Covering Their Behinds, II

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As I keyboard Keith Olbermann is delivering another of his blistering special comments, and I’m not even going to try to condense it. As soon as it’s online I’ll link to it. But the basic subject is Bush’s failures to prevent the September 11 attacks.

And through it all was threaded this bit from the Faux Nooz interview with President Clinton:

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

This is something I’ve been saying since the spring of 2002, when Newsweek, Time, and other news sources first reported that the outgoing Clinton Administration had warned the Bushies about bin Laden, but the Bushies did nothing. This is from the May 27, 2002 issue of Newsweek [emphasis added]:

By the end of the Clinton administration, the then national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become “totally preoccupied” with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: “You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other.” Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq.

John Ashcroft seemed particularly eager to set a new agenda. In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge in Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft laid out his priorities for Freeh, another Clinton holdover (though no friend of the ex-president’s), “basically violent crime and drugs,” recalls one participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about terror and counterterrorism. “Ashcroft didn’t want to hear about it,” says a former senior law-enforcement official. (A Justice Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying that in May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was his “highest priority.”) [Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, “What Went Wrong,” Newsweek, May 27, 2002]

As Glenn Greenwald documents, Republicans in general were sublimely unconcerned about Islamic terrorism during the 2000 election campaign. But even after Sandy Berger’s warnings, the Bush Administration shoved al Qaeda off their plates. For example, the Hart-Rudman commission report on terrorism was released in February 2001 — and ignored. From a Buzzflash interview with Sen. Gary Hart:

HART: Our commission did not have the resources to give detailed projections as to how, when and where. But the fact is that for two years we had said this was going to happen, and one major step that needed to be taken was to coordinate existing federal assets, particularly our border control agencies — Coast Guards, Customs and Border Patrol, and Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We were very explicit about that, and we had been. And that was our first recommendation to the President. And it was that failure to act — to begin to do that — that I think permitted this event to happen. No one believes in absolute security. But the goal is to make it as difficult for the attackers as possible, and we had not done that. There had been no — to my knowledge — no major step taken by this administration in the period between January and September to stop these attacks, including coordinating the databases and communication systems of the Board of Control Agency and the INS. Everybody since 9/11 that’s looked at the situation has said the porousness of that system is what permitted these people to do what they did. And the question is: what, if anything, did the administration do between January 31st and September the 11th? And the answer is: not very much.

I hope you won’t mind me linking to this little nugget again — a CNN transcript from April 30, 2001:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.”

still, Secretary of State Colin Powell says efforts to fight global terrorism will remain consistent.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POWELL: The results are clear: state sponsors of terrorism are increasingly isolated; terrorist groups on under growing pressure. Terrorists are being brought to justice, we will not let up. But we must also be aware of the nature of the threat before us. Terrorism is a persistent disease.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WOODRUFF: The secretary of state did go on to say that South Asia, particularly Afghanistan, continues to be the focal point for terrorism that is directed against the United States.

Notice he didn’t say Iraq.

And let’s not forget the anecdote from Ron Suskind’s book, The One Perfect Solution. From a review:

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Let’s go back to the Newsweek article from 2002:

While Bush may have a point in saying he heard no specific threat, other aspects of the administration’s story weren’t holding up. Last week Rice declared, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center… All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking”; in other words, using passenger jets as hostages. In fact, the government had ample reason to believe that Al Qaeda was no longer interested in traditional terror. The CIA had learned as early as 1995 that Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of ’93 WTC plotter Ramzi Yousef, had talked about plunging an airliner into the CIA building. Italian authorities had warned of a similar bid at last June’s Genoa summit of the G8 leaders–and they ringed the area with surface-to-air missiles, with CIA cooperation. …

… It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

And while most of the current controversy is about what America didn’t do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn’t take the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a weak image abroad. The day after the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole, the then candidate Bush said “there must be a consequence.” An FBI document dated January 26, 2001–six days after Bush took office–shows that authorities believed they had clear evidence tying the bombers to Al Qaeda. Yet the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own.

By the time the Bushies did get serious and gear up against Al Qaeda, it was too late. The administration says a long process of revamping the strategy against Al Qaeda culminated–in a supreme irony–on Sept. 10, when the directive reached Rice’s desk for Bush’s signature. And yet even then there were questions about how serious the administration really was. The new strategy called for little more aggressive action than Clinton had adopted: arming and financing anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan. And on the same day, Ashcroft submitted his budget request, barely mentioning counterterrorism.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who with Republican Sen. Jon Kyl had sent a copy of draft legislation on counterterrorism and homeland defense to Cheney’s office on July 20, also heard some news that day. Feinstein was told by the veep’s top aide, “Scooter” Libby, as Feinstein described it to NEWSWEEK, “that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material.”

Most of the facts about the Bush Administration’s inattention to warnings have been in the public record since 2002. Yet it’s still controversial, an act of courage, to talk about it in public.

Crooks & Liars has Keith Olbermann’s comments. Highlights:

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War — though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this President.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11th, 2001 — or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the Executive. …

… The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton…but by the same people who got you elected President.

Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it– we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us “safe” ever since — a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush — you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition, Sir, of cowardice.

I’m sure the bleating and whining from the Right about the awful liberal media have already started.

I have compared Clinton’s and Bush’s pre-9/11 terrorism policies many times before, most recently here. I have never claimed that Clinton did everything he might have done to stop bin Laden, but he did a damn lot more than Bush did. And based on their record, the Bushies are the last people on the planet who ought to be taken seriously on terrorism. Yet they thump their chests and declare that they, and only they, have the cojones to keep the nation safe from terrorism. And they are taken seriously.

The Bush Administration didn’t keep the nation safe from terrorism. Spin though they may, that’s as bare-assed a fact as you’re likely to find anywhere on this planet.

See also: Juan Cole’s commentary on the Clinton interview. Glenn Greenwald comments here and here.

Covering Their Behinds

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It’s National Rebuttal Day on the Right. The White House is rebutting the National Intelligence Estimate from April that came to public attention yesterday, and the Right Blogosphere is rebutting the Bill Clinton interview on Faux Nooz.

Let’s start with the White House. Richard Serrano writes for the Los Angeles Times:

The White House on Sunday sharply disagreed with a new U.S. intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq is encouraging global terrorism, as Bush administration officials stressed that anti-American fervor in the Muslim world began long before the Sept. 11 attacks. …

… But the White House view, according to Watkins, is that much of the radicals’ rage at the United States and Israel goes back generations and is not linked to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

“Their hatred for freedom and liberty did not develop overnight,” Watkins said. “Those seeds were planted decades ago.”

Let’s get this straight — Before the invasion they blithely ignored Iraq’s violent history and warnings that an invasion could have nasty consequences, in favor of their candy-and-flowers fantasies. But now that the Bushies need an excuse they get interested in history.

He said the administration had sought in Iraq to root out hotbeds of terrorism before they grew. “Instead of waiting while they plot and plan attacks to kill innocent Americans, the United States has taken the initiative to fight back,” Watkins said.

An argument that does not, in fact, rebut the findings of the NIE — that our thrashing around in Iraq is growing extremism rather than reducing it. Intentions are irrelevant.

And I say it’s the War on Extremism, not the War on Terror. Let’s get the name straight.

Payson at Think Progress posts a video of a Bush Press Conference in which the President made claims that were directly opposite what the NIE said. The press conference was in August; the NIE was handed to Bush in April.

Speaking of excuses and intentions, at Slate Michael Kinsley discusses Bush’s ever-shifting explanations regarding “victory” in Iraq. You’ll enjoy this one.

Jeffrey Sachs points out that, assuming Bush’s intention was to control the world’s oil supply, he’s missing the bigger picture.

It is ironic that an administration fixated on the risks of Middle East oil has chosen to spend hundreds of billions – potentially trillions – of dollars to pursue unsuccessful military approaches to problems that can and should be solved at vastly lower cost, through R&D, regulation, and market incentives. The biggest energy crisis of all, it seems, involves the misdirected energy of a US foreign policy built on war rather than scientific discovery and technological progress.


Max Hastings explains why the “struggles against Islamic fundamentalism” are unwinnable as long as Bush and Blair are running the show. It’s going to take new leadership (dare we say, regime change?) before any realistic solutions to the Iraq problem will be found.

In the “poor baby” department — at WaPo, Peter Baker writes that President Bush really, really, really does feel “anguish” over the loss of American soldiers and that all the public bravado is an act. To which I point out that nobody can fake sincerity better than a psychopath.

And in the “they shoulda seen this coming” department — Peter Spiegel writes at the Los Angeles Times that the Army warned Rumsfeld it is billions of dollars short of what it needs.

The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

I’ll move on to the Clinton rebuttals in the next post.

Punctuate This

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So if the death and bloodshed in Iraq is just a comma, what punctuation mark is George W. Bush?

I say he’s a colon (:). But some say that in his wild and crazy youth, he was an asterisk (*). As in:

    Bush joined the Texas Air Guard
    Among the clouds to frisk.
    He wouldn’t go to Vietnam
    His little asterisk.

It sorta rhymes.

News That Isn’t News

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Karen DeYoung writes in the Washington Post:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Mark Mazzetti writes for the New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

Like they needed an NIE to figure that out. The White House is still in denial mode, of course.

From DeYoung’s and Mazzetti’s articles, it seems the NIE came to the same general conclusions as the experts consulted in James Fallows’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on national security. I blogged about this article here, here, and here, and probably elsewhere.

In a nutshell: Since September 11, al Qaeda has been scattered around the globe and has become more diffuse, less organized. That’s good and bad; Fallows’s article argues that at the moment the old al Qaeda organization has lost the operational capability to pull off Big Deal attacks such as those of September 11. On the other hand, the myriad independent cells springing up around the globe are harder to track and perfectly capable of nasty little operations such as the London subway bombings.

Still, in some ways we could be making real progress against Islamic terrorism were it not for the war in Iraq. The Fallows, Marzzetti, and DeYoung articles all state plainly that Iraq is growing the threat of terrorism against the United States, not reducing it. DeYoung writes,

According to officials familiar with the document, it describes the situation in Iraq as promoting the spread of radical Islam by providing a focal point, with constant reinforcement of an anti-American message for disaffected Muslims. The Web sites provide a narrative of a war with frequent victories for the insurgents, and describe an occupation that they say regularly targets Islam and its adherents. They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Muslims wherever they are to take up arms against the “Crusaders” on behalf of Iraq.

Both Bush and bin Laden now consistently describe the Iraq war as the “central front” of the global war, and both are depending on victory there to set the direction of future struggles far afield. Although intelligence officials believe bin Laden’s ability to direct major terrorist operations has been greatly diminished, his status as the ideological leader of a global movement that appeals to disaffected Muslims has vastly increased. …

…The latest terrorism assessment paints a portrait of a global war in which Iraq is less the central front of actual combat than a unifying battle cry for disparate extremist groups and even individuals. “It is just those kinetic actions that lead to the radicalization of others,” a senior counterterrorism official said earlier this summer. “Surgical strikes? Nothing is surgical about military operations. They tend to have impacts, affects.”

Another problem that Fallows’s experts discussed was the misallocation of resources caused by our focus on Iraq. For example, Fallows writes,

When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Last I heard, we’re dumping $1.5 billion in Iraq every week. I suspect that money could be put to better use than pissing people off.

Rightie bloggers are in full-bore pooh-pooh mode. Captain Ed writes,

It makes the classic logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation, and the basic premise can easily be dismissed with a reminder of some basic facts.

Ed then crashes ahead with his “basic facts” without noticing that they support the NIE conclusions.

First and foremost, Islamist radicalism didn’t just start expanding in 2003. The most massive expansion of Islamist radicalism came after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the Islamists defeated one of the world’s superpowers. Shortly afterwards, the staging of American forces in Saudi Arabia to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait created the most significant impulse for the expansion of organized Islamist radicalism and led directly to the formation of al-Qaeda. It put the US in Wahhabi jihadist crosshairs for the first time.

Righties have a weird inability to grasp large concepts. Islamic radicalism was inflamed when the non-Muslim Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The deployment of non-Muslim Americans in the Middle East in 1990 brought about the formation of al Qaeda. More non-Muslims invading Iraq in 2003 got ’em all whipped up even more. One might conclude that Muslim in the Middle East get really, really pissed off when non-Muslim soldiers mess with their territory.

James Fallows’s experts explain that the American invasion of Iraq and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan run together in some Middle Eastern heads:

So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another.

America’s military action in Afghanistan after 9/11 was different, because that action really was tied to 9/11 and because we allied ourselves to other Muslims — the Northern Alliance — against the Taliban. Unfortunately our loss of focus in Afghanistan allowed bin Laden to escape, and now the Taliban is making a comeback.

BTW, the Captain’s blog post title is “NIE: Ending 12-Year Iraqi Quagmire Made Terrorism Worse,” revealing some confusion on the Captain’s part between a “quagmire” and “containment.” Among other things, American troops didn’t die during the 12-year containment of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the containment sure as hell didn’t cost $1.5 billion every bleeping week. Was the containment perfect? No. Is the Iraq War perfect? Cough.

Another rightie, Rick Moran, falls back on straw-man arguments to criticize the NIE:

I am not disputing the conclusions in this leaked report. I am resisting the implications that some would draw from it; that if only we had not confronted the jihadists or worked to solve the root causes of terrorism, none of this would be true today.

Did anyone actually advise that we should not confront terrorists? Not that I’ve seen. The difference is that some of us think we should have focused on those terrorists who perpetrated acts against America and Americans, and are likely to do so again, rather than squander our attention and resources on every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not.

And as for “if only we had not … worked to solve the root causes of terrorism” — that’s a joke, right?

DeYoung:

But “a really big hole” in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, “is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized.”

In fact, the Bush Administration hasn’t done a bleeping thing about root causes. All it has done is package Islamic terrorism as a political wedge issue here in the U.S. They don’t even honestly articulate what the root causes are. Instead, they crank out propagandistic sludge like We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Oh, sure, the Bushies have gone through the motions of helping Muslim civilians, but even the famous Iraqi “restructuring” program was more about allowing Bush campaign contributors to exploit Iraq and make a profit from the invasion than it was about helping Iraqis.

Their other big “root cause” initiative was to name bleeping Karen dumb as an eggplant Hughes Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

I rest my case.

The Big Dog Bites

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Be sure to read the transcript of President Clinton’s Fox News interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace tried to hang “aren’t you really responsible for September 11” on Clinton, and Clinton wasn’t having it.

WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them [al Qaeda] out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people. …

…WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right…

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..

WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir…

CLINTON:…

WALLACE: I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question?

CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know…

Exactly the same stuff I was saying here. No one has yet held the Bush Administration accountable for their terrible lapses in judgment about al Qaeda and terrorism in the eight months before 9/11. The nation literally was less protected from al Qaeda by September 2001 than it had been in September 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. Then the scum had the nerve to claim they are somehow uniquely suited to guard the nation’s security. And they got away with it.

The whole nation needs an intervention.

More CGI

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Yesterday Colin Powell was riding around the halls of the Manhattan Sheraton on a scooter. I swear this is true. Sometime yesterday I stepped on an elevator and, just before the doors closed, Mr. Powell himself scooted in on a scooter. He scooted out on the next floor. Weird.

In spite of the fact that I spent a big chunk of the morning venting about how the book publishing industry got screwed up, I am still at the CGI conference, which should wrap up early this afternoon. You can tell we’re coming down to the wire, because this morning the breakfast spread put out next to the press room, which yesterday featured a generous selection of baked goods, was down to three bran muffins. And I got here early. Too bad about everybody else.

The big news yesterday was Richard Branson’s pledge of $3 billion to combat global warming. As of the most recent press release total commitments for this week’s conference totals $5.7 billion. This money doesn’t go to the Clinton Global Initiative organization but directly to the projects and people doing the good work.

Right now, Mr. Clinton is announcing that Jim Zogby is committed to a project in the Middle East. It seems to be a youth outreach project, but don’t quote me. Eventually the details will show up on the CGI web site, I trust.

Also just announced: Wal-Mart is committing $1 million this first year to repackage products in a way to save oil, trees, and whatever else goes into packaging. (Speaking of Wal-Mart, Ezra is right about Item #2.)

There really is a lot of good work coming out of this conference, and the best part is that it isn’t all talk. My frustration with the Take Back America conference last summer was that it was all talk. Panels would convene and say, this is a problem, and somebody ought to do something. And everybody would say yep, and that would be it.

Now Barbara Streisand is on stage committing to something. I’m watching on a screen from the press room, btw; I’m not seeing La Streisand in person. Oh, well. This morning some of us bloggers got a how d’you do and handshake from Senator Hillary Clinton, who was very warm and gracious and friendly. She looks great, too.

I saw the real rock star yesterday, though — Al Gore. He took part in a panel called “Building a Sustainable Future,” at which I took notes, but my notes are at home now. The gist of it was about sustainable use of resources and business practices for both the public and private sector.

I’m about to pack up my laptop and head home. See ya later.

HarperCollins Trade Books Production Department: Let’s Dish

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The following blog post will probably bore the stuffing out of most people, but I wanted to vent.

According to an item in today’s New York Times, the publication of Andrew Sullivan’s new book has been delayed.

The entire print run of “The Conservative Soul,” a new book by Andrew Sullivan, the blogger and political commentator, is being discarded after Mr. Sullivan spotted a significant production error in the text: half of the fifth chapter had been inserted into the middle of the sixth chapter. Writing on his blog (time.blogs.com/daily_dish), Mr. Sullivan called the mistake “every writer’s nightmare, especially as I discovered the error myself while rereading the book late one night last week and couldn’t believe my eyes.” The finished books were already en route to retailers, so HarperCollins recalled the print run of 26,500, ordered a reprinting and delayed the publication date by one week, to Oct. 10 from Oct. 3. Kate Pruss, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said the printer would cover the additional costs. (The total cost of the error has not been determined.) No editorial content will be changed in the reprinted edition, Ms. Pruss said. JULIE BOSMAN

Prediction: Sometime today some rightie bloggers will claim the book was sabotaged by liberals. But I’m going to guess it was sabotaged either by outsourcing or downsizing, or both.

Without looking at the books I can’t say for sure, but it sounds as if the books were trimmed and bound with a signature out of order. This is an error that would have been made by the printer/binder, which I’m sure is an outside vendor. It’s been generations since publishers printed and bound their own books.

In brief, the process works this way: several pages (usually anywhere from 8 to 32) are printed on one big sheet of paper, and then that piece of paper is folded and the folded paper trimmed to separate the pages. Pages printed together this way make a signature. The signatures are gathered together (hopefully in order) and bound into the book. These days this process is all done by big printer-binder machines.

Back in the day it was standard procedure for the printer/binder to pull some gathered signatures (called F and Gs, for “folded and gathered”) off the printer-binder machine before binding and send them to the publisher, so that the publisher could make sure the signatures were in order. If in fact someone at HarperCollins saw F&Gs and the signatures of the F&Gs were out of order, but HarperCollins staff signed off on them, then the fault is HarperCollins’s and not the printer/binder’s. (It is possible, but extremely unlikely, that the F&Gs were OK even though the books were mis-bound.)

Back in the days when books were set by photo-offset process there was another step before F&Gs, called “blues.” Blues are blueprints of the photographic plates. The publisher received sets of blues that had been folded and gathered as the printed pages would be. The publishing production staff could check page and signature order (and other stuff) at that stage, before the actual printing. But now that photo-offset is being phased out in favor of an all-digital process, blues are going the way of raised metal type.

Over the years book publishers have been cutting more and more corners to save time and cost, and it is entirely possible that all of the checkpoints were eliminated for Andy’s book. If so, no one at HarperCollins cast eyes upon the product from the time production transmitted PDF files of the pages to the printer/binder and the time a box of the first printed and bound copies showed up in the publisher’s offices, by which time the rest of the 26,500 print run was bound and boxed and being loaded onto trucks.

On the other hand, if someone at HarperCollins did sign off on the F&Gs, likely it was a junior staffer who was swamped with a workload that would have been handled by two or three people 20 years ago.

The first books I was responsible for producing, back in the early 1970s, were printed by linotype, meaning raised metal type. When F&Gs hit my desk I had a couple of days to check them before I called the printer and gave an OK to go ahead and bind. I was expected to be painstaking and go through the book front to back several times looking for the several things that can go wrong at that stage before signing off. Today, if a staffer sees F&Gs at all, he or she is usually under a gun to give the approval that same day, or possibly within two or three hours. If the same staffer is already swamped with other books on critical deadline — well, mistakes are made.

When I got my first publishing job, ca. 1973, all of the manuscript development, editing, copyediting, and proofreading typically were done in house. By the time a book was published, several people on the publisher’s staff had examined every page, at several points in the manuscript-to-bound-books process, looking for errors. New staffers were trained in editing, copyediting, and proofreading procedures by senior staffers. Over the years more and more of the editorial functions have been outsourced or subcontracted, however. Today most copyediting and proofreader are freelanced, and good luck finding competent people who have received real training. Increasingly even manuscript development and substantive editing are freelanced, or subcontracted to a book packager. It is not unusual for a book to be published without anyone on the publisher’s regular payroll actually reading it.

Changes in technology introduce new ways for books to be screwed up. The old linotype guys who did the typesetting and created the metal plates for printing were artisans who caught many errors themselves; also, proofs would be read independently by both printers’ and publishers’ staffs. Then we switched to offset process. The linotype operators, who were Union workers, were laid off, and compositors/printers hired nonunion people (mostly young women fresh out of high school) with typing skills to keyboard the manuscript. The keyboarders rarely caught old errors but were champs at introducing new ones. But at least we could still see as many passes of proofs as we needed to ensure the books were thoroughly checked.

Once photo-offset became the standard procedure, page composition and printing/binding were done by two separate vendors.
Vendor #1, the compositor, would keyboard the manuscript and output galley proof. After proofreading and correcting, the vendor output clean “repro” proof, which would be shipped to the publisher. Usually someone at the publisher’s staff would paste the repro proof on boards to make up pages. The boards were shipped to vendor #2, the printer, to be photographed, and the images on the film were transferred to the printer plates or rollers by a chemical process. Again, the publisher re-checked the book at every step.

Desktop publishing changed procedures again, because pasteup was eliminated. It became standard to require authors to submit word processing files, so keyboarding was also eliminated. Some publishers had in-house desktop departments; others continued to use vendors. Most of the time clean, corrected pages were sent to the printer/binder by whoever did the composition, and the printer/binder photographed the pages, but in the case of complicated four-color books sometimes the compositors output film.

Now it’s all digital. The author submits Microsoft Word files of his book, which are edited, and the edited files are given to somebody (often a freelancer) who uses desktop publishing software to compose the pages. These pages are proofread once, maybe by another freelancer. With luck, somebody at the publisher gets a look at a second set of proof to make sure corrections were made, but that individual won’t have time to do a second proofreading. Instead, the staffer only skims the old “foul” proof looking for proofreader marks, and then checks new proof to be sure the error was corrected. Then the desktop compositor outputs PDF files, which are sent to a printer, and the printer imposes the files into signatures (some magazine publishers are using software that creates imposed PDF files; I’m not sure if book publishers are doing that yet) and transfers the digital impositions onto printing plates.

Sometimes in the case of mass market books two books are printed at the same time from the same plates, so that if the signatures get out of order chunks of Bodice Ripper #1 might end up in Bodice Ripper #2. It’s also possible this happens a lot and no one notices. But if you ever read a paperback romance novel in which the heroine’s name inexplicably changes from Mary to Jane, blame the printer.

It’s a wonder to me that more oopsies don’t happen. Yet the urge to downsize and outsource continue. We production editors used to joke that at least the Suits couldn’t ship our jobs overseas. We were wrong. We’re approaching the stage at which no one with hands-on responsibility for producing books for American readers speaks English. I’m serious.

So, Andy, I’m sorry about your book. At least the problem was caught before the copies were put on display at Barnes and Noble.

The War on Bad Metaphors

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I’m blogging at you from the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative conference. The 8 a.m. (8 a.m.? In New York City? This may be the city that never sleeps, but at 8 a.m. it’s damn groggy) session featured Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, moderated by Fareed Zakaria.

A point made by speakers yesterday, and repeated this morning, is that the metaphorical war we are fighting is the wrong metaphorical war. Instead of the War on Terrorism, speakers say, we should be fighting the War on Extremism.

I agree. And, one would think, President Bush ought to agree as well. Yesterday at the UN he said,

At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear and moderate people who work for peace.

Note: The enemy is not “terrorism.” The enemy are ideological extremists who use terrorism as one of their tactics. But it is extremism, and the spread of extremism, that we should be fighting. Talking about a war on terrorism makes as much sense as calling World War II the War on Great Big Stuff That Blows Up.

The name is critical, I think, because by misdirecting our attention from the enemy to violence perpetrated by the enemy, it might seem that the struggle is primarily a violent one. But if the conflict is primarily ideological, we need to put more emphasis on countering ideology than perpetrating more violence. Although some military action probably is required, military action must be subservient to and supportive of political and diplomatic efforts. Instead, we put our military strategy first, and misdirect politics to support the military strategy.

Queen Rania, poised and articulate, spoke to the problem of extremism directly. Extremist ideologies that once existed only on the fringes of the Muslim world now resonate with more and more Middle Easterners, she said, and it’s important to understand why.

Our lack of knowledge of one another helps extremism spread. Westerners tend to lump all Muslims into one group. Even those who appreciate that there is a difference between Shi’ia and Sunni may not understand that there are further divisions within Shi’ia and Sunni. A nuanced approach to the people of the Middle East is critical.

It is a huge mistake, she said, to rule out a political approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of a military approach. (This line brought robust applause from the audience.) Before the recent war in Lebanon, she continued, most Lebanese were moderate, peace loving people. But over the course of two months, once moderate people were radicalized. The war pushed the entire Arabic public toward extremism; it caused the voices of peace and moderation to lose currency and become marginalized. The way to win the war on extremism is to support and strengthen the voices of moderation in the Middle East, not discredit them.

President Karzai said that he had tried to warn the West to pay attention to the spread of extremism since the Taliban came into power in 1966. Long before September 11, the Taliban was killing Muslims. They were destroying families; they ruined livelihoods by, for example, burning vineyards full of grapes. And most of all, the Taliban preached hatred. Karzai said he tried to tell the West the hate would reach them eventually. But no attention was paid, he said, because you in the West did not hurt. We didn’t pay attention until we did hurt.

Karzai also said that we in the West mistake the voices of terrorists, of the most brutal elements of the Middle East, as the voice of the people of the Middle East. This has to stop, he said.

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu radiates more sweet, selfless joy than his little body could possibly contain. No religion in the world promotes death and murder, he said. Instead, all of the world’s religions promote compassion, justice, love, caring. It is unfortunate that people misuse religion for bad purposes, like a knife intended to cut bread might be used to hurt someone.

It’s a mistake to associate the terrorism of the Middle East with Islam, the Archbishop said. If a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, it’s called Muslims terrorism; but when a Christian man blew up a building in Oklahoma, no one called it Christian terrorism. Likewise, terrorism in Northern Ireland, or the Holocaust, was not called Christian terrorism.

We humans can survive only if we survive together, the Archbishop said. We need one another. No one is totally self-sufficient without being subhuman.

To be continued.

CGI Update

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It seems the real action is on the eastern shore of the island — Hugo Chavez spoke to the UN General Assembly and called George W. Bush the devil. Daniel Trotta reported for Reuters —

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush “the devil himself” and told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday the U.S. president had left the smell of sulfur hanging in the chamber from his appearance the previous day.

The U.S. rival and close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro used his speech before the assembly to accuse the United States of myriad evils such as helping render the U.N. Security Council worthless by robbing small nations of power.

“The devil himself is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Right here,” said Chavez, who also called Bush a “world dictator.”

Speaking from the same podium from which Bush had addressed the assembly on Tuesday, Chavez said “it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.”

“The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species,” Chavez said. “We appeal to the people of the United States and of the world to halt this threat which is like a sword hanging over our heads.”

I can’t see how Chavez’s rhetoric helps anybody, but I thought you would get a kick out of it.

“We’re not going to address that kind of comic strip approach to international affairs,” said US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, as he adjusted his cape. Then Bolton leaped into the sky and flew across the East River, yelling “Your ass is MINE, Voinovich! Captain Zemo doesn’t forget!”

And here I am stuck in the basement of the Sheraton, blogging.

I am continuing this first-hand blog coverage of the “urgent issues and innovative solutions” panel at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference; see earlier post here. I’m spending so much time on this panel that I’m missing the afternoon working sessions, but there was a lot said that I wanted to be sure somebody wrote about.

Remember awhile back when ABC’s Brian Ross reported that Osama bin Laden had been offered sanctuary in Pakistan? Musharraf said this agreement was not made between the government of Pakistan and terrorists. Rather, it was an agreement between a jirga (consultative council) of tribal elders in North Waziristan and the Taliban. Government officials were represented in the negotiations, but it’s actually the jirga‘s agreement, according to Musharraf. The basic provisions of the agreement are these:

1. Members of al Qaeda may remain in North Waziristan as long as there is no al Qaeda activity either in North Waziristan or across the border in Afghanistan.

2. Same thing goes for members of the Taliban.

3. There must also not be attempts at “Talibanization” in North Waziristan. “Talibanization” was defined by President Musharraf as a mindset that rejects music and television and enforces strict codes of conduct and appearance, such as making all men wear beards. The Taliban may not force other people in a community to abide by their rules, in other words.

There were no follow up questions on this point, so one asked Musharraf if this agreement might give sanctuary to Osama bin Laden if he popped up in North Waziristan and abided by the rules.

Musharraf said this agreement is already working. Yesterday some Pakistani Taliban crossed the border into Afghanistan to do mischief. Local tribal leaders who were signatories to the agreement arrested ten of these Taliban and turned them over to the Pakistani government.

Musharraf spoke at length at what he called “misperceptions” about terrorism and Islam. The turmoil began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Pakistan joined the West in this fight against Soviet expansion. Pakistan’s contributions to the Cold War were critical to defeating the Soviets, he said.

But now we suffer from the fallout, he said. We helped the West, but in 1989 we were left high and dry to fend for ourselves. We took in 4 million refugees from Afghanistan, including Muhajadeen, and we got no assistance from the West. Then the Taliban formed. On top of this, he continued, we have problems on our eastern borders with terrorism in Kashmir. Our national fabric was destroyed by the fallout from Afghanistan, and we got no assistance whatsoever to rebuild it.

The real problem is not terrorism, he said, but extremism, and you can’t defeat extremism militarily. Instead, one must address problems in the “environment,” by which I infer he meant society and culture, so that the environment is no longer conducive to growing terrorism. Muslims feel they are being targeted by the West, which fuels alienation, which fuels extremism. Incidents like the infamous Danish cartoon flap only rubs salt in the wounds. Further, the extremists are convinced that modernization is westernization. Yet there is nothing in Islam that forbids modernization. And since Islam encourages making decisons by consensus, it is not in theory hostile to democracy.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are very different, from Musharraf’s perspective, because the Taliban has its roots in the people of Pakistan, whereas al Qaeda are foreigners. This makes the Taliban a more intractable problem for Musharraf.

And the absolute foundation of Muslim unrest, said Musharraf, is the “Palestinian dispute.”

I see that Dave Johnson has posted about this morning’s panel also. And here is a real boring “MSM” story about the conference so far.