Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Big news!

Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death

An Iraqi special tribunal today convicted Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging…

As you’d expect in an industry devoted to bringing crucial information to as wide an audience as possible, out of the thousands of English-language stories on the verdict, only one (from the United Arab Emirates), has bothered mentioning this:

Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials…his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim…

Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim…

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched…Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents…

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam’s apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said…

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives…during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy…

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup…the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq’s communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down…the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End…

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq’s armed forces…the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam’s ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America’s one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

This is of course how it should be, because all that matters in life is what’s happened within the last twelve seconds.

There are stupid people everywhere on earth. In most countries they quietly putter their lives away, trying to grow mangos in Nova Scotia and getting into occasional bar fights with people who tell them Jean-Luc Picard isn’t a real person.

What’s unique about 21st century America is that we have a gigantic industry devoted to finding these people and giving them jobs opining about politics. “Can’t tie your own shoes?” read the want ads. “Believe two plus two equals nine, and willing to say so in public? Apply today for a career in the Right Wing Media!”

Thus there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of these cretins toiling away in the subsidized vineyards, making their Idiot Wine. But I think we need to stop today and salute Jim Geraghty of National Review, who has produced perhaps the Stupidest Vintage ever.

Here’s why:

As we’ve known since the early nineties, Iraq got close to building a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Gulf War. The shortest estimates are that Iraq would have needed perhaps another year (without the sanctions imposed in August, 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait).

After the Gulf War, however, the Iraqi nuclear program was destroyed by the IAEA and never reconstituted. During this time the IAEA required Iraq to explain in detail exactly what their pre-91 nuclear program achieved. Copies of these documents were given to the U.N. on repeated occasions, including in fall, 2002. Before any were publicly released, sensitive information about weapon design, etc. was excised.

After our newest war huge numbers of Iraqi government documents were captured. America’s right pushed for them to be publicly released online. (They believed the documents would hold overlooked clues to Saddam’s Chamber of Secrets hiding his WMD and valentines from Osama.)

Now the New York Times has reported that the uncensored versions of the nuclear documents were accidentally included in the online release:

…the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb…

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Here’s where Jim Geraghty and his Brain The Size Of A Grain Of Rice come in. In a post at National Review, he asks:

I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

Wow, that’s AN EXCITING ALL-CAPS QUESTION.

Let’s give it AN EXCITING ALL-CAPS ANSWER:

NO.

What’s confused Mr. Grain of Rice Brain, of course, is the difference between what Iraq had done before the Gulf War in 1991 and twelve years later before the recent war.

Now, making this mistake is remarkably stupid to start with. Still, you can imagine that someone who knows nothing whatsoever about the subject could do so. Where Jim “My Brain Weighs Eight Milligrams” Geraghty really outdoes himself is going ahead and writing something about it. Because doing so required him to consider whether it was more likely that all these things were true —

1. The CIA spent $1 billion without finding any trace of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

2. The New York Times discovered Iraq actually had a nuclear weapons program a year away from a bomb and decided to reveal it in an ambiguously-worded sentence in paragraph 14 of a story about something else.

3. The Bush administration knows about this program and has modestly decided not to say anything about it.

— or whether it was more likely he’d misunderstood something. And then decide it was the former.

DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN THAT’S STUPID

Even better, he then takes the stupid foundation and builds a giant Mansion of Dumb on top of it. (Doesn’t this incredible revelation mean that Joe Wilson has been proven completely wrong?!???)

But again, we shouldn’t blame Mr. Geraghty. He’s doing the best he can with his three neurons. In other times and places he would have lived a happy, simple life, whiling away the hours trying to milk chickens. The responsibility truly lies with the owners of National Review, who’ve plucked him out of his natural habitat.

In other words, it’s the puppet-masters who matter, not the puppets. Although given Mr. Geraghty’s performance here, that analogy is an insult to the intelligence of puppets.

EXTRA BONUS STUPID: While Jim Geraghty is Patient Zero, the Idiot Virus has spread here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and surely millions of other places thanks to this.

As the clock winds down to the midterm elections, Dennis Perrin points out we shouldn’t believe much if anything will change if Democrats are running Congress. In a three-part series of bleakness, he provides his own personal political history here and here, and then gloomily winds it up here.

Paul Burgess, former Bush speechwriter, has been getting some attention for this recent friendly op-ed:

Friends, neighbors, and countrymen of the Left: I hate your lying guts

I never used to feel hatred for people such as Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, or other pop-culture notables who, for example, sing the praises of Central American dictators while calling President Bush the greatest terrorist on earth. I do now…

I have also grown to hate certain people of genuine accomplishment like Ted Turner, who, by his own contention, cannot make up his mind which side of the terror war he is on…

I now hate Howard Dean, the elected leader of the Democrats, who, by repeatedly stating his conviction that we won’t win in Iraq, bets his party’s future on our nation’s defeat.

I hate the Democrats who, in support of this strategy, spout lie after lie.

This is obviously notable for the view it gives us into the, uh, emotional state of the Bush administration.

But there’s something else worth pointing out too. Let’s take a look at one paragraph again:

I never used to feel hatred for people such as Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, or other pop-culture notables who, for example, sing the praises of Central American dictators while calling President Bush the greatest terrorist on earth.

The “dictator” Burgess has in mind is obviously Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. (An article about Sheehan’s January visit to Venezuela is here.)

And what’s funny about this, and makes me think we have the worst-run empire in history, is that:

1. According to this op-ed, Paul Burgess was “director of foreign-policy speechwriting at the White House.”

2. VENEZUELA IS IN SOUTH AMERICA

Congratulations to Bob for yet another nice review of Prisoner of Trebekistan…this time in a tiny, obscure publication called the New York Times:

Harris has been, among other things, a stand-up comic, and it shows in his book, in lively phrases and an ear for the incongruous…He is a skilled storyteller, and the play-by-play he provides for his various matches pulls you in like a good sports story.

The one strange thing is the reviewer is disappointed that, as presented in Trebekistan and Ken Jennings’ book (reviewed at the same time), “Trebek and his staff are without flaw.” Bob makes it clear contestants can’t say much about the people running Jeopardy! because they barely meet them. There are actual reasons for this; i.e., to prevent accusations of collusion and fraud. It would be a problem for the show if during his winning streak Jennings had been going on luxurious Mediterranean cruises with Trebek and the people who write the clues.