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Today is the 3rd anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo for business as a gulag. I just looked it up: the traditional third anniversary gift is leather. Oh dear.
Mahmoud Abbas has won the legitimacy that only comes, the world media imply, from an invitation to the White House. I mean sod the elections, if Chimpy invites you to break bread (now that I think of it, I’m not sure if a meal was actually mentioned; maybe better to nosh a little first), then you have been well and truly anointed.
Shrub added that he envisioned “a day when he and president-elect Abbas and Israel’s leaders could stand together and say, ‘We have peace.’” Hey, you can always say it. You say stuff all the time.
The lawyer of Abu Ghraib torturer Specialist Charles Graner asks the important question: “Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?”
Also, that leash thing, “A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,” and hell, parents have their kids on tethers at the mall. Why, “In Texas we’d lasso them and drag them out of there.” Yee hah.
So in the same package of rule changes that gutted ethics inquiries was a provision that in event of “catastrophic circumstances,” a quorum is no longer needed in the House of Reps, just whoever shows up. No, I can see no way in which that could go wrong.
There’s a good essay by Gary Younge in the Guardian on how the Right’s backlash continues, even while the Left increasingly lashes in the first place. The national debate is thus conducted entirely within terms framed by the Right. Younge blames Clinton, which is too easy, for turning the occasional necessary capitulation by the left from a matter of pragmatism into a dogma, “triangulation.” Younge:
“The absence of the lash simply changed the nature of the backlash. It is no longer an act of political retribution: the right has turned it into an art form.
“First it finds an enemy - preferably a weak minority - gays, unmarried mothers, Muslims, the irreligious, international law or small countries that break international law, asylum seekers, Gypsies etc. In the inconvenient instance that a real enemy, no matter how exaggerated, cannot be found, it constructs one: the "liberal establishment", the "armies of political correctness", the "liberal media" or "feminazis". Then, with the enemy, real or invented, in place, it simply creates and inflates the crisis to suit, and bingo - the bespoke backlash. No lash required. Add venom and mix recklessly.”
So despite its promises not to interfere with the Palestinian elections, Israel interfered with the Palestinian elections. Quel surprise. They turned away voters in East Jerusalem (most East Jerusalahoovians weren’t going to be allowed to vote inside the city anyway, but make their way through checkpoints to the West Bank). Combine that with inadequate voter registration, harassment of candidates (Israel had the nerve to say that Barghouti was courting arrest as a publicity stunt--he was arrested Friday for trying to pray at a Jerusalem mosque without a license!), and voting under military occupation. All the reasons I’ve cited as making Iraqi elections illegitimate apply to Palestine. The infrastructure for free and fair elections simply does not exist. (Although that said, the Palestinians have a thriving political culture, unlike the Iraqis.) Israel has put its thumb on the scale in favor of Mahmoud Abbas, who they think is enough of a ruthless thug to deal with the other ruthless thugs. They’re even willing to ignore the little matter of Holocaust denial, just this once.
North Korea launches a campaign against long hair on men: “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.” Evidently long hair hinders intellectual development by diverting nutrition from the brain to hair growth. Clean shoes are also important.
The US bombed the wrong house, near Mosul, killing 14 people (the US says 5 without saying how they would know that), but issued the semi-apology that it “deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives.” Or maybe it possibly regrets the loss of deeply innocent lives. I’ve deleted the rest of what I wrote about that crack, because UnFairWitness had the exact same thoughts and posted them first:
Like maybe they killed 14 people in a house they weren’t even supposed to be targeting and just got lucky? Or maybe there are so many bad guys in Iraq that you can randomly bomb a house and get a few?
The insertion of that adverb shows the presumption of guilt Americans apply to all Iraqis.
A Romanian woman with two wombs got pregnant in each simultaneously. She had the first baby a month ago, prematurely, and will have the second in 5 weeks.
Don’t know about the American price of either, but the Observer claims that in Britain, cocaine is now cheaper than a cappuccino.
Responding to complaints from animal rights activists, McDonald’s in Britain is considering killing its chickens more humanely, by sending them to the gas chamber. PETA approves of this.
Belarus’s dictator, and king of the combover, Aleksander Lukashenko insists that unlike Georgia or Ukraine, there will be no people’s revolution in Belarus, whether “rose, orange or banana.”
Long live the Banana Revolution!
Bush: “The positive and incredibly amazing development, when you take a step back and look at history, is that Iraqi citizens will actually be allowed to vote.” Allowed. By an army of occupation. Bush says democracy in Iraq is “hard”--there’s that word again--because “there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.” A handful if you know someone with 200,000 fingers. He accused this handful of having “this dim vision of the world that says, if you do not agree with us, then you’re of no count.” Pot. Kettle. Black.
Remember two months ago when Shrub said that Iraqis would be eager to vote when they “realize that there’s a chance to vote on a president,” except of course that it’s not a presidential election? Well, he still doesn’t know what the elections are actually for: today he said, “Once the elections take place, we look forward to working with the newly constituted government to help train Iraqis as fast as possible so they can defend themselves.” The elections are for an assembly to write a constitution, not to constitute a government.
Naturally, the most important moments in the Gonzales hearings occurred after I posted my last. They fall into two categories: 1) the I-don’t-remember moments, when he was repeatedly asked about various details of the torture memo he was busily distancing himself from, but which he helped write. Specific methods of torture were discussed in meetings he was in, but he has no recollection of this. In other words, he claims that he was in a meeting in which whether mock executions are ok was discussed, but can’t remember the meeting, or what he might have said. I’d say that sort of disinterest, or forgetfulness, or treatment of torture as an issue so routine as to be forgettable, disqualifies someone from the attorney generalship. 2) He was repeatedly asked if a president may authorize people to break the law, specifically the Torture Act, and he repeatedly refused to answer, saying it was hypothetical, which is not a valid reason why he can’t answer it (this is well discussed in Slate). Incidentally, when they replaced the memo last week, I couldn’t understood how it was supposed to help Gonzales in the hearings, but now I realize that “that’s so last week” is actually considered a valid reason not to discuss something.
Working on his Bushite smirk, but not quite there yet.
The Iraqi interim puppet government has extended the state of emergency, with enhanced police powers including warrant-less arrests, and curfews, in order to allow “the peaceful participation of Iraqis in the political process.” On that day, the entire country will be locked down, with travel bans and curfews. Freedom, ain’t it grand?
Favorite correction from the newspaper of record:
An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.
“The best ten” British websites, including The Ugliest Cars in Britain;
a site of pictures of “derelict London,” including galleries of pubs, buildings, graffiti, toilets, World War II bunkers, etc., and another for pictures of cafes serving bad English food.
The Gonzales confirmation hearings are ongoing as I write.
Gonzales says, “Torture and abuse will not be tolerated by this administration.” Tolerated? He’s still pushing the “a few bad apples” theory, and we’re way past that. “This administration” ordered torture, wrote memos justifying torture, and dotted every i in those memos with little smiley faces.
G. refuses to say whether the torture at Abu Ghraib was criminal, because there might be court proceedings. Oh please, Ashcroft did a little victory dance in public every time a shoe bomber or Al Qaeda gofer was arrested.
“We are nothing like our enemy; we are not beheading people.” Phew.
To apply the Geneva Conventions to Al Qaida “would really be a dishonor to the Geneva Conventions. ... It would honor and reward bad conduct.” The Geneva Conventions are about the laws of war: war is not “good conduct.”
I wish the D’s would stop praising Gonzales’s “rags-to-riches” story. Patrick Leahy: “The road you traveled... is a tribute to you and your family.” That road was paved over dead bodies in Texas and broken ones in Guantanamo; the toll on that road was too damned high.
Gonzales refuses to answer questions on torture, since all such questions are hypothetical, because “the president has said we’re not going to engage in torture.” There’s something faulty in that logic somewhere, but I just can’t put my finger on it....
The distinction he keeps making between his role as White House counsel and that of the attorney general seems to be an acknowledgment that in the former role he always told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear.
(Update: More on the hearings in my next post, above.)
Howard Zinn on the Daily Show tonight.
The WaPo article on the participation by military doctors in torture sessions in Guantanamo buries the money quote, from deputy assistant secretary of defense David Tornberg, that such doctors are acting as combatants and therefore are not obligated by the Hippocratic oath, and that there is no doctor-patient relationship. (The Post also neglects to say that Tornberg is himself a doctor.) Even if doctors could ever be absolved of their ethical obligations by virtue of being “combatants,” Guantanamo was not a combat zone. See the New England Journal of Medicine article.
And the LA Times, in an article rightly pointing out that only a fraction of the money pledged by nations after a disaster is actual delivered, fails to ask the obvious question: what’s the US record?
Some (but not enough) Democrats in the Senate are showing some interest in turning the Gonzales hearings and vote into a referendum on torture. I say not enough D’s not only because I’d like to see Gonzales sunk but also because I’d be genuinely interested in knowing what the result of an up-or-down vote on torture in the United States Senate would actually be.
Bush picks one of those failed judicial appointees, Claude Allen, to be his domestic policy adviser. Allen (whose record I discussed here) admitted during his confirmation hearings having used the word “queers” but said he didn’t mean it in a bad way.
Evidently for several decades in Israel, Shin Bet could veto the hiring of any Palestinian teacher, a fact Ha’aretz describes as a “well-known secret.” They’ve just abolished that.
Scientists scanning the brains of shepherds in the Canary Islands find that Silbo, a system of communicating via whistling they have used for centuries, utilizes the same parts of the brain as spoken Spanish. In other words, it’s a language, albeit a limited one. (Nature article.)
And here are a bunch of doctors (you can tell by the fact that they’re all wearing white lab coats) preparing to scan the brain of a test monkey to see if it utilizes any part of its brain when giving a speech on medical liability reform:
One thing missing from a speech dealing with malpractice law: any mention of actual victims of medical malpractice. Thus Shrub says that “lawyers”--not patients, not survivors--“are filing baseless suits against hospitals and doctors” (he also blamed juries at one point). Lots of stories about doctors whose premiums are rising, pregnant women losing their OBGYNs, but no mention of victims of botched diagnoses, etc, and certainly nothing about how you can scale down the punishment for incompetence and laziness on the part of doctors without creating a rise in incompetence and laziness on the part of doctors. By the way, most of the rise in malpractice insurance premiums is due to the tanking of their investments in the stock market during the economic downturn, not rising jury awards.
The group that claims responsibility for killing the governor of the Baghdad region issued a statement: “We tell every traitor and everyone who is loyal to the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate.” See, I knew having the Iraqis we appoint to office swear loyalty to the Jews and Christians was a bad idea.
Afterwards, “Comical” Allawi called up Bush in order not to talk about postponing the elections. Actually, the US says there was “no substantive conversation” about postponement, which is the sort of denial that raises more questions than it answers.
The assassinated governor was thought to have been running in the elections, but one of the great advantages of the electoral system we imposed on Iraq is that candidates don’t actually have to announce their candidacies, for example if they want to stay alive.
SOME CHEEK! Col. Gary Cheek, in charge of US forces in eastern Afghanistan, says he has given orders for fewer prisoners to be taken, because prisoners bitch about being tortured, and just killing them is so much easier. OK, fine, he didn’t say the last part, but what on earth else is he supposed to have meant? Here’s the full quote, judge for yourself: “We are always adapting to the changes in the environment, and our commanders, our soldiers, are also trying to be more sensitive to the Afghan culture. I’ve told our commanders, for example, to minimize the number of Afghan nationals or others that they detain.” I’m not sure if killing captured Afghans is really more sensitive to their culture than torturing them.
That put me in a nostalgic mood. Here’s something I clipped from one of the British papers for November 2, 1996:
IN THE School of Islamic Thought that has shaped the ideology of the Taliban, there is an active debate on the appropriate punishment for homosexuals.
Mullah Mohammed Hassan, Governor of Kandahar, the fundamentalist movement’s home province, explained the dilemma: "There are two kinds of strong punishment. There are those who say homosexuals should be thrown to their death from a high fort, and those who favour putting them in a pit and pushing a wall on top of them.”
Back to the 1st story, in which Col. Cheek claimed that a prisoner who died in September was not beaten to death as his family claims, but died of a snake bite. Cheeky says the dead guy complained of having been bit, but no bite mark was found, no autopsy performed, and the guy certainly can’t confirm or deny that story, now can he?
Whenever Bush has talked about disaster relief, he talks about American generosity and compassion and “the good heart of the American people,” and I get a little more creeped out each time he does it, without being sure why. At first I thought it was because it’s unseemly and contrary to a generosity of spirit to be constantly harping on your own generosity, but now I think it’s because he’s making it all about us, not about the victims. A true Christian, like he claims to be, would have felt that it was a duty to relieve suffering, but nothing he’s said indicates that the suffering of others imposes any obligation on the rest of us.
Oh: when, in my last post, I referred to Bush the Elder’s “Message: I care” line, I hadn’t seen him on CNN, denying that he and Billy Bob were called in for damage control after Shrub’s lackadaisical first response: “That’s not what this is about. It’s about saving lives. It’s about caring, and the president cares.”
George Monbiot makes the obvious point that the US spends much more on killing foreigners than it does helping them after natural disaster, but adds a less obvious one: “For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.”
Which helped me realize what was bothering me about this picture on the White House website today, of Shrub roping in his father (“message: I care”) and Bill Clinton (“aren’t you the guys who made snide comments about feeling people’s pain just last week?”) to help him recover after his first fumbling reactions to the tsunami: a big-ass painting of Teddy Roosevelt, in uniform, bringing freedom to the benighted heathens of Cuba.
The British Freedom of Information Act went into effect today, and lots of old files were opened, including one showing the 18-year (1963-81) campaign by civil servants to get softer, but more expensive, toilet paper. An epidemiologist “concluded that, for reasons that might not be appropriately described in a newspaper without risk of offence, hard paper was less hygienic than soft.”
Idiot of the day (from the Daily Telegraph):
A 33-year-old Italian was in serious condition in hospital after he was run over when he laid down on a pedestrian crossing following an argument with his girlfriend. The man had refused to get into the car his girlfriend was driving and was hit by a vehicle travelling in the other direction in Wohlen, Switzerland, police said.
Well, the American contribution to disaster relief is finally within the respectable range. I figured at some point they’d notice that the Day 2 pledge of $35m was less than they planned to spend on Bush’s inauguration. Speaking of Bush’s inauguration, before the tsunami it just promised to be tacky and vulgar and nausea-inducing, but now it’s especially inappropriate and, according to the NYT, his committee is still raising money, $5.5m this week. Any person or corporation who contributes a dime to that unworthy cause after the day of the tsunami needs to be named and shamed, and Team Chimpy needs to stop asking for donations.
London Times headline: “Remote for Sick Woman’s Brain Is Stolen.” They’re not kidding, either, it really is a remote control, for an implant which eliminates violent tremors. They can’t turn the device off so that she can go to sleep.
I’ve said it before: Brits will bet on anything. But here’s a pleasant betting story: ten years ago a 90-year old placed a bet with William Hill (bookies) that he would survive to 100, and has won £7,000 at odds of 66:1. He’s gonna have a party, and I wish him (unlike Shrub) a good one.
And for Shrub’s little shindig, may I suggest a theme:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Just a thought.
Douglas Adams was right (but then, Douglas Adams was always right): London Times headline: “Family Saved by Their Towels” (tied themselves to a palm tree in Thailand).
Observer piece on Burma, whose military junta is refusing to admit that more than a handful of Burmese died in the Tsunami Tsuris, and more generally on why forms of government matter following disasters.
Safire’s language column points out that the Bushies are careful to refer to the key element of their Social Security privatization plan as “personal” accounts, never private accounts.
Speaking of personal, an Observer article on American abstinence-only sex ed. programs mentions a program widely used in Texas called “Worth the Wait.” But that phrase is in no way applicable to an abstinence program: the only reason you’d care if something was worth the wait was if you actually had to wait for it. If something is worth the wait but you can have it now, why wouldn’t you? Anyway, they have a website, which is very orange. Right at the top of each page are fun facts, some of them even true, although there’s also this: “FACT: It is illegal to have sex under a certain age, 17 in most states.” The most entertaining pages, if mocking abstinence websites is your idea of entertainment, are:
- “101 Fun Things To Do (Besides Having Sex)”: Have a picnic; have an 80’s movie marathon (looking at ‘80s fashions will put you off sex); play capture the flag (guess that’s not a metaphor); groom your pet then take it to the park to it show off; learn how to play a musical instrument (guess that’s not a metaphor); visit a nursing home (looking at old people will put you off sex).
- Advice scenarios: “I have been having oral sex with my boyfriend of a year. He’s been pressuring me to go all the way, but I don’t really want to. He says that since we’ve gone this far, I might as well do it. Am I not a virgin any more?”
- Refusal skills: Actually a list of responses to requests for sex, many of them rather contemptuous in tone (“The Come-on: If you won’t have sex with me, I’ll just find someone who will. The Come-back: Go ahead. Find someone who doesn’t respect you or themself.”).
Revealed in that bit is a belief that sex actually isn’t worth the wait, that it’s something only people with low self-esteem do. Indeed, most of the site, and presumably the program, presumes that sexual desire is something that other people have. All it offers to teenagers coping with their own sexual impulses, as opposed to those of their partners, is picnics and fear of STDs. And of course all it offers homosexuals is a lifetime of solitary, um, contemplation. Now, any program trying to tell teenagers that sex is just degrading and tawdry (degrading and tawdry in a bad way, I mean, not the good kind of degrading and tawdry) or, more positively, that tries to teach them to operate rationally as well as groinally, runs the danger of presenting relationships and sex in a dreary, emotionally impoverished manner. “Love is your choice,” the site says, “You have the right to choose whom you love”. Is love that’s a matter of choice worth having?
Here’s the annual list of new laws in California, taking effect Jan. 1, always a wacky mixture. Some highlights: .50 caliber rifle sales are banned. You can’t film someone in a bedroom without their knowledge. You can’t declaw a cougar or a lion or a tiger. Equal insurance benefits for same-sex domestic partners. Motor scooter users require driver’s licenses. Mandatory sexual harassment training for supervisors in any business with more than 50 employees. Smoking banned in state prisons. Spyware is banned.
Colombia has extradited left-wing FARC rebel leader Ricardo Palmera to the US. President Uribe had threatened to do so unless FARC released 63 hostages. Right-wing death squad types who play ball with the government have had their extraditions quashed. In other words, the United States’s justice system is being cynically used as part of the internal politics of Colombia.
Anyone really interested in the year 1974 should look at the Jan. 1 British newspapers, which report on the annual release of official papers under the 30 Years’ Rule. Multiple British newspapers, since they all focus on different things, but this is a good entry point. Actually, nothing hugely exciting, except that Harold Wilson was a bigger jerk than I realized, and Princess Anne told a would-be kidnapper, “Not bloody likely!”
Qatar is banning child jockeys from camel-racing, so they’ll be replaced by robots. Something to look forward to in 2005.
Note to London Times: was it necessary that a story about a move towards employing fashion models with more normal weights be headlined “Purge on Anorexics”?
Most useful information of the day: the NYT says that while pressing 0 in automated phone systems usually no longer gets you a live human being, hitting it 3 or 4 times may.
From the Daily Telegraph:
Two women aged 34 and 38 have been charged with prostitution for offering sex from their hot-dog stand in Long Island, New York, which traded under the name Double Delicious.
"We’ve never seen hot-dogs mixed with sex before," said a police spokesman. "There are so many jokes, so little time."
The Massachusetts Lottery Commission went to court to defeat a lottery winner’s wish to be paid in a lump sum. So instead, 94-year old Louise Outing will get her $5.6m in installments over 20 years.
Several Sunni groups describe polling stations as “centers of atheism” and warn Iraqis against “the farce of democracy.” They’re not so big on farce; they prefer more sophisticated forms of entertainment like public stonings.
All the election workers in Mosul have quit following death threats.
Welcome to the annual
“Whatever Happened To...?” Awards for 2004,
in which I pick out a few news stories, individuals, phrases, etc. that were seen briefly, if you were alert enough (like Janet Jackson’s nipple), and then dropped out of sight with major questions still unanswered (unlike Janet Jackson’s nipple).
Let’s begin:
What was the US’s precise role in the Haitian coup in February? What did we know and when did we know it? Did we actually require Aristide to resign the presidency as a condition for saving his life?
In October 2003 the Toledo Blade ran a series about a US military unit that went on a mass killing spree in Vietnam in 1967. In February, the Pentagon announced it would investigate. So?
Before Yushchenko, there was President Chen of Taiwan, who during that country’s elections (March 2004), claimed to have been the victim of a weird assassination attempt, with homemade bullets, and no one was really sure what actually happened if anything, then nothing.
Abu Ghraib: Seymour Hersh and even Rumsfeld said that there was much worse to come in the way of photographs and film, so where is it? Rummy said (in May) that he would really love to release all the pictures, but the darned lawyers wouldn’t let him. Guess the lawyers still have him all tied up, metaphorically speaking, with a hood over his head, pointing at his genitals and laughing, metaphorically speaking (or not). Also, weren’t we supposed to have torn down Abu Ghraib by now?
The lists of casualties in Iraq issued by the Pentagon never include contractors, security guards, and mercenaries of all sorts. It continues to be the case that we rarely find out who any of these people (alive or dead) are, just where the US, Halliburton etc are recruiting these people who are then imported into Iraq, given guns and immunity from the local law, and turned loose. However in April there was this article about one who had been a death squad assassin for South Africa’s apartheid government.
May: the Sunday Times (London) reported that one of the intended 9/11 hijackers, Niaz Khan, had turned himself in to the FBI a year and a half before 9/11, was questioned and then let go. Silly me, I expected a shit-storm of vituperation and investigations. When an FBI person told the Independent, “Every effort was made,” I wrote, “Hopefully, that phrase will be very slowly, very firmly shoved up the FBI’s collective ass over the next few months.” Didn’t happen. The Sunday Times article is here; there are links to other articles here and here.
Friendly militias. In August, Paul Wolfowitz proposed to the House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon build a “global anti-terrorist network of friendly militias,” death squads, warlords and the like. There were no angry editorials, denunciations by John Kerry, nothing, so in October they slipped it into a Pentagon authorization bill, and away we go.
September: Insurgents took over a school in Beslan, and Russia let loose a blizzard of lies that remain unresolved, even while Putin used the incident to tighten his authoritarian grip on all of Russia and eliminate democratic election of governors. Two reporters who might have negotiated with the rebels were, respectively, poisoned and arrested. Russia low-balled the number of hostages, then claimed with no proof that the rebels were Arab rather than Chechen, and kept their demands, which were related to Chechnya, out of the media, even while the authorities took hostages of their own, the families of Chechen rebel leaders.
September: did N Korea test a nuclear device, or what?
October: the Al Qaqaa Cock-Up. 380 tons of explosives were looted from a military base after US forces searched it, then left the doors unlocked.
October: bombed a wedding in Fallujah. Never admitted it was a wedding.
November: The Marine who shot the unarmed wounded prisoner in the mosque, was he ever, like, arrested, or given a stern talking to, or something?
November: Colombia claimed there was an attempt to assassinate Bush while he was in the country.
Did we ever find out who was responsible for the provision in the appropriations bill allowing committee chairs the right to look at anyone’s tax returns?
I’d like to give a special blogger’s fond farewell to two phrases that helped make 2004 so much fun: “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” (from the State of the Union Address) and “member of the reality-based community.”
And then there are the people of 2004:
A.Q. Khan, we hardly knew ye.
That woman sterilized by Tom Coburn.
Vincent White. American adviser to the Afghan government, tossed in prison on trumped up sex charges when he interfered with corrupt contracts.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. At the beginning of the year we’d never heard of him, then he was the biggest terrorist ever, although the US seemed unsure even about the number of legs he possessed, then the US military razed a city to the ground for refusing to hand him over, before admitting he had probably left Fallujah before the bombing started, then evidently stopped caring where he was or what he was doing.
Also riding the roller coaster that is the American attention span: Achmed Chalabi, “hero in error”: he was under indictment for money laundering, then he wasn’t; he was America’s bestest bud, then Bush said he might have met him on a rope line one time; he was on the governing council, then it looked like they reduced the number of seats in the National Council just to get rid of him, then he showed up anyway, and now he’s reinvented himself as a Shiite anti-American, and no one’s even mentioning the whole spying-for-Iran thing anymore.
Chalabi’s nephew. The head of the war crimes trial of Saddam, then wanted for murder, now... still in exile, I think.
Iyad “Comical” Allawi, catapulted into power by the US without some basic questions about his past being answered. In London in the ‘70s, did he just spy on Iraqi exiles for Saddam, or did he kill them? I don’t know the answer, does George Bush? Does he care?
Mary Cheney. She’s still a lesbian, right?
