http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video

The police story changed as the evidence against them mounted.  The occasions where protesters smashed windows appear contrived too, with banks of press photographers ready and waiting, and police video cameramen inside the bank poised to capture the breaking of a window at the Royal Bank of Scotland, by hooded "protesters" who, I suspect, will never be apprehended.

There appears to be no regard for civil liberties - particularly the right to conduct a peaceful protest - under New Labour.  The Labour Party, in opposition, were appalled and vociferous in their condemnation of police brutality during the Miners Strike of the early 1980's, which they directly attributed to the orders Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.  Now, the agents of the state are at it again, presumably so nothing will spoil PM Gordon Brown's Obamic Moment? 

It doesn't really add up.  There are those in the Metropolitan Police who know they can get away with murder, because they pulled it off with no apology in the case of Jean Charles Menezes. That set a frightening precedent.
 
Ironic that the police were grassed by a banker, whose interests they were supposedly there to protect. 

Weekend Edition
January 9-11, 2009

Why Hamas is Not the Issue
Gaza: History Matters
By ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN

Mohammed, age six, marched with determination to his bedroom, put on a record of the Fatah marching song, picked up a wooden toy rifle and marched out to the balcony. He pointed the rifle to the sky where minutes ago, Israeli planes flew over dropping bombs on Palestinian refugee sites. Mohammed told me he wanted to be a pilot so he could fight Israeli warplanes. “But Mohammed, the Palestinians do not have planes.” “I don’t care, I will fight them whatever way I can.” Was a resistance fighter born this minute or was he a “future terrorist”? (Beirut 1973)

How does one explain the horrific fate that has befallen caged Gaza – a land saturated with rubble and body parts – carpet-bombed by air, invaded by ground, attacked by sea? Put to the test of history, Israeli “explanations” fail the credibility test.

History matters. Israel conquered and occupied Gaza (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) in 1967. Hamas was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. In Gaza, it provided a network of social welfare institutions supporting the poor. During the first Palestinian Intifada (literally “shaking off” the occupation), a Hamas resistance military wing was formed. Israel and the US favored and met with Islamic Hamas leadership as a counterforce to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Fatah faction then dominant in the Intifada. As Hamas later strengthened, Israel reversed the process.

History matters. Palestinians have consistently resisted Israeli dominance over their lives. Gazan resistance has been especially problematic for Israel. In the 1970s, before Hamas, Ariel Sharon was charged with “pacifying” Gaza. Sharon imposed a brutal policy of repression, blowing up houses, bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, imposing severe collective punishment and imprisoning hundreds of young Palestinians.

Domination and colonialism are contrary to the United Nations Charter. The legitimacy of struggle for self-determination by peoples under colonial and foreign domination was reaffirmed in U.N. General Assembly resolution 2787 (December 6, 1971). As others before them, Palestinians have and do exercise the legal and moral right to resist.

History matters. In 2005, Israel withdrew its illegal colonial settlers from Gaza. Israeli scholars Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron noted in a Counterpunch article at the time that the primary motive of the evacuation of the settlers was to remove them from harm’s way in anticipation of an intensified future mass attack on Gaza.

History matters. After Hamas won elections in 2006, its leadership accepted a two-state solution based on the pre-war June 4, 1967 borders, but this was unacceptable to Israel. Earlier, Israel destroyed secular Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Arafat for failing at Camp David in July 2000 to comply with its demands to accept permanent Israeli control over Palestinian life and land confined in enclaves. Hamas became the new challenge to Israel’s vision.

The facts of history affirm that Israel will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state on any part of historic Palestine. Hamas is not the issue. All Palestinian leaders sooner or later, secular or Islamic, are declared unacceptable partners for peace no matter how much they concede to Israel. That Israel hides behind the “Hamas Islamic threat” today to destroy it as a potential partner is becoming transparent.

Today, Palestinian Authority President Abbas’s Fatah “security force” is used against Hamas supporters on the pretense that Abbas could be accepted by Israel as a satisfactory “partner” but for Hamas. Both before and after Hamas won the 2006 elections, Abbas fared no better than Arafat though he conceded more. In fact Jonathan Cook’s new book, Disappearing Palestine,” describes the persistent Israeli strategy to achieve the diminution of Palestine. Nonetheless Abbas continues to comply with Israeli/US demands, faulted by his people and humiliated by his keepers.

The picture changes when history matters. Treating Israeli war crimes as historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Israel has a choice: by accepting Palestinian rights under international law now and jettisoning its exclusivist ideology and militarism, Israel secures the future of its people in a shared Israel/Palestine; or by continuing its present policy of ruthless repression of indigenous Palestinians and denying them self determination, it cultivates an intensified and unyielding native resistance. Israel has always chosen the latter. Will President-Elect Obama have the courage to help Israel embrace the first?

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston

Posted Jul 22, 2006, this documentary provides a useful point of comparison with today's coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza, which has been widely blamed on the Palestinians in the mainstream media:

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=50287

Strange happenings in Baghdad, as the outgoing Dubya suffers “the worst insult in the Arab world”—assault by footwear. The foot being the lowest part of the body, this is as bad as it gets, apparently; it takes me back to a cheerful montage of images from Iraq in 2003, when Iraqis seemed to be queuing up to rub the soles of their shoes against portraits of the vanquished Saddam. Now every journalist and blogger can polish up their pearl of wisdom one more time and explain, pace Wikipedia, just how profound the contempt this gesture indicates is.

I’m interested, though, in a rather more pragmatic question: just how effective is it to insult someone in an alien cultural idiom? Bush, naturally enough, looked bewildered, but he ducked speedily and seemed none the worse for wear afterwards. Gordon Brown, I suspect, would have stolidly absorbed the blows; Obama would probably have caught one shoe in each hand before throwing them across the room for three points into a waiting waste-paper basket. But none of them, surely, would actually have been offended. The message would have come across much more clearly if the journalist had done something more traditionally American, like casting aspersions on the president’s parentage, motor vehicle, football team, taste in music, or pretzel-consuming ability; while simultaneously performing a thoroughly international gesture for emphasis.

After all, it’s common courtesy to research the ways of foreign visitors so that one doesn’t accidentally offend them. By the same logic, it’s surely common sense to research the ways in which one can cause maximum offense to foreign visitors. In America and Britain, footwear-lobbing (not to mention wellie wanging) is a jolly, even a folksy, kind of sport, like Morris dancing or buffalo chip throwing: more likely to raise a smile than hackles, with the possible exception of a well-aimed high heel. Then again, were George Bush to invite his critic to join him in lobbing a few Texan buffalo chips, I imagine the Iraqi would soon be begging for shoes…

Next Saturday world leaders meet in Washington to discuss new rules for the global financial system (though little will be achieved with President-elect Obama absent). So far, thinking about this matter has scarcely got beyond calls for better banking regulation: a microeconomic issue that is doubtless important but misses the main economic plot. The Bretton Woods system of 1944 was set up to "promote a stable system of exchange rates". This system has gone. But any new agreement, will need to be equally ambitious in addressing the problem of exchange rates, because the prevailing "non-system" has played a major role in the wild credit boom that has led to the financial crisis.

The old system broke down because creditor countries such as Germany and France found it more convenient to accumulate dollar reserves than revalue their currencies. This enabled the US to run balance of payments deficits financed by printing treasury bills. But since these were ultimately exchangeable for gold, the system was unstable and came crashing down in 1971, leaving a world of floating exchange rates.

It is now east Asian countries, especially China, that have accumulated US treasury bills, paid out to finance current account deficits - recently running at $700bn a year. Asia's savings glut has its counterpart in the consumption glut of western states such as the US and UK.

This destructive conjunction can be traced to two interrelated projects of Asian governments. One was to accumulate US dollar reserves to insure against a repeat of the capital flight of 1997/8 and to avoid the humiliating conditions that the IMF imposed for rescue packages. The second was to keep exports growing rapidly to boost employment and growth. Exchange rate undervaluation, prohibited in 1944, was the policy weapon used. Asian governments intervened massively to buy dollars and resist market pressure for currency appreciation. Moreover, they "sterilised" their dollar purchases, preventing domestic price increases that would have eroded their export competitiveness. So balance of payments adjustment was blocked.

The excess Asian savings have been shovelled into housing bubbles in both the US and Britain - not directly, but by enabling our governments to pursue expansionary monetary and fiscal policies that stoked up credit expansions. In this way the global imbalances have contributed directly to the meltdown. For the past 10 years the US has, in effect, had no budget constraint. And what was true of the country as a whole was true of all those companies and individuals who piled up debt on the back of inflating asset prices. The IMF was marginalised because its central purpose, which was to prevent these huge imbalances from occurring, had been negated.

Two lessons follow from this story. First, a way must be found of meeting countries' reserve needs for crisis insurance, while avoiding the use of national currencies as international reserves. The simplest way would be to activate and build upon the IMF's ability to create special drawing rights as an international reserve asset. The IMF might also become an international asset manager, pooling countries' reserves and making them available to deficit countries.

Second, the global exchange rate system must help rather than hinder the correction of excessive imbalances. Ever since the IMF articles were amended in 1978, each country has been allowed unilaterally to choose any exchange rate regime that suits its goals and circumstances. We have ended up with a free-for-all that is radically flawed from a systemic viewpoint. The US and Europe are floating but the Japanese and Chinese currencies, as well as those of a number of other Asian countries, are undervalued, but closely tied to the US dollar.

Undervaluation may make sense for a small nation but it is dangerous collective nonsense if practised by a key country or by several significant countries. In the next quarter-century, as emerging countries catch up with the west, large exchange rate changes will be in response to fast productivity growth. Smooth realignments are unlikely if the free-for-all continues. It is crucially important, therefore, that the major countries agree on a common exchange rate system that promotes balance of payments adjustment. (Small countries tend to follow one or other major country.) A fixed rate between major currencies is one possibility, provided sterilisation is disallowed. But it would involve a loss of monetary independence - probably politically unacceptable as well as economically painful and inefficient. So the major currencies - the dollar, the yen, the euro, the yuan - will have to float. But unmanaged floating can lead to prolonged and manifestly insane exchange rate movements (for example the US dollar bubble in 1984/85) that can themselves cause macroeconomic instability.

That leaves only two realistic options. Exchange rates between major currencies could float in unmanaged fashion most of the time, but with occasional policy cooperation and coordinated intervention to prevent gross misalignments. Or more ambitiously, the major countries could decide to practise managed floating of a structured kind. They could periodically agree on exchange rates that are appropriate for global adjustment, intervention being permitted only to influence market exchange rates in the direction of the agreed rates. It is no good relying on the IMF. The organisation has to be led by a group of key economies that have significant weight in the world economy (currently the US, Europe, Japan and China).

The most we can expect of Saturday's conference will be an agreement to increase the liquid resources at the disposal of the IMF. Exchange rate reform will have to wait on the end of the crisis. But it is important to start thinking about it now.

Archeologists from the British Museum visited the historic site of Ur, Iraq, this weekend; the visit was part of an assessment of various archeological sites for damage and looting.

When Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539BC he must have been quite taken by the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel and the palaces of cedar, decorated in gold and bronze.

Contrary to the standard operating procedure for invaders of his day and age, instead of laying waste to the place Cyrus set an example for the future by allowing his new possession to prosper, respecting its religion and cultural heritage.

Instead of shock, awe.

More than 2,500 years later, some of the surviving glories of what is considered to be the capital of the ancient world are to go on show at the British Museum, London, in an exhibition which opens on Nov 13. Visitors to “Babylon, Myth and Reality”, will see 100 objects, predominantly from the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar (605 – 562BC), including glazed panels from the Ishtar Gate, one of the entries to the fabled city, and enamelled lions from the walls of the Processional Way.

These remains are almost mythical, but what might make an even more profound impression on visitors will be the section of the exhibition devoted to the reality of the five years since the Second Gulf War.

What it highlights is the “carelessness” of the troops who set up camp on the site of the ancient city in May 2003 and proceeded to cause incalculable damage to the ruins and the relics that lay beneath.

The exhibition has already been shown in Berlin and Paris but, surprisingly, neither capital made anything of this cultural tragedy. The British Museum, however, pursuing its now familiar, eye-catching policy of relating the past to the present, as it did with Persia in 2005 and the Emperor Hadrian earlier this year, is not afraid to mix politics with pottery.

John Curtis, the keeper of the department of the Middle East at the British Museum, visited Babylon before the invasion and several times since, in a flurry of dramatic helicopter rides and a border dash, complete with highway robbers demanding antiques at gunpoint.

“It’s the same as the other shows in that we look at Babylon and what it means to European thought and tradition,” he says. “What makes ours different is that there is much more focus on Babylon today.”

Mr Curtis was one of the first to ring the alarm bells about the post-invasion vandalism. Not a man prone to exaggeration, as long ago as Dec 2004 he nevertheless filed a report saying: “It is regrettable that a military camp of this size should have been established on one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain.”

He listed the damage, including the digging of trenches, the building of a landing zone for helicopters that flattened the ground, deep ruts from vehicles and fuel leakage. Pieces of pottery and cuneiform inscriptions were found in banks of spoil and in the soil used to fill sandbags.

Nothing has happened since to change his sense of outrage.

“There is no excuse for what happened,” he says. “It was totally unnecessary. I have asked for a full-scale international investigation into the damage done to the site during its occupation by coalition forces.”

He has no time for the suggestion that this type of institutional vandalism is an inevitable consequence of war.

“The fact is that when Babylon was made into a military camp the war had already been won,” he says. “I don’t think it was necessary to establish a camp there at all. Maybe they did it because it has the same strategic advantages that made Babylon a capital city in the first place – on the banks of the river, on an intersection of routes and on slightly rising ground – and it was in an area which lies 90km south of Baghdad which had already been fenced to protect the site, so it was very convenient.

“But there is obviously no special advantage in making a camp there, because when the coalition closed the base down at the end of 2004, after all the controversy about the damage, they were quite happy to do so, even though it was at the height of the insurgency.”

It was not “political or deliberate”, he believes. “I’m a great believer in conspiracy theories but in this case it was just incompetence.”

The problem, he says, was that the coalition forces did not have archaeologists or other experts embedded who knew about Iraqi history or culture.

“That’s a retrograde step from even World War Two, when the troops in Italy and North Africa did have experts who were put to good use. It compares poorly with World War One, too, when there was much less destruction even though there were vast numbers of troops.”

More than 30,000 British troops – mainly Indians – died during the Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War, fought against Ottoman forces led by German commanders and waged chiefly to protect British interests in one of the world’s first oil refineries, at Abadan.

Donny George, an Iraqi archaeologist who was director of antiquities in Baghdad before leaving the country in Aug 2006, after receiving death threats against him and his family, insists: “The invasion troops knew that this was the city of Babylon. I believe that the original decision to have an army there was to protect it but then they thought it was a wonderful place for a camp and, little by little, it was developed into a very big base.”

He says that in April 2003, before the invasion, “American archaeologists gave the military the co-ordinates for thousands of archaeological sites. So they knew where they were, they had the names of the sites, everything. The damage could have been avoided.”

For Mr George, the exhibition has an important message to convey: “It is very important to explain that whatever the aims of the military were, they have done this damage to the country. Not only to Babylon but to the history of mankind.”

In addition to the destruction caused by the occupying forces, as many as 16,000 objects were looted from the Museum of Iraq in Baghdad alone, although about half have since been returned. Many were hidden away by Mr George in reinforced storerooms.

“I think the looting was organised,” says Mr Curtis, “but I don’t think it was organised by western criminal gangs or the Mafia, as some have suggested, but by local sheikhs and their tribes.

“It’s a huge problem trying to track the artefacts down. We don’t have much information about how much was dug up, who was doing the selling, how things were transmitted abroad and which market things ended up in.”

Since Dec 2004 the site has been protected by elements of the Iraqi paramilitary Facilities Protection Service but, says Mr Curtis, “The damage has been done. It has taken until now for a proper assessment to be agreed on and we are waiting for Unesco to draw up a management plan so that things can be put right.”

The US Senate has allocated some money and there is a proposal that the World Monuments Fund and the Getty Foundation should become involved. Nevertheless, “it will all take a long, long, time”, says Mr Curtis.

The Babylon exhibition itself is, of course, steeped in irony; that it is possible at all is thanks only to what amounts to European looting from another age. There are some valuable finds still in Baghdad, such as glazed brick panels, tablets, terracottas and jewellery, but they are, inevitably, trapped in Iraq and cannot form part of any exhibition staged abroad. Consequently, everything in the show will have come from the collections of the Louvre in Paris, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and the British Museum.

In May 2002, the Iraqi archaeological department demanded that artefacts removed by German archaeologists at the beginning of the last century should be returned. Mohammed Aziz Selman al Ibrahim, an official of the ministry of culture, said at the time: “I have anger, but what can we do? I appeal to the German government to give back our antiquities to Iraq.” Nothing was forthcoming.

Much of the Ishtar Gate, excavated between 1899 and 1914, was lifted and taken to Berlin, where it was reconstructed in 1930 and where it stands today. The Germans took many other treasures, including all but two of the 120 golden lions on the friezes which lined the Procession Way. Both the French and British also removed the spoils of their excavations.

Having created Iraq, which became a state in Nov 1920, the British imposed a monarchy on the new country but retained control until the Thirties. Under the country’s first Antiquities Law of 1922, it was decreed that foreign archaeologists should split their finds 50-50 with Iraq. Nevertheless, the proceeds of excavations by the colonial powers were often removed in bulk – such as the two shiploads said by some to have been removed by Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist and political officer, and which allegedly ended up in Britain.

Bell was a vivid character who worked with TE Lawrence and the British government’s Arab Bureau to create Iraq out of the post-First World War carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. In a letter home, written as she worked on creating the new borders imposed on the region by the victorious western allies, she wrote: “I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”

The consequences of her “creation”, of course, reverberate today.

Nevertheless, Bell had a genuine love for the region and its history, and founded The National Museum of Iraq, an act that helped to make her an object of veneration to some when she died in Baghdad in 1927.

In her life she had encouraged the youthful nation to exploit the glories of Babylon as part of a British-orchestrated exercise in nation building.

Saddam Hussein also understood Babylon’s symbolic value and in 1985 started rebuilding the city on top of the ruins. To the dismay of archaeologists, he inscribed his name on many of the bricks in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar, and in glorification of himself. The inscriptions proclaimed: “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq”.

“My complaint about Gertrude Bell,” says Mr Curtis, “is that she is one of the great imperialists and the notion of drawing lines through the map to create new countries irrespective of tribal allegiances or history has led to a lot of the problems we have today.”

Nonetheless, despite the mistakes of empires – past and present – he is cautiously optimistic that, like him, visitors will come away from the exhibition with the feeling that things will improve for Iraq.

Mr George, speaking from his exile as visiting professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, says: “I believe that this kind of exhibition and the material that is being shown will help to show people that Iraq is not a desert, not a place where people live in tents and have camels, but a great civilisation.”

Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called "Literary Censorship in England" which was supposed to be the introduction to Animal Farm, except that it never appeared, in which he points out "look, I’m writing about a totalitarian society, but in free, democratic England, it’s not all that different", and then he says unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force, and then he gives a two sentence response which is not very profound, but captures it: He says, two reasons - first, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear but second, the whole educational system from the beginning on through gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don’t say.  

My Fellow Americans,

It grieves me to see the livelihood of decent ordinary Americans, folk who pay off their mortgages and file their tax returns every April 15, threatened by the behaviour of irresponsible people in the financial sector. That is why I am planning to take the money away from ordinary Americans and give it to those irresponsible people. Because capitalism and democracy is the best system of government in the world, and you can't have capitalism without irresponsible people in the financial sector.

In normal circumstances I believe that companies which are managed badly should be allowed to go bust. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not working, as people have lost confidence in the system. That is why, so that ordinary decent people will still be able to get credit to buy homes and pay their children through college, I must take all their money and give it to these very well paid people who mismanaged their companies. Because these are not ordinary people in normal circumstances who use monkey wrenches and stuff and can be allowed to lose their jobs as firms go bust. These are rich folk like me. Society needs rich folk, so unless you give away all your money to these very rich people now, you will end up poor and without a pension and you will die alone and miserable.
This is not like taking money for medical insurance or welfare. I can assure you none of this money will be wasted on poor people, and hardly any of it on black people. So unless we build a bipartisan consensus and you give all your money to me to redistribute to the extremely rich, the plain truth is you will end up poor.

Thank you.

George W Bush

(Steve Bell in the Guardian)

I saw voters from West Virginia being asked the  "race question" on tv and they sidestepped it with breath taking elegance:

smirk:  "what's his name again?"
smirk's wife: "Barack Hussein Obama"
smirk: "well you don't need to go any further than the name, da ya?"

Names matter.  The guy on the other side's name is nearly the same as the guy in "Die Hard". 

Some of the tv commentary has been beside itself with heaving analogy.  Jon Snow, aging (the unkind might say senile) anchor of Channel Four News eulogized:" Bill Clinton took the audience and grabbed them by the frontal lobes of their brains"

:D

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been occasional reports from Georgia, which have stuck in my mind and niggled away. 

It hasn't sounded a particularly well formed democracy.  It hasn't sounded a safe and free society.  It  was only in February that the Georgian government was regarded as the prime suspect in the sudden death of a wealthy political exile in London - which turned out to be a heart attack.  But it was clear from those first assumptions, that Georgian authorities were held in similar esteem as those who, it is widely accepted, had organized the polonium in the tea bags of the hapless Russian exile, Litvenchenko...

And this is what I turned up

We saw another sun in the sky when it exploded."

"I looked to the forests around the city and they were on fire from the heat."

"All of a sudden there was a bright flash and everything around was bathed in intense light and heat."

At exactly 8:15 am on the 6th of August 1945, a U-S bomber dropped the first atomic bomb ever to be used in conflict on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That conflict was World War 2. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki. The conflict in Europe had already ended and when Japan surrendered five days later, the war was finally over.

The bombs not only helped end the war, they began the nuclear age. An atomic bomb was different to any bomb that had been used until then. It was a nuclear weapon, more than 2000 times more powerful than the largest bomb that had ever been used. It heated the air to 9000 degrees Celcius, burning everything in its path. The explosion generated a shock that flattened just about everything for 13 square kilometres.

140 000 people died; around one third of Hiroshima's population at the time. Thousands more have died since, from radiation poisoning and genetic problems. The most famous of those is Sadako.

Sadako Sasaki was two when Hiroshima was bombed. When she turned 11 she was diagnosed with Leukemia, due to radiation exposure.

Sadako made 644 cranes before dying when she was 12, and a famous children's book was written about her and read by people around the world. 60 years have passed since the bombing, and while it's hard to forget what happened, most people have been able to forgive.

Which means students like Ayumi and Hitomi from Hiroshima can come and study in Australia which was once an enemy of Japan. But no matter where they are in the world, they remember Hiroshima day.

"Hiroshima day reminds us of the importance of peace so that we never start a war."

The city of Hiroshima has been rebuilt, but not completely.

At Peace Park, children pray for peace. They learn about the effects of the bomb from survivors, who are known as Hibakusha. And they are shown around the Memorial Dome, which was the only big building to survive the blast. The damaged remains have been kept as a reminder of what happened.

Obama, The Prince of Bait and Switch

by John Pilger / July 30th, 2008

This appeared in 1968 - and certainly I would have been reassured to know that Hertz girls were specifically trained in  "diagramming a map" - 

what is a diagram of a map? I have never seen one.  Born too late, I guess.


 

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

Taken from a much longer article.  He burps and farts and booms.  Bless my soul, what a character he is!  He lives in America now and he is evidently admired for doubting the existence of god, among other things.

“Everything on North Korea and Iran is in one of these,” Hitchens said, pointing to a standalone bookshelf during a tour of his Washington apartment. “The ‘axis of evil’ shelf. We also have India—I just decided to put the India box there.” I remarked that it’s a rather Orientalist way to categorize his reading. “Well, exactly!” he replies with a smile.

The apartment where Hitchens lives with his wife, writer Carol Blue, and his daughter, Antonia, is cavernous but lacks much décor. Besides a grand piano in the living room, the only furnishings Hitchens seems to have acquired in two decades at this address are hundreds of books, many piles of which rest unshelved against the walls. His office in the apartment next door is equally spartan but for a pile of promotional books on the kitchen isle (the anti-liberal firebrand David Horowitz, among others, seeks a blurb from Hitchens for the back cover of his latest offering). A framed National Magazine Award rests on the back of the gas range, next to a refrigerator that houses a few bottles of water, a jar of mustard and little else.

Hitchens’ only television set is in the master bedroom. It’s a recent acquisition, Blue said, and she watches it more than he does. He hardly has time, he said, now that he’s working on a memoir.

“That’s now the next thing,” he says. “Till this is done I can’t do another book. I’m stuck with it now—I wake up thinking about it. And I’m reading other people’s memoirs and making notes, and I keep being reminded of it.”

When writing a memoir, it helps to have known everybody imaginable. As Hitchens discusses his autobiographical work, I recall another tendency in his literary journalism. He almost always hangs his reviews of living or recently deceased authors on an anecdote about his interactions with them. Reflecting in The Atlantic on Saul Bellow, Hitchens recalled a conversation with the author in which they ended up having “a strong disagreement” over Palestine. “I have several times devoutly wished that we could have had this discussion again,” he wrote. Perhaps most poignant was his account in The Nation of an evening spent with Jorge Luis Borges at his home in Argentina, where Hitchens buried their political differences in a shared love of literature by reading Kipling aloud to the aged, blind author.

When he doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge of a writer, Hitchens employs hypothetical conversations and “encounters that never took place.” H.L. Mencken and Evelyn Waugh almost met once, and Hitchens wishes they had.