paul mitchinson.com

Tim Naftali responds to Max Holland’s article on the 9/11 Commission Report, which I mentioned in my previous post.

It strikes me as a rather weak response, especially given the final paragraph’s ringing declaration of principle:

I would not present myself as the official historian of anything. I value my independence too much.

Well somebody’s been presenting Naftali as the 9/11 Commission’s “official historian.” In fact, one of his employers has — the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia, where Naftali is a professor (or an “instructor,” depending on where you look). I have a few screenshots where the phrase appears — and this comes from just the simplest Google search. Here’s two from the CI Centre:

The Counter-Terrorism Training and Resources for Law Enforcement web site reproduced that phrase verbatim in their description of the same event hosted by Naftali:

The 9/11 Commission Report has been perhaps the most praised official government document in history. In a throwaway line he likely regrets, John Updike wrote in the New Yorker last November that it was a "masterpiece produced by a committee," comparable only to the King James Bible.

But in a remarkable piece published in the Washington Spectator, Max Holland exposes the Report’s serious limitations. Primary among them is what the Report left out: its staff reports, its public hearings. The 9/11 Commission never bothered to have these published in book form. (They are available on the Internet — for how long, one never knows — to anyone with high-speed Internet access who enjoys reading hundreds of pages of documents in front of a computer screen.)

Take a look at the shelf space occupied by some major probes since 1945: these include the 1946 congressional inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attack (40 volumes); the 1964 Warren Commission investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination (27); and the 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies (15).

By contrast, the 9/11 Commission climaxed in the publication of a single, 567-page volume—without an index. The relative poverty of this effort at the culmination of a twenty-month, $14 million investigation reflects a downward trend in the government’s obligation to disseminate information to the public.

Holland acknowledges that the hearings are being published privately by Oceana Publications. The cost? $395. How many libraries can be expected to come up that money in their acquisitions budget?

Equally disturbing is the whiff of cronyism and profiteering surrounding the document. The Commission made the unprecedented decision to choose a private publisher (Norton) over the the U.S. Government Printing Office to print the report. The result was an inferior, more expensive product. The Commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow, as Holland and others have pointed out, had a “long-standing relationship” with Norton.

Verging on the scandalous, however, is the Commission’s sponsorship of an an ancillary study of the history of U.S. counterterrorism policy. This plum assignment was handed out to Zelikow’s University of Virginia colleague, Timothy Naftali. (I interviewed Zelikow, Naftali, and Holland in a 2000 piece I wrote for Lingua Franca on the Presidential Recordings Project.) Naftali’s project, which cost the US taxpayer at least $15,000 according to Holland, was considered unusable, and the Commission declined to publish it even as one of their own monographs. Naftali now has the best of both worlds. Since his study was paid for by the government, he now markets himself as “the official historian of the 9/11 Commission.” But since the Commission found his work unpublishable, he has managed to attract a private publisher, Basic Books.

Read it all.

I detest Daylight Saving Time, and will be glad to get rid of it for another few months. But lawmakers north and south of the border are determined to inflict it on me for a few more weeks every year. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that this will save fuel or make our children more active — despite what our lawmakers say. What it will do — and I speak from personal experience — is make us all less active in the mornings.

Consider the situation of the recreational runner. Most work outside the home. Others, like me, have young children. There is no other time to run except early in the morning before they are awake. Daylight Saving Time means that I have 2 choices:

1. Don’t exercise.
2. Run in the dark, risking life and limb.

In a nutshell, DST encourages evening behaviour at the expense of morning behavior. Morning workouts, farming chores, Jewish morning prayers, walking to work or school — all become more difficult under DST. What becomes easier is shopping and late evening backyard parties.

Harumphh!

On Monday, October 17th, Howard Kurtz wrote about David Frum’s efforts to derail the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers in the Washington Post. Frum was “reluctant to be interviewed and uncomfortable with being portrayed as Harriet Miers’s most vocal critic.”

Two days later, his reluctance evaporated in Canada’s National Post, where Frum writes a regular column. Frum’s efforts earned him a page 1 thumbsucker of a story, with the headline From axis of evil to the evils of Harriet Miers: Frum heads bid to dump nominee. Here, Frum oozed self-confidence in his leadership role:

[Frum] claims more insight in Ms. Miers’ abilities than other conservatives. The two worked together at the White House in the first year of the Bush administration, before Ms. Miers became White House counsel. “I knew first-hand why, for all her virtues as a human being, she would be inadequate both ideologically and in terms of qualifications for this job,” said Mr. Frum.

Frum continues to have trouble keeping his story straight.

In yesterday’s National Post, he attempted to assess George Packer’s devastating new book, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. Here’s Frum’s take:

As fiercely critical as he is of the Bush administration, Packer was and remains a supporter of George Bush’s war. [italics added]

“I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence,” [Packer] writes. “Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame.”

Searing words. Now listen to what comes next: “The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is.”

Unfortunately, Frum appeared to stop reading. Packer’s next line? “For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.”

Packer, in other words, opposes George Bush’s war. Not the liberation of Iraq, not the overthrow of Saddam — but very specifically the war as it has been directed, and is being directed by George Bush and his allies. Of course Packer hopes, and believes, that the Iraq war is “winnable.” But not under Bush’s leadership. Not any more. And Frum is emphatically wrong about Packer drawing distinctions between Bush’s administration and Bush’s war, as he writes in this passage:

Bush’s war, like his administration, like his political campaigns, was run with his own absence of curiosity and self-criticism, his projection of absolute confidence, the fierce loyalty he bestowed and demanded.

I introduce this little screenshot of Google news in order to make a humble request to reporters and headline writers: open your thesaurus.

In the coming days, Saddam Hussein will hurl abuse at the court, show disrespect to the judge, and generally act like a pain-in-the-ass. But resist the urge to call him “defiant.” Please.

Thesaurus.com offers a few alternatives, some better than others. “Insolent” and “recalcitrant” work well, though headline writers might rebel. “Contumacious”? How the hell did that one get in there? “Ballsy” is excellent, though it has an unfortunate hint of admiration. “Sassy” is even better.

As usual, nothing beats Roget’s. I can’t believe thesaurus.com missed these beauties: “brazen,” “saucy,” “cheeky,” “bumptious,” “cocky.” All these deserve to be appended to Saddam’s name.

But “defiant”? Yawn.

James Lileks asks a simple question this morning:

[D]o you think that if President Clinton had invaded Iraq and knocked Saddam for power in 1998, we’d be seeing a movie about the dictator’s trial right now, with George Clooney as the prosecutor?

Look, I appreciate the sentiment here. I’m sick and tired of all the star-struck coverage of Saddam’s “defiance,” the furrowed brows over whether the trial might “further stoke animosity between Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, many of whom are loyal to Hussein, and the ethnic Kurds and Shiite Muslims now leading the country.”

But we heard — and continue to hear — exactly the same nonsense about NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, and resultant trial of Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, according to former U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor, “Saddam monitored Milosevic’s performance at The Hague and was very impressed with it.” Senor “worries that the trial will “inflame” Sunni insurgents in the short run.”

Ah yes. Here we go again. How many times did we hear that Milosevic was conducting an “impressive” defense at the Hague? He is rallying Serbs around him. His trial has proven “counterproductive.” The Hague is a “kangaroo court,” as one sub-headline in a BBC story put it. This is all conventional wisdom now, on all sides of the political spectrum. I heard it rehearsed endlessly, for instance, on CBC. It is also garbage, as political events in Serbia proved.

Believe me, I’d love to see a made-for-TV movie about the arrest and trial of Milosevic. (Emma Thompson as Carla del Ponte?) But it ain’t gonna happen.

I’m beginning to appreciate Seth Roberts’ point in my comments section about the “flaws in conventional scientific tests.” Not that I withdraw my objections to Roberts’ diet theories. But Roberts is right to say that the limitations of his “research” are shared by an awful lot of “conventional” science.

Consider the latest findings on lower back pain, dutifully reported by Reuters. A paper in the American Journal of Public Health (subscription only) drew some pretty bold conclusions about the treatment of back pain:

We found that (1) participation in recreational physical activities reduces the likelihood of concurrent and subsequent low back pain, related disability, and psychological distress and (2) use of back exercises increases the likelihood of concurrent and subsequent low back pain and related disability.

Now, as someone who has suffered — sometimes excruciatingly — from lower back pain, I can tell you that this is surprising. A few years ago, when things had gotten so bad that I was virtually unable to go out for a recreational walk, I decided to research the matter. (I had tried everything from physiotherapy to chiropractic therapy to accupuncture.) Since I had been diagnosed with spondylolisthesis L5-S1, I searched the scholarship on the subject. What leaped out at me at the time was that one technique that appeared to have success at treating low back pain in all the studies I consulted was a series of extension exercises designed by Robin McKenzie. (Yes, I’m simplifying matters.) What struck me even more was that these techniques had been published in a thin little popular book called Treat Your Own Back. Believe me, it’s not every day that you see a popular self-help book cited approvingly in the scholarly literature.

But what absolutely floored me was that the technique worked for me. It took weeks, but for the first time in almost a quarter century, I was — and am — pain-free. Now I realize that this appears to be the same kind of personal testimonial that I have criticized in Seth Roberts and David Zemanek. The difference, I would suggest, is that the technique had already been the subject of extensive scientific testing. My own “self-experimentation” was simply confirmation of the fundamental principle.

So, does the latest study prove that I was simply the victim of the placebo effect? Are back exercises really counter-productive? Well, let’s look a little at the study. One would think that a study making the sweeping claim that “back exercises” cause pain might have paid careful attention to the precise design and character of the exercise performed. Instead, we get this little confession in the paper:

Furthermore, information on specific types of back exercises was not collected. Although little evidence indicating that some specific exercise regimens are more effective than others exists in the literature, certain exercise regimens may be more effective than others. Also, we relied on participants’ self-reports of their exercise and physical activities, and it was not feasible to validate responses with other strategies such as direct observation.

So, not only did the researchers ignore the specific nature of the exercise being performed (not all extension or flexion exercises are the same), they never even bothered to check how — or whether — these exercises were being performed at all. Shouldn’t it be obvious to the editors of the American Journal of Public Health that the study’s conclusions are empirically unsustainable?

This is such a sleepy blog that I doubt folks like Carlin Romano read it. Still, it’s a wonderful coincidence that, two weeks after my post comparing Romano with William Bennett, Romano himself has weighed in with a defense of the radio host — or as Romano refers to him, an “academic philosopher by training.”

Bennett … tried to spotlight what he considered the wrongheadedness of the argument — the notion, by his natural-law beliefs, that good economic consequences (lower crime) of an immoral act (abortion) can justify the immoral act — by countering with a more extreme hypothetical proposition or conditional.

The article is Romano at his best: effortlessly learned, spikily opinionated, genuinely enlightening. I gobble up everything he writes, and always learn something from him.

Still, I think, Romano might be missing, or deliberately gliding over, an important point when he argues that Bennett was engaging in “suppositional reasoning.” It’s true that his advocacy of aborting black babies was suppositional. (“Suppose that we abort all black babies,” he seems to be saying. “What could be expected to happen?”) But what preceded this point was emphatically not. “But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime … ” he opened his remarks. This is not hypothetical — it’s a statement of conviction. His conviction is that black babies born today will commit crime at a greater frequency than white babies will. As I wrote before, this is empirically baseless, unless you believe that cultures are immutable.

Suppose, for instance that the African-American community began to embrace the philosophy of William Bennett. Black parents suddenly started reading The Book of Virtues to their children before bedtime. Self-reliance would skyrocket. Crime would plummet. Gambling would … well, let’s not go there.

[A note: the preceding paragraph is not suppositional reasoning. It is sarcasm.]

Caleb Crain, channeling Nicholson Baker, laments the rough untrimmed pages of certain hardcover books:

It’s wretched nostalgia, and it should be stopped. All binding is centralized today, and so no customer chooses deckle edges anymore, and no one can opt out of it, either, except by waiting for the paperback. Deckle edges absorb and retain dust with fantastic efficiency. But the truly demonic thing about them is that they turn a book into a trick deck of cards—the sort where if you flip the cards over one by one, you see all suits, but if you riffle along one edge, you see only clubs or only diamonds. If you riffle through the pages of a deckle-edged book, only certain pages flip open to your eye. Should you be hunting for a quote that happens to appear on a page whose width is not a local maximum, you’re out of luck. You can try putting your thumb along the clean-cut top or bottom, and you’ll get a little functionality this way. But not much. It becomes hard even to figure out what chapter you’re in.

As they say in this blog biz, “read it all.”

The American Conservative, paleoconservatism’s house organ, has continued its war against neoconservatism by launching a broadside against, wait for it, Christopher Hitchens. Well, no surprise there, I suppose. Hitchens has been called a neocon by the Left for years. And the paleos and the far Left have become chummier and chummier since the war in Iraq.

But the attack is unique in one main respect: it scolds Hitchens for being a Soviet apologist and a Communist fellow traveller. After all, Hitchens opposed the Vietnam war and the invasion of Grenada, the commie scum. There can be “no doubt where Hitchens stood during the Cold War,” writes Tom Piatak. “He was faithfully following Leon Trotsky, who wrote in 1939, “the defense of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution.””

I confess that this left me a little mystified. That is not how I remembered Hitchens’ views at all at the time. In fact, he regularly took shots at “anti-anti-Communists” for their fatuous “yes, but” responses to human rights violations in the Soviet bloc. As late as August 1988, for instance — with perestroika in full stride — he wrote a moving account of the political nightmare of Czechoslovakia, quoting opposition writer Milan Simecka, with approval:

However adaptable socialist ideology may be, it would be hard for it to justify with any credibility the fact that the socialist state behaves like a red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist of the last century, that it establishes blacklists, and fires employees suspected of involvement in “strikes”, not to mention those who might be a source of trouble, or those who fail to show the right degree of respect to the management, and so on. You do not need ideological reasons to be disgusted by such practices; the good old socialist gut-reaction we inherited from earlier generations tells us they are wrong.

At other times Piatak simply mischaracterizes what Hitchens wrote. Consider this passage:

And after Solidarity had been outlawed and Lech Walesa imprisoned, Hitchens participated in a Nation forum on Communism and Poland in which—to his credit—he wrote that it was legitimate to defend the “Polish workers movement,” but also fretted about “the Manichaean anti-Communism of the bad old days,” wished that Walesa had denounced Pinochet, and rebuked Susan Sontag for saying that Communism was akin to fascism and that the reliably anti-Communist Readers’ Digest had done a better job of informing its readers of the realities of Communism than had The Nation or The New Statesman—coincidentally (or not) Hitchens’s journalistic homes during the Cold War.

Let’s be clear what Hitchens actually wrote. He didn’t “fret” about Manichaean anti-Communism: he praised Sontag for steering clear of it.

“I was pleased that Susan Sontag invited the left to criticize its own record on Stalinism,” he wrote. “Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association] to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and ship-builders have been abolished. It is, really, casuistry to mention them in the same breath.” Some on the Left, he admitted attempt to “divert an argument about Polish self-determination into an argument about the hypocrisy of Reagan and Haig. By doing so, they devalue solidarity with Solidarity, and I think Sontag was right to say so.”

With “apologists” like Hitchens, it’s no wonder the USSR lost the Cold War.