or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
November 12, 2005
For All Your Robert Dreyfuss Needs
I'm a longtime admirer of Robert Dreyfuss' writing for TomPaine.com and elsewhere. Though I haven't read it yet, I just bought his new book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. So I'm pleased to see he's started his own website, including a blarghh.
I was particularly interested to read this recent post (based on his work on an important article about the current state of the CIA):
...there are a lot of angry spooks who would love nothing more than to come talk to the Senate about the administration’s malfeasance.
This is interesting because both the Senate Intelligence Committee "Phase I" report and the presidential WMD commission concluded there was no pressure exerted on intelligence analysts. This is completely preposterous, but it was possible for the Bush administration to get away with it when political conditions were different. It may not be possible for them to continue to shove this under the rug for the Senate Phase II report, even though this ground has purportedly already been covered.
Posted at November 12, 2005 06:35 PM | TrackBackIs he the actor's brother? I am pretty sure he is...
Posted by: En Ming Hee at November 13, 2005 01:16 AMThe actor is related to the Dreyfuss of the eponymous affair more than a century ago whose repercussions are still wreaking havoc in the Levant and that brought the world to the abyss of DEFCON III in 1973...
From the Publisher's Weekly review at amazon.com: "He convincingly situates America's attempt to build an Islamic bulwark against Soviet expansion into Britain's history of imperialism in the region...".
This is an old game and US agents just followed the SOP manual of 19'th and early 20'th century Russian and esp. British imperial efforts at coopting and amplifying marginal Islamic movements for their own ends in the "great game" du jour.
Interestingly, these coopted movements have been known for generations by locals in those regions as at least partly cat's paws--pious pretensions notwithstanding. There were thus many anti-obscurantist movements such as those led by modernizers like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and other editors and writers who lampooned the ass backwards--literally shown sitting backwards on an ass in an old Persian cartoon--"Mulla Nasruddin" Islamists. There is a reason why why Islamists have done so poorly in elections in Islamic countries where the government was at least somewhat responsive to the needs of the people. But then, who is interested in gleaning nuanced opinions or listening to their understanding of their own history from the "Arab street" or wherever the raving mobs so often seen on cable News may be...
Posted by: sk at November 13, 2005 06:06 PMThe Phase I report most definetly concluded no such thing because such an investigation was explicitly excluded from its purveiw, reserving it for Phase II. I don't remember for sure but I thought the same was more or less the case for the presidential WMD commission. Niether really dealt with the use of intelligence, let alone demand sworn testimony from the civillian leadership.
Posted by: buermann at November 15, 2005 10:31 PM
