Right Wing Nut House

This story is getting more bizarre as we dig deeper.

A former ABC News consultant on terrorism has been exposed as a gigantic fraud, faking interviews with famous people and having them published in a French news magazine.

Alexis Debat, a former French defense official who has been working as a consultant for ABC News since 9/11, says he hired a freelance journalist to conduct an interview with Barack Obama. When it came out in another French magazine that the Obama camp was denying the interview ever took place, Debat claimed he was “scammed” by the freelancer.

Debat says the freelancer, a Robert Sherman from Lombard, IL was paid $500 to conduct the Obama interview. A local newspaper checked out the address Debat gave for Sherman and found that no such address exists in Lombard, IL.

The French magazine where the fake interview was published, Politique Internationale, has now heard from several other subjects of supposed sit downs with Debat, all of whom claiming they never participated:

Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.

“This guy is just sick,” said Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, Politique Internationale, a prestigious publication that has been in business for 29 years. Wajsman said he was removing all articles with Debat’s byline from the magazine’s Web site.

Yesterday, a spokesman for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said a supposed interview with Debat, published in the June 2007 edition of Politique Internationale, never occurred and was a fabrication.

And before you start feeling sorry for Politique Internationale, the magazine was contacted in 2005 by the UN Deputy Director for Communications about an interview they were going to run under Debat’s byline with Kofi Annan that never took place, threatening to expose it as a fake if the magazine went with it:

Despite that, Debat continued for the next two years to be cited as the author of interviews with a range of prominent U.S. public officials in Politique Internationale.

The U.N. official said a second supposed interview of Annan by Debat, posted earlier this year by Politique Internationale, was actually portions of a speech the secretary-general had given at Princeton University.

The magazine editor, Wajsman, told ABCNews.com he thought the problem with the Annan interview, one of the first he submitted, was “maybe a technical one” or a misunderstanding.

Wajsman said he had referred the matter to his lawyer for possible action against Debat.

“I was a victim of this man. I had no reason to suspect someone like him could lie,” Wajsman said.

Methinks Mr. Wajsman is an idiot. He had “no reason to suspect” Debat would lie after having done so with one of his first interviews for him? Sorry Mr. Editor, you were too greedy for the good stories, never questioning where they were coming from, and you have now gotten caught with your pantaloons down around your ankles. Take your medicine and resign immediately.

Debat had already been fired by ABC for a little fib he told about his PHD; he apparently never got one. Now in light of these revelations, ABC is scrambling, looking at every story Debat has done in the last 6 years to determine if he was pulling some of the same crap with them. They evidently did a cursory examination after they let him go back in June and found nothing. They now say they are doing another examination to make sure.

Why not do the job right the first time? Perhaps ABC News didn’t want to know if Debat had scammed them. They wouldn’t be the first institutional organization that went through the motions when carrying out an investigation just so that later they could say, “Well, we looked into it at the time and didn’t find anything.” Now that the pressure is on, they apparently are going to do a thorough job of it.

Blogger-Journalist Laura Rozen points up the tightrope that ABC was walking by keeping Debat on as a consultant:

My own feeling as primarily a print world reporter, and this is just one part of the complicated matter, is that it is deeply problematic for a news organization to have a paid source/consultant to sometimes put on the reporter hat and act as the reporter too. (Indeed, I don’t like the idea of paid sources at all, but it seems to be a frequent practice at TV news networks). Seriously, imagine if a New York Times reporter put an ex NSC or CIA operative on the payroll for about $2,000 to $4,000 a month as a source, cited in articles as a source, and then sometimes let him or her report news stories with a byline, without glaringly indicating to readers what was going on. But this is what ABC was doing with Debat. ABC must have known they were stretching the rules on this one. For instance, their consultant Richard Clarke is never presented as the reporter. But ABC changed the rules in the Debat case, presumably because he was bringing them such sexy scoops, that they loved flacking at the time. Now they insist the scoops were solid, but Debat misrepresented his credentials. They’re blameless.

Just a few days ago, Rozen points to this piece in the Times Online where Debat talks about a “3 day blitz” against Iran:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Do we believe that he has inside information about the bombing campaign? Or is he doing one of his Walter Mitty routines?

Debat is one of those figures so beloved of today’s media; a witty, urbane scholar who comes across as authoritative on television. He bridges the gap in knowledge between a reporter and the audience and is used most frequently to fill in the background on personalities and events, usually buttressing the point being made by the reporter and producer of the piece.

Behind the camera, consultants are good for fleshing out details on stories, getting inside information by using their sources in government, and for confirming facts gathered in the course of reporting.

But Rozen is asking should these people be journalists as well? It’s a good question and something of a dilemma. Should a source for news also report it? I’m no journalist but even I can see the potential conflict. And ABC, knowing of his work with Politique Internationale as a by lined reporter, might have asked themselves some tough questions. If they had, they might not be spending the next few days combing over every story Debat ever had a hand in, making sure he did nothing untoward.

Bottom line: Guys like Debat, Jason Blair, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and Stephen Glass get away with it because the stuff they write or bring in is just too good to be true.

And many times, it is.

Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of his own destruction, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, a convicted thief of classified documents, has been hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign as a foreign policy advisor.

Giving an ex-con a helping hand is fully in keeping with Mrs. Clinton’s compassionate nature so I’m loathe to criticize her for hypocrisy. But as a result of the scope of Berger’s crimes - stealing and destroying classified documents that reflected badly on her husband’s presidency - he may be just the man Hillary needs to white wash the historical record so that her foreign policy, instead of being a mish mash of liberal bromides and bewildering zig zags on Iraq and the War on Terror, may actually acquire a coherence so far lacking.

Perhaps he can get started on any documents connecting Norman Hsu to the campaign and work his way up from there.

It will certainly be a novel experience having our next president’s foreign policy shaped by a convicted felon. Aside from the obvious advantage that Berger will bring to the Clinton Administration when having to deal with other criminals like Syria’s Bashar Assad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, just think of the benefits of having an advisor that actually thinks like a crook. This opens up possibilities far beyond the foreign policy sphere - one reason Berger may have been hired in the first place.

Seriously, this is truly incredible. Richard Miniter outlines Berger’s crimes:

My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals.

You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole.

So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats).

Recall that Berger was ostensibly preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission while at the same time, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Commission investigators:

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI —including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time—in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

What do you think the reaction of the Commission would have been to Berger if it had been known that he absconded with or destroyed hundreds of terrorism-related documents from the Clinton Administration?

All of this is water under the bridge, of course. Perhaps Berger was good enough to write a note to future historians to be published after his death exactly what it was he destroyed and why. Someone as intelligent as Berger, a man who spent so many years at the center of history, would, it is hoped, eventually have enough self respect to not keep future historians in the dark.

Berger has now been rehabilitated to the point that Mrs. Clinton is rewarding his service to Bill’s legacy by making him one of her top foreign policy advisors. There is very little chance he would have any job in a new Clinton Administration for which he would have to be confirmed by the Senate. His nomination would never get out of committee. But there are a couple of positions to which he might be considered a front runner - positions where the prying eyes of the Senate would be blocked because he wouldn’t need any confirmation hearings.

How about National Security Advisor?

Now that the Wall Street Journal has made their article on the Hsu swindle of Source Financing Investors available for free, we can see the scope of the grifter’s con of Joel Rosenman is absolutely incredible. I may have been right when I speculated that Mr. Hsu’s entire life was one big Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Rosenman’s partner, Ms. Cheng, met Mr. Hsu while working for an Internet company in 2000. She began investing in one of his businesses and made a profit, according to someone familiar with the matter. In 2002, she joined JR Capital and introduced Mr. Rosenman to Mr. Hsu. That year, Mr. Rosenman invested and also made a profit. He began telling friends and relatives about the investment opportunity.

Mr. Rosenman described the deal in a pitch letter he provided to prospective investors for Source Financing Investors, which he launched in 2005. The investment pool would “lend to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers.” Since 2001, he writes, “the return of these short-term (typically 4½ months) loans has been no less than 40%.”

That last bit about a 40% return on the investment was pure hooey. It was Hsu up to his old tricks of paying off early investors by victimizing later ones. The idea was to appeal to simple human greed - a get rich quick scheme that seemed to work. The early investor’s excitement would lead him to tell a lot of friends about the “opportunity” and, in Rosenman’s case, even set up an investment company to unwittingly assist Hsu with the scam:

Mr. Rosenman described the deal in a pitch letter he provided to prospective investors for Source Financing Investors, which he launched in 2005. The investment pool would “lend to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers.” Since 2001, he writes, “the return of these short-term (typically 4½ months) loans has been no less than 40%.”

In a “step-by-step” outline of a typical transaction prepared for investors, Source Financing describes the way a deal worked with Mr. Hsu. Source Financing would agree to provide bridge loans for seasonal high-ticket, high-quality retail goods made in China for exclusive brand names, according to investors. Mr. Hsu told the company that he would obtain from Chinese manufacturers a price quote for apparel production. He would then add a mark-up and give the quote to a high-end buyer in the U.S.

If the U.S. buyer accepted, according to the outline, Source Financing would transfer by wire what Mr. Hsu said was 80% of the necessary loan, with Mr. Hsu saying he would provide the other 20% himself. Mr. Hsu told the investors he would then receive a letter of credit from a Chinese bank and that the manufacturer would ship the apparel to the U.S., where Mr. Hsu would deliver it to the merchant.

That Hsu must be a fast talker. I’m no investment expert but does anyone else see where an investor could get screwed 6 ways from Sunday? The deal is dependent on a rickety house of cards indeed. And how much do you want to bet that some if not all of those “US buyers” who accepted those quotes were shell companies set up by Hsu in order to fool investors everything was on track!

But this to me, would have been the biggest “tell” that something was amiss:

Mr. Hsu would give the investment firm a check, post-dated for 135 days beyond the wire transfer, for the amount of the loan plus profit. When the check matured, Source Financing would deposit it and allocate the money to investors. The company that would carry out these transactions, Mr. Hsu told investors, was Components Ltd., set up in 1997.

Some investors in Source Financing said they got involved through friends who knew Mr. Rosenman. Some did not know who Mr. Hsu was until news about him broke in late August.

Again we see the power of greed at work here. What possible guarantee is a post dated check? It is a worthless piece of paper until the date it can be made good. If Hsu was going to skip out - as he evidently was doing - what possible good would a post dated check be? It still came down to Rosenman placing his full faith and trust in Norman Hsu - his biggest and most tragic mistake.

I may be off base with this and if someone can give me a rational explanation why any sane businessman would think that accepting a post dated check in a deal like this would protect him somehow, I’m open to hearing it.

It is doubtful that Hsu fulfilled any of the promises he made about the deal - the exact same thing he did for 1/40 the amount of money in 1991 in the latex glove scam. No clothing manufacturers were contacted. No letter of credit from a Chinese bank. No product at all. Hsu was able to succeed in his con the way that all grifters make a living; feeding off the avarice of their marks.

As I said in the post below, Hsu is a first team all American crook. I look forward to more revelations about his swindles so that before long, he may be inducted into the Con Man Hall of Fame.

The Wall Street Journal has partially solved the riddle of where Norman Hsu got the money he used to donate substantial sums to Hillary Clinton’s Senatorial and Presidential campaigns as well as numerous other Democratic candidates.

Joel Rosenman, the producer of the Woodstock rock concerts in 1969 and 1994 gave Hsu’s company an astonishing $40 million “investment” with which Mr. Hsu has apparently absconded: (WSJ Subscription required):

New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

In a letter this Monday, Mr. Rosenman told investors that the 37 outstanding deals with Components Ltd. are set to mature “over the next four months.” But he indicated that was not likely. He said he had deposited two checks from Components that “matured Sept. 7.” He was informed by the banks that there were insufficient funds.
“This development, coupled with recent revelations,” he wrote, “led us to believe that payments due on our recent transactions with Components and Hsu may not be made.”

Forty million dollars? This fellow Hsu must have a golden tongue with an uncanny knack of separating people from their money. And I think it is obvious we underestimated his abilities. Norman Hsu is not some run of the mill grifter. He is a superstar in the world of con men; a first class, top of the line, first team all American crook.

No word on exactly when Rosenman invested this money with Hsu but the Journal article mentioned it was “recently.” If so, that hardly explains the great bulk of donations Hsu has made to Democrats going back at least 3 years. How many others has Hsu bilked? And is his entire life one big Ponzi scheme where he scams mark after mark, using the proceeds from his most recent victims to pay off some of the past investors?

There is nothing “common” about this criminal. Which brings up several troubling questions that few seem to be asking at the moment:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign couldn’t explain yesterday why it blew off warnings about felon-turned-fund-raiser Norman Hsu - and the Daily News learned FBI agents are collecting e-mail evidence in the widening scandal.

Clinton was forced Monday to give back a whopping $850,000 raised by convicted scam artist Hsu after learning his investment ventures were being probed by the FBI as a potential Ponzi scheme.

She earlier gave to charity $23,000 Hsu donated himself after reports revealed he fled sentencing for a $1 million scam in California in 1992.

Yesterday, the campaign insisted it did all it should to vet Hsu after California businessman Jack Cassidy warned in June that Hsu’s investment operation was fishy. Cassidy e-mailed his tips to the California Democratic Party, which forwarded them to the Clinton campaign.

We should also be asking questions about Mrs. Clinton’s security. How could the Secret Service let someone like Hsu within 50 yards of Hillary? Or were their objections overridden?

But the question the Justice Department is going to want answered is who in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign knew about the Cassidy warning and then failed to adequately vet Hsu’s shady dealings? Or, more troubling, discovered Hsu’s history and still took the money anyway.

Meanwhile, See Dubya at Hot Air has dug into Clinton’s donor list and pulled out several contributions from Rosenman’s family as well as others connected with his investment company:

Source Financing, Mr. Rosenman’s company, has asked the beneficiaries of Mr. Hsu’s largesse to quit giving it away to charity in order to recover it for their investors.
No word on whether Mr. Rosenman wants his own contributions to Hillary back, nor those of a Ned Rosenman who also works for Source Financing, nor those of a Molly Rosenman, also of Source Financing–each of whom gave her $4600 back in March.

Mr. Rosenman’s partner, a Mr. Yau Cheng also donated $4600 to Hillary. See Dubya asks whether all of these checks were part of a bundle delivered by Hsu to the Clinton campaign. In fact, there were 260 individual donors whose checks were bundled by Mr. Hsu. Malkin rightly calls on Hillary to come clean and cough up the list. She’s already returned $850,000. Why not make the names public?

Timing will be critical in this case. When did Hsu receive the $40 million? All the donations from Source Financing were made in March of this year. Was there some kind of understanding between Rosenman and Hsu about part of that $40 million when repaid offered as reimbursement to donors scared up by Source Financing? Was more of that $40 million earmarked for political donations to Democrats? How many operations like this exist to get around FEC regulations?

This could be the biggest election financing fraud in history, even surpassing the Nixon crimes committed during the 1972 election.

Some of the questions about the source of Norman Hsu’s largess spread around the country to Democratic candidates have been answered. But as in all scandals, each question answered raises additional problems. This is a very serious scandal for the Clinton campaign, one that could even sink her candidacy even if it doesn’t touch Hillary directly. And depending on how extensive the lawbreaking was, it may pull down the Democratic party a notch or two nationally.

My latest column at PJ Media is about the Petreaus hearings. A sample:

There are few things in Washington that get the political juices flowing more quickly than an important Congressional hearing. Part heavyweight title bout, part high school musical, when the gavel comes down and the kleig lights click on, America’s leaders paste on their most serious faces and prepare for their five minutes of notoriety with all the care and solemnity of a bride getting ready for her walk down the aisle.

This is why rather than asking the witnesses questions, members generally gave speeches about why they support/oppose the surge, usually concluding by asking some rhetorical question along the lines of “How many times did you beat your wife today, General?” or “Why do puppies find you so irresistible, sir?”

What a difference a week makes.

I honestly didn’t expect a large boost for Fred Thompson after he officially declared his candidacy. He had been “on the verge” for so long that I believed most Republicans had already accepted him as a candidate and that any bump he got from announcing would be a blip, barely beyond the statistically significant.

But polls taken in the last 72 hours tell a different story. Apparently, many conservatives who had been flirting with both Romney and Giuliani are taking another look at Thompson, tightening the race nationally while showing a definite “Fred Surge” in one key state.

First, the national numbers. Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Fred Thompson is enjoying a bounce from his formal entry into the Presidential race.

In the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination, Thompson is on top for the first time since late July. The former Tennessee Senator is currently the top choice for 26% of Likely Republican Primary Voters. Rudy Giuliani, who has been the frontrunner for most of the year, is close behind with support from 22%. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney earns the vote from 13% while 12% prefer Arizona Senator John McCain. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee remains atop the second tier at 6% (see recent daily numbers).

Now that’s what I call a surge.

CBS has Fred moving up as well, narrowing the gap with Giuliani:

After seeing his support among Republican primary voters rise to 38 percent in August, Giuliani was backed by only 27 percent of respondents in the most recent survey, narrowing his lead over Thompson to 5 percentage points after holding a 20-point edge last month.

While Thompson, at 22 percent support, is now a close second to Giuliani, he was not the only Republican to seemingly benefit from Giuliani’s fading numbers. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was written off by some after months of staff upheaval and disappointing fundraising, saw his support increase 6 points since the last survey to 18 percent. On the other hand, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won August’s straw poll in Ames, Iowa, saw little benefit nationwide, scoring 14 percent support - largely unchanged since last month.

Gallup gives Fred a smaller bump (19% - 22%) but still significant.

Obviously, Fred is tapping into a conservative base that was unhappy with Romney and especially, Giuliani - for different reasons. Romney’s calculated moves to the right have not sat well with many while Giuliani makes no bones about his differences with many conservatives, although he’s probably conservative enough for most Republicans. Unease with Giuliani’s experience as well as his stands on root Republican issues like abortion and gay marriage have some of the base looking for an alternative.

Romney, still mired in the mid teens nationally, may be getting a little desperate. A poorly disguised political dirty trick directed against Thompson has backfired:

A top adviser to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney appears to be behind the launch of a new Web site attacking GOP presidential rival Fred D. Thompson during his first week on the trail.

The site, PhoneyFred.org, painted an unflattering picture of Thompson, dubbing the former TV star and senator Fancy Fred, Five O’clock Fred, Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred, Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred. Shortly after a Washington Post reporter made inquiries about the site to the Romney campaign, it was taken down.

Before it vanished, the front page of the Web site featured a picture of Thompson depicted in a frilly outfit more befitting a Gilbert and Sullivan production than a presidential candidate.

The Republicans have a long way to go as far as being internet savvy. You can bet if a Democratic candidate set up an attack website, there would be no way to trace it back to the campaign. The Washington Post was able to unmask the fake Fred site in no time.

Meanwhile, in California, the latest Survey USA (GOP) poll has Giuliani edging Thompson 28%-26%. Their last poll in early August had Fred trailing Rudy by 11. The Mother of all Primaries on February 5 next year will include California, Illinois, and New York along with 16 other states - at least (it is still not clear whether Michigan and Florida will toe the party line and push their primaries back to February 5 or later). Fred’s best chance for a big state win on Mega Tuesday will probably be California since Romney’s dad was a governor of Michigan and Rudy looks unbeatable on his home turf of New York. Florida is another possibility for Fred as several of his key advisors have ties to Jeb Bush. Regardless, all of these numbers should give a little momentum to Fred as he wades in to the money morass and attempts to raise funds.

That, of course, is the key; turning these surging numbers into a flood of mother’s milk. With the constraints on his fund raising abilities off, Fred is going to have to raise at least $1.5 million a week between now and the end of the year by my calculations in order for him to be competitive in the early primaries and caucuses. This is more than doable if his operation is finally set and he has the people he wants in key positions. Any confusion at the staff level from here on out will reflect badly on the candidate and this will almost certainly affect his ability to raise money.

What The Fred Surge says about the race is that it is still wide open. You have to wonder if New Gingrich isn’t seeing the reaction to Thompson entering the race and contemplating his own prospects.

At this point, anything and everything is possible.

UPDATE

Steve Smith emails from the Romney campaign with an explanation of the “PhoneyFred.Org” website that the Washington Post charges a top aide to the campaign with involvement:

As reported in the Boston Globe, the site has no direct affiliation to our
campaign, and we had no knowledge of its development.

The person responsible is not an employee of ours, but we took immediate action
to make sure it was clear the site was not affiliated with the campaign.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2007/09/romney_camp_dis.html

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

A photograph, partially torn at the corner and suffering from being stuffed into a drawer full of screwdrivers, wrenches, and assorted knick knacks and gewgaws reflected the fluorescent light in the kitchen off its scratched surface making it difficult to identify. Why we call it the “utility drawer” is beyond me. I suppose it’s because anything and everything that doesn’t have its own place eventually ends up being carelessly thrown in there - parts of one’s life that defy categorization or stuff that we can afford to forget about.

The picture is unremarkable. It is a photo of me from 6 years ago standing on a dock, the river over my shoulder. I’m wearing a Chicago White Sox hat pulled low over my eyes, protecting them from the bright sun. It is a picture taken by my friend Patty before a few of us went out for a late afternoon river ride.

The date timestamped on the back was September 9, 2001.

Interesting how photographs pull memories out of your head as a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. You don’t think about a particular day or experience until something else acts as a catalyst and the memories all come back in a rush. For instance, sometimes when I smell strawberries I think of the lip gloss worn by one of my first girlfriends back in high school. The memories are so powerful, I can almost taste her lips on mine and smell the perfume she used to wear.

That’s one of those memories that cause you to pause and smile, a warm feeling washing over you as the intensity of the recollection brings about an actual physical reaction. And then it’s gone and try as you might, you can’t conjure up that same memory with the same intensity until the next time you are caught unawares and whatever it is that triggers remembrance is set in motion.

So it was with this scratchy, damaged photograph I accidentally pulled out of a kitchen drawer yesterday, September 9, 2007. But the memory of the event that it elicited was fleeting. More to the point, the photograph acted as one part of a memory bracket with my own mind’s eye in the here and now acting as its counterpart. I was looking at my pre-9/11 self and contemplating what I had become in 2007.

The radical coincidence of finding a photograph on the exact same date that it was taken years earlier was serendipitous. Would that everyone could be so lucky. In that late summer of 2001, there was no shadow moving across the land, no premonition of danger, not a clue that less than two days later the America we had gotten so familiar with - omnipotent, invincible, striding confidently toward a fat, happy future - would be brought so low. And all our silly pretensions about being immune to the evils that plague the rest of the planet would come crashing down in a series of searing, unforgettable images, dust and smoke blotting out the sun that just hours before shone so benevolently on a land seemingly oblivious to what evil was capable.

The photograph doesn’t show that we were sleepwalking toward disaster for the previous decade. But the memory of what occupied the attention of the man in picture at that time is as clear as day to me. I was on vacation for the week and was going on a trip on Thursday. My biggest concern about flying at the time was that the cross country flight didn’t allow smoking and I dreaded the thought of having to endure a perpetual nicotine fit for the entire 5 hour flight.

If the man standing in the kitchen contemplating the past could have sent a message to the man standing on the dock in the photograph telling him about 9/11, you can well imagine what the reaction would have been. Disbelief, anger at such thoughts invading the complacency we all felt about our safety, and perhaps confusion - a profound befuddlement that surpassed his capacity to grasp that such things could happen in America or anywhere else for that matter. He would have had no frame of reference that could illuminate the terrible consequences of raw, unreasoning hatred directed against strangers whose only transgressions were in the fevered imaginings of a radical ideology that gave its adherents permission to commit murder in the name of God.

Time is not absolute. Our memories prove that. Reminiscing can bring the past back to us, telescoping time and space so that the smells, the tastes, and the emotions we felt at any given moment can exist in both the present tense and the yesteryear of our thoughts. It is a blessing and a trap that the human mind works in this way, gifting us with faces, events, and feelings from the long ago that bring joy to our hearts but at the same time, entangling us in unwanted skeins of retrospection, recalling all too clearly those times that are best left unremembered - orphan memories that no one wants but can’t escape.

And if those memories can play tricks on us so as to cause us to recall events incorrectly, we rarely recollect false emotions or senses. I know that the man in the photograph and the man in the kitchen are the same person. But the emotional world of 2001 in which the man in the photograph lived did not include the 9/11 attacks or the realization that the slow, inexorable march of time would cover that open wound with a healing scab, lessening the horror but leaving behind an inexpressible sadness at what was lost that day.

We are the same, that man in the photograph and me. But the emotional wall between us that makes any real connection impossible is a direct result of the man in the kitchen having lived through 9/11 and its momentous aftermath. Try as I might, I can’t quite recapture the absolute certainty I felt at that time that nothing in America would ever really change. It’s not so much that I believed we would never be attacked. It’s just that I and most Americans never had the thought enter our heads. It wasn’t unbelievable or unimaginable. It simply didn’t exist in this universe.

That, I suppose is the biggest difference between the man in the photograph and me. And to this day, that difference is coloring our politics, our culture, and refashioning America below the surface into a different place than the country inhabited by the man on the dock. No one knows what that America will look like a decade, two decades from now. The forces of denial and appeasement are strong. But I hope if I pull that photo out years from now, I will still recognize the world in which the man on the dock lived and recall the things he considered important and vital about America.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has a terrific round up of 9/11 recollections.

Attacking the President over his Iraq policies and for the sunny side up way in which the Administration has been reporting progress on the war over the last 4 years is fair game. This is politics in America today, albeit much of the criticism is vicious and personal, and therefore appropriate in the context of what constitutes a debate over our policies.

But leave it to the left to lower the bar so that even rattlesnakes can’t get under it.

This is an ad that appeared in the New York Times today from that bastion of restraint and decorum, Moveon.Org:

At least give them credit for originality. I can’t remember the last time a general officer in the United States Army was all but called a traitor.

The body of the ad is unimportant if only because it links to reports from the GAO and others that show the surge isn’t “working.” If there is anything about Iraq that we can say with certainty, it is that in the relatively short amount of time (about 3 months since our force buildup was complete) that the surge has been in full motion, good progress has been made in some areas, no progress in others, and some places have gotten worse.

Duh.

The fact that al-Qaeda and the sectarian murderers (many of whom are not free agents but are being paid by outside actors) can read the newspapers and watch al-Jazeera, knowing full well the political situation in this country and are further aware that a supreme effort on their part to kill as many innocents as possible will likely bolster calls for an immediate withdrawal of our troops places people like Moveon.Org and the netroots who have also been sliming General Petreaus over the last few days in a de-facto alliance with the killers. Both want exactly the same thing; America totally out of Iraq. To not acknowledge that using the enemy’s deliberate attempt to escalate casualties in hopes that war opponents will gain the upper hand in this country is self-deluding. It doesn’t mean that the left are traitors or unpatriotic or anything else except pure, unadulterated dupes, easily manipulated and trained like dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Only in this case, they are trained to say “I told you so” about the surge after every mass casualty attack.

As long as the situation is even marginally better, we should continue to do all in our power to help the Iraqi government somehow come to grips with its numerous problems. I have little confidence the crew currently in charge - Maliki and his sectarian mob - are anxious to get anything done in this regard. But the “bottom up” reconciliation being effected in Anbar and elsewhere may work to force the national government to deal with the Sunnis sooner rather than later. When 50 Sunni tribes representing the great majority of Sunnis in Anbar form a secular political party to participate in the political life of the country, Maliki and his henchmen will have political difficulty in not working with them and others, although I imagine we will have to exploit the Shia fears of a well armed Sunni population in order to do get them off the mark.

Unfortunately, Baghdad and its environs are a different story. Here, the national polity has been so fractured, the factions so numerous and violent that it would be best if we allowed the Iraqi army alone to handle security there. Given that the army and police are riven with Shia militia sympathizers, this probably means a virtually “Sunni free” Baghdad in the future. This, along with the power of the Shia militias in the south are beyond our military’s capability to deal with. The militias ultimately are a political problem for the government.

Is the situation likely to turn around in 6 months? A year? No one, including Moveon and their smear machine can say. But given the stakes and given what has occurred so far, we should at least give General Petreaus the benefit of the doubt and allow him to continue his work, revisiting the issue again next March and on a regular basis after that.

Sliming General Petreaus, calling him a liar, a stooge, an Administration lackey is a sign that the left can’t win the debate on the merits of their arguments. All they have left is to attempt to kill the messenger by destroying his credibility. General Petreaus has more integrity in his little finger than all those who have sought to damage his well deserved reputation have collectively. And judging by what I’ve been hearing at the Congressional hearing this morning, their tactic has backfired badly.

For the first time since I began blogging 3 years ago, I found it necessary to pull an entire post from the site.

Entitled “The Most Shockingly Dishonest Poll in the History of the Media,” it linked to this poll at ABC News that shows the Iraqis don’t feel any safer today as a result of the surge.

The methodology at the end of the article stated the poll had been taken 6 months ago. It did not mention that they had additionally polled Iraqis in August. I found out that little tidbit thanks to Allah at Hot Air.

Obviously, I erred in my original post that ABC and the BBC tried to put a fast one over on us. I apologize to those who may have been misled by my erroneous information.

It’s the Administration says the left. It’s probably al-Qaeda themselves, say those more reality based.

Whoever made it, may very well have faked it:

Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The audio track does appear to be in the voice of a single speaker. What I suspect was done is that an older, unreleased video was dubbed over for this release, with the video frozen

Just to be sure, I downloaded the MPEG file and played it on my Windows Media Player (I sometimes have issues with the Flash Player). Sure enough, the video freezes right where Mr. Maschke says it does - in both instances.

In effect, what we have is about a 3 1/2 minute video that has been stretched out to more than 26 minutes by simply freezing a frame of OBL over first about ten minutes then more than 12 minutes of the tape.

The Telegraph gives us a possible explanation:

The al-Qaeda leader’s first video message for three years featured a bizarre rant against America, with references to global warming, “insane taxes”, the US mortgage market meltdown and rising interest rates.

American spy chiefs were quick to name Adam Gadahn, the head of al-Qaeda’s English language media operations, as the author of large sections of bin Laden’s broadcast.

Last October, the 28-year-old “loner” became the first American charged with treason since 1952, for appearing in a succession of al-Qaeda videos under the guise of “Azzam The American”, in which he condemned globalisation and made American cultural references.

[snip]

What surprised analysts was his use of the language of Left-wing protesters, which showed detailed knowledge of the economic travails of middle America.

Bin Laden referred to “the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgage” and blamed “global warming and its woes” on “emissions of the factories the major corporations”.

A former senior US intelligence official said: “It has Adam Gadahn written all over it.” Mike Baker, a former CIA covert operations officer, said the tape left bin Laden with “the title of biggest gas bag in the terrorist world”.

CIA officials said voice analysis of the tape proved it was definitely bin Laden.

Funny that the CIA concludes that it’s Bin Laden on the tape but never mentions - or perhaps didn’t catch - the freeze framed video. It is hugely significant because as Maschke points out, all of the topical references that “prove” the tape is recent are uttered when the “video” is in freeze frame.

If our government is going to release a tape showing that Osama is alive, one would think that this kind of little detail would be hugely important to point out to the press and the American public. If anything, this video chicanery buttresses the case that Osama has been worm food for a while.

Wheels within wheels: The CIA knows Osama is dead but doesn’t want al-Qaeda to know that we know. Why? Perhaps they have someone close to al-Qaeda’s inner circle. Not close enough to know where they are, but close enough that our intelligence people are kept abreast of a few things. Letting on that we know Osama is dead might expose that source to al-Qaeda.

And how about the idea that this is a speech that may have been written by some poor deluded leftist twit pretending to be a jihadist read by the world’s number one terrorist? Adam Gadahn may be a useful idiot to al-Qaeda but I hardly think they have grown so unsophisticated that they would be using him as Osama’s ghost writer - literally. Besides, CNN International is seen all over the world. If they want to copy leftist propaganda spouted here in the United States, they can do no better than use Ted Turner’s creation for that.

Michael Ledeen is not convinced either:

Third, is it really Osama? As you know, I was reliably told something like two years ago that Osama had died. Nothing in this speech sounds at all like the “old” OBL. That man knew how to give a stemwinder, he used elegant language, his threats were blood-curdling, his calls to the faithful inspiring. This man talks like, well, a high school dropout. In fact it reads like an “Onion” spoof. And the sound is bizarre, at least on my IBM desktop. It sounds almost as if there was enough garble in it to make it difficult to match with voice prints of the “real” guy. I’m not convinced.

Is it possible that this “tape” was manufactured by the Bush Administration and released just days before the Petreaus Report to Congress on Iraq in order to sway nervous Republicans into standing firm while reminding the American people that Iraq is part of the War on Terror?

The question has to be asked because it will probably be the number one topic of conversation on lefty blogs today. And the answer is a qualified no, it is not possible. One can accuse the Bush Administration of incompetence in many areas but you would think if they were going to run a fake video, they might have done a better job of manufacturing it so that some guy in pajamas sitting in his mother’s basement couldn’t expose them.

And al-Qaeda shutting down it’s various websites immediately after the tape’s release is an interesting tell as well. They wouldn’t want their sympathizers telling the world that the video is an obvious fake.

Yes, I suppose it is possible that the Administration ordered up the video for the Iraq debate. Anything is possible. But there is not one scintilla of evidence that points the finger at the Administration while logic and inference finger this as an attempt by al-Qaeda to stick their nose into the debate themselves - just as they tried to do with the 2004 election when they released the last Osama video.

I’m sure this is not the end of this story. By the end of the day, I suspect a Blogswarm as well as further interesting speculation. Perhaps even more revelations will be forthcoming once bloggers with professional audio and video equipment start putting the tape to the test.

One of those days when it’s great to be a blogger…