonium-210 would be enough to kill you if ingested, and a gram would represent, roughly, 10,000 times the lethal dose.

But the fact is that there's not much known research on the ingestion of this rare isotope -- who would you feed it to? who would have been eating it or breathing it by accident? -- so some scientists suggest it would take hundreds of micrograms to kill someone.

Presumably an assassin would come to the same conclusion. That's yet another reason to suppose the stuff that killed Litvinenko came from an operation capable of bombarding highly pure bismuth, and which did so in the last few months -- ie., the kind of facility that exists in a nuclear weapons state and, as far as I know, nowhere else.

I also got e-mails asking about the "signature" or the "fingerprint" of this isotope. As I understand it the problem here is that no investigators, not those at the IAEA, much less those from Scotland Yard, have access to the facilities of the nuclear weapons states, and therfore cannot compare the Po-210 that killed Litvinenko with everything that might be available. Nor is it likely that the Russians, Israelis, or for that matter the Americans and the British, are going to open their labs and production facilities for police examination.

That traces of radiation were found on BA planes which flew from Moscow to London and back in the week before Litvinenko showed symptoms of poisoning would seem to point the finger even more clearly at Russians, although not necessarily at Putin. The current illness of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar would seem to be another plot twist.

But I confess it's Lazar that interests -- and darkly amuses -- me. On his Web site he notes that the polonium-210 he sells, such as it is, would be almost impossible to use as a poison. But another isotope found in smoke detectors ... would work just great. I haven't tested that claim, and don't intend to.

This article about Lazar which appeared in the Albuquerque Journal earlier this year gives a pretty good picture of the "UFO guy":
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/463826nm05-28-06.htm

And this one in Wired probably tells you more than you ever wanted to know:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html

For a statement from the man himself, see: http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm

If you like, you can also order a Polonium coffee mug:
http://www.unitednuclear.com/mugs.htm

NYPD: Perspective

Clyde Haberman's essay in today's New York Times is the best single piece I've seen on the Sean Bell killing in New York. There are certainly a lot of questions to be asked about those 50 shots the police pumped into Bell, his friends and his car the day he was due to get married. But very little coverage looks at the crimes that precipitated the intensified undercover work at many bars and dives around NYC, even though the savage killings of 24-year-old Imette St. Guillen after clubbing in SoHo in February and 18-year-old Jennifer Moore in July dominated the tabloid headlines at the time. Even less attention has been paid to the dangers faced by the undercover officers on the ground. That's where Haberman focused his attention:

"... meanwhile, in Brooklyn, some attention turned to cops who lost life, not cops who took life.

This is happening in a federal courtroom where a Staten Island man with an expressionless face is on trial for his life, charged with shooting two undercover police detectives in the back of the head. He in effect executed them, it is charged, for the effrontery of trying to rid the streets of illegal guns.

These two events would seem unrelated. But they are two faces of the same New York story. Both involve police undercover work that went disastrously wrong, although in different ways.

The very nature of this work can lead to nightmarish situations because, by definition, undercover officers are supposed to melt into their surroundings. Snap decisions — when to back off, when to make arrests, certainly when to shoot — are rarely uncomplicated or without peril.

In the case before the Brooklyn jury, the murdered detectives pretended one night in March 2003 that they were interested in buying a gun. As part of this pretense, according to the charges, they sat up front in a car, acting as if they had a bond with two men in the back seat.

This was a mistake. It allowed one of the men in the back to fire at them, point-blank.

They paid with their lives, Detectives James V. Nemorin, 36, and Rodney J. Andrews, 34 — they with five children between them..."

James Bond's Particular Poison

I still haven't seen the latest film version of "Casino Royale," but I gather from recent news stories that it includes the original Ian Fleming recipe for a devastating martini. (Charles Bremner's piece in the Times of London about the sudden global demand for Lillet was particularly amusing.) But while reading through my old copy of the novel (the same as the one pictured, pages 40 and 41) I was struck by the conversation that surrounded the recipe, reminiscent as it is of a cosmopolitan hedonism that seems long lost. It is the quintessence of classic Bond:

'My name's Felix Leiter,' said the American [CIA agent]. 'Glad to meet you.'

'Mine's Bond - James Bond.'

'Oh, yes,' said his companion, 'and now let's see. What shall we have to celebrate?'

Bond insisted on ordering Leiter's Haing-and-Haig 'on the rocks,' and then he looked carefully at the barman.

'A dry Martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.'

'Oui, monsieur.'

'Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?'

'Certainly, monsieur.' The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

'Gosh, that's certainly a drink,' said Leiter.

Bond laughed. 'When I'm - er - concentrating,' he explained, 'I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink's my own invention. I'm going to patent it when I can think of a good name.'

He watched carefully as the deep glass became frosted with the pale golden drink, slightly aerated by the bruising of the shaker. He reached for it and took a long sip.

'Excellent,' he said to the barman, 'but if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.'

'Mais n'enculons pas des mouches,' he added in an aside to the barman. The barman grinned.
'That's a vulgar way of saying "we won't split hairs," ' explained Bond.

But Leiter was interested in Bond's drink. 'You certainly think things out,' he said with amusement as they carried their glasses to a corner of the room. He lowered his voice:
'You'd better call it the "Molotov Cocktail" after the one you tasted this afternoon.' ...

Litvinenko: Wet Work and KGB Sushi?

This is the sushi restaurant on Picadilly in London where Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko ate his last meal, as it were, on Nov. 1. I've passed by there a couple of times this week and it's been packed, despite the prominent coverage in the British press of Litvinenko's terrible suffering from a mysterious poison. .... So I decided, what the hell, I'd go to Itsu for lunch today, eat a couple of California rolls, chat up the staff, see what other customers were thinking. But by 1:30 this afternoon it was shut down tight. The sign out front reads "As a result of the Russia/KGB business, we are temporarily closed while Scotland Yard investigate. Sorry!!"... Litvinenko died last night of what authorities in the UK are calling a "massive and deliberate dose" of an isotope called Polonium 210. The BBC is reporting traces of radiation have indeed been found at Itsu as well. ... Apparently polonium, exotic as it sounds, is not so hard to come by. A quick Google search shows traces of it are found in cigarettes and, well, fish. The BBC is reporting that it can be purchased on line. ... Moscow is adamantly denying any involvement in Litvinenko's demise, but the suspicion that this is the work of some present or past members of the Russian secret services is not going to go away. As suggested in the Shadowland column this week, what the Soviets used to call "wet work" is growing common in our world of deeply conflicted national interests. The intellectual authors seem to think they have licenses to kill, and they may be right. -- C.D.

More On The Poker Paradigm

One of the comments on the previous post suggests author and poker player James McManus is misreading Iran's game, and somehow playing into the hands of neo-con warmongers. But, even if that were true, and I don't believe it is, his analysis is essentially about a paradigm -- and about the power of the unknown. On this point, and its role in "virtual" nuclear proliferation around the world, you'll soon be able to read much more. (Watch for Newsweek's special "Issues 2007.") In the meantime, you might want to keep an eye on www.cardplayer.com , where McManus will start a series of articles on poker history later this week. You can also listen to him on NPR yesterday:

Analysis
Iran's Poker-Like Stand-Off

Listen to this story...

Weekend Edition Saturday, November 18, 2006 · Author and high-stakes poker player James McManus talks about the parallels he sees between the political posturing of Iran's president and a game of poker.

Of Persians, Poker, Bluster and Bluffs

James McManus, who writes brilliantly about poker, had a piece in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend that really is one of the most useful things I've seen about the diplomatic showdown with Iran over its nuclear program. Can President Bush master the game of Tehran Holdem? You may need to register to read the whole article online and get the nuances of winning with weak hands, developing a narrative, and so on. But here are some of McManus's observations:

...At least 250 years before our country was founded, Persians were playing bluff-based card games with decks of four suits: coins, goblets, polo mallets and scimitars. In the late 18th century, their vying game As-Nas (My Beloved Ace) became the prototype for the 20-card French game poque. Introduced by Napoleon's troops to New Orleans, poque evolved into 52-card poker on Mississippi steamboats in the decades after the Louisiana Purchase. Union and Confederate soldiers played the game between battles, then brought it home to every state and territory. By 1970, when the first World Series of Poker was hosted by Benny Binion at his Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas, the variation of choice was no-limit Texas hold 'em. During the next 36 years, the number of challengers in the main event mushroomed from seven to 8,773, including players from 56 countries. But only one country besides the U.S. has produced more than one champion: Iran.

Amir Vahedi is one of the likeliest Iranians to bring this number to three. Born in Tehran in 1961, Vahedi enlisted in the army during the war with Iraq (1980-88). After he'd served for two years in that hideous bloodbath—poison gas was deployed and martyr brigades of children, called the Basij, marched across minefields—Vahedi's mother begged him to desert his unit and leave the country. Despite his determination to serve with honor, he decided to obey his mother's desperate plea. He was imprisoned in Afghanistan, but upon his release obtained a forged passport, made his way to East Berlin, slipped into West Berlin and eventually arrived in Los Angeles. Here he drove limos and learned to play tournament poker, achieving enough success with the latter—his lifetime earnings exceed $2.5 million—to be immortalized with a cigar-chomping bobblehead. Affable and gregarious away from the tables, Vahedi is almost recklessly aggressive while playing hold 'em. "To live in a no-limit tournament," he has famously observed, "you have to be willing to die."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to have adapted this as his rallying cry. He was a Basij instructor during the war with Iraq and lately has been extravagant in his praise for suicide bombers. Soon after his inauguration speech, he asked, "Is there any art more beautiful, more divine and more eternal than the art of the martyr's death? A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity." And if, as he believes, the Twelfth Imam is about to return to destroy the infidels, why should he compromise, especially when a reported 9 million Basij formed a 5,400-mile human chain to support his nuclear program?

But is Ahmadinejad really a martyr himself, or does he just play one on TV? More crucially, can the West accept nuclear weapons in the hands of a demagogue obsessed with self-slaughter?

Even though his regime probably has no warheads, it counts on belligerent pronouncements toward Israel—which "must be wiped off the map"—and America to unnerve world energy markets, raising fuel prices while enriching Iranian coffers at the rate of nearly $1 billion a week. This in turn enables Iran to fund Hezbollah and Shiite jihadis more lavishly, to pay hefty sums to import nuclear expertise, and makes it less vulnerable to economic sanctions. In this sense Ahmadinejad has us almost literally over a barrel. Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear program edges closer to yielding the estimated 15 to 20 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium necessary for a warhead or suitcase bomb. Ahmadinejad and the atomic ayatollahs may have banned gambling, but they have communicated a willingness to risk millions of lives—Muslim, Christian and Jewish—in the ultimate no-limit staredown.

…

More general bluffing guidelines include:

Bluster = Weakness. If Ahmadinejad claims to already have "the full gamut of nuclear technology," a pokeraticious diplomat will infer that he doesn't. She'll put him on a much weaker hand and re-raise. If he tries to stare her down, she'll remain serenely confident that leaders holding powerful cards tend to downplay or even—the Israelis again come to mind—deny the existence of a nuclear arsenal.

Isolate your opponent. One player is exponentially easier to bluff than two or three. This is why Rice tries to isolate Iran by accepting Chinese and Russian demands to limit sanctions against their affluent client.

Project strength. After defeating Saddam Hussein, the U.S. failure to create a stable peace in which democracy could thrive makes us look weak. So does Israel's failure to disarm Hezbollah. So does our failure to capture Osama bin Laden.

Seem to mean it. As the physicist and educator Jeremy Bernstein observes, "The Israelis seem to mean it when they say they would not allow the Iranians to have nuclear weapons." Harry Truman clearly meant it in 1946, as did Kennedy in 1962. Indeed, the entire first and second world wars and the Cold War, as well as Operations Desert Storm and Joint Endeavor, made us appear very much to mean it, while Vietnam, Somalia, the fiasco in Tora Bora and now Iraq II all cut in the other direction. For his part, Ahmadinejad seemed to mean it when he recruited children to march across minefields, and, lately, as he arms and funds Hezbollah and countless Shia suicide bombers.

Expect duplicity. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who also negotiated for the release of American hostages in 1979, warns that Iranian negotiators will deploy "bazaar behavior" resembling that of "a Middle Eastern marketplace, with outlandish demands, feints at abandoning the process and haggling over minor details up to the very last minute." He counsels our current negotiators to remain steadfast but realistic. Or as Doyle Brunson, winner of a record 10 WSOP bracelets, has noted, "Luck favors the backbone, not the wishbone."

Make sure your hole cards remain face-down. Israel, unlike North Korea, has never shown its hand by conducting a test, but is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons. It's safe to assume this is why Iran bars Atomic Energy Commission inspectors from several key sites.

Keep all options on the table. This includes even the most baldly Strangelovian. The trigger finger of Vice President Dick Cheney could seem even itchier, for example, if he communicated through back channels something along the lines of: "Keep rattling that rickety scimitar in our face, Mahmoud, and we'll turn Tehran and Natanz into parking lots that glow in the dark."

The most spectacular upside of a nuclear bluff is avoiding warfare. If we or the Israelis can make Iran's leaders believe their research enrichment facilities and even a city or two will be nuked if they don't halt enrichment, we might short-circuit their quest for weapons-grade material and avoid having to kill a single Iranian.

The downside, of course, is increasing the risk that we'll overplay our hand and push a desperate opponent too hard, unleashing a whirlwind of suicide bombers—or worse.

Mark Twain's War Prayer

Thanks to Dr. Orin Hollander for reminding me of Mark Twain's powerful statement, dictated during the war in the Philippines 100 years ago, which his publisher refused to print. An excerpt:

"...When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory-- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

"(After a pause.) 'Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!'

"It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said."

War Poetry II

One of the better satires, from one Norman Ball, who certainly seems to have a good ear:

The Oz Man II

(In the Shameful Shadow of Shelley's 'Ozymandias')

I met a Baathist from a ravaged land
Who said: Two short, blue-trousered legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-dazed by shock and awe, a visage frowns,
with wrinkled lip, and smirk of chimp-command.
No doubt Dick Cheney well those passions read,
Which squawk on yet, as do most lame-duck things,
Like mice that roared, while at the trough they fed,
And on one trouser-cuff these words appear:
"My name is W, unelected King:
Look on my Evil Axis and despair!"
No liberty remains. Round the decay
Of neo-cons and hegemonic air,
Fallujah's level sands stretch far away.

War Poetry

Many readers have their own thoughts about Kipling and about war poetry appropriate to Iraq. Some have sent in their own compositions. But this is a classic:

Here's something from LT. S. L. Sassoon known in WW I as the " Trench Poet"

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with Scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heros up the line to death,
You'd see me with my puffy petulent face,
guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the roll of honor, " poor young chap,"
I'd say - " I used to know his father well,
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die - in bed.

Things never seem to change, do they? As Woody Guthrie sang... " the worst of men must fight and the best of men must die..."

Thanks for listening.

Ray Brown
U.S. Army Infantry
Viet Nam 68-69

Timelines: Iraq and WWII

In response to the latest Shadowland column, about Kevin Tillman's scream of rage at the administration and its war, a reader in California who still clings to "stay the course" rhetoric asks, "Would today's America have the fortitute[sic] to persevere in World War II?"

Of course the answer is yes. But consider this:

From the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to final victory over Japan in August 1945, three years and eight months passed. The war was over.

From the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to November 2006, three years and eight months will have passed. And there is no end to this war in sight. - C.D.

Follow-Up: Alberto's Retraction

So, Alberto Fernandez retracted his remarks about the arrogance and stupidity of American policy in Iraq -- sort of. This very brief response appeared overnight on the State Department's Web site from the Office of the Spokesman:


In response to questions about his recent interview with Al-Jazeera, the following is a comment attributable to Mr. Alberto Fernandez:

"Upon reading the transcript of my appearance on Al-Jazeera, I realized that I seriously misspoke by using the phrase 'there has been arrogance and stupidity' by the U.S. in Iraq. This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize."

###
2006/947


The irony, of course, is that this is the sanest admission the administration has made about Iraq in a long while -- if ever -- and perhaps even some Republicans were ready to applaud what had seemed to be, briefly, such candor and clarity coming out of Foggy Bottom. - C.D.

Iraq: A Rare Voice of Reason in D.C.

I hope Alberto Fernandez isn't in too much trouble. The director of public diplomacy for the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Fernandez has been for several years now the only credible voice defending what is an almost entirely discredited policy in the Arab world. I think he always knew that one day someone in D.C. would pick up on the kinds of things he said in Arabic on Al-Jazeera. You know, like, the truth. And then he'd have the Bush administration's infamous loyalty test applied to him -- and most likely fail. We'll see. His description of U.S. policy in Iraq as "arrogant and stupid" is leading the AP wires.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at Zvika Krieger's excellent little profile of Fernandez from a few weeks ago. - C.D.

Iran: Cartoon Controversies Continue...

The government in Tehran is mighty sensitive about cartoons. First it fed the uproar over the Danish depictions of Mohammed, then it held its own Holocaust caricature festival. And now it has closed down the newspaper that published the above depiction of two chess pieces. The cartoon is seen as an allusion to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks that the last time he spoke to the United Nations, a year ago, he felt himself surrounded by an aura. He's on his way back to speak again ... -- C.D.

Torture: The Basic Problem

As often happens, the most salient fact was left to the end of yesterday's New York Times story about the torture -- or, interrogation -- of Abu Zubaydah. As I was once told by an interrogator from Lebanon, not a place known for friendly persuasion, "the basic problem with torture is that if someone is telling the truth ... how do you know?" What the Times story establishes, in a fashion so understated that the point could be missed, is that the CIA turned up the heat, and cold, and music, on Abu Zubaydah when it didn't believe his story that Jose Padilla was a fool, which he clearly was, and after it became convinced Aby Zubaydah was lying when he said he knew of no other 9/11-scale terror attack in the works. In both cases, he was telling the truth. But--how do you know?

This is the conclusion of the Times story:

In his early interviews, Mr. Zubaydah had revealed what turned out to be important information, identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — from a photo on a hand-held computer — as the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Zubaydah also identified Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes.

But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

Crucial aspects of what happened during Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation are sharply disputed. Some former and current government officials briefed on the case, who were more closely allied with law enforcement, said Mr. Zubaydah cooperated with F.B.I. interviewers until the C.I.A. interrogation team arrived. They said that Mr. Zubaydah’s resistance began after the agency interrogators began using more stringent tactics.

Other officials, more closely tied to intelligence agencies, dismissed that account, saying that the C.I.A. had supervised all interviews with Mr. Zubaydah, including those in which F.B.I. agents asked questions. These officials said that he proved a wily adversary. “He was lying, and things were going nowhere,” one official briefed on the matter said of the early interviews. “It was clear that he had information about an imminent attack and time was of the essence.”

Several officials said the belief that Mr. Zubaydah might have possessed critical information about a coming terrorist operation figured significantly in the decision to employ tougher tactics, even though it later became apparent he had no such knowledge.

“As the president has made clear, the fact of the matter is that Abu Zubaydah was defiant and evasive until the approved procedures were used,” one government official said. “He soon began to provide information on key Al Qaeda operators to help us find and capture those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”

This official added, “When you are concerned that a hard-core terrorist has information about an imminent threat that could put innocent lives at risk, rapport-building and stroking aren’t the top things on your agenda.”

Yeah, but ... -- C.D.

Shadowland: Flying Blind

There's an interesing first batch of letters responding to this week's column, "Flying Blind," about the way travelers are being turned into inmates by airline security. Several of the writers favor profiling of one sort or another, which is a practice with all kinds of sinister overtones of its own, and probably isn't that reliable for the kind of mass transit we're talking about in American airports.

When I went through Ben Gurion a couple of weeks ago, a charming interviewer -- a graduate student in psychology -- did a very thorough job trying to find discrepancies in my explanation of why, among other things, I had Lebanese visas in my passport. ("I went there last year when there was so much hope for democracy? Remember that?" I said. I got the impression she didn't.) No doubt facial expressions played a role in the fact she let me get on the plane. I just kept smiling. But it's proving very diffictult to codify expressions into some sort of system than computers, or minimally trained security staff, can figure out. If you're interested, just take a look at this very detailed paper presented at Delft University in Holland. (Also see the photographs below.)

A fair amount of ironic humor crept into the e-mails about the column. My personal favorites are these two:

Comments:

Agree completely. We are jumping at shadows, behaving like a nation of cowards, and making ourselves ridiculous. The real terrorists must be laughing themselves silly. All they have to do is whistle the tune, and we dance to it. The cheapest form of psychological warfare imaginable. Everyone agrees that aviation security is a necessity, but I would really like to see some strategic thinking rather than the knee-jerk, reactionary idiocy we see today. Perhaps the nation which sent a robot to patrol the Martian surface and decoded the human genome could come up with a technological way of screening passengers and cargo for explosives in an effective yet non-intrusive way? The fact that this has not been accomplished, almost two decades after Pan Am 103, is an utter disgrace. Right now, we have to surrender our Evian and hand cream to board an airliner, and TSA screeners fondle us in ways that would get you arrested for sexual assault anywhere else. We have to take off our shoes because Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes--thank God he didn't try to hide it in his underwear!

Comments:

Nudity. Nudity is the answer to airline security. All passengers should be totally nude, with no jewelry, no carry-on luggage, no nothing. Then all we would have to worry about is a terrorist eating or drinking something that might blow up during flight (like prune juice, pinto beans, etc.) This would drastically limit the options of any would-be terrorist.