A Good Read

Posted on April 4, 2003

Interesting stuff: Metaphor and War, Again.

Detritus of Torture

Posted on April 3, 2003

If you have any doubts about how repressive the regime in Baghdad is, read the BBC’s account of the liberation of a base used by the Iraqi internal security police.  It’s pretty chilling.

Smile!

Posted on March 31, 2003

Ever have one of those days where you need a perspective check?

On the one hand — OK, so we’re at war and it’s not going like we’d expected and the top leaders seem to be idiots and Iraqis who’d moved away are streaming back into the war zone to fight us and we’re picking fights with other countries before this fight is even over.

On the other hand… um, er… there’s this.

Aah.  Feel that oh-my-god-we-are-so-screwed tension just melt away!

“A Noise I Never Want To Hear Again”

Posted on March 31, 2003

The odd duck of the Air Force for the last twenty years has always been the A-10 Thunderbolt II. It’s a fearsome ground attack aircraft — the first the Air Force ever fielded that was specifically designed for the task.  The entire aircraft is actually built around its General Electric GAU-8/A cannon, a colossal Gatling gun the size of a VW Beetle that shoots depleted uranium shells designed to pierce the hide of the toughest tanks of the old Soviet Union.  It’s a weapon that nobody wants to be on the wrong end of.

If you’re curious what being on the wrong end of that gun would be
like, though, you should check out the BBC’s story about a British tank crew that were caught in a friendly fire incident when an A-10 pilot mistakenly identified their vehicles as Iraqi tanks:

Lance Corporal Gerrard said he suddenly heard the distinctive, relentless roar of an A-10’s anti-tank gunfire.

“I will never forget that noise as long as I live. It is a noise I never want to hear again,” he said. “There was no gap between the bullets. I heard it and I froze. The next thing I knew the turret was erupting with white light everywhere, heat and smoke… I felt I was going to burn to death. I just shouted ‘reverse, reverse, reverse’.”

Talk about a waking nightmare…

Cheap TiVo for PC and Handheld

Posted on March 31, 2003

SnapStream offers software that lets you turn your PC (and — intriguingly — your Pocket PC) into a TiVo for practically nothing — $50 for the software alone, or you can get it bundled with TV tuner hardware for less than $150.

Who’s Blogging Now?

Posted on March 28, 2003

Does this new site make Gary Hart the first-ever Presidential candidate with a blog? He denies he’s running yet, but it sure looks that way to me…

Decline and Fall of the American Empire?

Posted on March 26, 2003

The Guardian is running an interesting story on its site describing an emerging consensus in the financial markets that we’re witnessing the beginning of a real decline in American power and influence in the world — the kind of decline that Britain suffered after World War II, the end of an empire.

I hate the idea of an American empire with a passion, but it does appear that we’ve embarked on making it a reality.  Fifty years of gradual erosion of republicanism in America have resulted in a true imperial Presidency — the President can take us to war essentially with anyone he pleases, without consultation or approval from Congress.  Congress still holds sway on domestic issues, but thanks to gerrymandering of the redistricting process, the vast majority of Congressional districts are “uncompetitive”, meaning the incumbent is virtually guaranteed to win re-election.  This has become so widespread that one group is even claiming they can predict the results of the 2004 election — that’s right, next year’s election — for 350 House seats (out of 425) with a 99% degree of confidence.  The House, which was supposed to be the chamber closest to the people, has instead become a type of de facto House of Lords, elected for life.  So much for democracy.

Is this an American Empire?  Not yet — but a Presidency unfettered by checks and balances and a Congress unresponsive to popular will is pretty close to it.  We as citizens have to step up to the plate and make our voices heard if we’re going to avoid taking the final steps towards the end of the American republic.

In these times, it’s useful to remember the words of John Adams:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Adams was cautioning us so that America would not become another example in the list of failed republics. One wonders if there’s anybody in Washington who is still listening.

It’s Funny Because It’s True!

Posted on March 26, 2003

I’ve had way too many discussions that sounded exactly like this one…

Next, Turkey?

Posted on March 24, 2003

While everybody is focusing on the fighting in southern Iraq, another crisis is brewing — despite warnings from the US and the EU, the Turks appear ready to cross their border with Iraq. While the Turks claim only peaceful intentions, it’s well known that they want to claim Iraqi Kurdistan to keep its people from setting up their own independent state. Given the way Turkey treats its own Kurds, however, the Iraqi Kurds don’t want to live as Turks any more than they want to live as Iraqis, and they’re ready to fight if pressed. So if the Turks move, we’ll have to deal not just with the Iraqi army, but with a civil war between the Iraqi Kurds and the Turkish army — both of which are (nominally) friends of the U.S. Since we were happy enough to let Saddam massacre the Iraqi Kurds when they rose up during the last Gulf War (at our urging, mind you), the prospects that we’d choose to really oppose Turkey in such a case are not what you would call comforting. Will these people ever get the chance to live without some other country keeping them under its thumb?

The Six Lessons of 9-11

Posted on March 19, 2003

“The six lessons of 911” is an interesting piece looking at what we should have learned from our first brush with large-scale terrorism, and what we seem to have learned instead.

How Sports Coverage Should Be

Posted on March 19, 2003

I’ll admit up front that I don’t know the first thing about cricket, so about 80% of this article reads like gibberish to me, but it’s so damned entertaining I didn’t care!

“The Arrogant Empire”

Posted on March 17, 2003

Fareed Zakaria has an excellent piece in Newsweek examining the underlying reasons for the world’s backlash against our Iraq policy, and how Bush and company have gotten us to where we are today. If you support the war and wonder why so many people around the world don’t — why anyone can have doubts about a war to remove a brutal thug like Saddam Hussein — you need to read this.

Last Day of Peace?

Posted on March 17, 2003

Well, the “coalition of the willing” has spoken and it looks like 24 hours from now the bombs may be falling on Baghdad.

Let’s hope that, if that’s the case, that things play out the way the Wolfowitzes and Perles have been predicting: a short, mostly bloodless conflict that results in a flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Let’s hope that’s how things shake out — because the alternatives are mostly dreadful.

When I lived in Egypt, I learned early that the favorite expression of the average Egyptian was in’shallah — “as God wills it”. It’s an expression of the futility of man’s actions in the face of whatever the larger plan of the universe is. It’s an expression that seems pretty relevant right now; maybe the Administration’s plans will turn out to be right after all, in’shallah. We shall see.

Put Your Bombs Between the Minarets

Posted on March 14, 2003

Kevin Sites is a “sojo” — solo broadcast journalist — who CNN has blogging from the front line between Iraq and Kuwait:

We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack…
Our instructor, a good-natured Brit named Ian, has taught us nerve agents are undetectable, that blister agents smell of garlic, and that a choking agent will remind you of freshly cut grass — right before it ruptures your lungs and drowns you in your own fluids.

Stumble Upon StumbleUpon

Posted on March 13, 2003

Now here’s an interesting idea — StumbleUpon is a “Web site discovery tool” that lets you rate sites you like with a TiVo-style thumbs up or thumbs down, and then it can connect you with new sites that people like you enjoyed. It may sound a little like Alexa, but unlike Alexa, StumbleUpon doesn’t track your personal information, removing any privacy worries, and it adds a personal element with its “Top Stumbler” recommendations. Highly recommended!

Awww, Dad!

Posted on March 11, 2003

From the Times of London: Bush Sr. Warning Over Unilateral Action.

How pathetic is it that we have to read British newspapers to find out news from our own country?

Taxing

Posted on March 9, 2003

So somebody explain this to me. I have a friend living out West who was on unemployment for a few months last year. Now she’s doing her taxes, and she’s discovering that — wait for it — she actually owes income tax on the money she received as unemployment benefits!

So in other words, if you’re in need, Uncle Sam will give you a pittance, and then demand a third of the pittance back a year later. That means that, in one sense, unemployment relief isn’t a grant, it’s a loan, and at an abysmal interest rate to boot. Where is the logic in this? On what planet does it make sense to treat unemployment relief as taxable income?

The worst part is that they don’t withhold for taxes on the unemployment checks, apparently, so it’s up to you to put part of your benefits away for tax time. Put part of your benefits away?!? If you’re in a position where you need unemployment relief, would you be thinking of saving for a rainy day?

The tax code is out of control. This is just the latest example. When are we going to wise up and demand reform that preserves progressive taxation while simplifying the Byzantine code?

It’s (De)Motivational!

Posted on March 6, 2003

Looks like someone’s beaten the Despair, Inc. boys to the lucrative Federal government motivational-poster contract!

Where Leaders Fail, Part Two: Credibility Capital

Posted on March 6, 2003

As a kid, I was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, the youth auxiliary of the Air Force. (At the time I thought I was going to grow up to be a fighter pilot… a not-terribly-unusual fantasy for an Air Force brat living in an Air Force town.) After a while I worked up in rank to become an NCO, and I was put in command of an element of a few other cadets. I was spectacularly, explosively, bad at it. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get these kids to straighten up and fly right.

Frustrated and out of ideas, I asked one of the senior officers, a grown-up volunteer from the base, what the key was about leading people. He seemed to have the knack, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if he knew something I didn’t. He told me something that I’ve never forgotten. “You want to be a leader?” he asked. “Just remember this. Don’t ever ask your men to do something if you wouldn’t be willing to step in and do that thing yourself. And don’t ever decide you could step in unless you’d be willing to do that thing twice as hard as any of your men have to.”

All the experiences I’ve had since then have pointed up the wisdom of his words. One of the keys to leadership is credibility — your people need to believe that you’re not asking them to do hard work or make sacrifices just because you’re afraid or unwilling to do so yourself. And when you do step in and work alongside them, you need to always work harder and longer than you expect them to. Always.

Putting these two ideas together results in what I think of as “credibility capital”. Credibility capital is something you earn slowly, over a long time, as your people watch the decisions you make. Each time you demonstrate that you’re willing to lead from the front, to only ask them to make sacrifices when you’ll do the same, you earn a little credibility capital. Each time you ask your people to work late while you punch out at 5 to catch a game or have dinner, however, you lose a lot of credibility capital.

Credibility capital is like real capital: dearly won and easily lost.

Leaders that fail often do so because they don’t understand this. Their misunderstanding tends to fall into one of two general categories:

• They underestimate how hard it is to earn new credibility capital.
• They underestimate how easy it is to spend down their existing credibility capital.

The first kind of mistake is demonstrated when leaders realize that their people don’t take them seriously, or when new leaders take the reins of an existing team, and they try to magically max out their credibility capital overnight. Typically they do this through empty symbolic gestures (“Employee of the Month” programs, coffee mugs with the company logo, etc.) or stupid attempts to trade money for credibility (giving everyone a bump in pay, a spot bonus, an extra vacation day, etc.) These always fail because no matter how generous the bribe is, its impact is too immediate and transitory to address the core problem. Give an unhappy employee a $5,000/year raise and you can count in weeks how long it’ll be till they are unhappy again. You’d have to double or triple their salary to buy them off for good — an absurdly high price to pay.

Trading money or goods in exchange for credibility makes no sense because the trade comes at an abysmal exchange rate. It’s like trading in a fortune in peso for American dollars: you find you quickly have to redefine your definition of “fortune”!

The other type of failure comes when leaders don’t realize how easy it can be to lose credibility capital once you’ve accumulated some. You think the stock market is risky? You think Vegas is risky? With credibility capital you gamble most of it every time you lead your people into another day. And if your gambles pay off, you only win a little more — but if they fail, you can kiss much or all of it goodbye.

To understand how this works, consider the case of Gary Hart back in 1987. (For those of you whose memories don’t run back that far, he was a Democratic candidate for President that year.) He seemed to have it all — personal magnetism, bold ideas, a forceful presence and a reputation for solid leadership in the U.S. Senate. Of course, there were rumors that Hart had some personal “issues”, mostly regarding fooling around with women other than his wife, but the media were respectful and kept their distance from those rumors throughout his career — until ’87, when the rumors got loud enough that some reporters from the Miami Herald began looking into it. As you probably know, they found that the rumors were true, and that was the beginning of a period in the political wilderness for Hart that continues to this day.

However, while the revelations themselves were damaging to Hart, they aren’t what sank him. What sank him was — well, himself. The day the Herald ran its expose on Hart, the New York Times ran an interview with the candidate in which he was asked if there was any truth to the rumors of womanizing. Hart fatally replied, full of bluff and bluster, “Follow me around. I don’t care… If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” He didn’t know that the Herald had done just that, and they had been anything but bored.

Why is this relevant to credibility capital? Because, as I said above, I don’t believe the revelations themselves sank Hart. Sure, they were bad, but he could have battled back from them if he’d been able to seize the moral high ground. However, his remark in the Times seemed so arrogant, so haughty — after all, he certainly knew when he made it that he had a lot to lose if the rumors were investigated! — that it demolished any claim he had to moral legitimacy. The man who dared the press to follow him around is going to lecture America on the need to provide privacy to public officials? Oh, puh-leeze.

Hart’s blunder illustrates how quickly credibility capital can bleed away. All it takes is one ill-timed remark or ill-considered action. Smart leaders continually toil to build more credibility capital and jealously guard the amount they’ve already banked away. They come in early and stay late, even if there’s nothing for them really to do, just to let the troops know that if they have to stay late the boss is going to as well. Dumb leaders like Hart gamble wildly with their credibility, putting it all on the line in situations where the stakes don’t have to be that high. By the time they realize that the house always wins that game, it’s usually too late.

Whenever I’m leading a team, I think about my credibility capital. Is it low or high? Is the net change that day positive or negative? And if it’s negative, what am I doing tomorrow to get it back up again? I don’t think that way out of ego or ambition — I think that way because if you want to get something done in a leadership role, you either learn to think that way, to lead from the front by reflex, or you spend your time wondering why your projects always fail and your people always desert you. That’s a lesson that darned few leaders in the world seem to have picked up. Maybe they could have used a stint in the CAP too.

Playing Chicken

Posted on March 4, 2003

Josh Marshall has an excellent analysis of the seriousness of the recent escalation of the North Korean situation. Meanwhile, John Robb is contemplating the consequences that could spin out if the North decided to take advantage of our focus on Iraq by making a grab for South Korea.

In that scenario, all hell breaks loose because the US doesn’t have the troops to fight both wars at the same time. In that situation it is likely the US will use force multipliers like tactical nukes to emasculate North Korea’s military.

Very thought-provoking stuff (if by thought-provoking you mean terrifying).

Movable Type Plugin Directory

Posted on March 3, 2003

All you Movable Type users out there should check this out: there’s finally a MT Plugin Directory, pulling together all the various MT add-ons into one place. Great idea!

Dancing With the Devil (Cont.)

Posted on February 26, 2003

After I posted my piece on Sy Hersh’s observations regarding Pakistan, I got to thinking about why I found them so provocative. After all, we all knew how much of a twisted little fellow Musharraf is, and how precarious his situation there is. (For those who don’t, all you need to know is that Musharraf stole power a few years back, but the main opposition to him comes from groups that want to turn Pakistan into a hard-core Taliban-style Islamic republic, so our government props up Musharraf to keep them from taking power and getting hold of Pakistan’s not-inconsiderable nuclear arsenal.) We also know our government’s justification for propping up Musharraf — the old “the devil you know” argument. In other words, sure he’s a tinpot dictator, but he’s our tinpot dictator, and that’s better than having someone else’s take over.

This line of reasoning always gets my blood boiling. You may remember, back when al-Qaeda hit New York and Washington, it was quite common for dazed Americans to ask each other “why do they hate us so much?”. Having spent some time in the Middle East myself (Air Force brat, stationed in Egypt from 1982-1985), I said that I knew exactly why they hated us so much, and it had nothing to do with President Bush’s simplistic “they hate us because they hate democracy and baseball and apple pie” explanation. The truth is exactly the opposite, they hate us because they want democracy — and because we keep them from having it!

Back during the Cold War, you see, we had one overriding objective in foreign policy: keep the Russians down. Every other consideration took a back seat. This meant that we made some decisions that, in retrospect, look pretty puzzling considering our rhetoric. For example, we intervened in countries like Chile to overthrow and assassinate democratically elected leaders who we felt would push their countries away from us and towards the Soviets. Conversely, we propped up local dictators, strongmen, and other thugs, as long as they promised to remain on our side. Oppress your own people? Rob them blind while you stuff your Swiss bank accounts with their savings? No problem! Just pledge not to go Red and we’ll keep you rolling in military and economic aid beyond your wildest dreams.

(As a side note, another decision we made at the same time was that we would build an army of rabid Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, arm them heavily, teach them how to fight guerrilla wars, then point them towards the Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. Great plan! Until the Russians left and we stiffed them on aid for rebuilding their country. One of those fundamentalist soldiers we stiffed was a young man named Osama bin Laden.)

So, who were the visionary Arab leaders picked by the U.S. to carry its flag in the Cold War? Among this stellar crop were:

• Hosni Mubarak in Egypt;
• the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia;
• … and, of course, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. (That’s Donald Rumsfeld he’s shaking hands with in the pic. Smile, Don!)

These “leaders” then proceeded to use the shiny new weapons they got each year from Uncle Sam to keep their own people from getting too uppity. We’ve all heard about Hussein gassing his own people (with U.S.-supplied chemical weapons, natch), but you don’t hear as much about Mubarak’s strongarm tactics against anyone who opposes him or the Saudis’ abysmal human rights record.

So, for fifty years, we’ve been paying strongmen to keep the countries of the Middle East in line for us. We never particularly cared how they did it, as long as they delivered results. The result has been that a region which sits on top of the most valuable natural resources in the world is home to absolutely incredible levels of poverty, sickness, illiteracy, and poor life expectancy. For the average Arab in these states, if you try to live within the system you’re doomed to a life that’s nasty, brutish, and short — and if you speak out and try to change things, it gets a lot shorter.

And as far as you can see, the reason why things are the way they are is because that’s how America — the only superpower, remember — wants them to be. America wants you poor; America wants you stupid; America wants you oppressed. If they didn’t, why would they bankroll the people doing the oppression? But you can’t speak out — there’s no way to participate in political opposition without having the evil eye of the dictator fall upon you. And then you find one lonely group that, in the shadows, is trying to bring down that dictator. They tell you they care about your future. They want you to be educated, healthy, happy. Maybe you think they’re a little extreme for your tastes — they want a state that puts the dictates of the Koran into law, a la Afghanistan under the Taliban — but who else is speaking out for you?

That’s why they hate us, folks, and that’s why they lash out against us — because they feel that we’re the reason they’re suffering. And in a lot of ways, we are.

So, what does all this have to do with Musharraf and Pakistan? Well, Musharraf is another of these two-bit thugs keeping himself at the trough at the expense of his people. But, we feel, we can’t let his government fall, or else he’ll be replaced by radical Islamists — there’s no doubt they’d win if a fair election were held in Pakistan today. So, we do whatever it takes — including letting the cream of al-Qaeda off scot free — to prop him up; and in doing so, we create more radical Islamists out of ordinary Pakistanis who feel the Islamists are the only way available towards a better life; which makes supporting Musharraf more essential; which breeds more Islamists, and so on.

The key fact in that kind of a system is that it can’t last forever; eventually things will boil over in Pakistan — the people will get fed up and toss Musharraf out. The real question is, who will be writing the plans for what happens when that day comes? If our only policy is “support Musharraf”, it won’t be us — just like our shortsighted policy of “support the Shah” came around to bite us when the Iranians threw him out and instituted an Islamic republic which was essentially closed to America for twenty years, and which is only now beginning to liberalize and ease up on its people. If such a situation were to emerge in Pakistan — a country with not just one nuclear bomb, but forty or more, being seized by a hard-line party with a grudge against the U.S. — the consequences could be dramatic and terrible.

That’s the challenge we SHOULD be facing right now — how to drain out the poison we’ve injected into these countries. But instead, we’ve chosen to focus on ousting Saddam Hussein — and even in that case, we’re stressing the need to knock off the man rather than to build a structure that allows Iraqis to lead a better life. And even if we did talk more about that, could you blame the Iraqis for being skeptical, after we put Hussein in power and then gave him the gas he used to massacre his own people? Why should they believe we suddenly give a damn about their best interests?

President Bush is fond of lecturing us that we should support the war because not doing so means we haven’t learned the lessons of history. I would suggest that he go back to history class. If there’s a historical analogy to be made here, it’s not to equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler during the years of appeasement — after all, Hussein’s one attempt to expand his territory since the end of the Iran/Iraq war was smacked down decisively in 1991, and he’s been content to stay within his own borders since. Rather, the parallels we should be looking at date back to 1919, when the victorious Allies of World War One imposed their will on Germany through the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed crippling economic sanctions and humiliating diplomatic provisions onto the defeated Germans. The result was that Germany spent the next ten years stewing in resentment against the Allies, and looking for someone who would have the courage to stand up for Germany. When that someone finally came along in the person of Adolf Hitler, many sober, reasonable Germans decided that, while they might not agree with his rabid anti-semitism, they would go along with him if he was the only one going the direction they wanted to go — towards a proud and prosperous Germany. (The West learned its lesson after suffering a second world war, approaching Germany with Marshall Aid and other prosperity-building measures to help fortify it against the rise of a new demagogue.)

When the treaty was signed, only John Maynard Keynes saw clearly the dark direction it was pointing Europe towards, writing in his landmark book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” that

Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organisation, and submerge civilisation itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual. This is the danger against which all our resources and courage and idealism must now co-operate.

As we turn our weapons on Iraq without a clear articulation of what we will do when they fall silent to improve the life of the average Iraqi — and what we will do for his brothers and sisters in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and our other nominal “allies” whose despotic rulers breed hatred for us every day — one wonders where to find a modern-day Keynes to point out to the powerful the folly of their course, and to call for us to marshal our resources and courage and idealism again. It’s a role that so far nobody has been willing, or able, to fulfill.

Dancing With the Devil

Posted on February 25, 2003

If you think that our #1 enemy in the world is Saddam Hussein — heck, if you think our #1 enemy in the world is Osama bin Laden — this interview with Seymour Hersh from NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS should be educational for you. Hersh argues to interviewer Jane Wallace that our #1 enemy may in fact also be one of our #1 “allies” in the war on terrorism: General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Check out this exchange, for example:

JANE WALLACE: Let’s talk about Konduz. During the war with Afghanistan–
SY HERSH: Great story.
JANE WALLACE: — you reported that during a key battle our side in that battle had the enemy surrounded. There were a reported perhaps 8,000 enemy forces in there.
SY HERSH: Maybe even more. But certainly minimum that many.
JANE WALLACE: It’s your story, take it.
SY HERSH: Okay, the cream of the crop of Al Qaeda caught in a town called Konduz which is near … it’s one little village and it’s a couple hundred kilometers, 150 miles from the border of Pakistan. And I learned this story frankly– through very, very clandestine operatives we have in the Delta Force and other very…
We were operating very heavily with a small number of men, three, 400 really in the first days of the war. And suddenly one night when they had everybody cornered in Konduz– the special forces people were told there was a corridor that they could not fly in. There was a corridor sealed off to– the United States military sealed off a corridor. And it was nobody could shoot anybody in this little lane that went from Konduz into Pakistan. And that’s how I learned about it. I learned about it from a military guy who wanted to fly helicopters and kill people and couldn’t do it that day.
JANE WALLACE: So, we had the enemy surrounded, the special forces guys are helping surround this enemy.
SY HERSH: They’re whacking everybody they can whack that looks like a bad guy.
JANE WALLACE: And suddenly they’re told to back off–
SY HERSH: From a certain area–
JANE WALLACE: — and let planes fly out to Pakistan.
SY HERSH: There was about a three or four nights in which I can tell you maybe six, eight, 10, maybe 12 more– or more heavily weighted– Pakistani military planes flew out with an estimated– no less than 2,500 maybe 3,000, maybe mmore. I’ve heard as many as four or 5,000. They were not only– Al Qaeda but they were also– you see the Pakistani ISI was– the military advised us to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There were dozens of senior Pakistani military officers including two generals who flew out.
And I also learned after I wrote this story that maybe even some of Bin Laden’s immediate family were flown out on the those evacuations. We allowed them to evacuate. We had an evacuation.
JANE WALLACE: How high up was that evacuation authorized?
SY HERSH: I am here to tell you it was authorized — Donald Rumsfeld who — we’ll talk about what he said later — it had to be authorized at the White House. But certainly at the Secretary of Defense level.
JANE WALLACE: The Department of Defense said to us that they were not involved and that they don’t have any knowledge of that operation.
SY HERSH: That’s what Rumsfeld said when they asked him but it. And he said, “Gee, really?” He said, “News to me.” Which is not a denial, it’s sort of interesting. You know,
JANE WALLACE: What did we do that? Why we would put our special forces guys on the ground, surround the enemy, and then– fly him out?
SY HERSH: With al Qaeda.
JANE WALLACE: With al Qaeda. Why would we do that, assuming your story is true?
SY HERSH: We did it because the ISI asked us to do so.
JANE WALLACE: Pakistani intelligence.
SY HERSH: Absolutely.

So, allow me to recap that for you: we had trapped thousands of the people who planned, supported and executed the 9/11 attacks, and then we let them go — all to prop up a corrupt military dictator! Musharraf was afraid that if those terrorists — I’ll say it again, the terrorists who planned 9/11 — were rounded up, he’d be under pressure from Islamists at home to confront the U.S. for their release. So he asked us to let them go, as a favor, and we did.

Gosh, aren’t we generous! Watch out, terrorists, we’re coming for you — unless you’re supported by Pakistan. Then you’re untouchable.

Want more? It gets better:

JANE WALLACE: You reported recently that not only do the Pakistanis have the nukes, the international community knew that. That’s why they were ostracized for many years, because they wouldn’t stop developing their own nuclear program. So they were blackballed by the rest of the world. Forget it, we’re not trading with them anymore.
They were in that position when 9/11 struck. Not only do they have these nuclear weapons, but then they go one further to put it in our face and start helping North Korea develop the same cheaper, more efficient warheads. What is that about? These are our new best friends?
SY HERSH: Well, this started before they became our new best friends. This isn’t– this started in ’97. What I did is I wrote about an intelligence report that the White House had for, what, eight months before it became known…
So here they are. North Korea’s– one of their great exports is missiles for cash and then they sell some missiles to the Paks. And the Paks come to the North Koreans in ’97 and they say, “Hey guys, we can’t pay. We got no money. We’re broke too. But we’ve got something in kind”… the Paks then start giving the fruits of their 10, 15 years, 20 years of nuclear labor to the North Koreans. And you have to understand, to start with a centrifuge and some designs and get to the point where you can actually make bomb-grade material is a 12, 15 year process…
The rationalization is that we can’t jeopardize Musharraf. We’ve gotta keep him going. Prop him up as much as possible.
JANE WALLACE: This is getting to be a very costly prop up.
SY HERSH: Absolutely. But you know, let me give you another– theory. Why do you think Pakistan has only helped North Korea with nuclear weapons? Why haven’t they helped other countries?
JANE WALLACE: I don’t know why.
SY HERSH: Well, the answer is, they probably have. They’re interested in spreading it to the Third World. How much control does Musharraf have?

That’s right — this same tinpot Mussolini who we gave up our chance to finish off al Qaeda to protect is the one who gave the bomb to North Korea, and potentially to anyone else who had money to spare as well.

Before you start sputtering about conspiracy theories, keep in mind that Seymour Hirsh is no fruitcake; he’s a widely respected journalist who’s broken some of the most important foreign relations stories of our time, including the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. If he says our foreign policy is off the rails, I’m inclined to listen. And from what he told NOW it’s hard to come to any other conclusion.

Dear God, Make It Stop

Posted on February 25, 2003

“The Streets” are:

1. A one-man pseudo-rap act made up of 23-year-old Brit Mike Skinner, who kicks out the jams in some kind of radioactive mutant Cockney accent;
2. INCREDIBLY F***ING ANNOYING

Is it 1 or 2? Wait! You’re both right!

My favorite radio station can’t stop playing this guy’s tuneless, pasty white-boy hip-hop. Apparently Salon liked him too. I don’t get it; this guy is like fingernails on a freaking blackboard to me.

Please… stop the madness…

Caring For Your Introvert

Posted on February 25, 2003

Jonathan Rauch has a great piece in this month’s Atlantic Monthly entitled “Caring for Your Introvert“.

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves.

Exactly! I have a new proposal: all business meetings must be chaired by an introvert. This should end the plague of endless meetings whose purpose is to let people vent about whatever happens to be annoying them at that particular moment. (“I know this doesn’t have anything to do with the agenda, but does anyone else here think our e-mail server is too slow?”)

Ahhh… happy thoughts 🙂