The League of David

Zzzzzzzzzz

This blog has gone to sleep.  For now.

I'm working now at my other blog, Making Sense of Jihad.

You never know, however, like Rip Van Winkle, the League may wake up, cranky and energized.

Technorati Profile

Staged and Inaccurate

I've been in semi-retirement since November because of health reasons, but NYT's fake photo debacle is getting out of hand, and it was enough to motivate me to come out of retirement even if it's just for today.  Little Green Footballs and American Thinker noted that Slate ran with the same image that the NYT ran with this weekend. The image is of two Pakistani men -- one old, one young -- standing with a supposed missile part between them.  I also received my copy of Time magazine today where on page 17 the supposed missile fragment is described as"detritus."   I commented at LGF on its use of the image, here, here, here and here.  It's then  that I noticed some other elements to the story that cause me to question the photo's provenance. 

The photo is not only staged, it may just pre-date the January 14th attack.

I searched the GettyImage archive for the name Thir Khan. There are seven images in Getty's database News/Editorial section:

The image in question could easily fit into a small group taken in the December from the "work accident" that killed several Al Qaeda bomb makers. 

The group of photos includes this one with the prerequisite dead child:

HAISORI, PAKISTAN: Pakistani tribesmen look at the body of Mohammad Aziz (13) who died when alleged bomb-making equipment detonated in Haisori village in the restive North Waziristan region, 01 December 2005. Five suspected militants, three of them foreigners, died when bomb-making equipment detonated at their house in a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border, officials said. But residents launched protests, saying that two of the dead were children and that the army had fired missiles at the building in Haisori village in the restive North Waziristan region. AFP PHOTO/Thir KHAN (Photo credit should read THIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Thir Khan is a local stringer for AFP and has taken pictures from the region, including this one from Sept 2005 that features artillery shells strikingly similar to the one pictured in the now-infamous picture:

MIRANSHAH, PAKISTAN: Pakistani paramilitary soldiers arrange a display of seized weapons, recovered in a search operation near Miranshah, 28 September 2005. Pakistani troops rounded up eight suspected militants during a search operation in a remote tribal town near the Afghan border, officials said. AFP PHOTO/Thir KHAN (Photo credit should read THIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

I first saw the NYT  image about the same time everyone else did, probably within 24 hours of the news reaching US media sources.  Like the way it appears in Yahoo News archive:

Pakistani tribesmen stand by missiles that were fired at their house, a day after US air strike in Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border. Pakistani officials have said that Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was probably not killed in a US air strike, as anger mounted over the deaths of 18 villagers in the attack.(AFP/Thir Khan)

AFP - Jan 14  7:14 AM

The caption was edited later

Pakistani tribesmen stand by a unexploded ordinance at their house which was damaged in an alleged US air strike the day before in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border. Pakistani officials said that Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was likely not killed in a US air strike, as Islamabad protested to Washington the deaths of 18 villagers in the attack.(AFP/Thir Khan)

AFP - Jan 14 10:01 AM

The image appeared to be one of those staged "for the Pulitzer committee" images, but there was nothing else worth noting about it until I saw the Michelle Malkin's post on the now-obvious inaccuracy in the original caption information.   Noted above, AFP changed the caption to reflect the image more accurately, but not enough.

Probably relying on AFP, NYTimes and Time used their own biased captions for the image without ever securing its source and date.  None of this would have mattered, but both MSM outlets were using the image to cast in a bad light America's attack on Al Qaeda leadership.  Time leads with the image, describing the precision attack, targeting senior Al Qaeda leadership as a "blunder." Slate's article is titled, "Were the missile attacks in Pakistan illegal?"

Doubts about the accuracy of the caption coupled with a brief background into the photographer creates more questions about the provenance of the image than previously thought.  All of the images from December appear to be taken at the same time of day, and there's nothing in the NYT image that clearly marks the area as Damadola.  That image could have easily been taken on the rubble of the house destroyed in December.  The image is ambiguous enough to imply practically anything you want from it.

This isn't an earth-shattering revelation, but it does show how little background MSM editors are willing to do.  Thir Khan could have taken that picture January 14th, but it's hard to say for certain where or when it was taken.  As I said, none of this would matter if the image wasn't being used as an example of America's "blundering" war on terror.  With such a questionable provenance, some editor somewhere should have exercised some caution.  That didn't happen.

UPDATE:  My bad.  Unlike the MSM, I'll admit it when I f-up.  Time magazine doesn't descrie the Damadola attack as a "blunder."  Instead, they describe as "a blunt insturment"  the precision use of hellfire missiles targeting specific senior Al Qaeda operatives in specific houses in one of the remotest regions on earth using intel from locals and/or insiders.

School's Out: Second Level of Hell: Cornell

Here's another issue of School's Out.  It's the League's ongoing series exploring the "excellence" of our elite English Departments.  There was a time when the study of liberal arts meant a deep and broad knowledge of the greatest fruits of civilization. 

Not any more.

Here are  a few course offerings from one of our "second tier" elite schools:  Cornell.

WARNING:  This school offers so many insipid, PC-laden, post-structuralist-inspired triviality that I just can't add them all here.  Follow the links to get a good idea of how bad it really is at our "elite" schools.

Cornell University, Undergraduate

276 Desire

Sexual desire may be seen as a series of scripted performances, a set of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Through a critical discussion of "these pleasures which we lightly call physical," to borrow a phrase from the French novelist Colette, we might discover a deeper appreciation for the strange narrative of someone else's desire, and perhaps even the strange narrative of our own. We will begin with the theory that desire has a history, even a literary history, and we will examine classic texts in some of its most influential modes: Platonic, Christian, romantic, decadent, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer. This course is an introductory survey of European dramatic texts from Plato and Aristophanes to Jean Genet and Caryl Churchill; and it is also a survey of the most influential trends in modern sexual theory and sexual politics, including the work of Freud, Foucault, Barthes, and various feminists and queer theorists. Topics for discussion will include Greek pederasty, sublimation, hysteria, sadomasochism, homosexuality, pornography, cybersex, feminism, and other literary and performative pleasures, and the focus will always be on expanding our critical vocabulary for considering sex and sexual desire as a field of intellectual inquiry. Letter grade only.

263 Studies in Film Analysis: Monsters and Misfits: Hollywood's Misogynist Myths of Women

Exploring a series of (mostly) Hollywood films, we will consider the cultural, political, sexual and psychological implications of conservative myths which demonize women in film. Mainstream misfits and monstrous mothers, love-lorn ladies and sermonizing suffragettes, language-lacking loners and marriage-mangling marauders, vampires and aliens: All film genres make room to exclude misfits, co-opt them back into the circle, or define community norms in opposition to them. We will view, discuss, and read about such films as The Piano Teacher, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Psycho,The Manchurian Candidate (two versions), Safe, The Piano, Far From Heaven, The Searchers, Alien, Gilda, Fatal Attraction,The Stepford Wives (two versions), The Haunting, Carrie, Boys Don't Cry, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

342 Themes in African/Diasporic Writing: The Afro-Europeans: Black Diaspora in Europe

Beyond the borders of North America, other long-established Black communities are articulating their own social, cultural, and political forms of Black Diaspora identity and consciousness. What are the histories and shared experiences of Blacks in Europe--in this course, specifically Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands--with those in Canada, the Caribbean and the U.S.? How do realities of those Afro-European populations shape their definitions of Black Diaspora? Readings in the course will consist of literary texts as well as autobiographies.

374 Slavery in 20th Century American Film and Fiction

This course explores twentieth century preoccupations and reconstructions of slavery, examining the ways slavery continues to define and impact sexuality, racial identities and their popular representations, our sense of public and private spaces, legal discourse, and our national identity.   What does it mean to be a black or white man or woman in America? Whom does law, history, and society concede as legitimate witness? How should we craft our histories?   Who is a subject of, and who is subjected to law?   How are privacy interests diffused against social interests: what are a (black) woman's reproductive rights (in the age of contraceptive options and abortion)? How do desires materialize and how are they materially denied?   Our readings will place in close proximity not only historical writings on slavery (slave history and slave narratives) and these 20th century revisionist slave stories, but slave law and contemporary immigration, property, reproduction, criminal, and privacy legislation.

Cornell University, Graduate

654 Queer Theory

The only thing better than having sex is theorizing about it. In an effort to provide us with a more sophisticated language with which to analyze sexuality in literature and culture, this course will offer an introduction to the most influential theoretical trends in the field of queer theory, the radical deconstruction of sexual rhetoric. We will consider various foundational texts of queer theory from the late 80's and 90's, but we will also explore new directions that the theorization of sexuality has taken in the past few years. In the final few weeks, we will discuss recent debates about sexual politics with reference to critical race theory, the transgender movement, marriage, pornography, pedagogy, and child-abuse scandals. Among those theorists discussed will be Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, James Kincaid, Jane Gallop, Douglas Crimp, and Michael Warner.

657 Modernism and Feminism

This class begins from two sources of first-wave feminist theory and narrative in Great Britain: the suffrage movement and the notorious "problem plays" of Henrik Ibsen. Beginning from readings of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, along with commentaries on the London productions, we will explore Bernard Shaw's appropriations of Ibsen, the development of the suffrage narrative in novels by Elizabeth Robins and short stories by Evelyn Sharpe, and other "problem" novels by Mona Caird , H.G. Wells and May Sinclair. When we move to a second and in some respects "postfeminist" group of modernist writers—especially Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and H.D.—we will consider in particular how the legacy of feminist writing might provide insight into their particular modernisms. The last readings will be Joanna Russ's 1970s classic How to Suppress Women's Writing and a late twentieth-century "problem play" by Wendy Wasserstein.

672 Islands of Globalization

This interdisciplinary course examines theories of globalization and modernity in relation to the cultural production of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. By drawing upon diverse fields such as cultural, environmental, literary, and postcolonial studies, we will explore why particular spaces are associated with the production of history and examine how even the smallest islands have contributed to world modernity. We will draw from studies in environmental imperialism to complicate the myth of the isolated tropical isle and place this in a dialogue with contemporary island tourism. By engaging what Kamau Brathwaite calls the constant "tidalectic" between land and sea, we'll consider how the history and geography of island spaces help deepen our understanding of home, nation, and transoceanic migration. Derek Walcott's suggestion that "the sea is history" will be considered in relation to indigenous, creole, and diaspora island literatures. This course will be taught in collaboration with the Islands of Globalization project hosted at the University of Hawai'i. Depending on interest, we might organize a visit to their campus during spring break.

 

Metro: DC's Gift to Terrorists

November 1, 2005

Mr. Osama B. Laden
Tribal Dialysis Center
1001 Maududi Lane
Hindu Kush, Waziristan, PK

Dear Mr. Terrorist:

As part of our Rider Appreciation Month, we'd like to offer you this vital information.  Now, you no longer have to spend months of pre-operational planning and practice runs, because we will give you information on peak transit times within the Metrorail system.  Please see below for more information on our new Help-the-Terrorists communications program.

Thank you for riding Metro

Sincerely,

Metro Management

School's Out: "Excellence" at Our Ivy League Schools

I haven't been following the Harriet Miers fiasco because I've been busy with life, and Miers doesn't really matter.  Honest.  It might seem like it, but she's not that important.  However, since gloomy Rod Dreher announced the coming of the Great Will Column that intended, in his words, to silence the opposition to the opposition to Ms. Miers, I've been waiting with bated breath for Mr. Will's staggering crie de coeur, his column to end all columns. 

Well, All Things Beautiful has an excellent response to Mr. Will's Column To End all Columns.  Carol Platt Liebau does, as well.  As for George Will, let me tell you a secret:  I've seen this bespeckled, pot-marked jerk up close and personal, and I wasn't impressed.  Unlike Hugh Hewitt, I'm not willing to give him the credit he doesn't deserve.  He's a pompous bore.  He eats French food and writes with the sort of dramatic, "insightful" voice that makes people yawn after a few sentences.  He gets all the Sunday column space, because the liberal elites like him.  He's one of them, with a bow-tie.

However, since Mr. Will and his supporters in the opposition adorn their elitism as a defense of excellence, I thought I'd continue my exploration of what is being taught at our nation's "elite" schools, where grade inflation and "legacy" students (read: nepotism) are standard practice.    I began the other day at Harvard, now I'm turning my attention to the English Departments at Princeton and Yale.

NOTE:  Readers get extra points for counting the number of times quotation marks are used senselessly.

 

From the English Department at Princeton:

ENG 383/AFS 383
Topics in Literature and Nationality: Writing Race and Nation: The South African Example
Description/Objectives:
What is a nation? We will examine the ways in which the nation is imagined, debated, and deconstructed in literary form. We will focus on the example of South Africa where questions of race and nation are historically and culturally entangled and have, for that reason, generated a literary culture that has produced winners of major literary prizes, including the Nobel and Booker Prizes. We will also examine how the national imaginary and literature are connected across time and space and how the process of political change transforms literary culture.

The Victorians: Sociability and Its Discontents
Description/Objectives:
In this course we will survey a range of more or less familiar literature, criticism and theory. Our broadest aim will be to find out what the nineteenth century novel has to teach us about how people are drawn into modern society and how they draw away from it. Our list of writers will include Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Wilde, Trilling, Foucault, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Goffman.

ENG 563
Poetics: Poetry, Metaphysics and the Environment
Description/Objectives:
This theoretical course will approach poetry in general and in relation to environmental fact. It will consider changing metaphysical assumptions and, following Vico's New Science, will treat the question of "poetic wisdom." We ask, regarding individual authorship and ideological constraints, "Is eco-criticism via viable?" Our texts will include earlier authors such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Dickinson and Whiteman, along with more recent poets.

ENG 572/COM 572
Selected Topics in Criticism and Theory: Derrida: Ethics, History, Politics
Description/Objectives:
This course aims to introduce students to the ethical, historical, and political dimensions of Jacques Derrida's thought and writings. Engaging contemporary critical debates over the politics and ethics of deconstruction, it will seek to understand the ways in which Derrida's meditations on language and literature open onto questions of ethics, history, and politics. We will be reading several of Derrida's most well-known books as well as his essays on the university, law, religion, democracy, nationalism, psychoanalysis, and the war on terror.

TheLeague notes:  Good God! The Philosopher Frog lives!

From the English Department at Yale

ENGL 285a, U.S. LITERATURE IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
Nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. literature and the history of technology, with an interest in how innovations like the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio have transformed the literary imagination..."I sing the body electric"--Walt Whitman's famous line uses modern technology to imagine the power of modern poetry. This course reads Whitman and several other well-known U.S. writers with an eye toward the technological transformations that have generated the imaginative world of modernity. How do the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio inform the American scene as writers have conceived it? Can the experimental literary forms of "modernism" be understood as technologies designed to transform social life? How does literature, a relatively old-fashioned medium, adjust to the explosion of new, hi-tech media in the twentieth century? The course has two mascots: Thomas Edison, whose electric innovations promised Americans new, sometimes shocking, forms of contact with each other; and Harry Houdini, whose escape stunts explored the dynamism, the mobility, of a modern society where old geographical and social divides appeared to be losing their hold. Attending to history, however, doesn't mean forgetting about the details of literary texts--only close and careful reading will reveal the subtleties at the contact point of literature and technology.

ENGL 328a, FICTION WITHOUT BORDERS
"The dream of the great American novel is past," Maxine Hong Kingston declared in 1989. "We need to write the Global novel." But what does it mean to write a global novel? Examining contemporary fiction from the United States, South Asia, South Africa, China, and Britain, we will explore the changing relationships between literature and globalization.

In particular, this course will focus on three sets of questions. First, how do these novels address the social, political, and economic changes that we associate with contemporary globalization? We will ask how phenomena such as migration, travel, social reform, transnational communication, consumerism, and expanding capital markets influence our ideas about what it means to be global. We will discuss not only how novels portray the nuances of increasingly transnational lives, but also how these novels themselves shape transnational experiences for their readers.

Second, how do novels attempt to represent worlds that are often quite different from the cultural locations of their authors? Writing about other people and places has often been seen as a way of asserting power over them, and thus the idea of "fiction without borders" can be considered a project fraught with ethical difficulty. We will explore literary and philosophical defenses of the need to imagine others, asking if novels with global aspirations can adequately evade the common charge of imperialist, Orientalist, or primitivist representations.

Third, what is the relationship between a novel's literary form and its portrait of globalization? This course will examine different aesthetic approaches to the problem of global fiction, ranging from realist novels to multilingual texts to works that play with the boundaries of fiction. We will discuss the consequences of particular stylistic and formal choices, and we will question how those choices might imply or invent specific global readerships.

ENGL 345a, ORIENTALISM
This course introduces students to English and American representations of the East, the Orient, or Islam, often referred to as "Orientalism." The emphasis will be placed on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works that imagine the Orient as a holy site of Christian pilgrimage, an allegory of unrestrained sensuality and fantasy, and a discursive mirror against which English and American traditions measure their own distinction and progress. Reading poems, plays, novels, and travel narratives inspired by the translation of The Arabian Nights, we will examine the ways in which this epic shaped several Anglo-American genres and forms. A comparison between British and American authors will allow us to demonstrate how the latter drew on Eastern cultural traditions (e.g., mysticism and soufism) to liberate their writing from European cultural hegemony on the one hand, and counter the rigid precepts of Puritanism, on the other. Theoretical works by major critics of Orientalism will be discussed throughout the course to help students understand how literature is both critical of and complicit with the discourses of power such as imperialism and capitalism. One of the main objectives of the course is to expose students to the problems of "interpretation" in cross-cultural contexts: the representation of unfamiliar cultures and geographies; the patterns of exoticist and stereotypical thinking; the textual construction of identity and difference; East-West interactions; and the possibilities of dialogue across diverse literary and cultural traditions.

ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent. Issues of identity, modernity, empire, and history as well as of narrative and linguistic experimentation. Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

ENGL 354a, LITERATURE OF FRIENDSHIP
One of modernity's great untold stories is the rise of friendship to a preeminent position in social imagination and practice. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has written, "We are friends with everyone" now: parents, co-workers, teachers, etc. Whereas friendship was once a relatively unimportant relationship, clearly subordinate to family, feudal, and other more formal, stable, and hierarchical ties, over the past two centuries it has become the relationship in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. It has become, in other words, the characteristically modern form of relationship. New types of friendship have emerged, and new ways of thinking about old types: with feminism, the emergence of equal friendships between men and women, as well as friendships between married couples; with the rise of a visible gay culture, changes in the way non-sexual friendships between men are lived and understood: with the emergence of youth culture, a new emphasis on group friendships.

This course will explore some of these changes through their expression in British and American literature. The main emphasis will be on fiction, with some attention to poetry, essays, and film. The syllabus will include some or all of the following: poems by Wordsworth, Jane Austen's Emma, essays by Emerson and Thoreau, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, E.M. Forster's Passage to India, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Mary McCarthy's The Group, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, and John Sayles's The Return of the Secaucus 7.

I haven't even reached the graduate courses yet.   Here are a few:

ENGL 925a, AMERICAN LITERATURE AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Beginning with Cabeza de Vaca and Olaudah Equiano as instances of Christianity in the Atlantic world, this course studies the extension, migration, and transformation of world religions-Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their folk variants-within the context of American literature, challenging the standard account of an exclusively Puritan heritage. Readings range from Emerson and Thoreau to Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Amy Tan, and Bharati Mukherjee. Also AMST 925a, CPLT 529a.

ENGL 801a, VICTORIAN PROSE: THE CONDITIONS OF ENGLAND
In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle announced, "The Condition of England…is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in the world." Although there was no more a single "Condition of England" in the nineteenth century than there was one unified Victorian period, Carlyle's statement does epitomize the conflicts and excesses both of Victorian culture and of the prose that charted its contradictions. Starting with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and ending with Morris's News from Nowhere, this course will examine the art and rhetoric of Victorian nonfictional prose by focusing on two of its characteristic tensions-between social criticism and personal experience and between fact and fiction. Readings will include canonical texts-Carlyle's Past and Present, Mill's On Liberty and Autobiography, Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and selections of Ruskin's works from Modern Painters to Praeterita-as well as periodical essays by such women writers as Cobbe and Linton and working-class contributions to the debates on the "factory question" by Brown and Dodd. As an example of the fictional techniques often mined by these writers as they explored the various conditions of England, two monthly numbers of Dickens's Bleak House will also be assigned during each of the ten central weeks of the semester. (Students are encouraged to read Bleak House in its entirety before the beginning of the course so that the weekly assignments of the novel may offer them the pleasures and advantages of rereading.)

The last part is the best.  "Students are encouraged" to read Bleak House in its entirety.  How about...they read Bleak House and study Dickens in a class on Dickens,.

Excellence at work, foks.  Excellence at work.

Next week, I'll descend into the second level of "elite" school status...the dreaded Tier Two Ivy League schools.

Never Trust A Reporter, My .00002 on Plamegate

So I was listening to Jed Babbin, who's filling in for Hugh Hewitt this week.  This woman calls, saying that she read Judith Miller's 2001 book, Germs:  Biological Weapons and America's Secret War [check out the Philistine reviewers who haven't read the book and are just posting bad reviews because they didn't like her reporting on Iraq].   Later on, the woman's husband calls and reads the book's acknowledgements.  At the heart of the book is a collection of unnamed sources from the loosely knit network of WMD experts scattered throughout the various federal intelligence agencies.  Could it be that she met or knew of Valerie Plame long before her husband's 2002 trip to Niger?

WMD is not like a major industry with thousands and thousands of analysts and researchers. It's a tiny cadre of experts, some at CIA, some at DoD, many at DOE (and the labs), and a few at the FBI.  It's possible to have one or two folks who are the only experts in their analytical areas.  This means that an energetic reporter could ID and contact practically all of the analysts who work on any one WMD issue.   This was probably more the case before 9-11 than after.  The federal government has hired, or brought out of retirement, many more since then.  It's still a rolodex-size group, not a phone book.

Is it possible that Judith Miller knew Valerie Plame long before the Wilson Niger visit?  You bet.

On a related note.  Judith Miller began writing about Iraq and WMD issues in the 1990s.  It's obvious that her late 90's work for the New York Times became the basis for the 2001 book.  I've looked over a few of her late 90s WMD articles and, well, what can you say?  Can you name a source every once in a while, Judy?

Here are two of my favorites.  I'd like to call your attention to the second article, dated February 2000, on the difficulties collecting info on Iraq's WMD program:

C.I.A. Is Said to Find Iraq Gives Contracts to Nations That Want to End Economic Sanctions
7 September 2000

The Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq has consistently used the United Nations' oil-for-food program to reward countries that call for ending economic sanctions against Iraq, and to punish those that oppose lifting the embargo, administration officials familiar with the findings have said.

The officials said the C.I.A. stated in a new report that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq has given the bulk of contracts in the program to China, France and Russia, as well as to other vocal champions of lifting the sanctions...The Council instituted the oil-for-food program in 1996 to let Iraq sell some of its oil to help ease the suffering of ordinary Iraqis reportedly caused by the sanctions. But the C.I.A. study shows that Iraq has also used the program as a lever to pry open the sanctions by rewarding allies with contracts, especially those on the 15-member Security Council...

''Over the life of the program, Baghdad has awarded one-third of the contracts to France, Russia and China,'' the report states. ''Besides these Security Council members and neighbors, Iraq has given substantial oil-for-food business to others that deliver antisanctions rhetoric.''

The two-page report is accompanied by charts and graphs that demonstrate the strong correlation between support for lifting sanctions and the awarding of contracts under the program, which is now in what the United Nations accounting system calls Phase 8. Each phase corresponds to a period of 180 days.

Copies of several of the graphs and charts were provided to The New York Times, and sections of the report were read to a reporter by officials who had read the report and thought that its conclusions should be more widely known.

The report, which was completed last month and is secret, is little surprise to the Clinton administration, Iraq's most vocal critic on the Security Council and the chief advocate of continuing the sanctions until Iraq proves that it has abandoned its programs for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. But the report is quite likely to reinforce administration frustration over the mounting pressure among nations and aid organizations to lift the sanctions on the ground that they inflict undue hardship on the Iraqi people.

Flying Blind in A Dangerous World
6 February 2000

CONSIDER the following:

The Central Intelligence Agency says there is so much nuclear black market activity in the former Soviet Union that the C.I.A. cannot rule out the possibility that Iran has acquired enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb.

Satellite photographs show that in the past year Iraq has rebuilt the Al Taji missile complex north of Baghdad and many other military sites damaged by American air strikes in late 1998. Officials admit, however, that they don't know whether Iraq has reconstituted its chemical and biological weapons programs.

The Clinton administration acknowledges that aid money to Russia's civilian germ research may have been secretly diverted to Biopreparat, a shadowy organization that once directed the Soviet Union's germ warfare program.

These developments, worrisome enough by themselves, have led experts to a larger and still more troubling concern that America's intelligence services may be incapable of monitoring the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear expertise and technology.

Testimony on Capitol Hill last week by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was hardly reassuring. Now, more than ever before, he glumly warned members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ''we risk substantial surprise.''

While the C.I.A. and American law enforcement officials have thwarted plots by terrorist groups against American targets in the past, Mr. Tenet bluntly told the senators, ''I must be frank in saying that this has only succeeded in buying time against an increasingly dangerous threat.''

Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former journalist and senior government official, agreed with Mr. Tenet, noting that terrorists and rogue states were making it harder for anyone to monitor them. ''People now commercially encrypt sensitive communication and don't talk over cell phones,'' he said. Countries bury telephone lines and rely less on microwave transmissions. ''A lot of what N.S.A. [the National Security Administration] used to get simply isn't gettable now,'' Mr. Gelb said. ''And we don't know how to reacquire it.''

Hoo-ray.  A named source.

The spread of so-called dual-use technology -- guidance and control equipment, electronic test equipment and speciality materials -- all of which can be used for legitimate and illegitimate purposes, has also complicated matters. For example, there is ''substantial overlap,'' says Mr. Tenet, between what is needed to make a vaccine and a biological warfare agent.

Yet another area of concern is that the pool of skilled weapons technicians is larger than ever, administration officials say. The end of the Soviet germ warfare program alone left tens of thousands of former employees in desperate financial straits, and tracking their whereabouts is difficult, intelligence officials say. Iran, for one, continues to recruit such talent with some success, American and Russian government officials agree.

RICHARD N. HAASS, the director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and a former member of the Bush administration, adds that proliferators are extremely ''tough targets.'' Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, he said, ''were in every sense of the word hidden.''

Gathering information in countries with which the United States lacks formal relations is also challenging. ''We have very few people going in and out who can tell us things,'' Mr. Haass says. He adds that American intelligence is now paying for ''years of underinvesting in 'humint,' '' -- intelligence collected by people rather than by satellites or monitoring devices.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. analyst and writer, says, ''The C.I.A.'s clandestine service, a highly bureaucratic, sclerotic institution that still remains most at home on the diplomatic cocktail circuit overseas, is structurally, culturally, and linguistically ill-prepared to undertake the long-term, unconventional work needed to place an agent inside a critical weapons facility.''

As a result, the agency came to depend on ''walk-ins'' who freely come to the agency. But exceptional walk-ins -- ''the sources of our finest espionage'' -- are rare, Mr. Gerecht said, ''which is why our human intelligence on hostile weapons-of-mass-destruction programs has always been, and probably will remain, poor if not nonexistent.''

Some analysts also blame the agency for withholding information it does have. When two government agencies made grants between 1995 and 1997 that benefited Biopreparat, the Russian joint stock company that the United States fears may still be tied to covert Russian germ research, officials responsible for the grants said they had not known that Biopreparat was under a cloud. But the C.I.A. had known about that entity ever since the defection of a key Russian scientist in 1992.

CONGRESS, too, has helped to reduce America's intelligence effectiveness. Over the past two years it cut nearly by half funding for Russian scientists, whom the Administration says have provided invaluable insights into the Soviet Union's germ warfare programs and the current status of those once involved in it.

Nor is the Clinton administration blameless. Senior officials, citing their need for better information to assess whether Iraq is reconstituting its unconventional weapons programs, last month supported a new inspection program created by the United Nations Security Council. But Daniel Byman, a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, writes in the latest issue of the journal ''Foreign Affairs'' that the United Nations' system is so enfeebled that it will probably do more harm than good.

The inspectors themselves will most likely be an inexperienced group, deprived of Security Council backing and a strong director, Mr. Byman wrote. As such, the inspection agency will in all probability find ''only what Saddam wanted them to.''

Mr. Hussein could then claim Iraq is certifiably free of weapons of mass destruction, which could ultimately cause sanctions against his country to be lifted. At that point he could easily import whatever he needed to rebuild his arsenal.

The Administration's acceptance of the impotent inspection regime, meanwhile, is a timely reminder that the United States usually comes to depend most upon the nighttime world of spies and spying only after failing to pursue effective policies in broad daylight.

School's Out: Harvard

This is the first in a series on the neo-Marxist, froggy-philosophizing, politically correct mish-mash that supposedly passes as English studies at today's universities.

I'll start this series with the English department at our top-ranked university, Harvard.  According to the common-volk at National Review online, it's important to have credentials from this university in order to be a Supreme Court justice. 

Let's see what our future Supreme Court justices will be reading.   Keep on scrolling, they grow more absurd the further down you go.

Art of Dying
English 90ad
How is dying an art? And how is it learned in advance? Handbooks, poems and plays from before 1600 speak, solemnly or cheerfully, of contemplating death, dying, and the dead as vital to individual and communal living. We'll examine the imagination of death in pre-modern literary culture: death as performance or aesthetics; grave humor; death in language, politics, and fashioning identity.

Money and Literature
English 90ml
Money and language as means of representation, exchange, and production. Principal literary texts include works by Shakespeare, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Ruskin, Joyce, and Martineau as well as attention to novels where a coin is the narrator and to coins inscribed with poetic epigrams. Special consideration of the economics of literature from Aristotle to Heidegger, the relationship between monetary and aesthetic form in visual arts and cinema, and various theories of money as social fiction.

Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment
English 146
How Enlightenment theories of moral sensibility and physical susceptibility shaped categories of sex and gender. Topics include theories of sexual difference and sexual identity; the rise of the conjugal couple; libertine writings and the “invention of pornography.” Readings range from the scandalous Eliza Haywood to the respectable Samuel Richardson, from Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, including conduct books, medical treatises and trial records.

Imperialism and Victorian Literature
English 156x
By 1830 a quarter of the world population lived within British territories. For some Victorians, colonial expansion constituted a moral imperative, a mission to "civilize" the world. Others were ambivalent about the empire that Britain had created. This course explores how Victorian writers viewed the world beyond their shores: how they perceived colonial possessions, how they justified or confronted imperialist violence, how they viewed competing and emergent imperial powers.

The Postcolonial Classic
English 166x
This lecture course will explore the idea of a classic work in the postcolonial, global era. It surveys literary, cultural, and political works that illustrate the relationship between aesthetic values and questions of cultural citizenship. Works read may include Gandhi, Fanon, Sartre, Mandela, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, John Coetzee.

Postcolonial Narratives
English 167p
An investigation of the major concerns, paradigms, and quarrels within postcolonial literary studies. While reading authors such as Achebe, Conrad, Dabydeen, Dangarembga, Ghosh, Phillips, Rushdie, and Salih, we shall pay close attention to the continuities and the discontinuities of the postcolonial experience as represented in literary texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

Literature of Migration and Ethnicity: The Case of the United States
English 196
How have migration and ethnic diversity affected the American literary landscape? Is the stress on ethnic diversity a form of resistance to, or a feature of modernity? Such questions, complemented by ethnic theory, inform discussions of books ranging from The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans to Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and of authors from Richard Rodriguez and Jamaica Kincaid to Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie.

Literary Ecosystems
English 198x
From the extermination of the dodo to the search for the birthplace of the eel, writers have been writing about the relationship between human beings and the natural world for centuries. This lecture-workshop offers an immersion in environmental writing, in fiction and non-fiction, from the 18th century onwards. Participants will be expected to develop writing projects of their own, centered on environmental themes, and in forms of their choosing.

Culture and Its Wars
"Freshman Seminar"
The term "culture," referring to the distinctive values, products, and practices of a group, is only a little more than two hundred years old, and almost as soon as it appeared, it became a fighting term. Folk culture versus elite culture, high culture versus mass culture, "Culture and Anarchy," "Culture and Ideology," "Culture and Society," cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, the culture wars: these are some of the terms of dispute. The stakes in these arguments have seemed enormous. But what is a culture? Can you point to it, measure it, evaluate it? How do you interpret it? Are there "bad" and "good" cultures, healthy cultures and deformed cultures? Do people's cultural tastes and preferences matter to the quality of their lives or the condition of the polity? The seminar will begin by looking at the emergence of the term and at some of the uses to which it was put in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, we will discuss the anthropological literature on culture, specifically the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and James Clifford. We will examine the public debates over mass culture and popular culture, in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and over cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. We will end by considering, through a look at the political science literature, the usefulness of the notion of a red-state/blue- state "culture war" in explaining the behavior of the American electorate today. Student projects will involve an analysis of a contemporaneous public debate in cultural terms

American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac
Lit & Arts, A-86
This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of protest literature in the US from the American Revolution to the rise of Hip Hop and globalization. Using a broad definition of "protest literature," it focuses on the production and consumption of dissent as a site of progressive social critique, using a wide variety of print, visual, and oral forms. We examine the historical links between modes of protest and meanings of literature, and explore how various expressions of dissent function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological texts within specific cultural contexts. "Readings" range from novels to photographs and music.

Literary Theory in the Life of Literature: Graduate Seminar
English 298
Interactions between concepts central to literary theory-genre and `textuality', writing and `difference', ethics and interpretation, narrative and cultural translation-and literature embodying such concerns. Barthes, Habermas, Derrida, Lacan, Carey, Forster, Ghosh, Morrison, Rushdie, others.

Narcissism, ideology, and moral hysteria, oh my!

When I was a Philistine, the New York Times' cultural coverage was something to be devoured.   Then something happened, and it wasn't just my own political change of heart.  The coveraged just began to suck.

It's nice to know I wasn't the only one who noticed:

The truth is, deterioration at the Times is a rich subject, full of cautionary tales about how a great liberal institution can go rancid by making a caricature of its principles and adulterating its work. When a great newspaper’s front page is indistinguishable from its editorial page, and its editorial page is indistinguishable from a transcript of a Democratic Party rally, journalistic decay is a certainty. But if what’s happened to the Times’s news reporting and opinion pages is an outrage—think only of the repulsive way in which the paper attempted to generate anti-Bush capital from the Katrina disaster—its coverage of culture is somehow more depressing than infuriating. Here, too, one finds the triumph of ideology over principle and an unseemly race to the lowest common denominator. Yet in matters of culture and the arts, the Times adds another dimension of depredation—we mean the element, half preposterous, half nauseating—of unthinking modishness.

Drop the bomb, please

This is a couple of months old, but it's still funny.  Catholic Philistines decry the inevtiable decimation of the priestly ranks if the Church actually does say no mas to gay cliques, pink palaces, and the various forms of deception and blackmail that seem to be the fruits of such a dysfunctional mindset.  They warn ominously of empty sancturies, crowded pews, and dogs and cats sleeping together if the nuclear option is used and honor is restored to the priesthood.

Diogenes at Off the Record had this response:

For the sake of argument, let's accept the predictions of the Cassandras at their direst face value, viz., that eliminating gay priests would empty the rectories. Further, let's pretend that we, the faithful, had a say in the matter. Finally, let's oversimplify by reducing the options to two:

Plan A. The Status Quo: Priestly formation -- and parish life generally -- continues as it has been and is presently.

Plan B. The Nuclear Option: After the holocaust, only one priest remains per diocese. For the next fifteen years (i.e., until the effects of the reform kick in), you have to drive 35 miles every Sunday and Holy Day to an outdoor football stadium, where you have a bad view of a valid and licit Mass served by unbuggered altar boys, and hear a scarcely audible but orthodox homily, delivered by an ancient priest in a nearly unintelligible Vietnamese accent.

As for your sunny Uncle D, not only would he go for Plan B like a shot, he'd give almost anything to be able to make the choice in the first place.
 

Bomb's away.

TANG the Rematch? Hooah!

If on the first day of her nomination hearings Harriet Miers opens her mouth and she sounds like a dollar store clerk, I'll say the President made a bad choice.  Everything else is meaningless, and tedious.  Luckily, I'm not the only one.  Strata-sphere has a link to a recent poll that pretty much shows that most conservatives are withholding judgment.

I just heard WSJ columnist John Fund talk ominously about the inevitable return of the President's air national guard service, because of something, I forget.  This apparently is a bad thing to Mr. Fund because, as you know, the President didn't follow his advice and choose an imminent scholar with impeccable credentials from such conservative institutions as Harvard and Princeton and vetted by the folks at the Corner and Laura Ingraham's radio show.   The implication seemed to be that if Bush doesn't listen to him and Rush and the fools at NRO right now then he's going to have to deal with more questions about his time as Texas governor and (shocka!)  his ANG service. 

I guess this is a bad political move for him, since he may run for local office when he gets back to Texas in 2009?

Spare me.  TANG the Rematch  would be a hoot!   If Philistines want to bring up Bush's ANG service again and again and again and again, then let them.  It didn't help them last year;  I can't image it's going to help them now.   Perhaps they'll drag Dan Rather out of "retirement" so that he can blather on and on about the memos' fake accuracy.

Oh, man, this would great.  Let's remind the world why George Bush won reelection in 2004.  Can we drag the nomination hearings out for six months?

Slowly, Things Are Changing

The DC area has its share of astonishingly ugly Catholic churches (architecture, not people).  Visit parts of northern Virginia or suburban Maryland and savor the fruits of Philistines' labor.  Decades of "experimentation" with "sacred spaces" has produced some of the ugliest insults to God.   Sorry folks, after centuries of unprecendeted beauty, you can't tell me that God prefers the Wal-Mart look.

Just think how long - how many more decades -- we're going to have to live with gymnasiums adorned with Catholic-stuff.

However, there's a glimmer of hope in Silver Spring.  The pastor of St. Michael's has proposed several renovations to the church -- some of them much needed, including a paint job.  More important, however, is the relocation of  the tabernacle "to a noble place in the center of the sanctuary."

Amen.

Now, they need a music director who can think beyond those vile Dan Schutte songs.

Why I'm Not Listening to Laura Ingraham

I work from home most of the time.  As a result, I get to listen to what I want to during the day, including a lot of  talk radio.  Lately, however, talk radio has bored me. 

You see, since I'm not part of the Stop That White Trash Woman  Harriet Miers crowd, I'm not much interested in listening to those who are talk about it constantly.   Unfortunately, that means I've had to stop listening to Laura Ingraham.

All-Miers All The Time is  not acceptable content for those of us who are not part of the Over-privileged and Perpetually Aggrieved crowd.

Totally Un-PC Lyrics from the 40s

Part of a series.

It's 1948, and singer Peggy Lee penned this winner with her husband, Dave Barbour.

Mañana is soon enough for me

The faucet she is dripping and the fence she's fallin' down
My pocket needs some money, so I can't go into town
My brother isn't working and my sister doesn't care
The car she needs a motor so I can't go anywhere
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)
My mother's always working, she's working very hard
But every time she looks for me I'm sleeping in the yard
My mother thinks I'm lazy and maybe she is right
I'll go to work mañana but I gotta sleep tonight
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)

Oh, once I had some money but I gave it to my friend
He said he'd pay me double, it was only for a lend
But he said a little later that the horse she was so slow
Why he give the horse my money is something I don't know
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)

(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)

My brother took a suitcase and he went away to school
My father said he only learned to be a silly fool
My father said that I should learn to make a chile pot
But then I burned the house down, the chile was too hot
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)

The window she is broken and the rain is comin' in
If someone doesn't fix it I'll be soaking to my skin
But if we wait a day or two the rain may go away
And we don't need a window on such a sunny day
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)  Oba! Oba!
(mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me)  Oba! Oba!

BTW

BTW

I'm reading blog comments, and I'm coming across one of the dumbest justifications for snob-based opinion of the Miers nomination:

If you had a choice between a doctor who went to Harvard and one that went to SMU which one would you choose?

I think they're expecting the answer to be "Harvard, of course."  But, uh, no, actually.

First, I work for a living.  I have health insurance. So, I have to go to doctors and hospitals covered under my insurance. 

Second, I am going to choose the best hospital for my treatment, not just a doctor.

Third, what kind of fucking rarified world do some people live in?  I live in the DC area, and most of the doctors I get to see have their first degrees from third world universities like, oh,  I don't know, the University of Tehran or the University of Dehli, or Mombassa Tech.  I don't know what world some of these folks live in, but I suspect Harvard Medical School graduates are just knocking down the door to service them, because they're certainly not covered by the Aetna HMO.

I wouldn't mind if I had my pick of Havahd grads when I go in to surgery early next year.  Where is this world?

You go, girl!

I recall only one time in my life when going to jail seemed like a viable option.  I was in an interview at the development office of the Library of Congress.  They needed a librarian.  This was a new thing, you see, because the office never actually employed librarians before; they weren't used to it.

However, my interviewer said, they needed someone who could work around a diverse group of people.

Oh, I said, I currently work for a federal office that handles minority health policy.  I have a proven record of working with people from diverse backgrounds.

No, she corrected with a sneer, I mean diverse populations

Well, that's what I mean, I said.

No, she said, this office works with very wealthy people, and we need someone who can work with them.

I was silent.  I still didn't understand.

She continued, "I can tell by your accent that you're probably not used to working around wealthy people."

At that moment, My Three Readers, I seriously considered grabbing her oft-dyed blond head and pounding it through the leaded glass coffee table we were sitting around.  Really, how much jail time would I get if I told the judge what she just told me?  Instead,  I kept my cool.  I felt the blood rush to my face.  I took a deep breath, and knowing that I had only one chance to return the favor, I said, "I'm sorry.  I didn't know that finishing school was one of the educational requirements for this position.  But, I can assure you, I do know how to hold my fork, and I didn't have to go to school to learn."

I finished the interview soon after, and thankfully never heard from those horrible people again.  Later on, I told a friend who worked at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress).  She dismissed it and said that the office was just full of "congressmen's wives."  Unfortunately, that wasn't my first or last scrape with DC's "power elite," but it has informed my perception of this vast collection of over-privileged and underwhelming people. The vast majority of them do no harm, and, thankfully, drift away depending on which political party is in power that year, but they're replaced with others.  All of them make up the DC "power elite," and they are, as a whole, a very dull, dour group of Philistines.

Which brings me to several conservative complaints about Harriet Miers.

George Will -- the Garrison Keillor of the right -- has had an unmanly snit fit over her nomination.  He's huffing and puffing, and throwing his sizable weight around Washington, suggesting that she needs to be rejected in order to force the president to nominate one of Mr. Will's choices.  His column today is an appalling collection of shoddy reporting and elitists poseuring:

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is  no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument'' for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their prepresidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections.

I'm agreeing wholeheartedly with InstaPunk. This is the kind of B.S. you expect from E.J. Dionne or Maureen....Dowd.  He's pissed that the President Bush didn't pick someone he could schmooze with at La Chaumiere.   Note to George: you have space in all  the newspapers because the leftists who run them aren't frightened by you anymore.  You're one of them.

Over at RadioBlogger there's posted a transcript of a conversation between Hugh Hewitt and blogger Beldar.  Here is described some of Harriet Miers accomplishments, these are the things they're not talking about at the Corner:

WD: She actually oversaw the merger between Locke-Purnell, which was the Dallas firm, and the Liddell-Sapp firm in Houston, each of which were major firms in their respective markets. It was a merger of equals, and left that firm as a clearly one of the powerhouse statewide firms, probably...certainly on anybody's top ten list for major Texas law firms, and on most people's top five list.

HH: Blue chip law firm, in other words, capable of handling...

WD: It's a blue chip firm representing corporate clients, mostly, and clients who are used to picking the best lawyers every place they need lawyers.

HH: The kind of talents that you bring to that job, I've argued with Ramesh Ponnuru and others, are sophistication in the management of strong personalities, knowledge of all the human resources laws and their complexities, contract law, compensation law, ERISA, the sort of things that any large-size American corporate CEO would know, but which is an alien factor on the Supreme Court today.

WD: Well, there's a lot of different management styles within different law firms, and a lot of different ways to skin that cat. But all the managing partners at successful firms, and hers has been a successful firm, they all have certain things in common. For one thing, they all have the respect of all the partners in the firm. And when you're talking about a 400 lawyer plus law firm, it's probably 200 odd partners, getting someone who everybody, or nearly everybody agrees to respect, is not mean feat. They have to have the ability to either induce or compel those people to get along together and work together productively. They have to have skills to mediate, they have to have skills to order. They have to have skills to supervise, they have to run a business, make payroll, handle all the myriad employement logistics, all the sort of problems that any business have, and then they also have to attract business.

HH: Yup. Oh, you have to be...absolutely, you have to be entrepreneurial. Bill Dyer, what about the charge that SMU just isn't good enough for the Supreme Court?

WD: That's something that I can understant how people, particularly from out of state might jump to that conclusion. Here in Texas, the SMU Law School has a good reputation, and always has, particularly in Dallas. It is a well regarded firm. I did recruiting there several years ago at two different law firms I was at. And we considered the top students there as being competitive with the students we hired from more prestigious law schools, including the University of Texas or Harvard, Stanford, whatever. It's not as deep, but the top students can be very, very good. The Law Review she was on there, for example, is a good law review. At the time she was at that school, it was almost certainly the best law review on state law issues, better than the Texas law review. So, it's a little misleading, I think, to the people who are making out like she's some kind of night school graduate, practicing law out of the strip shopping center, are just way off base.

HH: Not that there'd be anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld.

WD: Well, no.

HH: Bill Dyer, what about what it takes to become the president of the Texas Bar Association. All bar associations are different, and they're...you know, I often wonder about dogs who chase cars, what are they going to do when they catch it. And so, what about that? I'm not a big ABA guy, or a California Bar guy. I belong to them, but that's because I have to.

WD: Sure. Well, the Texas Bar is very, very different from the American Bar Association. And I have a word or two to add about the ABA later. But for people who aren't familiar with the Texas Bar, it is the organization in Texas that basically supervises everybody who practices law, and everything professionally that they do. It is a mandatory organization that you get your license through it. And you can't not be a member of the Texas Bar, if you're licensed in Texas to practice law. So to develop a leadership position in the Texas Bar, you have to be able to serve and attract a broad constituency. You have to please the office practice lawyers, and the adversary practice lawyers. You have to handle the plaintiff side of the bar, and the defense side of the bar. Big cities, small town. Basically, every kind of lawyer, you have to have some kind of sensitivity to. And they're all involved in the Texas Bar. And the Texas Bar has been one of the leaders in the nation, in terms of things like adopting mandatory continuing legal education, to make sure that lawyers stay up to speed, or board certification procedures like the medical doctors have. We do that now in Texas, and that's something the Texas Bar has done. So being president of the Texas Bar is a significant credential. It shows a level of leadership within the profession, and service to the profession, that we still take real seriously.

I have a lot of respect for President Bush for choosing a woman who has more to offer than the same credentials that have, quite frankly, gotten us such horrible decisions like Kelo (5-4) and  Lawrence v Texas (6-3(!)). 

I can see also other reasons for her nomination.  One that stands out  is her experience making important legal decisions in the war on terror.  I know everyone is sick and tired of the GWOT, but there are years and years of it yet to fight, and I suspect there are going to be major cases dealing with extremely difficult issues that haven't even appeared in a courtroom yet.  If there is one person who has a long view of  the GWOT it's the President.  I suspect with that view in mind, he made the decision to go with an accomplished lawyer who's actually participated in the GWOT.  And, no, playing a round of golf with a well-connected general doesn't count.

Now did Miers spend her legal career writing for all the right publications and attending all the right conferences? Obviously, no.  Does she belong to all the right organizations?   I would bet the answer is no.  She's not part of those elite circles where conservatives and liberals hobnob together in mutual self-congratulation of their power and status.  And it's those closest to that sphere of influence -- like the "bloggers" at the Corner -- who have come out with the harshest, ill-informed criticisms. 

The more some conservative commentators ooze condescension toward this accomplished attorney, the more I am going to support her.  I've been on the receiving end of a sneer, and I know how it must feel.  All I can say is, "You go, girl."

10 Years of the "Arab Street"

I'm on a Philistine news watch today.

I recently noticed something about MSM coverage of the Middle East.  The Arab Street has vanished.  It seems that for years we've been reading and listening to people talk about the Arab Street as if this vast wave of angry, pitch-fork wielding Arab proletariat was going to rise up from the sand and take over the Levant in one, last great Revolution. 

I never bought it.  The Arab Street never existed.  It was the fantasy of an aging leftist intellectual class that refuses to give up.  Philistines may come in all shapes and sizes, but there is one general characteristic: a cosmic longing for the Revolution.  Unfortunately, lefty intel analysts I've worked with in the past (especially the ones educated in Middle East Studies departments) bought into the idea of the Arab Street.  Some are still waiting for it, like an analytical Second Coming.

However, I have unscientific evidence that this revolution, too, is vanishing. 

 

I went on to an excellent commercial online database called Factiva and performed two types of searches on  the exact phrase "arab street."  I restricted my dataset to four Philistine newspapers:  The New York Times, the L.A. Times,  the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.  I further  restricted my search to exclude republished news, pricing info, etc.  I then did two sets of searches. 

I'll start with the second search because that's what's represented above.  I searched the phrase in these four newspapers for a full year of each year since 1995.   I then recorded the number of "hits" (results) that were returned.  This isn't scientific because the results could include duplicates or unrelated articles that happen to have those two words in succession.  It also doesn't read for context , and so articles and columns that have to do with the Arab Street, but didn't phrase it precisely in that way, aren't included.  The results, however, are startling:

1995:3

1996:6

1997:6

1998:7

1999:3

2000:13

2001:48

2002:61

2003:89

2004:19

2005 (so far):16

In the first set I searched the phrase in three separate data ranges:

01/01/1995-09/12/2001:  48 hits  (approx. 5.5 years)
09/13/2001-02/01/2005: 208 hits  (approx. 4 years)
02/03/2005-10/01/2004: 15 hits  (appox .5 year)

I love this.  It looks like our premier newspapers of record discovered the Revolution soon after 9/11, further building up the fantasy ahead of the Iraq invasion.  But after watching Arabs in Iraq and Lebanon voting and waiving American flags, thanking America, the Arab Street vanished.  In the Philistine mind, if the Revolution isn't their Revolution then it doesn't exist.

Let me suggest the Endangered Liberal Meme Act of 2005,  intended to preserve this and other quickly vanishing leftist memes for posterity.

Not One Named Source?

Al-Reuters published a bizarre article this morning, linked at the Drudge Report, that has not one named source.   I never comment on these lapses of journalistic judgment because I could be here all day doing only that, but this one is so blatantly bad that I can't let it go.

CIA faces spy shortages as staffers go private
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As CIA Director Porter Goss tries to rebuild the agency's global operations, he faces a shortage of experienced spies created by a post-September 11 stampede to the private sector, current and former intelligence officials say.

Okay.

Goss, who a year ago inherited a CIA wracked by criticism of intelligence failures over Iraq and the September 11, 2001, attacks, has come under fire from critics about the publicized departures of several high-level clandestine officers.

Okay.

Reform advocates see the loss of senior officials as a natural consequence of changes intended to root out an old guard blamed for lapses that prompted Congress to put the CIA under a new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.

Okay.Then it starts getting funky.

"The CIA and the intelligence community failed this country pretty badly. That's why there's new leadership at the CIA. Change is not easy," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee.

When I read this quote, my librarian's sense for news started creaking into action. After many years of reading article, after article, after article, in an endless stream, day-in, day-out, you can tell if a quote is canned or if it comes from a real interview.  This looks like an official statement, not a quoted source.  I may be wrong on this one, but it just sounds like something a Congressman would say "in committee."

But current and former officials say Goss does face problems stemming from the agency's reliance on a robust private contracting market for skilled intelligence and security workers that has grown more lucrative since the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

As a member of the vast military-industrial complex I can agree with this to a point.The Agency, like many federal agencies, is losing staff. However, it's much more complex than big bucks.  Many bureaucrats are leaving because they're reaching retirement age, and these folks are bailing with a 20-year pension and the hope of making even better money in contracting. This article doesn't mention the retirement-phenom, only market pressures.

"Goss realizes he has a major problem in the (clandestine service) because he's having major bailouts among the old guard and also retention problems all the way down the ranks," said a former clandestine officer.

[Unnamed source #1].

I don't buy this. Most former clandestine officers are...in their late forties or older, and I'm not sure folks in that age group would use a phrase like "major bailouts."That's an idiomatic expression more often used by Xers, like me.

Experienced spies have been surrendering their blue staff badges and leaving the CIA in droves, often to return the next day as better paid, green-badged private contractors, current and former officials say.

[Unnamed Sources #2]

Again.Who?

But as contractors, they can no longer supervise fresh recruits at a time when the CIA is pursuing a 50 percent  increase in spies. Nor can they supplement a pool of experienced operatives from which the agency traditionally draws its top leaders.

Sure...

"You've got a seismic shift with the contractor issue," said a intelligence official who views the trend as byproduct of low morale among clandestine staff officers.

[Unnamed Source #3]

"It's frankly scary to look at the number of middle managers that are diving out with 10, 15, 20 years in because they're going to make $175,000 or $200,000. It reduces what we  call the 'blue badges' -- government people with clearances.

This quote isn't very clear, and leave me asking more questions.  Clandestine (DO) or Analytical (DI) middle managers?  What kind of jobs are they taking? What kind of jobs are offering that much? Are they security consulting? Straight analysis? IT work? I've been in and out of contracting for fifteen years, and the 175K salary for a "middle manager" seems more like science fiction to me. Unless you're well-connected, you're not making an easy 200K. A salary like this in defense/intel contracting usually comes with a dozen or more employees and multi-million dollar budgets.  And you're going to have to bring in a steady stream of business.

If this source exists, then I would say his/her golf buddies are lying about their salaries.

PAY IS BETTER FOR PRIVATE CONTRACTORS

A $200,000-a-year contracting salary compares with annual  pay of about $135,000 for experienced CIA staffers at the very top of the scale used to set federal salaries in Washington.

"Often you leave behind the deadwood. The deadwood gets in charge, and then even more people move on," the official said.

This could be just sour grapes from a former DO/DI official (again, it isn't made clear) who was forced out, or was smart of enough to know the writing on the wall.  I've been through several downsizing/management changeovers, and it's always been the case that the safest managers are the ones that share the new management's goals. A new leader in any kind of organization is going to have men and women around who are going to forward their vision and agenda.  If you don't like it, then you can leave.  Sometimes a manager who is too closely associated with the "old" management is going to be compelled to leave.

Reading articles like this, I'm always surprised at the incessant griping that government bureaucrats do when faced with an all-too-common situation in the private sector.  The sense of entitlement can be brutally obvious. 

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck said Goss is determined to stem the trend toward private contracting by rebuilding the blue-badged workforce as CIA operations expand worldwide.

Good.  And I hope they find folks from private industry.  Is Donald Trump available?

Officials say the U.S. Congress set the stage for today's shortage of experienced staff by ordering a 17 percent across-the-board reduction in agency personnel in the mid-1990s after the Cold War.

Who’s fault is that?  Let me guess: George Bush.  He and Karl Rove used their Jedi-mind trick powers on Clinton-era policy makers and compelled them to cut the Agency’s work force.  However, they didn’t get rid of enough whacked-out Philistine analysts, according to this Frontpage article.

The Directorate of Operations, which runs CIA clandestine activities, has dwindled to fewer than 5,000 staff members from a peak of over 7,000 in the 1970s, intelligence sources say.

Quality, not quantity.

To supplement the clandestine ranks, Goss issued an appeal to former senior intelligence officers over the summer to consider returning to help train new recruits.

But already, inexperienced clandestine officers have shown up at the CIA's Baghdad and Kabul stations in numbers that some current and former officials find worrying.

Again, who?  And how do we know how many “inexperienced clandestine officers” are showing up in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Do they wear name tags?

"They're great places to learn. But where are the people to lead?" complained a former senior clandestine officer. "Running around Afghanistan trying to recruit Afghans is a piece of cake compared with trying to recruit an Iranian nuclear scientist."

[Unnamed Source #4]

I’m sorry.  They weren’t doing that over the last 20 years.  Now the folks who weren’t doing that ten years ago (when we still had a chance to stop the Iranians) are complaining that no one is around to do that.

Please stay retired.

But Goss' success could depend on how he is perceived by the remaining clandestine staff.

He has been portrayed as a director struggling against opposition from clandestine officers who some say are offended by his reliance on a personal staff known to insiders as the "Gosslings."

Oh, spare me.  The old-timers are just frustrated they can’t get access to the big man.  They resent that they’re not in loop.  This is not necessarily a problem.

"We hear people feel like there's no strategic vision coming out of Goss. He's behind a wall of staff and his staff are disruptive," said a congressional aide briefed by CIA officials.

[Unnamed source #5]

Added a former clandestine officer with long experience in world hot spots: "The old CIA is finished. What happens now, I don't know."

[Unnamed source #6]

”The old CIA is finished?” Good.  It didn’t protect us on 9/11, why would I or any reasonable America boo-hoo the demise of an organization that won the Cold War (despite its Marxist analytical work force), but couldn’t pull the trigger on a crazy Arab in the Hindu Kush?

But I also have to ask the question again:  who is saying this?  If they're former, why won't they come forward?  The fact is if these are real people they are probably unwilling to name themselves because they are working in the vast military/intel complex themselves.  They're contractors.  I doubt, however, they’re all making 200K.

The Elvis of Che

For giggles I typed "resurrection Che" into Google, and sure enough, on the first page I saw this irony-free article on the importance of Che:

Today, when Che's image occupies every vacant public advertising space, it is easy to forget that for a decade his memory was quite systematically underplayed by the Cuban government. Why it was reborn in the 1990s is the theme of what follows - but it can be asserted that the official rehabilitation of Che has had much to do with the ideological needs of a Cuban regime under siege. To some extent (and a limited one) his reappearance on the international scene was an echo of what was happening inside Cuba; but Cuba's impact on the world was far more limited in the 1990s and its authority was significantly weakened. So the rediscovery of Che beyond Cuba has other origins, perhaps in the search among new movements of resistance robbed by the collapse of Stalinism for a political tradition which could provide a symbolic language of resistance.

In that political vacuum very few figures have been rediscovered who for one reason or another were not associated with that discredited past. Malcolm X was recuperated; so were ignored feminist revolutionaries from Sojourner Truth to Louise Michel. And Che Guevara emphatically returned. It is now clear from John Lee Anderson's exhaustive biography that Che did consider himself a Marxist and place himself in a revolutionary tradition. At first sight that might disqualify him from the list of uncontaminated fighters. But over time Che has been progressively disengaged in popular thinking from his role in the Cuban Revolution and from his responsibility for a failed strategy of guerrilla warfare; he has been relocated on a terrain of pure rebellion, individualistic and informed in the first instance by moral rather than political considerations.

Che lingers on and pops up again and again  like the Elvis sightings so popular in the 1980s.  He'll be resurrected over and over until all that's left in the public memory is a parody of the man. 

Who's This?

Part of an ongoing series.  Who's this?

1. A Buddhist monk auctioneer?
2. Evel Knievel's other brother, the lounge singer
3. The lame boy left behind when the "mountain-side shut fast"
4. Peer Gynt


Answer.