12 December 2007

The White House


I stopped to take a snapshot of the destruction at the White House yesterday. No, not that one, appealing as it might be to some folks. I am talking about the one in Buckingham.

The minute I write about a building standing in “lonely isolation,” someone appears to take it as a direct challenge. The White House was half chewed away by the time I appeared on the scene. It looked like a bomb hit it, which is coincidental. They say that the first bomb exploded in Algiers, shortly before 9:30.

The target in that case was non-cooperative, which the White House was, since it had protection. It was the building housing the Constitutional Council, which handles public elections in the former French colony.

Chinese workers had just completed the building, which was designed in the Moorish style, celebrating both the pre-colonial Islamic heritage and the rising presence of China throughout the continent. The bad guys hit a United Nations building a few minutes later on Émile Payen Street, a narrow way in the old part of town.

The building had housed the World Food Program, among other functions. “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” is the name of this group, or at least it was yesterday. They are a franchise outfit from the home company who designated six of their own to die in order to murder “the Crusaders and their agents, the slaves of America and the sons of France.”

Their media release was an interesting collision of images- slaves and sons- since the Islamic heritage of the Maghreb was once based on the taking of infidel slaves for ransom and hard labor. But never mind. This is about history that is either forgotten or re-invented, based on the agenda of the future.

It is certainly a hard-line position, but Algeria has always been a hard case. Later in the morning, the Secretary General was expressing his outrage about the strike on his soft target, just as Mike Hayden, resplendent in his blue suit with the four stars on the shoulders, was arriving at the Senate Hart Office Building.

He was summoned to talk to the Intelligence Committee. Mike is a cerebral and ambitious man, and he coolly distanced himself from the controversy about the destroyed videotapes. Some idiot had decided to record the interrogation of some high-value al Qaida targets, made their existence known, and some other idiot had ordered them destroyed.

Mike was phlegmatic about the whole matter, since it was on George Tenet's watch that the tapes were made, and on Porter Goss's that they were destroyed.

They were gone six months before he took the job, and thus Mike was able to put the whole thing in perspective. He was happy the tapes were gone; they were nothing but trouble and he said as much in a statement circulated to the workforce at Langley.

I don't know if he played the ultimate trump card on the matter, since his testimony was classified and no one has leaked it yet to the Post. I never saw the tapes, though I am sure they would have been a public relations problem. One thing that struck me was that at least one of the prisoners was questioned about the numbers contained in his cell phone, which implicated senior officials of some of our good friends in the Middle East.

The implication that our pals were witting of the coming attacks on New York and Washington would have been at least as embarrassing as watching some acknowledged terrorist get knocked around.

It is not like they didn't kill sixty more innocent people yesterday, you know?

But the wheels of the process will grind on. The Committee said they would call Mr. Tenet and Mr. Goss to appear before them for additional testimony.

The Senate really wants to get to the bottom of the matter, though when they get there, I doubt that they will like what they find.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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