Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Reporter Lawrence Kaplan recently spent time in Iraq for the New Republic. Among the things he witnessed was this:

On the day the preliminary results of December’s elections were announced, [Iraq’s Prime Minister Ibrahim] Jafari invites the election commissioners for dinner. The liberal activist Mustafa Al Kadhimiy wrangles two invitations…

As a television in the corner of the room conveys images of the carnage outside, Jafari admits to being partial to the works of Noam Chomsky. Why won’t Chomsky come to Iraq? he asks.

I think it’s safe to say that—of all the possible futures the Bush administration may have considered when they invaded Iraq—one thing they didn’t anticipate was ending up with a Chomsky fan as prime minister.

What White House staffer wrote a memo saying this?

No written communications from the White House to the Departments — all information about the program would be transmitted verbally… documents prepared would not indicate White House involvement in any way.

That was by Fred Malek, during the Nixon administration. His official title was “Special Assistant to the President.”

Malek was writing to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff, about Nixon’s “responsiveness program.” This was a scheme to politicize as much of the federal government as possible in support of Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. As the memo shows, Malek was extremely concerned that the program not be traced back to the White House. Unfortunately for Nixon, it was discovered and investigated as part of Watergate. (More details can be found in a recent Colbert King column.)

So, what’s Malek doing these days?

Well, he’s long been an influential member of the Republican establishment. (His rise was only slightly slowed when it turned out he’d carried out an order by Nixon to tally the number of Jewish staffers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in search of a “Jewish cabal.”)

And as Scooter Libby’s new website shows, Malek is part of the Libby Defense Fund’s “Advisory Committee.”

Which raises a natural question:

Why does Scooter Libby want the support of a political hatchetman from the Nixon administration who not only engaged in extremely unsavory activities, but then was caught trying to cover them up?

Is it because Fred Malek has completely changed since 1972, and Libby’s completely innocent, so they can have long discussions about the importance of ethics in governmental service?

Or…is Libby hoping for advice from Malek on how to avoid the mistakes he made?

In any case, the hubris of the Republican machine is flabbergasting. Again, Malek was Special Assistant to the President…while Libby, in addition to being Cheney’s Chief of Staff, held the title of “Assistant to the President.”

You’d think—just for the sake of PR—they’d want to keep Libby away from predecessors who’d done horrible things for presidents who later had to resign to escape impeachment. But apparently, no.

BONUS FOOTAGE: It takes a special kind of man to write a memo saying “be sure not to write anything down.”

As you may know, a new Turkish movie called The Valley of the Wolves—Iraq is setting box office records there. Apparently it portrays America in Iraq as monstrous, massacring civilians and removing prisoners’ organs for patients in the U.S., Israel and England.

Dispiriting. But what really caught my eye was this section of a recent Knight-Ridder story (via):

Yusuf Kanli, the editor in chief of the Turkish Daily News, said the film is grounded in a real event known as the “bag incident,” which cemented the movie’s popularity in Turkey.

“Abu Ghraib is a deep wound, but it’s war, and war is never clean,” Kanli said. “But what happened in July 2003 can never be forgotten by any Turk.”

In that incident, U.S. troops arrested 11 Turkish special-forces officers in northern Iraq and walked them from their headquarters with bags over their heads. It was considered a bitter betrayal by a trusted ally. Turkish newspapers dubbed it the “Rambo Crisis.” Recent opinion polls rank it as the most humiliating moment in Turkish history.

What interests me about this is not only did I have no opinion about the “bag incident,” I had NEVER EVEN HEARD OF IT.

In other words, it’s possible for America to do things to other countries that they consider “the most humiliating moment” in their history…and even anti-American America-haters like myself can’t be bothered simply to know it happened.

This is one of the true perks of power: being able to get away with complete ignorance about other people. Generally speaking, for countries as well as individuals, the more power you have the stupider you are. If you have gigantic amounts of power, you can get away with knowing nothing whatsoever. George Bush George Bush George Bush.

I’m curious to know if others knew more or less than me about the bag incident. (Well, more or the same; you couldn’t really have known less.) If you care to, you can comment on my site here.

UPDATE: It turns out it’s not just me. Few other people commenting had heard of this, and even those who had mostly didn’t know its significance.

Perhaps you remember George Bush and Tony Blair used to get mad at Al Jazeera for broadcasting tapes of bin Laden, on the grounds the tapes might include secret messages for his minions.

In light of that, here’s an interesting slice of 1953 history from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The “Roosevelt” it refers to is Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy). He’d been sent to Iran by the CIA in order to organize the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government:

Roosevelt told the Shah that he was in Iran on behalf of the American and British secret services, and that this would be confirmed by a code word the Shah would be able to hear on the BBC the next night. Churchill had arranged that the BBC would end its broadcast day by saying not “It is now midnight,” as usual, but “It is now exactly midnight.”

This makes me wonder two things:

1. When reporting on the Bush/Blair complaints, did the BBC mention this part of its own history—i.e., happily facilitating the overthrow of a government in a Muslim country?

2. Is the BBC still doing this kind of thing?

EXTRA CREDIT: In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Sullivan liked to call the BBC the “Baghdad Broadcasting Company” because it was “actively cooperating with Saddam.”

Below our gracious host posted a BBC story about a new leaked memo from the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The memo supposedly records a Bush-Blair White House summit on January 31, 2003, at which they (among other things) agreed on war whether or not they got a second UN resolution.

Is the memo real, and an accurate depiction of events? Well, Bush and Blair definitely did meet on January 31. And something else the memo says is that Bush told Blair “that the US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and threaten.”

Now, perhaps you remember the leaked email from the NSA about its plans to bug the members of the UN Security Council:

…the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc – the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals…

Again, the date of the Bush-Blair meeting was January 31, 2003.

The date of the leaked NSA email? January 31, 2003.

Huh.