by Kieran Healy on June 20, 2006
What a disaster:
One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. … Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”…
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
I can practically hear the little tearing sounds as Jim Henley rips the remaining hairs out of the top of his own head.
by Kieran Healy on June 17, 2006
Where do FIFA find these guys?
I really hope the Yanks hold out for a draw.
I’m not sure what it is about Italian footballers that inspires sheer loathing. Their Oscar-worthy acting? The purity of their cynicism? Whatever it is they’ve got it to burn.
Final whistle. Well done the U.S.
by Kieran Healy on June 16, 2006
The other day Matt Yglesias “said”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/06/world_cup.html that the continuous flow of the game (and the fatuous American commentators) make it hard for him to learn what’s happening in a soccer match. “Here’s a masterclass”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhuRMiDz63w from Argentina, who beat Serbia & Montenegro 6-0 this morning.
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on June 15, 2006
“As usual”:http://www.slate.com/id/2139458/, “Radley”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026693.php#026693 “Balko”:http://www.cato.org/new/pressrelease.php?id=34 is the man “to consult”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026686.php#026686 on the “Hudson vs Michigan”:http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05pdf/04-1360.pdf case, which concerns the constitutionality of no-knock police raids. (Balko is even cited on p.10 of “Breyer’s dissent”:http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/04-1360P.ZD.) Today’s decision basically says evidence obtained from no-knock raids is admissible in court. The broader implication, as Balko says, is that “there is now no effective penalty for police who conduct illegal no-knock raids.” By the by, Scalia, writing for the majority, is happy to set his originalism aside and argue that the growth of “public-interest law firms and lawyers who specialize in civil-rights grievances … [and] the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline … [and] the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability” all mean that the fourth amendment can be reinterpreted.
by Kieran Healy on June 15, 2006
Waiting for the England vs Trinidad & Tobago match to start (come on the Caribbean!), I came across “this story”:http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19340338-29277,00.html about a giant ocean vortex spinning off the coast of Australia. The article notes in passing that the vortex is “visible from space.” I think this expression needs to be retired. These days, the hosereel in my back yard is visible from space, and conveniently catalogued in an NSA database somewhere. (See: Potential WMD.) While I’m wasting your time, I want to complain about English (and Irish) football supporters who prissily correct Americans for using the word “soccer” and avoid that word themselves. I mean, it’s not as if the Americans invented the word — the Brits did, in the late 19th century, and the modern spelling was standardized around 1910. People used it interchangeably with “football” (and occasionally “Garrison Game”) when I was a kid.
OK, the game is starting. I predict Wayne Rooney will come on some time in the second half, and he will be so pumped with weeks of pent-up excitement that he’ll charge two-footed into his first tackle, breaking the leg of whoever is on the other end and tearing his own cruciate ligament to ribbons.
_Update_: Argh, so close for T&T — cleared off the line! Also: Peter Crouch could have cooked his dinner in the box and still had time and space to hit that cross properly. England fans must be apoplectic at this point.
_Update_: Rooney on for Owen. Let’s see how long it takes for someone to stamp on his foot.
_Update_: Oh well.
by Kieran Healy on June 14, 2006
I used to think “back fat”:http://www.deliciousitaly.com/lardo.htm was a “pizza topping”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/food/openings/n_9571/ at “Babbo”:http://www.babbonyc.com/. Now I “know better.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/fashion/thursdaystyles/15skin.html Mario Batali should make like _Fight Club_ and lipo it off the customers at the first dinner sitting and serve it to those at the second.
by Kieran Healy on June 14, 2006
There was a post here but I couldn’t get the formatting right and I nuked it. Apologies to the three people who had already commented.
by Kieran Healy on June 13, 2006
“Charles Haughey has died”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ at his home in Dublin at the age of 80. The _Irish Times_ today calls him “the dominant and most divisive figure of the past 40 years” in Ireland. If you’ve never heard of Charlie, think of him as something like a triple cross between Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon and Huey Long. The Times’ “obituary”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/obituary.htm gives an overview of his life. Essays by “Dick Walsh”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story3.htm, “Geraldine Kennedy”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story2.htm and “Fintan O’Toole”:http://www.ireland.com/focus/haughey/ITstories/story1.htm span his career from its brilliant beginnings to its scandal-ridden end. Wikipedia also has “a good article.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Haughey
Haughey was the leading figure of a generation of Irish politicians born in the years after the foundation of the state in 1922. They were in the ascendancy in the 1960s and by the end of the 1970s they were running the country. Haughey’s generation wanted a slice of the postwar economic boom, and they partly got it. The economy grew rapidly in the 1960s. Haughey’s career prospered and he became minister for justice, instigating a series of important reforms of the Irish legal code, and then minister for agriculture. He also became a wealthy man very fast — far wealthier, in fact, than anyone on a modest political salary could reasonably be expected to become. He bought a Georgian mansion and an offshore island. His extravagant lifestyle became a topic of conversation, and eventually his political opponents tried to make an issue of it. He brushed them off. His career nearly came to an end in 1970 with the “Arms Crisis”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Crisis, but after a decade in the political wilderness he became the leader of “Fianna Fáil”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fianna_Fáil and, soon after, “Taoiseach”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoiseach.
The view of him taken by his supporters is key to understanding Haughey’s position in Irish politics. In a brilliant article written in the early 1980s, my former advisor at UCC, Paddy O’Carroll, made an argument about the importance of local culture to Irish political style. An important figure in the Irish mythos is the “cute hoor”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_hoor — the person who can magically bend the rules or circumvent them altogether in order to get what they want. Cute hoors are admired by “sneaking regarders”, those too timid to get involved themselves, but who admire the strokes he pulls to get what he wants. Haughey played that role in Irish politics on a grand scale, to the point where he was subject to a cult of personality. A pliant press helped. By the 1980s, Haughey’s long-term extramarital affair and his ill-gotten personal wealth were open secrets, along with much else about the country that could not be said in public. Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh’s book, “The Boss”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1N9LLQ1VTU&isbn=1853718912, a superb account of Haughey’s “GUBU”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1N9LLQ1VTU&isbn=1853718912 government of 1982 is one of the few contemporary pieces of really hard-hitting investigative journalism on Haughey. (Joyce and Murtagh’s obituary for Haughey is “in the Guardian”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1796554,00.html.)
A series of “legal tribunals”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriarty_Tribunal in the 1990s took the lid of the whole thing, detailing the bribery and corruption that greased the wheels of Irish politics in the 1980s. Haughey was at the center of it all, of course. Called as a witness in one of these investigations Haughey tried to play the fool, claiming he didn’t remember anything. His own effort to pass himself off as a clueless gobshite, after a lifetime spent burnishing an image of shrewdness and authority, probably did as much to tarnish his legacy as anything the evidence showed.
by Kieran Healy on June 12, 2006
The U.S. “got schooled”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-SOC-WCup-World-Cup.html by the Czechs. The Times says that Dubya gave the team a call beforehand:
bq. Eager to prove they are among soccer’s elite after their surprising quarterfinal finish in South Korea four years ago, the Americans brought their most-talented team ever to this year’s tournament. They even got a pregame pep talk from President Bush, who called from Camp David before the game and wished them well.
Today’s result shows diplomatic good wishes won’t do it, so that leaves the other two standard policy tools for strategic foreign intervention. First choice would be a large foreign aid package. Seeing as Italy is the U.S.’s next opponent bribery stands a very good chance of working. Something to bail out “Juventus”:http://www.google.com/search?q=juventus+scandal, for instance. Failing that, it’s airstrikes on Turin.
by Kieran Healy on June 11, 2006
I just noticed via our “Technorati Link Page”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedtimber.org&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos that in the last few hours, CT has been linked to by dozens of (presumably) robo-generated blogspot blogs. Each one I’ve looked at is populated with a page of posts with content that looks like it was scraped from Wikipedia. All of them have names of the form AdjectiveNoun. My favorite name so far is TiredStation, which could be used by some pro-business content generators we know. So far the content is innocuous, but I suppose that the next step is for the Wikipedia content to disappear and be replaced by true spam after some suitable delay. Feh.
Meanwhile, the World Cup continues. In the general spirit of four hundred years of oppression I was hoping Angola would beat Portugal, or at least draw. The more anxious English pundits are killing themselves over Eriksson’s mysterious tactics, even though England won their opening game. Eriksson brought relatively few strikers along in the squad, and if the usual number of functioning legs for any _n_ strikers is given by the formula n∗2, in England’s case the calculation is presently the slightly more complex (n∗2)-(n-1). Coming up today: Australia vs Japan, USA vs Czech Republic, and Italy vs Ghana.
_Update_: My “adopted team”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/05/allah-allah-dennis-bergkamp-dennis-bergkamp/ came through with a late rush of goals. Australia were unlucky with Japan’s goal, which might easily have been disallowed seeing as a Japanese player impeded the keeper. But then again, Japan should probably have had a penalty just after Australia equalized, so them’s the breaks.
by Kieran Healy on June 9, 2006
Because it is impossible to find a live internet radio stream of World Cup matches, I am forced to follow the games on the text-only FIFA MatchCast. Winding up to the Poland vs Ecuador match, which is just starting, the Official MatchBot Commentator guy just wrote, “Poland’s record on German soil is excellent …” I guess it depends when you’re talking about.
by Kieran Healy on June 8, 2006
A “transcript”:http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=42 from World O’Crap, with Tim Russert and panelists Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Satan (“Call me Bob”) and Jesus Christ. A taste:
*Russert*: Mr. Christ, what do you say to accusations that you’re opposed to fighting a battle to bring about the end of all life on Earth because you’re an Anti-Semite?
*Jesus*: Well, first of all, I’d like to point out that I myself am Jewish—
*Ann Coulter*: Yeah! Just like George Soros. Another Jew who somehow figured out a way to avoid crucifixion.
*Jesus*: I WAS crucified! (DISPLAYS WOUNDS IN HANDS)
*Michelle Malkin*: Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the nails in his hands and feet? There are legitimate questions about whether or not they were self-inflicted wounds.
*Russert*: What do you mean self-inflicted? Are you suggesting Mr. Christ crucified himself on purpose?
*Michelle Malkin*: Did you read the book by Barabbas and the Golgotha Veterans for Truth? Some of the thieves who were actually crucified have made allegations that these were self-inflicted wounds.
*Jesus*: I did not NAIL MYSELF to the cross!
by Kieran Healy on June 7, 2006
From the weather forecast on the radio this morning: “Highs around 100 until Friday, warming up after that.” I’m looking forward to next month, when I’ll be in Palo Alto.
by Kieran Healy on June 5, 2006
Maybe she can get him to guest-blog. Not the guy in the bandanna.
by Kieran Healy on June 5, 2006
The World Cup is only a week away, which means there is actually a reason to be in Tucson in June, if like me you (i) want to watch the games but (ii) are too cheap to buy the cable package and (iii) only have a useless old TV in the garage somewhere. (We’re close enough to the border to pick up the Mexican stations.) “Here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1790025,00.html is a self-hating Englishman, deciding to support Germany because English footballers are oiks and English football fans are thugs. At least you’re in the competition, mate, unlike “some countries”:http://www.fai.ie/ I could mention. (“Here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2tjfbNRdz8 is some nostalgia. It’s all we have.) Given Ireland’s regrettable absence, I think I will be cheering for the “Socceroos”:http://www.footballaustralia.com.au/, seeing as my daughter was born in Canberra. The Aussies “have to play Brazil”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4973552.stm in their group. Probably their best bet is to hope the Brazilians will be confused by the Australian kit, which looks a lot like Brazil’s. I’m also hoping that the “U.S. team”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/teams/usa/default.stm does well, just because it will piss off the footie snobs.
Meanwhile, here are two terrific bits of World Cup commentary, both much better than the now-hackneyed “Gol” guy: a clip in Arabic from “Kuwait vs Czechoslovakia”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IS48giKs1U in 1982, and one in Dutch from the last minute of “Holland vs Argentina”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqEWpHuib9A in 1998. Both commentaries are out there in the realm of religious/sexual ecstasy.
