Thursday, November 20, 2014

'The Burning Room' and Bosch: A Talk With Michael Connelly

November 3, 2014
Michael Connelly is the award-winning bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Harry Bosch detective series and the Mickey Haller novels.
His latest Harry Bosch novel, The Burning Room, has Bosch setting his sights on a cold case that began a decade earlier when the victim was shot. With the victim having just died, the act is now considered murder, even though the case is ten years old. Bosch has been assigned a new partner, rookie detective Lucia Soto, and with retirement just around the corner, Harry does his best to teach Lucia the ropes of detective work and solve this ten-year-old case.
Harry Bosch is nearing the end of his career. Is this the last novel in which we will see him?
No. I think developments in the The Burning Room give me some opportunities to take Harry in a new direction.
Will we now also be following Lucia Soto's career?
I really like her and will bring her back. I always ask myself if I've said all I want to about a character, and with Lucy, the answer is no. There's unfinished business with her. She and Harry connect with each other as dedicated detectives. That was one aspect I really liked about her.
Bosch is a police procedural television series produced by Amazon Studios and scheduled for release in 2015. How did this project happen?
Harry's had a checkered history when it comes to Hollywood. Early on, there was interest in him. I sold the rights for a film in the 1990s. It was a long-term deal. Even though nothing came of it, I don't regret it, because it was Hollywood money that permitted me to become a full-time writer. It allowed me to focus on Bosch's character in the books, which is a big part of why I'm still able to write about him. It was something of a deal with the devil, but I would do it again.
Years went by, and I finally got the rights back. By that time, I'd written many books about Harry Bosch. It seemed clear that if I went back to Hollywood, the best way to tell the story would be in a television series. You know, in Hollywood, word leaks out and Amazon came calling. A partnership was formed. From my standpoint, it was easy and painless. I wasn't drifting around Hollywood, trying to sell Harry Bosch. It all kind of fell in my lap.
Beyond the connection to book-selling, Amazon wanted me involved in the TV series. That's quite unusual in Hollywood. Normally, they take a book and say, "Be a good little fella and run along. We'll take care of this." But Amazon wanted my involvement to help nurture the visual recreation of the character with whom I'd spent twenty years of my life. The prospect of participating was very attractive to me, and it was a no-brainer. The first season of Bosch will be ten episodes which can be streamed on television. It will premiere in February of 2015. It'll be a binger's delight, filled with Harry Bosch.
What's your involvement in the television series?
I co-wrote the pilot with the show-runner. In television, the show-runner is the creative boss. I don't have experience with television, so we wanted to get someone who did and whose creative mindset was similar to mine. We went to Eric Overmyer, who'd worked on The Wire and Treme, and who's worked on other shows I've loved. So, he's the boss -- the show-runner. I'm his lieutenant. He runs stuff by me to get my take and make sure we're on point with Harry Bosch's stories.
Harry Bosch is played very effectively by Titus Welliver. I don't recall elaborate physical descriptions of Harry in the novels. How do you feel about this physical representation of Bosch?
First of all, you're right. There are nineteen Harry Bosh books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention. I write the way I read. I like to imagine and build characters in my head. I trust the readers to build their own visual images. To me, that's part of the wonder of reading.
But with television, we have to apply flesh and blood to the character. I'm glad I had a say in the decision about depicting Harry on the screen. I'd seen Titus Welliver in a few shows and felt he had some inner demons in his portrayals, as does Harry Bosch. That's a key trait for Harry. The few physical descriptions of Harry in the books are mere window dressing. The real challenge is for an actor to portray a guy with the inner demons of Harry Bosch. In Titus, I saw the ability to do that. After all the auditions, we decided to go with Titus, and I'm very happy with him. We're six episodes into the filming of the first season, and Titus really owns that part.
In the pilot, I noticed flashbacks implying that as a kid, Harry was beaten and abused. I don't recall that from the novels.
The novels don't hit it on the head as much as the pilot does, but they do contain references to Harry's growing up in foster homes. It can be inferred that there was physical abuse in his childhood. In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can't dance around stuff. You either show it or you don't. We decided to show it in the series.
In the shift from page to screen, were there any important changes made to Harry Bosch and his world?
Yes. Basically, the novels provide a twenty-year palate from which to choose. In the books, Harry ages in real time. If we're lucky and have a successful show, we might have a five- or six-year run. We have more information in the books than we need. We're picking and choosing what we want for the series. For example, the books begin in 1992 with Harry being forty-two years old. In The Burning Room, he's sixty-four. He has a seventeen-year-old daughter in the book. In the show, Harry's forty-eight and has a thirteen-year-old daughter. We move in time for what we need. The first season of the series hits heavily on two books and touches lightly on a third book. To develop the best first season possible, we take a bit from here and there in the novels. And we can create new stuff with our cadre of writers. So we're not going to have a rigorous adaptation of the books. We're using the novel City of Bones as the mainstay for the first season. That story is the ninth or tenth in the Bosch series, so we're not conforming to the order in which the novels were written. We chose the story for the first season that we thought best showed what Harry Bosch is all about, what draws out his inner demons.
Will Harry age in real time, assuming the series continues for six years?
Yes, he will, because Titus will age. [Laughter.] But it's a smaller microcosm. My books are always set in the year they're published, even in the month they're published. Every subsequent novel involves Harry one year later. With television, it might not be that linear. In fact, we incorporated some later books into this first season in order to transition right into season two and hit the ground running.
I understand you're participating in writing the TV series. As a seasoned novelist, how does co-writing screenplays differ from writing novels?
It's hugely different on at least two levels. The first is what you lose when you go from writing novels to writing for television. In the books, Harry's a very internal guy. One reason he's been around for twenty years is that people like the way he thinks. In a television depiction, you can't go inside his head as you can with a novel. Everything on TV is about what he says and does, which is how a viewer determines whether or not he's likable. I think Harry has a kind of "Everyman's" sensibility with which people connect. In the books, it comes out in his thinking process, but with television, it's really all about what he says and does. That's a big transition for me.
The other aspect is for twenty-five years I've been in a room by myself, writing these books. Of course, I get edited when I turn a book in, but for the year during which I'm writing, it's me against the machine. For the television series, I'm in a room with writers, and all four walls are covered with 3-by-5 cards showing every scene from each episode. It's very much committee work until everything's nailed down and plotted out. Then, different scripts are assigned to various writers who go off and work on those episodes. It's very different from the way I write. I don't even use an outline. Now I can go into a room and see every act and each beat of a scene, an episode, or the entire season right there on the wall. By the time I go off to write a script on my own, I pretty much know everything.
How are you adapting to this sea change in circumstances?
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but for me, it's been a real breath of fresh air. I feel that after twenty-five years in a room by myself, I'm now writing differently. I'm having a great time with it. I think it's going to carry through in my writing future books.
In the pilot episode, Harry seems to be a more edgy guy than in the novels. Was that done as a concession to today's TV audience?
In writing a book, you have to connect quickly with your readers. You also have to instill a momentum in your story. In TV, you have to hit the ground running because there's so much else going on. You're right, in the TV series, Harry's edgier than in the books. This was our choice. We chose a story we knew would have Harry connecting with a case at the very beginning of the series. When a homicide detective gets involved with a case that resonates with his own past -- that taps into his inner demons -- he's going to be more on edge because he really wants to find who did this.
Dumb question: In The Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller is driven around in a 1986 Lincoln town car. In the pilot episode of Bosch, Harry drives around in an old-model Cadillac. Does this reflect your preferences in cars?
No, but I do like the idea of wisdom coming from experience and age. In the opening scene of the pilot, Bosch is sitting in an undercover car -- that old Cadillac. I didn't choose the vehicle; a props person did. But I'll take your question further and say that Harry would never drive a sports car. He'd drive an old, reliable machine.
How do you now apportion your writing time while working on a novel and television series?
I don't know if it's going to work; we'll have to see. The production company knows my priority is writing books. When we went into pre-production, I wasn't around a lot and was able to finish The Burning Room. When we started production, I was totally dedicated to the series. We'll finish the last episode of the season before Thanksgiving, and after that, I'll be starting my next book. So I'm hoping things won't interfere with each other.
So will the next book be a Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller novel?
Right now, I believe it will be both. The story will have Bosh, Haller, and Lucia Soto in it. But as I said before, I don't outline. Right now, I have an idea for the novel but won't begin writing until December, so who knows what will come of it? Things change, and I might get hit by the lightening of another idea and just go with that.
Mickey Haller is my favorite fictional character. Is another Mickey Haller novel coming?
I think what you connect with is that Mickey's more of an outsider. Harry carries a badge and represents the state, but Mickey's outside that rarefied coterie. In some respects, he's almost an outcast, and that can make him very likable. Recently, I've found myself more fascinated by Mickey's stories, and I want to get back to him.
I don't know how long I'm going to keep writing, but I see my writing life as orbiting around Harry. There's still a great deal more I can say about him. When I look back at the nineteen Bosch books, at about every sixth one, a curve ball comes that resuscitates and sustains the series. I think that happened with The Burning Room. So I'm excited about the possibilities for Harry Bosch's next decade.
Congratulations on another Harry Bosch novel, The Burning Room, and a television series that's sure to be a streaming blockbuster and TV binger's delight.
Mark Rubinstein is the author of Mad Dog House, Mad Dog Justice and Love Gone Mad.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Why the World Did Not Know about WMD in Iraq



Posted By Carter Andress On November 19, 2014 @ 12:51 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

The yellow cake was found in Iraq in 2003, shortly after a US-led invasion of the country [AP]

 After U.S. Central Command called on us to help transport from Iraq enough yellowcake uranium to make several atomic bombs stored at Saddam’s nuclear weapons complex, I realized why neither the Pentagon nor the White House advertised the presence of this WMD precursor: safety and security.

Before the U.S. military moved in to secure the facility after the 2003 invasion, looters had been there first. Even though the universally recognized yellow-and-black radioactivity warnings were posted on the bunkers, locals had ripped open the storage areas and stolen casks of yellowcake with many sickened as a result. More importantly, we did not want the insurgents alerted to the exposed stockpile as they might attack the facility. This is also why the George W. Bush administration did not crow about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq, as recently reported by the New York Times. That is a serious quantity of WMD, by any standard. Interestingly, the Bush team could have diluted near-uniform shock at the failure to find WMD by highlighting these discoveries instead of allowing the narrative we all know to solidify: “no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found except a few dozen old, mustard-gas artillery shells left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.” Yet President Bush and his advisors chose to protect the troops and the mission rather than score political points back on the war’s second front, the American body politic. (None of this, however, mitigates any unpreparedness by the Pentagon to treat service members exposed to chemical weapons.)

Before my company arrived to provide guards and to build and operate a base camp for U.S. Department of Energy scientists dissecting Saddam’s nuclear weapons facility, the American Army had occupied the site with almost a company of infantry. This was quite a bit of combat power tethered to a non-populated, static location when needed to actively defend the people against the elusive al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists and Iranian-allied militias rampant until early 2008 when the American Surge forces and the Sunni Arab “Awakening” had turned the tide delivering our victory in the Iraq War. The limited number of combat troops available did not permit fixing them at every site where WMD were found or might be found. Hence the requirement to not advertise that Saddam had left thousands of chemical weapons lying around, potentially under any mound in mostly flat Iraq. That would have set off a dangerous treasure hunt—and if found, a tremendous threat to American troops and everyone in Iraq especially if weaponized nerve gas had ended up with al-Qaeda.

We were able to move the yellowcake successfully because of our proven relationships with the tribes along our supply line to the nuclear weapons facility, located at the center of an area known as the “Triangle of Death,” due to extensive U.S. combat fatalities suffered there. Because of our and other U.S. government contractors’ employment of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, we helped drain the swamp (or “sea” in Maoist terms) whence the al-Qaeda insurgency sprung. The uranium operation caused us, as usual, to rent trucks from the surrounding tribes with comprehensive war-loss insurance (meaning if a truck got blown up then the owner took the loss). This in turn caused the tribes to look outwards on the convoy movements to protect their expensive tractor trailers instead of inwards—searching for a chance to attack. Doing business for the tribes with the American government, and then the Iraqi government, turned out to be safer than supporting the nihilistic, totalitarian jihadis and the traitorous Sadrists, minions of Iran.

Regardless of what position one takes on the U.S. invasion, the world could not abide by large quantities of nuclear weapons precursor in the hands of the genocidal tyrant in Baghdad. As we are seeing with the current, seemingly endless negotiations with Iran, the millionaire mullahs of Tehran are using the pretext of “peaceful” nuclear power generation in order to assert that the denial thereof is a direct assault on a nation’s sovereignty. Consequently, the concept that we could have gotten the yellowcake removed from Iraq as a part of lifting the rapidly degrading sanctions and truly certifying the country clean of all chemical weapons without the overthrow of Saddam defies logic and experience. The continued possession by Iraq of approximately 5,000 chemical warheads undiscovered after almost eight years of aggressive UN inspections along with the existence of enough yellowcake uranium to make 14 or so nuclear bombs with technology that the Iranians and Libyans already possessed calls for a new coda to replace “Bush lied, people died.” Certainly, we should look to the reinstatement of a principle justification for the American invasion of Iraq.

Carter Andress is president of AISG, Inc. (American-Iraqi Solutions Group) and the author, with Malcolm McConnell, of Victory Undone: The Defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Its Resurrection as ISIS (Regnery, October 2014).    

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Christa Harmotto returns to Hopewell with a new kind of medal


By Bill Allmann, Beaver County Times Sports Correspondent 
http://www.timesonline.com/sports
November 18, 2014

Sylvester Washington Jr. of the Times
U.S. Olympic silver medalist Christa Harmotto Dietzan appeared at Hopewell High School on Wednesday for a Q&A session and autograph signing.


HOPEWELL TWP. -- Ten years ago, Christa Harmotto brought gold medals back to Hopewell High School from both the WPIAL and PIAA Volleyball championships.

When she returned Tuesday night, she brought a different gold medal back – one from the world championships that she won as a member of the US National Team.
“After winning those gold medals in high school, I had no idea how far my career would have gone,” said Christa, who also brought a new last name back to Hopewell. After her recent marriage, she is now Christa Harmotto Dietzen. “I knew I was going to college but I didn’t know about anything beyond that.
“Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve been thankful for the support of everyone who has helped me along the way.”
Along the way, Christa has built on the three WPIAL and one PIAA titles from Hopewell, winning two national titles at Penn State and while being named an All-American four times while there, and won a silver medal as a member of the 2012 Olympic team.
Before talking to local volleyball players for an hour about setting goals and values, Hopewell gave Harmotto Dietzen another honor – her number 20 was retired with a plaque to go alongside other Hopewell greats such as Tony Dorsett and Joe Colella in the Hopewell lobby.
“I didn’t know that was going to happen,” said Harmotto Dietzen. “My roots mean so much to me. They’ve been so important in making me the person I am, that blue collar work ethic and the values that were instilled in me.”
Harmotto Dietzen reflected those values in the hour she spent talking to the student-athletes in attendance. There were no volleyball strategies discussed and no plays diagrammed. The only volleyballs in the gym were ones students (and coaches) brought to be signed.
She told the crowd to set goals but expect peaks and valleys – growth happens in the valleys. She told the crowd that she was thankful for her injuries because they made her mentally stronger and how the rehab made her even better at time management.
She told the crowd that no matter where she played and no matter how big the event, the court was always the same size she played on at Hopewell and the ball was the same size, so to filter through all the other distractions and to focus on that.
“I’ve wanted to do something like this, to talk to student-athletes on their level,” Harmotto Dietzen said. “I’ve done Q&A sessions with club teams before in southern California but I appreciate the boosters setting this up so I could share about goals, values, and leadership.”
Considering that volleyball has taken her to the highest level of her sport and sent her all over the world, some may have found it surprising that Christa was adamant that the student-athletes not just focus on one sport but to play as many different sports as possible, to avoid burnout both physically and mentally.
“I played all the sports, I played soccer, I was in gymnastics until I got too tall for it, and I played basketball,” she shared after the program. “I loved basketball and I can remember how tough it was to give up basketball before my junior year. It was my first major decision and my parents were out of town and I can remember calling and telling them.
“I had just reached the point where I felt I had to make a decision to concentrate on the US junior national team. It was a really difficult decision.’
The decision, though, has worked out, obviously, very well, and it doesn’t look like the end to its effect is near.
“Yes, there is another Olympics (2016) in my plan,” Harmotto Dietzen said with a smile. “After that, we’ll see. Mr. Borkovic (her high school coach, Terry Borkovic) asked me if I’d ever get into coaching and I had to say yes.
“I can’t imagine ever dropping out of volleyball.”
For good reason – it’s been an amazing 10 years.
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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

More Beheadings, More Denial


Posted By Robert Spencer On November 18, 2014 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 16 Comments

All you have to do is change the name of the victim, and this could be a story from August, or September, or October: the Islamic State has beheaded yet another hostage, this time Peter Kassig, aka Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and Barack Obama has declared yet again that the beheading has nothing to do with Islam. Obama might as well have a form ready for the next jihad beheading or mass murder attack: all he will have to do is fill in the blank and then take to the airwaves to say that the latest bloodshed has nothing to do with Islam. If the victims are British, he can lend his form to David Cameron.

But all this repeating of the political elites’ “Islam is peace” meme will never make it so. And the constant repetition of this falsehood is doing nothing less than endangering Americans. It keeps people ignorant who might otherwise get a clear idea of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. It fosters complacency. It makes all too many Americans assume that this kind of behavior is restricted to the “extremists” of the Islamic State, and could never happen here.

It could happen here. It could happen anywhere that people read the phrase “when you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4) as if it were a command of the Creator of the Universe. But to point out that simple and obvious fact nowadays only brings down upon one’s head charges of “hatred” and of “demonizing all Muslims,” when in a sane society it would bring honest explanations from Muslims of good will of what they were doing to ensure that no Muslim ever acted on that verse’s literal meaning.

In reality, they’re doing nothing. No Muslim organization, mosque or school in the United States has any program to teach young Muslims and converts to Islam why they should avoid and reject on Islamic grounds the vision of Islam – and of unbelievers – that the Islamic State and other jihad groups offer them. This is extremely strange, given the fact that all the Muslim organizations, mosques and schools in the United States ostensibly reject this understanding of Islam. And even stranger is that no American authorities seem to have noticed the absence of such initiatives, much less dared to call out Muslim groups about this.

On the contrary, instead of calling on Muslim groups to take some action to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, Obama’s latest denial was even more strenuous in its dissociation of the beheading from Islam: “ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”

“Least of all”! As if it were possible that the Islamic State’s actions represented Buddhism, or Methodism, or Christian Science, or the Hardshell Baptists, or the Mandaeans, to greater or lesser degrees, but the most far-fetched association one could make, out of all the myriad faiths people hold throughout the world, would be to associate the Islamic State’s actions with…Islam. The Islamic State’s actions represent no faith, least of all Islam – as if it were more likely that the Islamic State were made up of Presbyterians or Lubavitcher Hasidim or Jains or Smartas than that it were made up of Muslims.

Why do not just some, but all of the political leaders in Western countries cling to this outlandish fiction? Because reality indicts them. Not only do they insist that Islam is a religion of peace despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence to the contrary; they have made that falsehood a cornerstone of numerous policies. They have encouraged mass immigration and refugee resettlement from Muslim countries, without even making an attempt to determine whether or not any of the people they were importing had any connections to or sympathies with jihad groups.
Their governments have for years partnered with and collaborated with groups with proven ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. They have favored and aided the Brotherhood and groups like it to attain power in the Middle East and North Africa, deeming them “moderate” because they claimed to eschew violence, and blithely ignoring that their goals were the same as those of groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

If Barack Obama or David Cameron admitted that Islam was not a religion of peace, all these disastrous policies and others would be called into question. Cameron’s government might, quite deservedly, fall, and Obama’s would be crippled.

However, the primary reason why Obama and his cohorts continue to stand athwart the pile of beheaded bodies shouting that Islam is a religion of peace is because if they didn’t, the mainstream media – following its own policies as delineated by the Society of Professional Journalists – would immediately denounce them as “racists,” “bigots,” and “Islamophobes,” and their career not just as politicians but as respectable people would be over. It’s not that bad, you say? Just look at how the sharks are circling Bill Maher and tell me that.

Nonetheless, the Big Lie, however ascendant it may be today, is foredoomed. The fact that it is repeated, and must be repeated, so often is evidence of that. No one has to run around insisting that Christianity is a religion of peace, because Christian leaders are reacting to the escalating Muslim persecution of their brethren by opening up their churches to Muslim prayer and muting their criticism of that persecution out of deference to their Muslim “dialogue” partners. If anything says “religion of peace,” it’s Christians forcibly ejecting a Christian woman from a Christian cathedral for proclaiming Christ, so that Muslims could deny him there.

“Religion of abject surrender” might be more apt, but in any case, no one thinks contemporary Christianity is a religion of war. All too many Muslims worldwide, however, energetically go about illustrating every day that Islam is not a religion of peace, and so they keep Obama’s printer busy turning out denial forms, ready for him to fill in the blanks with the name of the next victim: “The murder of _________ has nothing whatsoever to do with the great religion of Islam…”

But this is a counsel of despair. The truth will get out; indeed, it is already abundantly out. We can only hope that not too many more will have to feel the blade at their necks before Obama and the rest can no longer avoid taking realistic and effective action.

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Monday, November 17, 2014

Gruber’s Deception


There’s a reason the Left is recoiling from him. 

In Washington, D.C. it is said that the cover-up is almost always worse than the crime. Certainly, the tortured attempts by supporters of Obamacare to explain away the comments of health analyst Jonathan Gruber — that the law only passed because of a “lack of transparency” that became a “huge political advantage” because of “the stupidity of the American voter” — are more preposterous than even the worst parts of Obamacare.

President Obama himself tried to dismiss Gruber on Sunday by claiming he was just “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” He insisted his comments are “not a reflection on the actual process that was run.”

Hmmm. Gruber visited the White House nearly twenty times, according to official visitor logs. The White House actively promoted his work on Obamacare and touted his testimony to Senate committees as “objective analysis.” The Washington Post reported that Gruber’s model of the law’s costs was “the coin of the realm” in the debate and “a very powerful tool for administration officials,” for which he as paid nearly $400,000 in taxpayer money.

In reality, an analysis of media coverage by The Weekly Standard concluded “an overwhelming number of the ostensibly independent statements or scores that were made or published in support of Obamacare . . . were traceable to the support of one man and his model. And that man was Jonathan Gruber, who was secretly under contract with the Obama administration.”

This is serious. There have been flim-flam attempts to sell legislation in the past — the Left is now trying to distract attention from Gruber’s comments by citing passage of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003. But there are some key differences. Despite its many shortcomings, the Bush prescription-drug benefit wound up being that rare government program that wound up costing substantially less than the predictions that were made at the time of its passage. And it didn’t involve the sweeping stranglehold on one-sixth of the nation’s economy that Obamacare entailed.

Democrats are now recoiling from efforts to get them to comment on Gruber the way Dracula recoils from a cross. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, flabbergasted reporters last week. “I don’t know who he is,” Pelosi said of Gruber. “He didn’t help write our bill.” But she herself had touted his analysis on her website in at least seven places, praised him at congressional meetings, and opened doors to him on Capitol Hill. Video has surfaced of her in 2009 praising “Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill.”

Faced with these facts, Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, told the Washington Post that “she said she doesn’t ‘know who he is,’ not that she’s never heard of him.”

Enough. We are now being subjected to what Springer’s Blog calls “Gruberish,” which it defines as “any bewildering deluge of falsehoods designed to confound an audience based on the speaker’s awareness that the truth must be concealed by any means necessary.”

The new Congress just elected by the American people should peel back this Gruberish. It should launch hearings into just how the Congressional Budget Office was manipulated to provide misleading cost figures for Obamacare, even as the GOP appoints a new CBO director who can bolster confidence in the office. It can pick up on an idea promoted by Representative Fred Upton of Michigan that Congress should send President Obama a simple bill of just a few lines codifying his frequently repeated pledge that “if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” Democrats may have to block it through a Senate filibuster, but the exercise and accompanying debate would be illuminating.

Finally, the media should be shamed into looking more carefully into the bona fides and honesty of the “outside experts” that are trotted out in support of dubious schemes like Obamacare. It should be embarrassing to national media outlets that the growing number of Gruber videos should have been unearthed by a Pennsylvania blogger.

It turns out that far from being disinterested analysts, “outside experts” brought in by government are often highly compensated players whose statements easily slide into propaganda. Gruber supplemented his $400,000 payments from the Obama administration with some $2 million in contracts helping states set up health-care exchanges, much as Mike Leavitt, a former Health and Human Services secretary and adviser to Mitt Romney, did on the Republican side. But as Byron York of the Washington Examiner notes, Jonathan Gruber is a special case worthy of special attention: “He is, by his own account, a man who intentionally deceived the public in order to pass a measure from which he stood to profit handsomely.”

That’s why liberals are scrambling to disassociate themselves from Gruber while at the same time denying the realities of Obamacare’s failures. And that’s precisely why the cover-up of Jonathan Gruber’s remarks — by President Obama, Representative Pelosi, and others — can’t be allowed to stand and must be exposed.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.
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Sunday, November 16, 2014

Bettina Stangneth: Eichmann before Jerusalem

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Wikimedia Commons
Adolf Eichmann’s fame surpasses even that of SS leader Heinrich Himmler and holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich. So why write another book? It was the simplest of questions: I wanted to find out who knew Adolf Eichmann before the Mossad famously snatched him from Argentina and put him before a court in Israel.

Allan Gould: The Eichmann effect

Today, the first of June, marks exactly 50 years since one of the most infamous men of the past century, Adolf Eichmann, was hung by the State of Israel — the first and only time that the death penalty was civilly imposed in that country. Following his execution, the body of the Nazi henchman promptly was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean Sea.
As a young man, passing through Israel on a youth pilgrimage during the summer of 1961, I witnessed Eichmann’s trial, and have been haunted by what I witnessed ever since. But I also have come to realize that the Eichmann trial eventually raised the consciousness of the world, and thereby changed humanity for the better.
When Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in 1961 and flown to Israel, most of the world was furious. The Washington Post condemned Israel’s implementation of “jungle law” and for “wreak[ing] vengeance.” And Time magazine attacked the young nation’s “high-handed disregard of international law.” Perhaps these pundits already had forgotten the flaws that vitiated an earlier exercise in international law, merely 16 years before: the Nuremburg Trial.
Eichmann’s answer, given in Israel, is not hard to find: ”Until1946, I had next to no public profile, until [I] was branded [as] the murderer of 5 or 6 million Jews.” We should not be surprised to hear these words from an accused man — and this one in particular. Eichmann, after all, is famous for saying that he had been “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” What is surprising is that, until now, the secondary literature on Eichmann has dutifully parroted this view. Other great controversies might surround the man behind the genocide, but everyone is agreed that until his trial in Jerusalem, the name Eichmann was known only to a small circle of people.
The suspicion that something was amiss, both in Eichmann’s story and in the research, arose when I started to read old newspapers. On May 23, 1960, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unexpectedly announced to the world that Adolf Eichmann had been captured and was to stand trial. What followed was not a puzzled silence but pages and pages of detailed articles describing a man about whom, supposedly, very little was known, by very few people. A glance at some even older publications confirmed my suspicion unequivocally. Long before the start of his trial, this “unknown” man already had more nicknames than most other Nazis: Caligula; Czar of the Jews; Manager of the Holocaust; Grand Inquisitor; Engineer of the Jewish Genocide; the Final Solutionist; the Bureaucrat; the Mass Murderer.
The evidence raises the questions: How had this knowledge come to be lost? How could a man cause himself to disappear, retrospectively, from the eyes of the world? The answer leads us to the problematic heart of the singular crime against humanity that we call the Holocaust, the Shoah, the extermination of the Jews.
Depending on whose account you read, Eichmann comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the “Eichmann phenomenon” before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life.
If we are to believe what Eichmann said in Israel, his real life — the one he had always longed for — began only in 1945, when the madness of the Thousand Year Reich lay in ruins. That was when the Adviser for Jewish Affairs became a harmless rabbit breeder, as he always had been at the bottom of his heart. It was the regime that had been evil, and his stellar career under Adolf Hitler had really been just a bizarre twist of fate.

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But because Eichmann was aware that a lot of other people might see things differently, he carefully avoided using the name Adolf Eichmann, even making his wife call him by his first forename, Otto, which had also been his grandfather’s name.
While the others were capitulating, he disappeared among the prisoners of war, becoming “Adolf Karl Barth.” Before he managed to escape, he was tried as “Otto Eckmann.” Then he was “Otto Heninger,” a forester on the Lüneberg Heath in northern Germany, working alongside other men who had new names. After that, he bred chickens, enchanting the female population of his rural backwater in the evenings with his violin playing. The life of Otto Heninger, which was already so very like that of the Argentine rabbit breeder, had only two distinct disadvantages: he couldn’t contact his family and he was wanted for war crimes. “In the five years I spent underground, living as a ‘mole,’ it became second nature to me, whenever I saw a new face, to ask myself a few questions, like: Do you know this face? Does this person look like he has seen you before? Is he trying to recall when he might have met you? And during these years, the fear never left me that somebody could come up behind me and suddenly cry: ‘Eichmann!’”
His hope that, in time, grass would grow over the National Socialist genocide, just as it does over other graves, remained unfulfilled. Ultimately, he could see no solution but to flee the country, and so in 1950 Otto Heninger disappeared as well. “Ricardo Klement” left Europe from Genoa, receiving a new identity and new papers in Argentina. He was then able to begin the life he had always wanted: He found work on a hydroelectric power station project, and led a troop of surveyors across Tucumán, a subtropical area in the north of Argentina where the mountains and valleys are reminiscent of the Alps.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia CommonsAdolf Eichmann's passport, on which he is listed as "Ricardo Klement'
He had plenty of time to make trips on horseback too, exploring the mountains, crossing the pampas, and even twice attempting to climb Aconcagua, the Americas’ highest mountain. Two years later, when his wife and their three sons were finally able to join him, he began taking the boys with him on his expeditions, teaching them to ride and fish and imparting to them his own love of nature. For a while, the collapse of the project’s firm somewhat dampened the family’s blissful existence: Ricardo Klement had to look for work, and he wasn’t always successful, but by 1955 at the latest, his happiness must have been complete. He was handed not only the manager’s job at a rabbit farm but also a fourth son, even though his wife was over 40. Little “Hasi” was the apple of his father’s eye. No wonder Klement then decided to build his own house, to accommodate his lovely wife, his four sons, Fifi the dachshund, Rex the German shepherd, the cuckoo clock, and the paintings of alpine scenes. If he hadn’t been kidnapped by Mossad, he would still be living the harmless life of Ricardo Klement.
This moving tale had just one major flaw: Ricardo Klement might have been the name on his passport, but the reformed Nazi and nature lover, a man who was now entirely apolitical, had never arrived in Argentina. Rural idylls were not Eichmann’s thing. For him, the war — his war — had never ended. In the evenings, he read and wrote, and his work was anything but introspective. This was no contented man in his 50s, reading for pleasure: the peaceable rabbit farmer was capable of throwing books against the wall and tearing them to pieces, filling them with aggressive marginalia, insults, and invectives, and covering mountains of paper with his commentaries, writing like a man possessed. Pencils snapped under the force of his scribbling; his fighting spirit was unbroken. The ideological warrior had not been defeated, and he was by no means alone.
The reason we know so much about his life in Argentina today is due to a happy coincidence. Over the last two years, documents have surfaced in several archives and are now available to researchers. For the first time, the Argentina Papers — Eichmann’s own notes made in exile — can be examined in conjunction with the taped and transcribed conversations known (slightly misleadingly) as the Sassen interviews. Suddenly, we are able to make connections that could never have been made before. And one thing in particular stands out: Not once during his escape and exile did Eichmann seek the shadows or try to act in secrecy. He wanted to be visible in Argentina, and he wanted to be viewed as he once had been: as the symbol of a new age.
Those who seek out the light will be seen. Clearly more people had dealings with Eichmann after 1945 than was previously thought. Tracing his route into the underground and into exile, we come across not only Nazi hunters and hit squads, but people who helped and sympathized with him and even became his friends — though for a long time afterward, they denied ever having known him, or said they had met him only briefly. Willem Sassen, a Dutch volunteer in the Waffen-SS and a war propagandist, spent decades claiming only to have been Eichmann’s “ghostwriter.” Like him, most of Eichmann’s friends denied most of their contact with the wanted man. Their denials no longer carry any weight. The Argentina Papers reveal the names of the people who sought Eichmann out to talk about old times and, more important, to discuss political plans for the future. For in spite of all attempts to ignore them, there they were: the Nazis in Argentina. They had escaped the Allied courts and were regrouping, with much bigger plans than to be left in peace to start new lives.
From a safe distance, the men around Eichmann used their freedom in exile to comment on developments in Germany and the rest of the world. They pursued ambitious plans for political overthrow, busily putting together a network of like-minded people. They even started counterfeiting documents designed to defend their view of glorious National Socialism against reality. And in their midst was Adolf Eichmann: self-assured, dedicated, and in demand as a specialist (with millions of murders to prove his expertise) — exactly what a man who had had his own department in the Head Office for Reich Security was used to.
If Eichmann ever really wanted to be the placid, harmless Ricardo Klement, it was not until he was sitting in an Israeli prison cell. In Argentina, he proudly signed photos for his comrades “Adolf Eichmann — SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired).”
National Post

Excerpted from Eichmann Before Jerusalem.  Copyright © 2014 .  Published by Knopf, a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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A murderer’s warped idealism


November 14, 2014
Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but it lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust is the dark sun into which humanity should stare, lest troubling lessons be lost through an intellectual shrug about “the unfathomable.”
Now comes an English translation of a 2011 German book that refutes a 1963 book and rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things — ideas that denigrate reason. The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth’s “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer” responds to Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily and perversely influential “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
Although, or perhaps because, Arendt was a philosopher, in her report on Israel’s trial of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of industrialized murder, she accepted the facade Eichmann presented to those who could, and in 1962 would, hang him: He was a little “cog” in a bureaucratic machine. He said he merely “passed on” orders and “oversaw” compliance. Arendt agreed.
She called Eichmann “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” lacking “criminal motives,” “a buffoon,” “a typical functionary” who was “banal” rather than “demonic” because he was not “deep,” being essentially without “ideology.” Arendt considered Eichmann “thoughtless,” partly because, with a parochialism to which some intellectuals are prone, she could not accept the existence of a coherent and motivating ideological framework that rejected, root and branch, the universality of reason, and hence of human dignity.
It was odd for Arendt to suppose that the pride Eichmann took in his deportations — especially of the more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews when the war was already lost and even Heinrich Himmler, hoping for leniency, was urging it for the Jews — was merely pride in managerial virtuosity. Arendt, however, did not have, as Stangneth has had, access to more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s writings and taped musings among Argentina’s portion of the Nazi diaspora, before Israeli agents kidnapped him in 1960.
Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the “final solution” even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. “His name,” Stangneth notes, “appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war” in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a “campaign” of “mass murder.”
“I was an idealist,” he told his fellow exiles, and he was. In obedience to the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within,” a.k.a. the “voice of blood,” his anti-Semitism was radical because it was ideological. Denying that all individuals are created equal entailed affirming the irremediable incompatibility of groups, which necessitated a struggle to settle subordination and extermination.
“There are,” Eichmann wrote, “a number of moralities.” But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, “Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things.”
Eichmann, a premature postmodernist, had a philosophy to end philosophizing. To him, Stangneth says, “philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories” was absurd. She says his ideology was “the fundamental authorization for his actions.”
In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” argued that Germany was saturated with “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that produced much voluntary participation in genocide. This made Hitler a mere product and trigger of cultural latency. But in 1992, Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men,” a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became willing mass murderers, had noted that the murders of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and tens of millions of Chinese by Mao’s Cultural Revolution could not be explained by centuries of conditioning by a single idea.
Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest” — set in Auschwitz, it is a study of moral vertigo — contains a lapidary afterword in which Amis abjures “epistemological rejection,” the idea that an explanation of Hitler and his enthusiasts is impossible. An explanation begins with Eichmann’s explanation of himself, rendered in Argentina.
Before he donned his miniaturizing mask in Jerusalem, Eichmann proclaimed that he did what he did in the service of idealism. This supposedly “thoughtless” man’s devotion to ideas was such that, Stangneth says, he “was still composing his last lines when they came to take him to the gallows.”
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The Great Immigration Betrayal


By Ross Douthat
http://www.nytimes.com/
November 15, 2014
IN the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.
First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.
Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed.
The legal issues first. The White House’s case is straightforward: It has “prosecutorial discretion” in which illegal immigrants it deports, it has precedent-grounded power to protect particular groups from deportation, and it has statutory authority to grant work permits to those protected. Therefore, there can be no legal bar to applying discretion, granting protections and issuing work permits to roughly half the illegal-immigrant population.
This argument’s logic, at once consistent and deliberately obtuse, raises one obvious question: Why stop at half? (Activists are already asking.) After all, under this theory of what counts as faithfully executing the law, all that matters is that somebody, somewhere, is being deported; anyone and everyone else can be allowed to work and stay. So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.
The reality is there is no agreed-upon limit to the scope of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law because no president has attempted anything remotely like what Obama is contemplating. In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home. None of those moves even approached this plan’s scale, none attempted to transform a major public policy debate, and none were deployed as blackmail against a Congress unwilling to work the president’s will.
And none of them had major applications outside immigration law. No defender of Obama’s proposed move has successfully explained why it wouldn’t be a model for a future president interested in unilateral rewrites of other areas of public policy (the tax code, for instance) where sweeping applications of “discretion” could achieve partisan victories by fiat. No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates.
Especially debates in which the executive branch is effectively acting in direct defiance of the electoral process. This is where the administration has entered extraordinarily brazen territory, since part of its original case for taking these steps was that they supposedly serve the public will, which only yahoos and congressional Republicans oppose.
This argument was specious before; now it looks ridiculous. The election just past was not, of course, a formal referendum on the president’s proposed amnesty, but it was conducted with the promise of unilateral action in the background, and with immigration as one of the more hotly debated issues. The result was a devastating defeat for Obama and his party, and most polling on unilateral action is pretty terrible for the president.
So there is no public will at work here. There is only the will to power of this White House.
Which is why the thinking liberal’s move, if this action goes forward, will be to invoke structural forces, flaws inherent in our constitutional order, to justify Obama’s unilateralism. This won’t be a completely fallacious argument: Presidential systems like ours have a long record, especially in Latin America, of producing standoffs between executive and legislative branches, which tends to make executive power grabs more likely. In the United States this tendency has been less dangerous — our imperial presidency has grown on us gradually; the worst overreaches have often been rolled back. But we do seem to be in an era whose various forces — our open-ended post-9/11 wars, the ideological uniformity of the parties — are making a kind of creeping caudillismo more likely.
But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election.
Or he can choose the power grab, and the accompanying disgrace.
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