In the event of panic or fire, your chances are going to be less than 50/50. Drunken revelers don’t tend to stand at attention singing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" while the women proceed at an orderly pace to the exits.

There are other certainties: that the club’s promoters will have secured their liquor license, immunity from complaints by the neighbors, etc., by dint of bribery and political clout. Duane Kyles, owner of E2, the Chicago club where 21 died last week, had the Jackson family–Jesse and Jesse Jr.–going to bat for him.

It was a busy week for the Reverend, since he also assigned himself the task of comforting the survivors and the bereaved. Jesse’s shuttle was too much for one Chicago city council member, Madeline Haithcock, who called him a hypocrite: "He’s with the victims one minute holding prayer vigils…and with his friends the next. That’s him. That’s the role he plays. He likes to get in the papers."

True. All politicians do. Back in the fall of 1991, there was a fire in the Imperial chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC, that killed 25 workers, mostly women on minimum wage. Jackson rushed to Hamlet, bible in hand. This being North Carolina and not the South Side of Chicago, there was no likelihood of Imperial being owned by a Brother. There was an authentic villain in the form of plant owner Emmett Roe, who had suspected the workers of stealing chicken and therefore locked or blocked doors. Roe was sentenced to 19 years, 11 months, but was let out after serving four.

Crowds and fire. Darkness and panic. These are the currency of these weird times as the Pentagon divulges its plan to "shock and awe" the people of Baghdad with a 48-hour barrage of missiles. Two weekends ago, we had the unity of vast crowds asserting life; and then, a few days later, we saw the crowd in the guise of panic-stricken throngs, in Chicago and Rhode Island, crushing each other to death and being burned.

At the start of the 1960s, another high decade for crowds, fire and war, Elias Canetti published his eerie, eccentric book, Crowds and Power. It has a brilliant opening passage describing how a man feels amid the panic of a burning theater: "The people he pushes away are like burning objects to him… Fire, as a symbol for the crowd, has entered the whole economy of man’s feelings and become an immutable part of it. That emphatic trampling on people, so often observed in panics and apparently so senseless, is nothing but the stamping out of fire."

Amid newscasts switching between reports from the charred club in Rhode Island and Bush calling on Saddam to lay down his arms, pending attack, can any decently sensitive person not imagine Baghdad or Basra once the missiles start to fall and anticipate dreadful episodes like the careful targeting of the Al-Amariya shelter, targeted because, as one Pentagon man told the press, they wanted to alert Saddam’s elite that their wives and children weren’t safe?

Actually, the elites had left Baghdad and the poor women and children were in the shelter when the U.S. missile penetrated the reinforced concrete roof and killed them.

This brings us to the consoling topic of luck: the mother who missed her chance to get to the shelter; the fellow who left the nightclub five minutes earlier. At some level, we pay hopeful respect to the whims of Providence.

But in the bigger picture, accidents turn into certainties. Back in 1998, Deborah and Rodrick Wallace published A Plague on Your Houses (Verso), a carefully researched book about how, in the 1970s era of "planned shrinkage," social engineers, some of them mustered in the Rand Corporation Fire Project, supervised the deliberate degradation of fire control resources in areas the engineers of shrinkage had slated for clearance.

About 10 percent of New York’s fire companies were eliminated, manpower cut back, emergency response systems whittled down. After the inevitable fire epidemic, there was an equally inevitable epidemic of housing abandonment by landlords. Poor neighborhoods collapsed. When the dust settled, the Wallaces calculate that about two million poor people had been uprooted.

Those strategists of urban destruction were never rushed into the pillory the way Kyles or Roe were. True, they were exposed by the Wallaces, but that was many years later.

Maybe, many years later, there’ll be a definitive account of why the Twin Towers fell as rapidly as they did. As things stand, one can find accounts that it was design incompetence and cost-cutting married to the desire to maximize rentable space. Go to scieneering.com, and you’ll find a compelling account of the extreme vulnerability of the panels and square tubes.

Here’s how the scieneering.com essay concludes: "Weak floor-to-wall connections and missing connections between segments of the exterior wall columns contributed significantly to the collapse of the World Trade towers. If these defects were not present, the collapse of the towers might have been prevented or delayed. However, the aircraft would still have penetrated into the core, and the ensuing fire would have trapped the occupants above the crash zone."

In other words, the odds were bad from the very start.

From A to E
Our bombs are growing up.

Remember the late Carl Sagan’s Nuclear Winter? Over in Rumsfeld’s empire, they’ve been working on Winter Lite. The "E-bomb," a high-powered microwave designed to fry the circuits of enemy equipment, has been hailed as the new "wonder weapon" in the forthcoming Iraqi conflict.

As described by Robert Williscroft in DefenseWatch (cited on the sparky DefenseTech site): "a properly constructed E-bomb can effectively ‘fry’ everything electric and electronic within several miles of the point of detonation. And the pulse is not the end. During the next fifteen minutes or so, collapsing electrical systems and communications grids will distribute the pulse, and create their own smaller pulses, analogous to an earthquake aftershock. The entire affected electrical and communications system will tear itself apart–self destruct."

But Williscroft goes on to describe Pentagon fears that "the use of the experimental weapon could burn out electronics on U.S. military equipment in the vicinity. Electronic circuitry on most Air Force systems hasn’t yet been redesigned to survive a concentrated onslaught of electromagnetic pulses, according to a February 2000 report by Air Force Col. Eileen Walling. DefenseWatch argues that a simple version of the "E-bomb," constructed outside the refinements of the Iron Triangle’s budgetary requirements with about $400 worth of materials, would serve as an almost ideal terrorist weapon against a high-tech target like the United States.

Williscroft also cites concerns among Rumsfeld’s men that destroying all urban communications in Baghdad might somehow alienate the locals. (You believe that?) And, "it would significantly raise the financial cost of rebuilding Iraq’s economy once a conflict is over." But that’s what makes life so delightful for the postwar construction industry. Ask Dick Cheney how Halliburton makes its money.

"Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot." Disrespectful? Certainly. Disloyal? Wait until Congress passes Ashcroft’s Patriot Act (part two) and it probably will be. In fact, this was a placard in Sydney, Australia in one of the rallies put on last weekend by nations united against the war. Count those demonstrators in the "thousands," as the press here likes to say, until you get to several million.

How seriously does the government take its own terror alerts, rolling out Orange like clockwork each time Bush’s polling numbers go down? Friday saw Defense Sec. Don Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks, two top players in the scheduled onslaught on Iraq, plus a passel of other notables, all floating on the Hudson, aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid.

Franks was giving Rumsfeld the Intrepid Freedom Award for overall services to liberty and the Western way of life. (Franks won it last year.) All it would have taken was four more Martyrs for Allah with a boatload of high explosive, and it could have made the attack on the Cole look like chicken feed.

Under the very eyes of the Navy and Coast Guard? Why not? Look at what happened a few days earlier in Key West, the actual day Ashcroft and Riggs announced we’re One Nation Under Orange. Four uniformed fugitives from Cuba’s navy patrol made landfall on the Homeland, passing undetected by southern Florida’s vast flotillas of Coast Guard and Navy vessels.

The four tied up their 32-foot fiberglass cigarette boat on the southern shore of Key West, at the Hyatt marina dock. Their craft was sporting the Cuban flag and contained two AK-47s, eight loaded magazines and a GPS finder tuned to the coordinates of the U.S. Coast Guard station.

Then, clad in their Cuban fatigues (one had a Chinese-made handgun strapped to his hip), they wandered about, looking for a police station where they could turn themselves in. Had they been terrorists, there were plenty of rewarding targets within strolling distance, including a major surveillance center for the Caribbean and Latin America, run by U.S. Southern Command, as well as a U.S. Navy base. Plus, of course, Key West’s literary colony.

Maybe the Masters of Terror feel Rumsfeld is worth more to them alive than dead. After all, the Soviet Union tried to split NATO for forty years without success. Rumsfeld and his commander-in-chief have done the job in barely more than a couple of years, as Sen. Bobby Byrd pointed out in a great speech on the Hill on Feb. 12.

Cocktailing & Confabulating

From the sublime Sen. Byrd to the barstool warrior Christopher Hitchens, who recently hailed G. Bush as his hero and who devotes his column in the current Vanity Fair to the beneficial properties of booze–citing his own superb mental powers and physical condition as irrefutable evidence.

I offer the following commentary as a public service for impressionable youth, who otherwise might take Hitchens at his word and assume that one can drink like a fish and still row safely to journalistic fortune with mind and body unimpaired. At least in the old Bohemian days, as I saw them in Dublin and London in the late 50s, many writers were drunks. They didn’t maintain the illusion that booze would carry them into clear-eyed, keen-brained old age or that they weren’t often a burden to their loved ones.

The nature of his relationship to alcoholic beverages has clearly been preying on Hitchens. Not long ago, he accused me in an email of putting about stories that he’s a drunk. I responded that given his tempestuous appearances on tv, the matter of his drinking hadn’t required my agency to become known to the American people.

In Vanity Fair, he triumphantly refers to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine that asserts that downing a glass of wine, beer or other booze daily can prevent a future heart attack.

Thus buttressed, Hitchens says that his own rigorous regime of drinking, begun at the age of 15 and continuing to his present age of 53, has enabled him to work prodigiously "while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike physique which is the envy of many of my juniors."

He offers tips on how to make drink your servant, not your master. "On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis–and all gin drinks–that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few and three is one too many… When you get the shudders, even slightly, it’s definitely time to seek help."

Let me pass lightly over the portly scribbler whom I observed a little more than a year ago experiencing some difficulty bringing a lighted match and the first cigarette of the morning into productive contact, also over the math about the gins. As far as dry martinis go, there’s been sound evidence in the past to take him as a six-breast guy.

The more troubling thing I’ve noted in recent years is Hitchens’ odd excursions from reality. I refer here not to the nonsense he quite often writes, but to what is quite simply a level of fantasy in his perceptions and recollections.

Not so long ago, I received a peremptory email from him, written late at night, demanding I rescind a vile slur made against him on the CounterPunch website (edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself).

I wrote back, pointing out that a retraction was unnecessary because no such slur had been made. After a few days, during which I assumed he’d re-read my item and realized his mistake, he sent another email, demanding a retraction once again.

An acquaintance of mine, no fan of Hitchens, remarked to me last week that he reckons the man to be a victim of early Korsakoff’s Syndrome. "What’s that?" I asked.

Back came his answer promptly: "Korsakoff’s Syndrome (from Korsakoff, a Russian neurologist) is an organic brain psychosis. A severe neurological disorder brought on by years of heavy alcohol abuse, compounded in turn, by vitamin deficiencies caused by self-neglect. It’s characterized by disorientation, a variety of neuro deficits and complaints and, most significantly, a memory loss of a unique kind which is the signal feature of the disease: sufferers tend to confabulate. That is, when asked a question they cannot answer based on memory, they just ad lib stories to fill in the gaps–often at great and garrulous length–providing detailed information the patient genuinely believes to be true but is wholly fictitious."

The exact quality of Hitchens’ memory will become highly germane sometime in the not-so-distant future. Sidney Blumenthal is scheduled to publish his memoir of the Clinton years, and he is devoting some pages to the manner in which his erstwhile buddy Hitchens tried to get him put away for lying to Congress.

At issue is precisely what Hitchens remembers Blumenthal saying over their notorious lunch at the Occidental Grill in downtown DC about Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey. Last year, Hitchens told an English interviewer that he is ready to remember even more inconvenient material from that lunch, in the event Blumenthal takes after him in the upcoming memoir. Some might call this Tactical Korsakoffism.

Alas, Korsakoff is not available for comment on Hitchens as a possible advertisement of his diagnosis. He died in 1900, at the age of 46.

Against the War? Be There!

Folks, this one is truly important. Everyone out there will count in what may be our last chance to prevent the war on Iraq. And it will be a remarkable moment, a worldwide demonstration for peace, perhaps the largest worldwide protest in history. Or at least in modern times. Another major demonstration in this country is planned for San Francisco, but the date has shifted to Feb. 16.

There are demos around the world–more than 315 cities–on all continents! There’s even a demonstration scheduled outside of the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. As for New York, the buzz is, this is going to be a major amount of people. Nobody is giving out numbers except to say it will build on the success of the Jan. 18 demonstration that the Washington Post called the largest antiwar demo since the Vietnam period. The London Daily Mirror several weeks ago forecast that there will be ten million turning out worldwide for all these protests.

The Gothamites on the streets Saturday will include plenty who watched in horror as the World Trade Center fell. Survivors and survivors’ kin are playing a prominent role. The antiwar sentiment continues to build here even as the Big Apple is a prime target for further damage. Whatever the stresses and strains within the movement about ANSWER, United for Peace and Justice is organizing this one. Leslie Cagan and other longtime hands are involved. Several hundred volunteers made a huge literature outreach last weekend. There’s lots of labor involvement, youth, war veterans.

After Sept. 11, there were pledges about ensuring better cooperation between federal authorities and the NYPD. That seems to be just what Bush and Bloomberg have had in mind. In the negotiations between the city and UFPJ, after an initial offer of a march permit (not for the route desired by UFPJ) the march offer was taken off the table altogether and now a federal judge has upheld that decision. The pressure on the NYPD may not have been so subtle. The Bush/Ashcroft operation sent federal prosecutors to the court hearing and the feds filed an amicus brief.

Another unsettling aspect is how the city has been using pens–metal enclosures–to chop up demonstrations, even relatively small ones. This tactic has made it very difficult to find friends, to feel that the assembled crowd has a collective presence. Rather, it often feels as though the police want to cage up people to demoralize and control. Here in the U.S., we are unlikely to wake up one morning to find a coup. Instead, we get the shredding of civil liberties in fits and starts, until one fine day we wake up to find it’s all gone.

The word "new"–as in "new U.S. doctrine" or "new imperial role"–has no place in any discussion of the latest Western plans for Iraq, any more than does the silly phrase "Revolution in Military Affairs." The Pentagon is leaking plans for its impending missile barrage of Baghdad and other ancient settlements in the cradle of civilization. It was once called "terror bombing," but now is dignified with the label of "a new strategy" known as "Shock and Awe."

The "strategy," so news stories excitedly disclose, was "conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days, designed as in 1991 to destroy infrastructure such as water and power supplies. The barrage will supposedly involve more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told CBS News. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The self-styled architect of Shock and Awe, Harlan Ullman of The Defense Group Inc., claims his plan will rely on precision-guided weapons. He talks of a "simultaneous effect–rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima–not taking days or weeks but minutes."

When he relayed the "shock and awe" scenario to the audience of CBS Evening News, Dan Rather said solemnly that, "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military." But the Iraqis had no reason to chafe at Rather’s patriotic discretion. They know what happened in 1991, which itself was a replication of Western bombing strategies in Iraq stretching back as far as 1920 when the Royal Air Force ventured into the "shock and awe" business in the earliest moment of Iraq’s existence as a mandate of the League of Nations after WWI.

As with Palestine and Transjordan, the newly conceived entity of Iraq, created by the imperious drafting pencils of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, was under British supervision. As the Turks were evicted, there was brave talk of an independent Iraq. But soon came the familiar vista of colonial supervisors and occupying troops from British garrisons in India. Though Iraq was, as it is today, an essay in enforced multiculturalism, a British stupidity soon wrought the near miracle of the unified revolt of 1920.

At a cost of some 8,000 Iraqi lives, the revolt was finally suppressed. But the British government reeled at the expense of rushing large numbers of troops to the scene. The bill exceeded the entire cost of financing the Arab rising against the Ottomans in WWI.

At this point, the Royal Air Force, desperately seeking rationales for independent existence, stepped forward and offered itself as a thrifty guarantor of the "security" of Iraq. Air Marshall Hugh Trenchard promised that the RAF would cheaply police the former Ottoman provinces of Mesopotamia. The RAF took over its new duties in 1922. Only four years old as an independent arm of the British military, the RAF had already formulated a prototype of "shock and awe." Here’s what Wing Commander J.A. Chamier wrote in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute in 1921, under the boastful title, "The Use of Air Power for Replacing Military Garrisons":

"To establish a tradition, therefore, which will prove effective, if only a threat of what is to follow afterwards is displayed, the Air Force must, if called upon to administer punishment, do it with all its might and in the proper manner. One objective must be selected–preferably the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected… The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle… This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt."

Citing Chamier’s prescriptions in a highly informative and witty essay on "The Myth of Air Control" in Aerospace Power Journal (winter, 2000) the military historian James Corum cites the RAF’s Notes on the Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq as proudly pointing out that "within 45 minutes a full-sized village… can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five planes which offer them no real target and no opportunity for glory or avarice."

But just as Tony Blair today faces dissent in the ranks of the British Labor Party, so, too, did dissent ascend from the same ranks three-quarters of a century ago. Displaying far more moral fiber than his remote political descendant in the Foreign Office, the repellent Jack Straw, Colonial Secretary James Thomas wrote to the high commissioner in Iraq stating flatly that reports of heavy civilian casualties in Iraq, a consequence of the RAF’s raids, "will not be easily explained or defended in Parliament by me." The RAF fine-tuned its PR about collateral damage. Henceforth there would be early warnings of "shock and awe" forays, leaving time for the villagers to run away. Then the bombs would rain down, though not, so the RAF insisted, with the aim of actually destroying the village, but merely of disrupting daily life.

Out in the field, such niceties were swiftly discarded. Corum quotes an RAF flight commander based in India’s Northwest Frontier in the 1930s as recalling the fairly constant action against tribes in that part of the empire: "If they went on being troublesome, we would warn them that we would bomb an assembly of people. An assembly was normally defined as ten people… Indeed, in my case I can remember actually finding nine people and saying ‘That’s within ten per cent and that’s good enough,’ so I blew them up."

This was before the days when oil became the prime objective of Western plunder, but time-honored methods of imperial extortion from subject peoples required the collection of taxes, and the RAF was placed in charge of Levies and Collections, bombing to extort money. Nothing has changed, the "tax" in its modern guise being recapture and control of Iraq’s oil. (Corum notes that though "the French, under their air-control doctrine, regularly bombed tribes and villages, no evidence exists that they ever bombed the natives as a means of revenue enforcement, as did the British in Iraq. This difference in air-control doctrines between the French and British may indicate deep cultural differences between the two nations. A likely explanation is that the French are culturally more tolerant of and sympathetic to tax evasion than are the British.")

Naturally enough, the RAF was at great pains to suppress in its reports and histories of campaigns in Iraq the role of the army, thus giving the entirely false impression that air power alone could maintain imperial control. But, in fact, RAF bombing accuracy in the inter-war period was mostly awful and there were all the usual unfortunate mistakes, familiar today to those following U.S. bombing mishaps in Afghanistan.

Bombing remote Kurd villages was one thing, but dropping bombs on Palestinian villages was quite another. The outbreak of the Arab revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 elicited eager suggestions from RAF commanders, such as Air Commodore Arthur Harris, commanding officer of the RAF in Palestine and later chief of Bomber Command in WWII–and hence one of the major war criminals of the twentieth century. Harris offered his recipe to halt Arab unrest: Drop "one 250-pound or 500-pound bomb in each village that speaks out of turn… The only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied." The British army saw this as folly, and certain to make a bad situation worse. Harris’ advice was rejected, and the world had to wait until later years to see Israeli bombers dropping U.S.-supplied explosives on Palestinian villages and camps.

In the years after the Second World War, the U.S. Air Force prowled eagerly through the RAF’s mendacious accounts of its prewar triumphs in Iraq. Corum reports that among these enthusiasts, Col. Raymond Sleeper, a member of the Air War College faculty, developed Project Control, an air-control doctrine to deal with the Soviet Union. In an article in Air University Review in 1983, Lt. Col. David Dean, USAF, issued a fervent but misleading testimonial of the RAF’s experience with air control. Dean saw air control as a cheap and effective way of policing the empire. The air-power theorist Carl Builder discussed British air control in an Airpower Journal article in 1995, arguing that it provided an excellent model for the kind of "constabulary missions" in support of the United Nations or "peace operations."

But as Corum concludes, "the idealized air-control system described by U.S. Air Force writers never really existed… Basically, one could barely justify air control as a doctrine 80 years ago, and people who advocate an updated version of such doctrine for current U.S. Air Force operations have misread history."

So much for "new strategies" and "revolutions in military affairs." The punitive expedition pressed by Bush and his circle remains squarely within the tradition of similar punitive expeditions launched, with aerial bombardments, nearly 80 years ago over the same terrain.

promised the chairmanship of the new Senate committee scheduled to oversee the vast Homeland Security Agency now in process of formation. So Lott will be able to continue dispensing prodigious patronage of the sort that has brightened the eroded downtown of Jackson, MS, with a vast new post office I was able to admire last spring. We may expect numberless counterterrorism facilities, command centers and kindred porkodromes to enrich the concrete pourers and building contractors of Mississippi.

As for Bill Frist, the millionaire Tennessee sawbones, everything you need to know about this unpleasing man was contained in one short paragraph of a profile of Frist by Michael Kranish in The Boston Globe Sunday magazine for Oct. 27, 2002, which discusses when Frist was in Boston, first at Harvard Medical School and then at Mass General.

"Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend’s dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. ‘It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,’ Frist wrote. ‘I was going a little crazy.’"

So now the U.S. Senate is going to be led by the cat world’s answer to Dr. Mengele! A man who can do that is capable of any infamy. Can’t you just picture this oily Tennessean cooing and clucking over the tabbies and tortoise-shells at the shelter, solemnly wagging his head as the shelter staff counseled him on proper cat procedures, then dragging the poor creatures into his lab and torturing them to death? I call on the Humane Society to demand that Frist publicly apologize for this appalling, indeed ineradicable stain on his character, and pay substantial reparations out of the vast fortune that has accrued from the Hospital Corporation of America, founded by his father and brother.

While serving as an ardent toady of business, especially the health care and pharmaceutical cartels, Frist projected a "caring" image, accepted without demur by all except his former interns at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Tennessee, where he amassed big bucks as a heart/lung transplant surgeon. "He was a complete asshole," recalled one to my brother Andrew recently. "Arrogant and unhelpful."

Frist, Andrew writes, "has subsequently let it be known that as a transplant maestro he ‘saw’ indigent patients. ‘The equivocation is telling,’ says the former intern, himself now a distinguished practitioner. ‘As far as we could see, the only indigent patients Frist saw were the ones he passed on the street on his way to operate on rich Saudis at the medical center.’"

If any further particulars are required to convict Frist, we need only say that he has been attracting the toadying attentions of Bono. Bereft of his two prime hosts in Washington, former Sen. Helms and former Treasury Secretary O’Neill, the appalling Bono has been calling on Frist and dining with Rupert Murdoch.

Squawks from The S&M Community

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom complains that I have been unfair both to the Coalition and to Jack McGeorge, the arms inspector who turned out to be a bigshot in the bondo/dom and sadomasochist "community." Among my sins: I called McGeorge "an experienced torturer." What’s wrong with that? Torture, as defined by Dan Mitrione, was the precise amount of pain, applied in the precisely required amount, to acquire the precisely required result. (Mitrione was a notorious CIA torturer, eventually captured by Uruguayan guerillas and executed.) Surely his proud description of his craft applies as a useful working definition of s&m practices, even though pleasure and not information is the objective.

Susan Wright, writing on behalf of the NCSF, noted proudly that "McGeorge is an activist and a leader in the SM-Leather-Fetish community who educates about safe, sane and consensual sexual expression for adults." His qualifications as a "leader" were proudly invoked by Jonathan Krall, a friend McGeorge dispatched as his emissary, to be interviewed by Salon. Two lines from the Salon piece: "He [Krall] says he has known McGeorge for more than 15 years through his very public participation in various S/M clubs.

"In the process, Krall believes, he’s routinely witnessed the ‘leadership qualities’ that will make McGeorge a fine arms inspector."

I think Wright was mostly pissed off by my derisive remarks about the semantic career of the word "community," in the course of which I jocularly yoked the BDSM community to the "cannibal community."

German Cannibal Goes Over the Top

The cannibal community was agog over some pretty far-out activities by two of that community’s members, one being now deceased and well-masticated. There have been abundant reports in the German and British press, but not much here, beyond a brief report on CNN.

Meet first Bernd Juergen B, who finished up on the terminal end of a consensual cannibal relationship. According to police reports, he wrote out his will and had it officially recognized by a notary on the morning of his disappearance March 9, 2001. In the will, he left most of his estate, including a penthouse apartment, to his live-in partner, a fellow named Rene.

Bernd Juergen B had told his boss at Siemens he was taking that Friday off "to attend to some personal matters." He was last seen at a subway station in Berlin. He then took a train some 300 kilometers from Berlin to an old house near Kassel. Reason for trip? Bernd Juergen B had responded to one of several adverts that read: "Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter." The advertiser meant this literally.

Armin M was also a computer technician and until recently had a job with a software firm in the Rhine Valley city of Karlsruhe, 30 kilometers south of Rotenburg. He lived with his mother in the 17th-century half-timbered manor house, staying on there after her death.

"He was a mama’s boy," a neighbor later told reporters. "He was totally fixated on his mother, who he said never let him date girls. After she died, he began to thaw out."

After some initial pleasantries the couple got down to business. Armin cut off Bernd’s penis, sauteed it and the two ate it. The proceedings were videotaped by Armin. Police who later watched the tape are, according to the press, now undergoing psychiatric counseling. "The victim appeared to be fully aware of the situation," one investigator has told the press. "Videotape material definitely shows both him and the suspect engaged in eating his own flesh prior to his death." The video also shows that the victim willingly allowed himself to be castrated before both men engaged in eating his severed flesh.

Then Armin M removed body parts for later enjoyment and buried the rest. Police found frozen human flesh and skeletal remains, and a cellar that had been renovated into a makeshift slaughterhouse, complete with trough drains and meat hooks.

The best account I’ve seen was by Roger Boyes in the London Times for Dec. 13.

Armin M, it turns out, was a former sergeant-major in the German army who later worked for the council in Mainz. In the old house the cops found 50 videos that are said to be worth thousands on the "very specialised market for cannibal acts." After snacking on the hors d’oeuvre of Bernd’s penis they set forth for the slaughtering room, where Armin M switched on the camera, then stabbed Bernd Juergen B to death. He then hung the body upside down on a meat hook, allowing the blood to drain, and later cut and wrapped the flesh for freezing. Boyes quotes the head of the Criminological Institute in Wiesbaden, Rudolf Egg, as saying "modern cannibals use[d] deep-freezing to extend and ration out their pleasure. Primitive cannibals used to eat their victims all at one go soon after killing.

"If he really derived pleasure from eating a man," he said, "then he could not possibly eat everything in a single day. And he obviously did not want to eat rotten meat. So he froze the body parts; the act of eating then took on the aspect of a ritual and could be drawn into his sexual fantasies."

German columnists have been blaming Hollywood, specifically The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. They’re also sprinkling slurs on the cannibal community at large, with the mass-circulation tabloid Bild expressing concern that cannibals could be everywhere. "They are invisible behind their glasses, their hairstyles, their families, their work, their seemingly unblemished innocence."

Boyes reports that cannibalism "hits a nerve" for a whole generation of Germans who "remember the desperate eating of human organs during the German army invasion of Russia," when the three-month siege of Stalingrad saw the starving storm troopers eating the bodies of their dead fellows, though presumably they avoided dead Russians as untermensch and therefore unfit for Aryan consumption.

And Talking of Food…

A flock of wild turkeys strutted into my front yard two days before Christmas, here in Humboldt County, displaying the same faulty sense of timing that brought their forebears to this same yard three years ago on the eve of Thanksgiving. They like to jump up and down under my holly tree, trying to get what berries have been spared by the robins. Talk about a turkey shoot! This could have been Ground Zero for Meleagris gallopavo but as I was leveling my 12-gauge I remembered I was scheduled to pick up a 24-pound turkey raised by a 4-H kid in Hydesville, which I bought at the Humboldt County fair, plus my yearly batch of two dozen pheasants from a friend in Rohnerville. How much poultry can a man have in the freezer?

Also the wild turkeys looked a bit bedraggled, as well they might, considering they’d been weathering some of the worst storms ever seen on our storm-lashed chunk of coastline below Cape Mendocino. Out of my yard strutted one, spared for the nonce. I brined the 24-pounder for 24 hours and then spit-roasted the portly bird.

"Invasion might cause
much death and destruction, and exert a destabilizing effect on the region.
It might also trigger the use of the very weapons whose removal was its ostensible
justification." Hard to decide, isn’t it? But you’re right, Kissinger
is simply incapable of reflecting on the imminence of death and destruction,
whereas Hitchens raises the matter, if only to discount it as of no great consequence.

The on-again, off-again
noises from the White House about the desirability of "a regime change"
in Iraq have become like white noise, always in the background, then intermittently
rising to oppressive levels. What’s it all really about? We can dismiss
the proclaimed reasons, starting with the "weapons of mass destruction."
I’ll buy the verdict of Scott Ritter here. Ritter, you’ll recall,
was formerly one of the most hawkish of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq.
He has stated repeatedly that Iraq is "qualitatively disarmed" and
as of December 1998 was in no position to develop biological, chemical or nuclear
weapons.

Even the rabid pro-war panel
on the first day of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on
Iraq was unable to produce any reason why Saddam would be crazy enough to try
and offer the pretext the U.S. has been yearning for. Beyond this, the United
States has systematically sabotaged arms control in Iraq and worldwide.

It was Clinton who pulled
out the arms inspectors in 1998. It was Bush who killed off the proposed enforcement
and verification mechanism for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention,
originally passed in 1972. The enforcement mechanism could have been used as
a lever to prize open Iraq for arms inspections. In April 2002, the United States
removed Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons, from office. George Monbiot of the Guardian has written that
it was because of Bustani’s efforts to include Iraq in the chemical weapons
convention, thereby opening it to weapons inspections.

Other rationales for attacking
Iraq have come and gone. A few months ago, former CIA director Woolsey, buttressed
by the writer Laurie Mylroie, were pressing Iraq’s implication in 9/11.
Few now raise that excuse, though it does remind us that the nation that was
host to most of the 9/11 perpetrators is Saudi Arabia.

This offers us the necessary
pointer. Remember, where the Middle East is concerned, everything revolves around
oil. The conspiracy-mongers mumbling about the natural gas pipeline scheduled
to run through Afghanistan and about the Kazakh oilfields are looking at the
wrong page in the Atlas. In Afghanistan it’s not "all about oil."
When it comes to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, it is.

Figure it. In the wake of
9/11 it becomes clear that Saudis, starting with Osama bin Laden, were at the
heart of the attack, with some members of the ruling family probably involved
or at least tacitly approving. Furthermore, America’s local supervisors,
the Saud dynasty, face increasing discontent. The Bush administration is led
and advised by people trained by origin and business proclivity to see everything
in terms of the availability and price of oil. Now Saudi Arabia is the world’s
"swing producer," meaning it controls the world price by either restricting
or expanding supply. Would it not be rational in the wake of 9/11 to seek urgently
other "swing producer" options, and to see such an option in the form
of Iraq? Iraq nationalized its own huge reserves back in 1972, taking control
over sale and pricing. Either upon his own initiative, or conned by the United
States, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, thus setting Iraq on the path
to utter ruin, and permitting the U.S., via sanctions, to control once more
Iraq’s oil exports, drastically restricting its supply.

So the U.S. game plan could
be to continue with the present "strategy of tension," or to gradually
ratchet up the level of military harassment, without all the trumpet blares
that accompanied the formal onslaught of 1991. More bombing raids, more attacks
from the Kurdish protected areas, more thundering about weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam can be counted on to play his own weak hand badly. Last week, for example,
he chose to divulge his apparent agreement for new weapons inspectors to a British
labor MP, George Galloway, who reported as much in a newspaper column. Result:
the concession, if such it was, made about as much noise as a crumpet falling
on a carpet.

It probably would not take
much in the way of armed intervention for Saddam to be overthrown in an internal
revolt. Then the U.S. could substitute a suitably brutal successor and have
Iraq ready as the swing producer, and Iran as the next target of opportunity.

Bringing the
Wars Home

"President George Bush’s
‘war on terror’ reached the desert village of Hajibirgit at midnight
on 22 May." Thus began a chilling story by Robert Fisk of the British Independent.

The essentials are that
U.S. Special Forces raided the village of Hajibirgit and shot dead the 85-year-old
village leader. Villagers were then accused of being members of the Taliban
or Al-Qaeda, flown to an interrogation center in Kandahar (home of the 101st
Airborne). One later told Fisk that "the villagers were, by their own accounts,
herded together into a container. Their legs were tied and then their handcuffs
and the manacle of one leg of each prisoner were separately attached to stakes
driven into the floor of the container. Thick sacks were put over their heads.
Abdul Satar was among the first to be taken from this hot little prison. ‘Two
Americans walked in and tore my clothes off,’ he said. ‘If the clothes
would not tear, they cut them off with scissors. They took me out naked to have
my beard shaved and to have my photograph taken…’"

Eventually the villagers
were taken to the stadium that the Taliban had used for executions, and ultimately
released.

According to Fisk, "The
Pentagon initially said that it found it ‘difficult to believe’ that
the village women had their hands tied. But given identical descriptions of
the treatment of Afghan women after the US bombing of the Uruzgan wedding party,
which followed the Hajibirgit raid, it seems that the Americans–or their
Afghan allies–did just that."

The villagers returned to
find their village looted by a group of Afghans led by Abdul Rahman Khan–"once
a brutal and rapacious ‘mujahid’ fighter against the Russians, and
now a Karzai government police commander who had raided the village once the
Americans had taken away so many of the men. Ninety-five of the 105 families
had fled into the hills, leaving their mud homes to be pillaged."

Now here’s a story,
replete with specifics about another appalling episode like the slaughter of
the Afghan wedding party. A check shows that thus far not a single word of the
destruction of Hajibirgit had appeared in any mainstream U.S. news medium.

But the war is coming home,
the way wars always do, in the form of drugs and psychosis. Witness the murders
of four Fort Bragg soldiers’ wives in the space of six weeks. Fort Bragg
is the home of the Special Forces Command. Three of the four soldiers had recently
returned from Afghanistan, where they served with Special Forces units.

"He was like my own
child," said Wilma Watson, describing her son-in-law Master Sergeant Wright.
"Until he came back from Afghanistan, I didn’t worry about violence."
Wright killed her daughter. "He was getting these attacks of rage."
One line of defense, discussed in an interesting piece published Sunday in Newsday
by UPI reporters Mark Benjamin and Dan Olmsted, is that at least two of the
soldiers had been taking Lariam, aka mefloquine, in Afghanistan. As the reporters
wrote: "Lariam has been blamed for psychotic episodes and suicidal behavior
for more than a decade. The official product information sheet, written by manufacturer
Hoffmann-La Roche and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, states
Lariam has been associated with aggression, paranoia and suicidal thoughts."

It is the Army’s drug
of choice to prevent malaria.

There’s nothing to
equal the military as the incubator of violence. The villagers of Hajibirgit
paid the price. The four murdered women in Fort Bragg paid another installment,
and the payments in terms of rage, drunkenness, drug addiction and antisocial
behavior will be exacted month after month for years to come, amid the resolute
determination of the press not to connect up the dots.

Violence Genes

The search for the "violence
gene" is always with us. Last week it surfaced once again, when The
Economist proclaimed that "the first study has just been published
showing how a particular gene and a particular environment interact to produce
violent individuals." The Economist cited the publication of "a
clear-cut case–a paper showing that the degree of expression of a gene
implicated in the development of aggression does indeed interact with a person’s
early circumstances to shape a violent or a pacific personality.

"Terrie Moffitt, of
the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, and her colleagues,
picked MAOA, the gene for a protein called monoamine oxidase-A, for their study,
which has just been published in Science. Monoamine oxidase-A is an enzyme
that breaks down members of an important group of neurotransmitters, the molecules
that carry signals between nerve cells. These neurotransmitters include dopamine,
serotonin and norepinephrine, all of which help to regulate a person’s
mood.

"There is abundant
evidence," The Economist continued excitedly, "that a reduced
level of monoamine oxidase-A (and therefore an elevated level of these neurotransmitters)
results in violent behavior. There is also evidence that chronically low levels
early in life result in an individual who is more than averagely predisposed
to react violently to any given situation in adulthood, regardless of monoamine-oxidase
levels at the time."

You take your pick: the
elusive "violence gene" or a militarized culture that sees unending
war, with racism and cruelty associated with that activity. Was it a "violence
gene" that drove McVeigh on, or an anti-malarial medication, or what he
experienced in his military training and in the war in Iraq?

But if the
big banks had stood to lose out bigtime then it would have been a different
story. The Senate hearings last week confirmed that the banks knew that there
were big problems with both Enron and WorldCom–in fact they helped devise
the "prepays" (loans disguised as trades) and other devices that concealed
how highly leveraged the companies were. See "Banks ‘helped Enron
disguise debt,’" Financial Times, 7/23. The next day’s
FT quoted an internal e-mail exchange at Chase: One wrote simply "Dollars
5 bn in prepays!!!!!!!!" while the other replied, "Shut up and delete
this e-mail." (FT, 7/24; an exchange later described as "misstatements
by young bankers.")

These issues
won’t go away because the big pension funds are taking the banks to court.
CalPERS and CalSTRS (representing teachers) and Lacera (Los Angeles County Employees
Retirement Association) have taken action against the large banks, including
Citibank and Chase, that underwrote WorldCom bonds even though they knew the
dreadful state of their finances.

Angelina
and The Times

My plan
is to take a few kicks at The New York Times, having caught sight of
a front-page headline in last Sunday’s national edition that imparted the
startling news that "IRS Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid Taxes" over
a report by David Cay Johnston.

Some NYT
editor must have concluded that this headline was too urgently subversive. By
the final edition the hed had been cautiously modified to "Death Still
Certain, But Taxes May Be Subject to a Loophole."

But first
a word or two about Angelina Jolie. I told her right from the start that Billy
Bob was a dirtbag who would play her false, and a dirtbag is what he turns out
to be. She sends him off to therapy, in a last-ditch effort to save their union,
and he seduces the therapist. So say the tabs, and who are we to gainsay them?
Into the trashcan go the vials of blood, along with the implement with which
they mutilated themselves, the better to express their passion.

I say: Angelina,
you’re well shot of him.

Back to
the Times. I finally got around to reading Ken Auletta’s New
Yorker profile of the NYT’s executive editor, Howell Raines.
All 17,000 words of it, printed in the June issue, not one phrase of which escaped
the amiable blandness that is Auletta’s trademark. How sad to think that
The New Yorker, which once featured Liebling and Woollcott,
is now content with Auletta’s humdrum flatteries of the Fourth Estate.

Outside
the Sulzberger empire, who really cares about Raines? Not me, though I do remember
him for all those silly editorial sermons about Bill Clinton’s sex life.

The pertinent
question is whether the Times is a good newspaper, and the answer there
is, all too often it isn’t. Part of the reason the prose of Paul Krugman
and Frank Rich seems so lively is that they shine amid darkness. The news pages
are clogged with prose that is either pedestrian or arch, the latter being the
besetting vice of journalists trying to turn in quality writing. And even the
editorial pages are dimmer than they were when Gail Collins was writing during
Election 2000. Collins was a delight, and so they moved her onto the editorial
board, and now she’s writing much less. My own suspicion is that someone
figured out that Collins was showing up Maureen Dowd as the commentator equivalent
of Bud Light, and shielded Dowd from further embarrassment by shutting down
Collins, via editorial promotion, a familiar stratagem.

The Times
spent so many years through the 1990s printing stupid stories about the triumph
of neoliberalism and of the free market that even if its foreign and economic
correspondents had suspicions that all might be well, they prudently suppressed
their doubts. So the Times missed what was actually happening in the
former Soviet Union, or in Argentina, Brazil and the other kleptocracies of
Latin America. The only reason more isn’t made of the stupidity of the
Times’ editorial pages is that The Wall Street Journal’s
opinion pages are so violently demented that almost any other editorial voice
sounds sane by comparison.

But by and
large our opinion-writing classes are even stupider than they were 20 years
ago. Take The New York Times’ initial reaction to the attempted
coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. If there was ever a coup urgently
and publicly demanded by Washington, this was it. Chavez was up there on the
Wanted List, just under Saddam. When the attempt on Chavez finally came in mid-April,
the Times swiftly editorialized that Chavez’s "resignation"
meant that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be
dictator." Eschewing the word "coup," the Times explained
that Chavez "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power
to a respected business leader." The editorial called Chavez "a ruinous
demagogue," and proclaimed that "Venezuela urgently needs a leader
with a strong democratic mandate," subsequently undercutting the majesty
of this statement by having conceded that Chavez himself actually had a democratic
mandate, having been "elected president in 1998."

Three days
later, Chavez was back in power and the Times ran a second editorial
half-apologizing for its earlier triumphalism. "In his three years in office,
Mr. Chavez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure
last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared,
overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating
a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never
something to cheer." Which of course is exactly what the Times had
initially done, without raising any unpleasant questions as to what role the
CIA had in the attempted coup.

The Middle
East? The tilt to Israel is noticeable to a powerful extent with straight news
coverage, even more obvious with analysis, and blatant with editorial and op-ed
coverage. We’re treated to frequent features on the personal and psychological
impact of suicide bombings on Israelis, but seldom see stories about the impact
on Palestinians of the occupation and all its aspects–the civilian deaths,
the roadblocks, the land confiscation, the curfews, the depredations by settlers,
the shootings by soldiers, the destruction of olive groves, etc., etc. Imbalance
in news coverage is chiefly a matter of omission rather than commission, and
since the beginning of the intifada almost two years ago, the Times has
only rarely given casualty totals for Palestinians and Israelis–one suspects
because Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths by about three to one, which
makes it difficult to portray Israel as the party under siege. (In contrast,
The Washington Post did report casualty figures with some regularity
until Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank in April.)

Most Times
editorialists have not yet seen fit to comment on the July 22 Israeli missile
attack on Gaza, although they generally do run editorials decrying large Palestinian
terrorist attacks. The Times also seldom uses the word "occupation"
to describe Israel’s 35-year-old rule over the West Bank and Gaza, seldom
describes East Jerusalem as occupied territory, seldom informs readers that
the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem are settlers who reside not
in "neighborhoods" or in "suburbs" of Jerusalem but in settlements
built on land confiscated from Palestinians, seldom reports on the steady expansion
of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank and seldom indicates that the
intifada is an uprising against Israel’s occupation. As Kathleen Christison,
a former CIA analyst who’s written a couple of fine books on the Palestinian
questions, puts it to me, "One gets the impression that few if any Times
correspondents understand what drives the intifada or accept that there is any
legitimacy to Palestinian resistance to the occupation."

The Times
demonstrated its partisan approach most noticeably in July 2001 in its commentary
on a major one-year-later retrospective on the Camp David summit published by
Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag. Christison points out that "In a
striking–and, one must assume, deliberate–effort to maintain its own
blame-Arafat position on Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag
story undermined Sontag by contradicting her principal conclusion."

Having done
extensive interviews with Israeli, Palestinian and American participants in
the summit and in-depth analysis of what went wrong, Sontag concluded that Arafat
was not solely to blame for the summit’s collapse and that all three parties
were responsible for mistakes made over the entire seven years of the peace
process. A "potent, simplistic narrative has taken hold" in Israel
and the U.S., Sontag wrote. "It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the
moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then ‘pushed
the button’ and chose the path of violence." But officials to whom
she spoke had concluded that the dynamic was actually far more complex than
this, that Arafat did not bear sole or even a disproportionate share of the
responsibility. In fact, Sontag concluded, Barak did not offer Arafat the moon
at Camp David but rather proposed a solution that might have been generous and
even politically courageous in Israeli terms, but that would not have given
the Palestinians what they regarded as a viable state.

Rather than
accept Sontag’s considered assessment of where responsibility lay, a Times
editorial two days later took care to praise Barak and blame Arafat. Barak had
come to Camp David, the editorial proclaimed, "with a daring offer, a peace
plan that essentially vaulted over the interim steps outlined under the Oslo
accords… Mr. Barak gambled that Mr. Arafat would accept his approach."
But, the editorial went on, Arafat was not up to the task and stirred up "the
violent uprising" that erupted two months later.

Of course
the worst offender was Thomas Friedman, who in repeated columns over two years
heaped blame on Arafat and the Palestinians and seriously distorted what Israel
offered at Camp David (repeating the fiction that Barak offered "94% of
the West Bank [and] half of Jerusalem," never mentioning that the resulting
so-called "state" would have been broken up into several noncontiguous
parts).

For which,
among other sins of commission and omission too numerous for individual citation,
Friedman was given his third Pulitzer, possibly the most ludicrous decision
in the long and infamous lifespan of the Pulitzer industry. Why did the Pulitzer
board, overruling the various juries on at least two instances, decide to heap
seven prizes on the Times last April? I thought Les Payne (himself victim
of the Pultitzer board when it overruled a jury’s decision to honor him
for foreign reporting) put it well in Newsday: "The tilt toward
the Times, I suspect, issues, at bottom, from the all-too-American notion
of rallying around the flagpole… [T]he Pulitzer board might give the nod
to a ‘second-tier’ paper during peacetime… Once the balloon goes
up, however, it’s back to the flagpole, and the closest thing the newspaper
industry has to a flagpole is The New York Times. The move to The
Times is so much easier, given its visibility and clout and number of sheep-dipped
Timesmen the paper has spread over the industry and in academia."

So the function
of those seven awards was to tell the world, See, we really do have a good newspaper.
It must be good if it wins seven Pulitzer prizes.

Trouble
is, just like I said at the start, the Times really isn’t that good,
if you want to find out what’s going on.

The right
is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew complain on the popular NewsMax site
that in the two weeks since the Harken story went critical, "the prestige
press" (Limbacher’s odd phrase, which presumably means he’s excluding
The National Enquirer) has given the affair 50 times more coverage than
it gave the Whitewater deal after The New York Times broke that story
on March 8, 1992. Limbacher moans that Whitewater showed up only 14 times in
the wake of the Times story, while from June 28 to July 12 of this year
there have been more than 700 stories on the Harken sale.

C’mon,
Carl. The reason Whitewater got off to a slow start was because for months no
one could figure out what The New York Times’ Jeff Gerth was writing
about.

Reading
any Gerth story is like bicycling through wet sand, but in the case of Whitewater
he surpassed himself. As readers sank up to their armpits in the sludge of Gerth-prose,
interest in Whitewater for that electoral year flickered and died. Gerth saved
Clinton’s ass. Ultimately Whitewater did make it into the headlines, but
in truth it always lacked sex appeal. There just wasn’t that much meat
in the stew. Not like Hillary’s commodity trades.

Just like
those trades, Harken is really easy to understand. Guy (the President) makes
a bundle selling stock in his company, which is going belly up, acting on insider
knowledge of the books, and also culled because his dad was in the Oval Office.
Guy forgets to tell the SEC. Same way with Cheney. No need to put in those daunting
phrases like "complex transactions." The simple numbers have serious
panache.

Here’s
one precis of the situation that’s gone the rounds: "Cheney’s
2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635. Increase in government contracts
while Cheney led Halliburton: 91%. Minimum size of ‘accounting irregularity’
that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000. Number of the seven official
US ‘State Sponsors of Terror’ that Halliburton contracted with: 2
out of 7. Pages of energy plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional
investigators: 13,500. Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential
campaign: $1,800,000."

But if anyone
can save Bush and Cheney it will be Gerth. Last week he and another Times
scrivener called Richard Stevenson managed the truly amazing feat of making
the Harken story complicated and boring. Here was the first paragraph:

"President
Bush received two low-interest loans to buy stock from an oil company where
he served as a board member in the late 1980’s. He then benefited from
the company’s relaxation of the terms of one loan in 1989 as he was engaged
in the most important business deal of his career." Only 52 words and already
the air is whistling out of the tire. On and on the story trundled, until it
approached the famous SEC non-probe. You’ll recall from the 700-plus stories
lamented by Limbacher that W’s prolonged failure to report to the SEC the
sale that netted him $840,000 was viewed with indulgence by that agency, whose
boss had been appointed by President G.H.W. Bush, and whose counsel had worked
for W. It’s hard to bore people with material like that, as Paul Krugman
is discovering each week. Here’s how Gerth and Stevenson approached this
bit of the saga:

"The
June 1990 Harken stock sale led to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange
Commission–during his father’s administration–of whether Mr.
Bush had knowingly sold the stock in advance of worse-than-expected financial
results that temporarily drove down Harken’s share price.

"The
S.E.C. took no action against Mr. Bush."

Now mind
you, Harken is not a new story. Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity
dealt with it long ago in his book The Buying of the President 2000.
Even back then Lewis speculated that the mystery institutional buyer of Bush’s
stock might have been Harvard Management–the overseer of the school’s
multibillion-dollar endowment. Lewis wrote, "A month after Bush came on
board, Harvard Management agreed to invest at least $20 million in Harken. It
would come to own some ten million shares of Harken stock, making it one of
the company’s largest investors. The Bush name may have helped seal the
deal… Harvard’s Harken investments in oil and gas would eventually
generate nearly $200 million in losses for the endowment." In other words,
Harvard Management lost staggering amounts in a bum investment that saved the
ass of the president’s son.

The broker
involved, Ralph Smith of Sutro & Company, has refused to name the buyer
of the Bush shares, though he has said it was an institutional investor. Lewis
reported that "at the bottom of a spreadsheet Smith used to record his
calls to Bush was the name of Michael Eisenson, along with the telephone number
of Harvard Management."

None of
this alluring stuff holds appeal for Gerth and his colleague, who simply wrote,
"In the case of the sale of his Harken stock, Mr. Bush benefited from the
action of an investor who remains unknown even today." A few days later
Gerth and Don van Natta Jr. were at it again, this time paralyzing Times
readers with a narcotic narrative about Halliburton. The lead was promising:

"The
Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an
array of accounting and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the
United States efforts to combat terrorism.

"From
building cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops
in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton
called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root."

Reading
the story was a bit like walking around some familiar room in the dark, tripping
over and then gradually recognizing bits of furniture. Through the choking fog
of Gerth-prose one could dimly descry the familiar landscape of Pentagon corruption,
with cost-plus bids, noncompetitive contract awards, manic overbilling and so
forth. Sen. Charles Grassley’s staff will be only too glad to send you
several thousand pages of testimony on such endemic corruption and fraud, a
goodly part of which stemmed from Al Gore’s efforts to reinvent government
by having recourse to the discipline and efficiency (heh heh) of the private
sector.

Another
reason for the sense of familiarity was that the essentials of the story were
told in an exciting and accessible way several months ago by Jordan Green of
the Institute for Southern Studies, published in Facing South, the institute’s
Internet newsletter, with a shorter version in Southern Exposure magazine.
Contrast Gerth-tedium with Green’s pioneering and far richer treatment,
under the title "Halliburton:To the Victors Go the Markets."

"Last
December, the US Department of Defense made a no-cap, cost-plus-award contract
to Halliburton KBR’s Government Operations division. The Dallas-based company
is contracted to build forward operating bases to support troop deployments
for the next nine years wherever the President chooses to take the anti-terrorism
war… The Pentagon posts all contract announcements exceeding $5 million
on its Website, but in Halliburton’s case neglects to disclose the estimated
value of the award… Though the Pentagon may be wary of admitting its favor
towards Halliburton, the British Ministry of Defence shows no such reticence.
In the third week of December 2001, the Defence Ministry awarded Halliburton’s
subsidiary Brown & Root Services $418 million to supply large tank transporters,
capable of carrying tanks to the front lines at speeds of up to 50 miles per
hour… Because of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invaluable service of persuading
Britain’s reluctant public to go along with the American campaign and in
providing British peacekeepers to secure Afghanistan, America’s junior
partner has been rewarded with a boost to its manufacturing base.

"But
the major rewards are reserved for the Texas oil oligarchy.

"Halliburton
Company has close connections with the Bush family. Aside from Cheney there
is Lawrence Eagleburger, a Halliburton director and former deputy secretary
of defense under Bush Sr. during the Gulf War. In its earlier incarnation as
Brown & Root Services, the company sponsored Texan and future president
Lyndon B. Johnson’s stolen election to the US Senate in 1948, building
the state’s spectacular political-industrial muscle."

That’s
how to write a story. But then both Green and the executive director of the
Institute, Chris Kromm, are former interns of mine. (But surely, you’ll
be asking, Gerth and his associate reminded Times readers of the colorful
saga of Brown & Root. No they didn’t.)

Even the
Gerth treatment may not save Cheney, who’s gone to ground again, just as
he did after 9/11, though this time the enemy will take the form of a subpoena-server
rather than the shock troops of Al Qaeda. What then? How can Bush freshen up
the White House’s battered image and his own terrible performance? Each
time he opens his mouth the markets take a dive and the dollar slumps against
the Euro. I thank Almighty God on a daily basis that my daughter elected to
get married in Geneva last year, when my dollars were able confront the bill
for the wedding feast in relatively good heart, with a side trip to Paris thrown
in.

When Cheney
totters into that good night, may we not expect to hear the call for a hero
of NYC’s darkest hour, the former mayor, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, a man whose
marital upheavals have now been settled with a handsome payoff to the injured
wife and the charges of abominable cruelties sealed forever?

Vice President
Giuliani. How does that sound? I’ll tell you how it sounds to me. Terrifying.