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[Note from Tom: A death can feel like an archive closing forever on some aspect of your life. Such is the case for me with the death of Andre Schiffrin. If you'll all excuse me, I want to note his passing briefly here:
This won't mean much to most of you, but Andre, publisher of Pantheon Books and my boss for 15 years, the person who, in 1976, hired me when there was really no obvious reason to do so and, more than anyone else, let me become what I am today, died last weekend. It's a moment of genuine sadness for me, an indication that an era -- my own in many ways, though he was nine years older than me -- has ended. The world of books is unimaginable (to me) without him. Without him, Studs Terkel might never have done his oral histories and Art Spiegelman's Maus, the "first graphic novel," might never have been published. (He let me do Spiegelman's masterpiece when, in embryonic form, it had been turned down by every major publishing house in New York.)
I first spent time with Andre in 1971 after I had published an essay, "Ambush at Kamikaze Pass," in the single most obscure journal on the planet, The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars . He nonetheless read it and invited me to lunch to urge me to turn it into a book, something I couldn't faintly imagine doing at the time. I did, however, finally come to agree with him and wrote that book, which was published in 1995 as The End of Victory Culture. In other words, with my project as with so much else in the world of books, he was a man almost 25 years ahead of his time.
Ariel Dorfman, a writer whose work I published early on in my tenure at Pantheon, wrote me this after Andre's death: "His existence changed our lives, just by giving you free rein at Pantheon to believe in a young exiled writer." He couldn't have been more on the mark. - -- -Andre's New York Times obituary offered the gist of his life and the sense that he was a great one. It missed, however, his risk-taking nature and his radical view of what might matter to our world. It also provided a less than satisfactory account of how the right-wing owner of the conglomerate that housed Pantheon made use of a politically inauspicious time for a small left-wing publishing outfit to push him out of his job (after which we, his loyal editors and employees, quit in protest). Still, no complaints here. The world and the man that made me are both history. What more is there to say at the moment?]
Someone should launch a feature somewhere on American foreign and war policy under the rubric: How could anything possibly go wrong? Here are just two recent examples.
The Obama administration intervenes militarily in Libya, plays a significant role in overthrowing the autocrat who runs the country as a police state, and helps unleash chaos in its wake. The streets of Libyan cities fill with militias as the new government's control of the situation fades to next to nil. Which brings us to our present moment, when a panicky Washington decides that what's needed is yet another, different kind of intervention. The plan seems to be to compete with various local and Islamic militias by creating a government militia as the core of a new "national army." Its members are to be drawn from already existing militias and they'll be trained somewhere outside of Libya. What an idea! Honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
Or consider this: Washington begins to panic about heightening tensions between Japan and China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. The problem, reports David Sanger of the New York Times, based on what Obama administration officials have told him, is that the conflict could escalate and so "derail their complex plan to manage China's rise without overtly trying to contain it." Now, let's get this straight: before things began to run off the rails in the East China Sea, the Obama administration was confidently planning to "manage" the rise of the next superpower on a planet already in such tumult that what being a new great power might even mean is open to question. And keep in mind that we're talking about an administration that couldn't manage the rollout of a website. What could possibly go wrong?
Both examples highlight the strange combination of hubris and panic that, as TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee points out today, seems to be the essence of so many of Washington's plans and actions at the moment. The urge to "manage" is invariably followed by shock at the unmanageability of this roiling globe of ours, followed by panic over plans gone desperately awry when things begin, utterly predictably, to happen unpredictably, followed of course by the next set of managerial plans. Is there no learning curve in Washington? Tom
Hollywood Without the Happy Ending
How the CIA Bungled the War on Terror
By Pratap ChatterjeeCall it the Jason Bourne strategy.
Think of it as the CIA's plunge into Hollywood -- or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency's moves couldn't be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world's most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world's most infamous jail.
The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called "the Pledge."
Last month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed "Penny Lane." (Yes, indeed, the name was taken from the Beatles song, as was "Strawberry Fields," a Guantanamo program that involved torturing "high-value" detainees.) These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to call the "global battlefield," where their mission was to befriend members of al-Qaeda and supply targeting information for the Agency's drone assassination program.
Such a secret double-agent program, while colorful and remarkably unsuccessful, should have surprised no one. After all, plea bargaining or persuading criminals to snitch on their associates -- a tactic frowned upon by international legal experts -- is widely used in the U.S. police and legal system. Over the last year or so, however, a trickle of information about the other secret program has come to light and it opens an astonishing new window into the privatization of U.S. intelligence.
Hollywood in Langley
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