The Legacy of Paul Tibbets,The Enola Gay & Separating the Warrior From the War

Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.

--MARK TWAIN

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II, did not want a funeral or a gravestone when he died.

To the end of his days, Tibbets acknowledged that the bomb that hurtled from the bowels of his Enola Gay -- killing 80,000 people outright and almost as many from radiation poisoning and other associated effects – had plunged the world into a terrifying new age where Armageddon was just the push of a button away.

But Tibbets also believed that using the bomb was a justifiable way to shorten World War II and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

"I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did . . . I sleep clearly every night," Tibbets said of the August 6, 1945, attack. “If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I'd do it again."

But Tibbets knew that his unnuanced and unapologetic views would make his death and burial place a magnet for protesters who saw him as the personification of man's inhumanity to man, and it is not surprising that his Wikipedia entry has had to be disabled because of attempts by people who tried to hack into it in order to portray him as a war criminal.

* * * * *

World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,200 a day. So when Paul Tibbets left this mortal coil at age 92 last Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, he was in the company of, among others, a Navy seaman who survived the Pearl Harbor attack, an Army infantryman who charged onto Omaha Beach on D-Day, and a Marine who helped liberate a Japanese POW camp in New Guinea.

Tibbets, of course, had a fame and notoriety that the other 1,999 vets manifested for their eternal reward on his final day did not. But all had one thing in common: They had a job to do and did it with valor and, for the most part, without complaint.

Tibbets was on some of the first bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe and later flew bombing runs in North Africa before he was recalled to the U.S. to test the new B-29, the first intercontinental bomber.

In September 1944, the then lieutenant colonel was summoned to a secret base in Colorado where General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold chose him to lead the 509th Composite Group, the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war, because Arnold believed that he was “the best damned pilot” in the Army Air Forces.

"My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war," Tibbets wrote in his book, Flight of the Enola Gay (1989).

Tibbets looked for the perfect airfield to train his men and settled on a remote strip in Wendover, Utah. Arriving crewmen were told nothing about their mission.

"Don't ask what the job is," Tibbets told them. "Stop being curious. . . . Never mention this base to anybody. That means your wives, girlfriends, sisters, family."

Tibbets granted his men Christmas leave in December 1944. What they didn't know was that it was a ploy to test security. As the men of the 509th headed home, they were met at the Salt Lake City railroad station by undercover operatives posing as solicitous civilians and friendly servicemen.

Two men from the 509th answered the questions of a friendly "officer," and both men were soon banished to a remote island off the coast of Alaska.

Tibbets' bomber crews made hundreds of practice runs using test bombs that were mock-ups of the real thing -- the uranium-filled "Little Boy" that would doom Hiroshima and the plutonium cored "Fat Man" that would hit Nagasaki.

Most of the mock-ups were filled with concrete, but some contained everything but the nuclear components and included conventional explosives in the triggering mechanisms.

On June 18, 1945, President Truman approved plans for the invasion of Japan, and on July 16 the first atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Believing that the Japanese should have one last chance to avoid the devastating power of the bomb, Truman issued an ultimatum that they surrender unconditionally or face "prompt and utter destruction." The Japanese ignored the demand, which did not include mention of nuclear weapons.

Tibbets himself decided to fly the B-29 that would drop the Hiroshima bomb. He named the plane the Enola Gay after his mother, who unlike his father who had wanted him to become a doctor, supported him in pursuing a career as a pilot. (The top photo shows Tibbets, at center, with bomber's ground crew.)

Several hours before dawn on August 6, the Enola Gay struggled up off a runway on the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas for the 1,700-mile flight to Hiroshima. Two other B-29s accompanied the lead plane to monitor the event.

In a 2002 interview, Tibbets told Studs Terkel that "After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, 'You know what we're doing today?' They said, 'Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission.' I said, 'Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special.' My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, 'Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?' I said, 'Bob, you've got it just exactly right.' "

Seventeen seconds after 8:15 a.m., from an altitude of 26,000 feet, Tibbets' bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, released the 9,700-pound Little Boy. Tibbets put the Enola Gay into a sharp, oft practiced diving turn to get away from the imminent explosion.

The bomb detonated at 1,890 feet above the center of Hiroshima with a core temperature estimated at 50 million degrees. In a micro-second, the city ceased to exist.

"My God, what have we done?" co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis wrote in his logbook.

Caron described the view from his seat in the rear turret as "a peep into hell."

Tibbets wrote that he looked back to see an immense mushroom cloud.

"It had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive," he wrote in his book. "Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar."

Three days later, a second and even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, taking about 74,000 lives. Kyoto, the original target of the first bomb, was spared. As desperate as high ranking government officials and generals were to end the war, they were sensitive of its cultural significance.

A third atomic bomb was being readied, but by August 15 the conciliators in the Japanese government had won out over hard-line militarists who had had the tacit backing of Emperor Hirohito, who was not the pitifully manipulated figurehead the Japanese claim, and indeed is the villain of this story, not Tibbets.

Japan capitulated and World War II finally was over after some 234,874 Americans had lost their lives in the Pacific theater alone.

* * * * *

I have wrestled for years with whether dropping the atomic bombs were justified.

Using the bombs did end the war months sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, as well as saved from starvation hundreds of thousands of POWs and millions of people under Japanese occupation.

Yet I understand those who believe that the bombings were immoral and, in a contemporary context, were acts of terrorism. I also feel for the Japanese people, having lived in Japan, visited Hiroshima and known an atomic bomb survivor.

But it would never have occurred to me to blame Tibbets, let alone the other members of the Enola Gay's crew.

After the war, Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about criticism directed at him over dropping the bomb.

"It was my decision," Truman told him. "You didn't have a choice."

Tibbets, who retired a brigadier general, spoke out for eliminating war, but he could be prickly and sometimes seemed appallingly unsympathetic to what he had wrought. He re-enacted the bombing at an air show in Texas in 1976, complete with mushroom cloud. He said it was not meant as an insult, but the U.S. government apologized after the Japanese government and mayor of Hiroshima complained.

The notion of separating the warriors from the war has taken a beating in the Iraq war, which despite President Bush's comparisons could not be more different than Tibbets' war.

There are few greater obscenities than Bush exploiting the troops that he has sent into a quagmire for political gain, but it is just as awful to use these troops as a cudgel in opposing the war.

Tibbets was to tell an interviewer three years ago on the 60th anniversary of the bombing (bottom photo), that when he got the assignment he knew "it was going to be an emotional thing."

"We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."

And for that I thank Paul Tibbetts. May he rest in peace.

Based in part on an article from The Los Angeles Times

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Blog Awards & Worst Blog Posts

'Tis the season to pick best blogs and best blog posts, but that Kevin Drum over at The Washington Monthly is focusing on the worst blog posts.

He's come up with a list of lulus that have to be seen to be believed, and even then beggar the imagination.

As Kevin notes, a century from now even the very best blog posts will be long forgotten, but the bad blog posts will endure.

After you vote for Kiko's House -- or not -- through the link in the post above, vote for what you think the worst post is. And if you know anything about the image with this post, you'll know who I voted for.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

With so much attention being lavished these days on the perceived flaws and foibles of the ’08 presidential candidates, it’s easy to overlook the reigning master of disaster – until such moments when he reminds us why he still wears the crown.

That’s precisely what George W. Bush did . . . when he spoke at a conservative think tank (naturally), and uncorked one of his rhetorical whoppers, the kind that has a landslide majority of Americans counting down the days to his departure.

In remarks to a rapt crowd at the Heritage Foundation, he essentially argued that if the Democratic Senate doesn’t confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, it will mean that the Democrats are weak in the war on terror. (Those last eight words worked for Bush in the elections of 2002 and 2004, and apparently he still thinks they pack a punch, despite the fact that he was soundly repudiated in the election of 2006. But I digress.)

In the midst of suggesting yesterday that Democrats are terrorist-coddlers, he came out with this: "Some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden . . . "

He was basically arguing that the Democrats don’t take Osama bin Laden seriously, whereas he, as our vigilant protector-in-chief, does take Osama bin Laden seriously.

But wait a minute – I seem to recall that Bush, in past disquisitions about the war on terror, told us that things were going so swimmingly that we didn't need to take Osama bin Laden seriously.

-- DICK POLMAN

After 9/11 it was apparent that we had a problem with our public relations in the Muslim world. One of the main jobs of our government was to figure out how widespread the problem was, and to counter it in any way possible. Obviously we wanted to track down radicals that were plotting follow-on attacks. That was vital. But, in the longer term, we needed to do an appraisal of what caused the radicalism in the first place, and see where we could make moves to tamp it down. I think this says it all in terms of how our government performed its task.

Helene Cooper writes in the New York Times:

"A recent global survey by the Pew Research Center concluded that the American image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia.

"The poll found that in five predominantly Muslim countries, fewer than 33 percent of the population had a favorable image of the United States. Even in Turkey, one of America's closest allies in the Muslim world, only 9 percent of the public had favorable views of the United States, down from 52 percent in 2000."

That, my friends, is an epic failure. And, I have to say, torture is right at the heart of the problem.

-- BOOMAN

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. . . . War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. . . . It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

-- JAMES MADISON

Democrats have objected to the Bush administration's pursuit of sanctions against Iran as a precursor to war. They have ignored the Iranian intransigence on nuclearization and treated the White House as the source of the problem. In doing so, they have given signals to Russia and China to continue their obstructionism on sanctions at the UN Security Council.

. . . The world has three choices. We can allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, with all of the terrorist access that will create, allowing deployment anywhere in the world without the use of rockets or missiles. We can go to war with Iran, striking the facilities we believe house their nuclear research programs, with all of the death, destruction, and radicalization that entails. Lastly, we can use economic and diplomatic sanctions to force Iran back to the table for honest negotiations to end their pursuit of nuclear weapons. There isn't a fourth option.

Which option do the Democrats want to take? Are they seriously considering the first option? If so, then they have no claim to understanding global security. Barack Obama offered the rather silly notion that we should negotiate directly with a nation with whom we have no diplomatic relations, primarily because they issue genocidal threats against our ally and conduct low-level war against us through their terrorist proxies. If they didn't negotiate in good faith with their economic partners in Europe without sanctions being applied then, why would Obama assume they would negotiate in good faith with the nation they call the Great Satan?

The Russians and the Chinese don't have a problem with the first option, because they don't see themselves as the primary target of nuclear terrorism and nuclear extortion. If the Democrats don't like the third option, it leaves only one avenue left, which Hoagland correctly asserts leads us by elimination to military action.

-- ED MORRISSEY

A full-scale regional war, chaos in the oil market, an overstretched American military pushed past the brink — all to take down a little thug like Ahmadinejad (who isn’t even Iran’s primary leader) and a state, however truculent, whose defense budget is less than 1 percent of America’s? Call me a Pollyanna, but I don’t think even the Bush administration can be this crazy.

Yet there is nonetheless a method to all the mad threats of war coming out of the White House. While the saber- rattling is reckless as foreign policy, it’s a proven winner as election-year Republican campaign strategy. The real point may be less to intimidate Iranians than to frighten Americans. Fear, the only remaining card this administration still knows how to play, may once more give a seemingly spent G.O.P. a crack at the White House in 2008.

-- FRANK RICH

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

Omar Cuff scores the first of four touchdowns against Navy. The spectacular University of Delaware running back has a nation-leading 28 TDs this season, 18 more than the Notre Dame.

With three regular season games to go, the Fightin' Blue Hen is on a pace to set an all-time TD record as Delaware, a perennial powerhouse, takes another step today toward its second national championship in five years and seventh overall.

College football aficionados will notice the similarity between Delaware's "winged" helmets and those worn by the University of Michigan and Princeton. Here's the story.

Photograph by Mark Campbell

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert — known as "Washington’s toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America — had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style. This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama:

"There’s been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"

When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds." Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"

Indeed it is, because the process is controlled by Tim Russert and people like him. Russert’s Bible question encapsulates everything wrong with him, and with our political coverage more generally. It seeks to make candidates look bad rather than finding out something important about them (if you want to explore a candidate’s religious beliefs, you don’t do it in pop-quiz form and give them just ten seconds to answer). It substitutes the personal anecdote for the policy position, the sound-bite for the substantive answer. It distills the debate into a series of allegedly symbolic, supposedly meaningful moments that can be replayed.

This type of debate question is not about what the candidate believes and would actually do in office, but about how clever the moderator is for cornering the candidate. And above all, it takes a genuinely relevant matter (a candidate’s view of the universe) and crams it through a channel by which the thoughtful candidate will be pilloried and the shallow, pandering, overly rehearsed candidate will garner praise.

-- PAUL WALDMAN

You cannot be a president of the United States who’s wanton in his expression of violence. There’s a lot of people who need care. He might be one of them. If there isn’t something wrong with him, then there’s something wrong with us. This, to me, is a very serious question.

-- DENNIS KUCINICH

(Washington Post columnist Ruth) Marcus and Hillary (Clinton) want it both ways. Marcus endorses the idea that a female President will change attitudes towards women, but one would think that backwards. Women get elected to office because attitudes have already changed. They have proven themselves as capable as men, and as able to handle the tough decisions as men, and until now, the sharp debate and criticism as well.

Hillary set that last cause back a few steps, and Marcus fails to realize it. By playing the damsel in distress, she wants to eat her cake and have it, too. Hillary wants to project strength but pull a fainting spell when other candidates treat her as an equal -- and as a frontrunner -- by challenging her on her policies. A fainting spell might serve as a distraction from the two disastrous answers she gave in the debate, but America won't elect Scarlett O'Hara as President. The voters want strength in the Oval Office, not passive-aggressive hypocrisy.

-- ED MORRISSEY

What is it about the candidacy of Ron Paul that has attracted the paranoid fringe of American politics?

Clearly, there are Ron Paul supporters who are rational and grounded, not given to spouting conspiracies or blaming “neocons” for everything bad that happens in the world (neocons being a blind for anti-Semitism). For all we know, they may be the majority of his voters.

But just as clearly, there is a dark underbelly to the Paul campaign – a ruthless, mob of internet ruffians who seek to intimidate those who would dare criticize them, the Paul candidacy, or most especially, one of their pet conspiracy theories about 9/11, the “New World Order” (an amorphous term that generally means the imposition of a one world government), or something as mundane and silly as planting a computer chip in every new born in America.

-- RICK MORAN

Given that the Republicans are now definitively the war party (not that the Democrats have yet become the peace party, but that’s another story), it’s hard to see how libertarian Republicans can survive, any more than Dixiecrats survived Nixon’s Southern strategy. The recent decision by RedState to ban Ron Paul supporters is a pretty clear indication of how real Republicans think about this. This has big implications for a thinktank like Cato, which has opposed the war (but very sotto voce – a visitor to their website would be hard pressed to tell that there even was a war) while remaining within the Republican tent. They had a good discussion of the issues a while back, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect.

This process cuts both ways. It’s hard to witness the catastrophic government failure that has characterized every aspect of this war without becoming more sympathetic to certain kinds of libertarian (and also classically conservative) arguments, particularly those focusing on the fallibility of planning.

-- JOHN QUIGGAN

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Killadelphia: City of Brotherly Mayhem

AN ALL TOO FAMILIAR PHILLY (MURDER) SCENE

The news from bloody Philadelphia just gets more and more horrifying.

I note that the city's TV newscasts are cast in the "If It Bleeds It Leads" mold, but the mayhem one day this week was so bad that it soaked up 18 minutes of the 30-minute evening newscast on one station, barely leaving any time for really important stuff like the weather and sports.

The mayhem included incidents in which police Officer Charles Cassidy was shot in the head outside a previously robbed Dunkin' Donuts by a perp who then stole his service revolver, another incident in which four people were wounded, including another officer, by an ex-con who drowned trying to escape his dragnet, and a lockdown at one of the city's largest high schools.

Officer Cassidy, a 25-year veteran, has died. He was the fourth Philadelphia police officer shot this year, the third this week, and the second in just 12 hours in a city that is chronically poor, undereducated and violent -- and shows no sign of coming to come to grips with its demons.

Mayor John Street led the Greek chorus that chimed in on cue after these latest war-zone convulsions in calling for stronger gun laws in a state where local jurisdictions are at the mercy of an adamantly pro-gun majority in the Legislature.

"Unless we can get control over the proliferation of illegal guns, then the people who are most at risk are, of course, the members of the Police Department," Street said with practiced angst.

Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson belabored the obvious in saying that his officers are being "basically assassinated" by armed and violent criminals.

"The availability of weapons in our city . . . the availability of guns are really completely out of hand here in the city of Philadelphia," he said. "Legislators have to realize that we have a gun problem."

That "problem" has resulted in 325 murders in the first 10 months of the year, the highest big-city homicide rate per capita in the U.S., although the pace recently has slowed slightly from the 2006 rate, which resulted in 406 murders.

Meanwhile, New York City, with five times Philadelphia's population and once America's murder mecca, has had "only" 220 murders. Chicago and Los Angeles also lag far behind.

* * * * *

I have been reading the essays of Ishmael Reed lately, and a recurring subject in his writings in the late 1960s into the 1970s was the coming race war between blacks and whites. That notion was very much a part of the black radical lexicon of that era and of course remains deeply embedded in the rantings and writings of white supremacists.

Reed, one of the best African American writers of our time, sat to the left of many of his peers back in the day but neither endorsed or rejected the notion of a race war. I suspect that he is not at all surprised that the race war in America today is blacks killing blacks.

In fact, there have been an astounding 100,000 murders in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks, most of them in inner cities and most black-on-black shootings, stabbings and other forms of self genocide.

This epidemic is only bound to get worse.

As Bob Herbert of The New York Times notes, criminals locked up over the past 10 or 15 years are now leaving prison by the hundreds of thousands each year. With few jobs or other resources available to them, a return to crime by a large portion of that population seems inevitable.

Who's to blame?

First and foremost, these shiftless souls themselves, with the federal government and society as a whole a not close second.

And in Philadelphia so-called civic leaders whose frailties have made it even more difficult to push back, including a weak mayor (Street) who has spent much of his administration fighting off corruption allegations, and a weak police commissioner (Johnson) who has been in over his head from Day One.

Street deserves an extra helping of scorn.

I admired him as a rabble rousing Afro-coiffed community activist in the early 1980s who was determined to shake things up. But he has become a poster child for the time-honored concept of being part of the solution and then becoming part of the problem. He has been a terrible disappointment as mayor.

The feds played a big role in the substantial reduction of big-city crime in the 1990s, but much of that support has since vanished because of the diversion of your tax dollars toward fighting terrorism and the war in Iraq, of course, as well as the belief of Bush administration ideologues that crime is a local problem and their resistance to any form of gun control that might help stanch the flow of guns into those inner-city killing zones.

According to one study, Philadelphia has lost a staggering $287 million a year in federal funding since President Bush took office for law enforcement, education, job training and housing -- the social programs that can chip away at the root causes of crime.

* * * * *

This is the kind of post that a know-it-all white blogger looks back on and says: "Boy, I shoulda known this one was gonna get me in trouble."

Perhaps it will because as much as Washington and white America is to blame for the chronic neglect of the underclass -- which is predominately peopled by blacks and other racial minorities and increasingly by immigrants, many of them illegals -- the buck has to stop somewhere and that somewhere is in the inner city itself.

This brings me back yet again to Philadelphia, a city that I know well and love dearly.

Since 2001, there have been 10,000 shooting victims in the City of Brotherly Mayhem. Some 80 percent of the victims were African American males, while most of the perps were African American males under the age of 25.

Hey, I now live in a college town neighborhood where the most serious crime is overturned trash cans, but that does not keep me from have an abject feeling of hopelessness when it comes to Philadelphia and its future.

Police Commissioner Johnson, speaking to a CBS Evening News reporter, has no illusions about the epidemic -- along with having no solutions -- and has doggedly resisted more innovative tactics despite saying that:

"Traditional policing is not working. That's just my opinion. Traditional policing is only locking up people better. That's not the only answer."

In trying to fight that hopelessness, I have come to believe that the biggest part of the answer is not jobs creation, better policing or effective gun control, but breaking the cycle of violence and failure by weaning up-and-coming young black men from the notion that being a man is not how many people you off or women you knock up, but succeeding where your peers -- the brothers who are dead or in jail -- have not.

Whether that means finding God, a teacher or other mentor who genuinely cares about a young man's future I know not. But help has to be on their doorstep or maybe just a block or two way, and not at some social services center downtown or ivy-covered university urban affairs department.

Photograph by Jim MacMillan/Philadelphia Daily News

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

Further Proof That The Surge Is Working

American diplomats are refusing to serve at the U.S. embassy in Washington because that is seen as a possible death sentence.

At a town hall meeting at the State Department attended by hundreds of Foreign Service officers alarmed that a senior official has told some of them that they risk losing their jobs if they don't go to Baghdad, they complained that:

* They are not receiving adequate training before being sent into the war zone.

* The embassy (photo), the largest in U.S. history, is too damned big.

* The Green Zone, the supposed safe area where the embassy is located, is frequently under mortar and rocket fire from insurgents.

* Returning diplomats are finding that the department will not authorize medical treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Service in Iraq is "a potential death sentence," said one man who identified himself as a 46-year Foreign Service veteran. "Any other embassy in the world would be closed by now."

I don't know about you, but this seems like just a bunch of nothing from unpatriotic whiners.

Memo to Bandar: Shut Your Yap Hole

RUMMY AND BANDY

It is difficult to know where to begin in describing all the things that are wrong with Saudi Arabia, let alone its favored-nation relationship with the U.S., so we'll leave it at the fact that this oil-rich and profoundly constipated kingdom has been a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. In fact, all but four of the 9/11 hijacker were Saudis.

That seems to have been lost of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, who says in a new documentary that Saudi Arabia could have helped the U.S. prevent the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a "credible" way.

The comments by Bandar are similar to those earlier this week by Saudi King Abdullah, who suggested Britain could have prevented the July 2005 train bombings in London if it had heeded warnings from Riyadh.

Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the 9/11 plotters "with precision."

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said.

Now it is no secret that the CIA and FBI also had a pretty good idea about what several of the hijackers were up to whom already were in country, but because of the overweaning dysfunctionality of the agencies – as well as a White House national security advisor who had her head where the sun don't shine – warnings were ignored.

Nevertheless, Bandar’s imprecation rankles – and in fact is deeply offensive.

Medal Winning Henry Hyde Hypocrite

Where's your other hand, Henry?

Face it, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has lost some of its luster since President Bush presented it to three extraordinary screw-ups -- George Tenet, Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer -- in 2004. But in an effort to resort it to its rightful place in the pantheon of medal-dom, say right up there is the Nobel Peace Prize, former U.S. Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois will be a recipient of the 2007 award.

Hank is to be commended for his many fine years of public service as a Republican congressman. When not personally consuming the other white meat, He certainly brought home more than his share of pork for the district in the western suburbs of Chicago where he served with distinction from 1975 to 2006.

But there is a facet of Hank's illustrious career that President Bush is sure to forget to mention at the medal award ceremony at the White House on Monday: Arch hypocrite.

Let's jump into the Wayback Machine for a trip to 1998 when Hank, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was leading the charge against President Bill Clinton for his adulterous consenusal sexual affair with a certain White House intern.

It was during those halcyon days of GOP finger waging that a most unfortunate thing happened to Hank: In one of the first big Internet news scoops, a young Salon magazine revealed that Hank had had his own adulterous consensual sexual affair -- diddling Cherie Snodgrass, a married Chicago woman (photo) and mother, for five years in the late 1960s.

The revelation followed news stories that two other self-rightgeous conservative Republicans who like Hank condemned Bill in the strongest terms -- Representatives Dan Burton of Indiana and Helen Chenoweth of Idaho -- also had had adulterous affairs.

Mind you that Republicans don't have the franchise on cheating on their spouses and being hypocrites. They just do it with more panache.

Incidentally, in response to the Salon story Hank harrumphed that his affair with Miss Cherie was a "youthful indiscretion."

He was 41 at the time.

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

A BORNEO ORANGUTAN

Poaching and deforestation in the tropics are imperiling dozens of humans’ primate relations, with nearly a third of the 394 known species of apes, monkeys, lemurs and other groups listed as threatened with extinction in a new report from the World Conservation Union.

The report focuses on the plight of the 25 most endangered species, which live scattered around the tropics, mainly in areas of Asia and Africa. “You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium, that’s how few of them remain on earth today,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, the chairman of the panel of primate experts who wrote the report and the president of Conservation International.

There have been improvements in a few areas. Brazil dropped from the list of places with the most imperiled primates for the first time since the periodic assessments began in 2000. But eight primates have been on all four reports issued since then, including the Sumatran orangutan and the Cross River gorilla of Cameroon and Nigeria.

The worst hot spots are in southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, and Madagascar, the report said.

-- ANDREW C. REVKIN

On our riverboat trip, the land on the northern, non-park side of the river was nearly completely clear-cut, and patches of the supposedly protected park were razed as well. Biruté Galdikas, the Jane Goodall of orangutans, who established the main research camp in Tanjung Puting (in southern Borneo), in 1971, warned earlier this year that the orangutan is being driven to extinction.

This is, or should be, the business of human beings everywhere. We all know the causes—economic growth, population pressure, and, in central Africa, war. Tourism of the kind being encouraged in northern Rwanda and Borneo, and the activism of Western groups, simply won’t counteract these larger forces in developing countries. Deforestation was discussed last week at a meeting of forty environment ministers near Jakarta (Indonesia recently suggested that rich countries should pay poor countries not to cut down their forests), and it should be on the agenda when the United Nations holds its climate-change conference in December, in Bali, just across the Java Sea from the orangutans of Borneo.

The passing from the world of our closest relatives is not a political tragedy, like Burma; it is not a humanitarian nightmare, like Darfur; it is not an ideological disaster, like Iraq. All the same, it makes me unspeakably sad. How lonely to inhabit the planet without that familiar and alien gaze to keep us company. The fact that magnificent, uncomprehending, essentially helpless animals have to pay the ultimate price for our indifference seems at times like a worse crime than anything human beings do to one another. Our belated awakening to the distant prospect of collective suicide known as global warming might be the last chance to prevent the more imminent crime of kin-killing.

-- GEORGE PACKER

Some Neanderthals were probably redheads, a DNA study has shown.

A team reports in the journal Science that it extracted DNA from the remains of two Neanderthals and retrieved part of an important gene called MC1R.

In modern people, a change - or mutation - in this gene causes red hair, but, until now, no one knew what hair colour our extinct relatives had.

By analysing a version of the gene in Neanderthals, the scientists found that they also have sported fiery locks.

-- PAUL RINCON

The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as "upright apes."

Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.

In other words, "the other great apes we see now, such as chimps or gorillas or orangutans, might have descended from human-like ancestors," researcher Aaron Filler, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and medical director at Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, told LiveScience.

Filler analyzed how the spine was assembled in more than 250 living and extinct mammalian species, with some bones dating up to 220 million years old.

He discovered a series of changes that suggest walking upright — and not with our knuckles — might actually have been the norm for the ancestors of today's great apes.

-- CHARLES Q. CHOI

GOP Pols Again Give Blacks the Finger

You have to pity the Republican presidential candidates for their "scheduling conflicts."

In recent weeks these peripatetic wannabes have crisscrossed the country speaking to "Value Voters," Jewish voters and even at a candidates forum in Wyoming, a state where there are more elk than voters. But faced again with having to appear in the same room with Negro . . . er, African American voters, most of the GOP frontrunners say they have to be elsewhere this coming Sunday, forcing the Congressional Black Caucus Institute to postpone a debate on Faux News.

No new date has been set – and there is a possibility than none will be.

Now the last time this puh-thetic excuse making came up, I was barraged with excuses from commenters who actually were sympathetic to these scoundrels.

Most noted that blacks don't vote for Republicans anyway, so why not pencil in an appearance at a potluck supper at a fire hall in Utah? Then there were the logic impaired commenters who argued that black politicians don't try to attract white voters, so why should white politicians . . . You get their drift.

Well, telling a pretty good chunk of the electorate (Hispanics, too) that they're worthless is all you really need to know about what kind of fire burns within these guys, or in the case of Fred Thompson, sputters.

As I have written before, you can talk around the issue all day, but the reason that the Republican Party can fashion attractive platforms on, say, taxes but not minority issues is that the party's base just doesn't like blacks because, in their view, they want stuff that they haven't "earned." (Karl Rove is a conspicuous exception, but even he was marginalized on the issue of reaching out to blacks and Hispanics.)

This does not mean that Republicans are a bunch of racists in the David Duke mold. Repeat: They’re not racists! Okay? But they are opposed to leveling the playing field in employment, housing, education and other areas where minority Americans continue to be disenfranchised and want a voice in who the next president will be.

And that is irredeemably sad.

Is CCC Again Giving Listeners the Finger?

For a music head like myself, there is nothing quite as liberating as not having to listen to commercial radio – which more often than not means stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, a thuggishly monopolistic media conglomerate with a conservative political streak.

Clear Channel owns over 1,100 AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, 11 satellite radio channels and more than 30 television stations in the U.S. -- and four FM stations in Philadelphia alone -- although that number probably will go up by the time you finish reading this.

I don’t have to listen to Clear Channel because I webstream music from non-commercial stations, but most folks are not so lucky and are stuck with having to listen to what the nannies at Clear Channel insist that they listen to.

For Clear Channel's classic rock stations, that apparently does not include cuts from Magic, Bruce Springsteen’s No. 1 gadzillion-copy selling album. The reason, according to Faux News, is that Clear Channel doesn't want cuts from the singles-rich album diluting all of the Springsteen oldies that are staples of class rock.

It apparently even has banned two of the softer tracks from Magic from its so-called "lite" stations.

Not so fast there, says blogger Southern Beale, who notes that Clear Channel "would put the devil himself on heavy rotation if they thought it would make them money."

Beale notes that some Clear Channel stations are playing the Boss's latest album and acknowledges that while the conglomerate throws its weight around -- like banning certain songs post-9/11 and those Dixie Chicks altogether, as well as promoting pro-Iraq war demonstrations -- she scoffs at the notion that there's any kind of political agenda in this particular instance.

The big question, she says:

"[I]s should we allow any corporation to have so much control over the public airwaves that they could single-handedly banish an artist from being heard on over 1,000 radio stations across the country for any reason? Clear Channel’s corporate office claims their radio programming reaches more than 110 million listeners every week. There are 300 million people in this country. Should we allow one corporation to control what over a third of the country hears at any given time? Shouldn’t there be a little more, you know, competition than that? A little more diversity in the "marketplace of ideas"?

Of course there should be. But I won't be listening.

Another Update on the Torture Debate

By Senator Arlen Specter's calculus, the inextricably intertwined issues of the Bush administration's embrace of torture and whether Michael Mukasey should be confirmed as the successor to the attorney general who issued secret legal opinions endorsing its use comes down to this:

If Mukasey says that waterboarding is torture and if torture is illegal then some CIA agents could get sued.

Now Specter is about as infuriating as any senator on Capitol Hill, legendarily infamous for his chameleon-like behavior, including threats to do the right thing followed by back-room deal making that is the wrong thing. But in this instance the moderate conservative who the hell knows that he is Republican is dead on.

So this is what it comes down to, America:

The nominee to replace Alberto Gonzalez will stand not on principle (and for all we know he may be impaired in that respect) because it is more important to save a few CIA asses (although not Valerie Plame's).

By all rights the Mukasey nomination should be as dead as a beaten and bloody Abu Ghraib detainee. But my prediction is that he'll be appproved because principle always is in short supply inside the Beltway and is notably hard to find these days.

Vietnam & Iraq: Bitter Lessons of Backing The Right Horse In the Wrong War

Eisenhower with Diem and an Abu Ghraib moment in Vietnam

Three weeks before the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, another assassination of a president occurred halfway around the world -- the CIA-backed murder of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

That assassination 44 years ago today is a mere historic footnote, but it helped propel the U.S. into a decade-long quagmire that took 58,000 American lives and in some respects was a template for another failed war that shows no signs of ending. The similarities include an attempt to impose democracy on a society that is unprepared for it and divided along sectarian lines, as well as propping up a corrupt regime more focused on power mongering than national reconciliation.

Kennedy was very much a free-thinking liberal, but he always put America's interests first.

As a young congressman, he had been a lonely voice in condemning U.S. military aid to colonialist France in its fight against the Communist Viet Minh Army in what was then called Indochina.

In April 1954, a few weeks before the French were expelled from Dien Bien Phu by the Viet Minh, Kennedy declared on the floor of the House:

"To pour men, material and money into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile . . . no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere, an enemy of the people, which had the sympathy and the covert support of the people."

Nevertheless, Kennedy rejected the 1954 Geneva Accords, which called for reuniting the Communist North with the U.S.-backed South, and believed that South Vietnam could not only survive but prosper as a democracy, and most importantly as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, with American moral and financial support.

Only a few weeks into his administration, Kennedy learned the hard way that meddling in another country's affairs could backfire after approving the disastrous CIA-backed Bay of Pigs Invasion against Fidel Castro. He vowed that the U.S. would not face similar humiliation in Vietnam.

Like Kennedy, Ngo Dinh Diem was a Roman Catholic, but South Vietnam’s first president was not exactly a poster boy for democracy.

As the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam revealed, intelligence reports showed that Diem was an autocrat whose policies were alienating the Buddhist majority and helping the Communists, and that his hold on power was shaky.

Within weeks after the Cuba disaster, Kennedy acknowledged that pats on the back and America greenbacks weren't enough when he ordered 400 Special Forces troops to Vietnam and another 100 advisers to help train up the South Vietnamese military, as well as instituting a clandestine war against the Viet Minh and Viet Cong guerillas in both the South and North and neighboring Laos.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited Vietnam shortly thereafter and met with Diem, calling him the "Churchill of Southeast Asia" in public but confiding to Kennedy in private that the U.S. would have to commit to further military action or get rid of Diem.

Kennedy rejected Diem's calls for a major infusion of American troops and air support, but the number of Special Forces and advisors grew steadily, as did the clandestine campaign, and by 1963 there were 16,000 Americans in-country and U.S. deaths were climbing into the hundreds.

By the summer of 1963, something had to give.

Led by the president's corrupt brother Nhu and sister-in-law, the flamboyant Madame Nhu, aka the "Dragon Lady," the Diem regime was waging open warfare against South Vietnam's Buddhist majority. They made mass arrests and closed schools, prompting demonstrations, including one during which a monk set himself on fire on a crowded Saigon street, a public relations disaster in the States and abroad not unlike the backlash provoked by images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq four decades later.

Sympathetic Kennedy biographers were to write that Diem's subsequent assassination was not in the script, but that appears to not have been the case because the president was not only privy to intimations that Diem was to be disposed of with U.S. help, but gave it his tacit approval.

Diem was advised by the U.S. to remove the Nhus from power but resisted. Then in August 1963, word reached Washington that a coup attempt was being planned against Diem and Nhu with the help of a CIA officer. Kennedy is said to have responded by declaring that there was "no turning back."

The first attempt was stillborn, but on November 1, Vietnamese Army soldiers loyal to a group of anti-Diem generals moved on the presidential palace, confronted Diem, demanded that he and the Nhus resign and offered them safe exit from the country. Diem called U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for help, but Lodge replied that the U.S. could take no action.

Diem and Nhu escaped through a secret tunnel under the palace and made their way to the Chinese district of Saigon where they were captured and killed under still murky circumstances.

No federal law then or now criminalizes U.S. involvement in the assassination of a foreign official. While the involvement of the CIA in and White House approval of the plot against Diem may have been questionable, it was not illegal. Nor was his death the end of the U.S.'s problems.

Upon learning of the assassination, Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said, "I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid." The North Vietnamese Politburo was more explicit, predicting:

"The consequences of the 1 November coup d' état will be contrary to the calculations of the U.S. imperialists . . . Diem was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Diem. Diem was one of the most competent lackeys of the U.S. imperialists . . . Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d' état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last."

Ho and his advisors understood what Kennedy and his advisors did not: Diem had been a powerful if unpleasant bulwark against Communism.

South Vietnam would never have another leader as strong nor a government as stable, and a succession of coups took place during the years after his death as the U.S. was inextricably drawn deeper and deeper into the fight against the Communists.

The U.S. had, in a sense, backed the right horse in the wrong war, and blind to the quagmire that awaited it, then helped kill the horse. The consequences, which may well have been the same had Diem continued to rule, included an end to the Democratic hegemony in Washington, over 58,000 American deaths and years of recriminations over a "lost" war.

The similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq wars can be overstated, and the similarities between Diem and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are mostly incidental. But another political hegemony is ending in Washington primarily because of a wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and America has plunged into a new era of recrimination.

Based in part on an article by Peter Kross
in the October 2004 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

Beautiful Photographs du Jour

Love it or hate it, New York's subway system is the largest
in the world -- and is celebrating its 103rd anniversary.

Magnum Photos by (top) Richard Klaver (1976)
And Bruce Davidson (1980)

Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Afghan girls at first volleyball tourney since Taliban overthrow

We're in recurring nightmare territory here. Today's Zogby poll shows more than half of voters would support a military strike to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and believe it likely the U.S. will do so before next year's election.

On PBS' News Hour, normally an oasis of rationality in the TV news desert, we have a solemn debate about attacking Iran between Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and Norman Podhoretz, the Neo-Con relic Rudy Giuliani is propping up to prove he is a true conservative.

When Zakaria points out we have used deterrence and containment against nuclear threats from China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, Podhoretz accuses him of "an irresponsible complacency . . . comparable to the denial in the early '30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough."

If Zakaria's informed rationality and Podhoretz's apocalyptic drool are given equal weight as two sides of the argument, we may be headed for another Iraq, propelled by the same political and media cowardice of five years ago.

-- ROBERT STEIN

It would hardly be surprising if some folks in the military started wondering whether it was really worth risking their lives to protect the freedoms of people who seem to hate them and the cultural milieu out of which the soldiers came. Especially those who have been exposed to the fever swamp of the comment section of some leading left-liberal blogs.

Maintaining civilian control of the military is a two way street. If the military is being Malkinized, maybe the Kosites of the world will find an explanation by looking at themselves in the mirror.

-- PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE

I have been saying for the last year and see no reason to stop saying that the change that is occurring among evangelicals is most fundamentally a spiritual shift. Evangelicals have been part of the Great Sellout for the last eight years - worshipping at the altar of George W. Bush. They have seen what happens when Jesus is sold out for politics. I don't see them rushing back anytime soon.

-- DAVID KUO

At some point, we have to do an honest cost-benefit analysis for criminalizing marijuana. We jail tens of thousands of people and create legal burdens for hundreds of thousands more every year for using or selling a weed that grows almost everywhere. It puts an equal burden on law enforcement, courts, and the penal system. In exchange, we get a dubious effect on usage for a drug that has the same addictive and intoxicating effects as alcohol.

Some will argue that marijuana serves as a gateway drug to more destructive substances, and that much is true. Many things act as gateways to harder drug use: abuse, poverty, boredom, and peer pressure, and especially alcohol, which is almost always a gateway to marijuana. Prohibition didn't do much about that gateway drug, and decades of marijuana prohibition isn't doing much for that one either -- and marijuana might at least have a claim to be medicinal.

-- ED MORRISSEY

The controversy over Baltimore County (Maryland) Circuit Judge Susan M. Souder's decision to throw out the testimony of a fingerprint analyst in a death penalty trial hasn't stopped. Her opinion has reached universities, judicial chambers and evidence labs across the country. But it's the National Academy of Sciences review of the forensic science field now under way that could have real implications for analysis of fingerprints, hair and other physical evidence - and their use in criminal trials nationwide.

The academy's Committee on Science, Technology and the Law should expedite its review and help settle an ongoing dispute over the supposed infallibility of fingerprint analysis, a claim that critics contend is based on "junk science."

In her recent ruling, Judge Souder found the traditional method of fingerprint analysis to be "a subjective, untested, unverifiable identification procedure that purports to be infallible."

-- THE BALTIMORE SUN

The nation’s top official for consumer product safety has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation intended to strengthen the agency, which polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

-- STEPHEN LABATON

Is it a good thing that only 52% of Maryland's black male athletes graduate? No. But the real tragedy is that only 54% of Maryland's black male students graduate. We should fix that problem first-- by improving public education so that students from poor and minority backgrounds come to college with the tools they need to succeed-- and see if the athletic graduation rates don't take care of themselves.

But it's easy to write self-righteous editorials blasting high-profile sports programs for their academic failings, while fixing the class and race problems of American education will cost real money, and require actual work. And nobody wants that.

-- CHAD ORZEL

Photograph by The Associated Press