I've been thinking a lot about Richard Clarke, and not merely because of the limitless chance to make "American Bandstand" jokes ("He's got a beef, you can dance to it.") His new book is being declared a bombshell, which means it's the "Bush AWOL" story all over again: an old charge, sexed up with some new details. And, indeed, it's largely a rehash of the "Bush knew" furore from 2002. Clarke has two main charges against President Bush: first, that he unforgivably fumbled the ball in his first months in office, missing a chance to prevent 9/11; and second, that he focused on Iraq, at the expense of the war on terror.

There's a lot to discuss about Clarke, but I'd like to focus on his first point for the moment:

He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. -Clarke on "60 Minutes" [emphasis mine]

I find this hard to believe. I also find it hard to believe that Clarke actually believes it (actually, it seems he once said he doesn't.)The planning for 9/11 began as early as 1999; the notion that the first 16 months of the 9/11 operation were just filler, with nothing noteworthy or detectable happening until the last eight, simply beggars belief. That Clarke seeks to slam Bush for shirking the war while undertaking a lame defense of the Clinton administration's "bomb the camp but try not to hurt anybody" approach to terrorism doesn't help his credibility as an impartial terror expert.

Oh, but Bush was warned, the story goes; there was all that "chatter". One of the main problems facing U.S. intelligence is that we are almost too good at hearing chatter, and not very good at interpreting it. Radio intercepts are great, but in mass they can become meaningless if you don't have humint assets on the ground to filter them through. One of the reasons our humint is so weak is because the Clinton administration, stung by revelations of CIA relationships with thuggish human rights violators, instituted new rules for running agents that essentially precluded recruiting anyone bad enough to be useful. The result is intelligence summaries like this:

In June 2001, the intelligence community issued a warning that a major Al Qaeda terrorist attack would take place in the next many weeks. They said they were unable to find out exactly where it might take place. They said they thought it might take place in Saudi Arabia.

Yes, well, aside from being uselessly vague on the timing and nature of the attack, and getting the location wrong, they pretty much nailed it, didn't they? That summary is by Clarke himself, in an interview on PBS' Frontline. In the interview, he also sets out his prescription for dealing with Al Qaeda:

Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained," well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen -- the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened.

Let me go on record as saying I would have been thrilled if President Bush had done this (pre-emption, anyone?). But I, it should be clear by now, am a knuckle-dragging militarist of the first rank. There is simply no way that Bush, just months after his Presidency's bitter birthing pangs, with his transition still in progress, could have initiated aggressive military action based on intel like that. And the exact same people who are currently treating Clarke like the Revealed Prophet of Counterterrorism would have shrieked like constipated banshees had Bush actually followed the plan Clarke suggests.

Go back and read some of the op-eds published just after 9/11, at the dawn of the Afghan campaign. Virtually every argument deployed against the Iraq War got its first field test in Afghanistan. They're all there: "unilateralism", "no proof of a link", "we're fighting a network, not a country", "we're alienating our allies", "we're squandering the world's goodwill", "we're creating more terrorists", et cetera, et cetera. It's mostly forgotten now, but there were many people who rolled their eyes at the mere notion of a "war on terror" in the first place (now, of course, even Massachusetts liberals throw the term around like they coined it). And that was after a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil. The liberal Clarke-boosters are essentially saying: Bush is criminally negligent for not doing what we would have given him no end of grief for doing.

And even if Bush had bombed the crap out of Afghanistan starting the day of his inauguration, it's unlikely that it would have stopped 9/11 anyway. Al Qaeda, like most terrorist groups, is structured using cells which work independently of one another, each having a small piece of the plan. By the time Bush entered office, the hijacker cell was already inside the U.S., and the operation in motion. I suppose it could have been prevented had the training camps been bombed to dust, and the FBI sent to question any flight student suspected of also being an Arab. Please see my comment about constipated banshees above, and double the decibel level.

The Richard Clarke of the PBS interview is exactly the kind of guy that was the subject of much public hand-wringing about the gung-ho simplisme of the U.S. response to 9/11 not two years ago. Now he's gospel. To paraphrase that French guy, we are all terror hawks now.

Ofc. Krupke at 3:44 AM
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23 March 2004

There are times when you don't feel like playing, and tonight was one of them. I'd had to get up early for a largely pointless training class (for which the PD will doubtless try to stick us for the overtime), I was fighting off a case of the springtime crud and a killer headache, and I was hungry. My misery meter thus pegged in the red zone, I appealed to my supervisor, who agreed to let me go home an hour early. Nice. So I dropped my paperwork for the night and cruised over to Taco Bell, determined to spend the last minutes of my shift chewing on nachos in the Crown Victoria Cafe.

It was getting the food that was my great cosmic mistake, I think. I can run the balance of a night without a peep on the radio, but the minute I pull into a drive-thru, the city explodes. No sooner had the creepily cheery late-night counterperson handed me my bag of fodder, when the call went out. A crew of cops from the tough industrial city north of ours were in a high-speed pursuit, bearing down the interstate towards us. According to the information we had, the suspect in the car had assaulted a woman, and was currently believed to still have her in the car with him.

We scrambled to get in position to intercept, when it seemed suddenly as if they had detoured into another jurisdiction. Nervous supervisors got on the radio, telling us to stand down. Then the dispatcher said that the pursuit column had suddenly veered down an off-ramp and into Southern City's road grid. About ten seconds later an officer on scene with the chase reported that the suspect had wrecked his car in one of our public housing projects. Short, staccato transmissions followed, cops' interjections cut short by the clicking radio and their racing lungs. The guy was out of his car and running.

I was zipping down from the expressway, blue lights flashing, and on a hunch I wheeled around, thinking the guy would try to get gone under the overpass. Two other cops had the same thought, and I scooted in behind them as the suspect hurtled between the concrete pillars and right into our ad hoc ambush. As I braked to a stop, the suspect was on the ground, wriggling as two officers fought to pin him, and another laid into his legs with a collapsible nightstick. The radio crackled that the suspect might have a gun. I slammed the cruiser door, launching my 32-oz promotional plastic cup of pink lemonade in its cheap window-frame holder all over the front seat. When I got into the fight we were able to roll the guy onto his stomach, at which point his left hand disappeared under his body. Reaching for something? I wrenched it out by the wrist, screaming some version of "Gimme that!!!" then locked his arm out behind him, where a sweating, out-of-breath cop from the neighbor city snapped the cuffs around his wrists. No gun. Good thing we didn't shoot him, I guess.

He had beaten his lady friend (he already had a pending warrant in Southern City for domestic violence), led an army of cops on a dangerous chase through three or four different jurisdictions, ran from the wreck, then fought on the ground. There's no way to count the number of people he put at risk. He had a pathetic finish, panting, mewling and pleading like a kid, face down on the cold dirty sidewalk. His pants, worn in the low thug style, had slipped down to around his ankles. He couldn't (or wouldn't) stand up, and another cop and I had to drag him along to put him in the cruiser. Typical: plenty of energy to run and struggle, none to walk to the car. By the time he tells his story in lockup, he'll have been ten feet tall and slinging cops around like frisbees.

And then it was over. The duty supervisors shooed all the extraneous cops from the scene, while EMS responded to treat the woman and the baby that had been in the car with this idiot when he did his long, quick Jimmy Cagney slide into oblivion. I packed it in then, ate the last of my cooling tacos and headed home for a well-deserved snooze before my oh-too-damn-early court appearance in the morning...

Fuck. Now I'm wide awake.

Ofc. Krupke at 1:54 AM
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20 March 2004

Today's lesson from the streets of Southern City is: if you're going to act the drunken fool in the middle of the street, don't call the cops beforehand.

The call went out at 2045 hrs as an assault, with the suspect still on scene. What we get from the dispatchers, of course, is what they can decipher from the verbal typhoon on the other end of the 911 line: nobody calls and says, "Um, hi. I'm being assaulted by my former boyfriend. We have a child in common, establishing this by state statute as a case of Criminal Domestic Violence, with the potential to aggravate. He's got a claw hammer. See you soon!" So they have to guess. What we find when we get there is another matter.

I was the first officer on the scene, blacking out the cruiser as I pulled into the dead end of the street. I crept on foot up to the house, a groaning wood-sided shack that had seen better days (1892), from which the howling sounds of domestic discord could be heard. I didn't hear any signs of violence, so I lurked just off the porch for a second, eavesdropping (best to know what the fight's about before you get tangled up in it). It also gives my backup more time to show up, as strolling into a domestic by yourself is, as Al Gore would say, a risky scheme. I heard one voice, a woman screaming at persons unknown to the effect that they could take their household arrangement and shove it. She then stormed out onto the porch, blowing my recon and my delay. So I played it off like I just walked up.

"What's going on?" I asked her. In a stream of expletives and little breath, she explained that he had put her out and that fine, she was going, as she managed a pile of shopping bags filled with her stuff on the rusty aluminum porch swing. She was reeling and slurring from either alcohol or mental illness - hard to say which. "Okay," I told her. "Lemme go in and talk to him." And also, I did not add, ensure that he was not even now going to fetch the cutlery.

As I walked through the open door into the living room, she was right behind me. The boyfriend was quite calm, and I was getting ready to question him when she lit into him. "You don't put ME out!", etc.

The first rule of domestics is: keep them separate. So I tried interrupting her tirade by instructing her:
"Hey, hey, hey. Go stand on the porch."
"Lady! Get outside on the porch!"
No dice. Okay, No More Mr. Affable Civil Servant: "GET OUT ON THE FUCKING PORCH!"

The effect was immediate, but not the one I wanted. "YOU DON'T CURSE ME!" she wheeled on me. "You don't curse like he curse me!" The boyfriend moved in from the side, his hands raised in a conciliating manner, or maybe-

There were no sirens outside. No blue lights. Nobody coming through the door. I was alone.

Okay. The boyfriend is trying to make peace. Good. But without breaking stride, the woman was back on him, hollering up a storm. "Go ahead!" she shouted at him. "Lock me up! Put me in jail!" She flailed her arms upward toward his face, as if to grab him or hit him.

So I did what any upstanding, honorable man would do: I sucker-jumped her while her back was turned. Snatching her arms near the shoulders, I pinned them behind her in what I guess you would call a quarter-nelson, propelled her through the screen door and pressed her against the porch railing. My shoulder radio mike crackled near my right ear: I heard my call sign, and the dispatcher asking if I was all right. Not having a free hand, I decided to let my silence be my answer. My immediate thought was to get some distance between me and the house; I couldn't see the boyfriend, and had no idea what he was doing behind me. As I frog-marched the woman across the street to my cruiser, I saw my backup running from his car. I hadn't even heard him check on scene. He helped me pin her while I handcuffed her and put her in the back.

I was pretty cranked up by this point. My cheap SCPD-issue clip-on tie had come unstuck and was dangling down the front of my shirt. The backing for my American flag tie pin is still out there somewhere, being slowly ground into the asphalt of Richards St. I took a deep breath, and flipped my mental switch from BAD to GOOD. The boyfriend had come out and was standing nearby. Now, where was I?

"So," I asked him, "tell me what's going on."
"We had a little fight. I don't want her to go to jail. She's all right."
"Why'd you call?"
"I didn't call," he told me. "She did."

Corporal Quincy had arrived by this time. Cpl. Quincy is a big, easy-going Southern boy with an uncanny ability to calm ruffled feathers. He talked to the woman, while I got information from the boyfriend. Neither was claiming to have been assaulted, neither had visible injuries, nobody was interesting in pressing it any further. We brokered a deal whereby she would accept a ride to her mother's house in a distant industrial area. She had calmed down by now. I removed her handcuffs, handed her a Kleenex, and let her out of the cage. She just needed to get her stuff together. Boyfriend had no problem. We hunted around the house for her keys, gathered everything into bags, and all was right with the world. As we were walking her to the car one last time, she perchanced to hear Cpl. Quincy telling the boyfriend that it wouldn't be a swell idea if he let her in if she returned.

Click, click, boom. "You dirty!" she shouted at the boyfriend. "You ain't nothin' but dirty!" The other officer and I told her to keep quiet, and half-hauled her across the street to the waiting cruiser. She wouldn't stop screaming, and she wouldn't listen to us. Neighbors started peeking out from behind their curtains. We put her in the car, and she wouldn't pull her feet inside, requiring me to open the opposite door, grab her under the shoulders, and drag her across the seat. Cuffs went back on. I tossed her belongings (two plastic bags filled with clothes, shoes, and a rapidly thawing package of pork chops) into the trunk.

I took her to the station and charged her with Disorderly Conduct. I could have stuck her with Domestic Violence (which was a bit of a stretch) and Resisting Arrest (which was not). But she was middle-aged and oddly enough had no prior record. Before I left the scene, the boyfriend tried several times to get us not to take her to jail. He asked about bailing her out. I told him it was up to him, but that I really, really didn't think it was a good idea.

I wasn't halfway through the booking process when the boyfriend was in the front lobby of the PD, calling for a bondsman. And the beat goes on.

Ofc. Krupke at 4:09 PM
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19 March 2004

Dr. Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia has joined the choir invisible of foreign (or "more", or "more foreign", or whatever the tape says this week) leaders that have endorsed Sen. John Kerry for President.

Here's a little of what the good doctor had to say at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2003:
The Jews rule this world by proxy . . . They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries, and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

The Kerry campaign has understandably distanced itself from this particular plaudit, saying, "It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America's presidential election." Whereas before, it was. This must be that "nuance" thing I keep hearing about.

You almost have to feel sorry for Kerry. I mean, it was just an easy applause line aimed at Americans who care deeply what the editorial board of Le Monde thinks. How was he supposed to know anyone was paying attention?

Ofc. Krupke at 2:42 AM
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18 March 2004

Well, whaddaya know? I guess the whole thing was about oil after all.

Ofc. Krupke at 1:05 PM
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16 March 2004

While speaking on NPR, Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, the prominent gun-phobic group, said this:

"If the existing assault weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference one way or another".

Way to stay on message there, Tommy Boy! Of course, he's actually right about that.

I first heard of Diaz from his extensive quotation in a typically asinine gun article in the Washington Post about the DC Sniper case. At one point, he stated that the .223 Remington cartridge is unpopular among hunters because it is too powerful.

(We will pause for a moment while the gun-savvy portion of our audience recovers from their laughing fits.)

Also included in the Post's coverage was an "actual size" picture of a .223 round that was at least twice the size of the real thing.

People make easy hay about the absolutism of the NRA, but the most striking thing about the gun control debate is the near-complete technical ignorance of the other side.

Ofc. Krupke at 1:20 PM
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As I was coming home from another rewarding night suppressing the Urban Poor, I stopped at a 24-hour grocery where I spied a slightly-above-the-fold piece in the New York Times ("All the news that's fit to make Bush look bad"). Its headline read, "G.I. Toll Increasing as Insurgents Employ Wilier Bombs and Tactics". The article then goes on to describe how Iraqi guerillas are using smaller, less sophisticated "drop and pop" bombs, which killed 6 U.S. troops over the weekend.

"Wilier?" Is that even a word? Never mind - the choice of "wily" in this context is questionable anyway: it's a term that connotes a kind of mildly disapproving affection. "Wily" is what you call a lovable rogue in a heist movie. It's interesting, too, that they chose that construction instead of, for instance, "U.S. Pressure Forces Changes in Insurgent Tactics", since that part of the article I could read through the vending machine window (the piece isn't online, and I refuse to pay for a paper that doesn't have a comics page - well, unless you count Krugman) essentially concedes that that's what's happening. See, but then it sounds like we're winning.

The headline also tiptoes around the fact that the spike in violence over the weekend is an "increasing toll" only because U.S. casualties have been decreasing since November.

Reading the Times these days, you can practically hear them humming "Paint It Black" while they type.

Ofc. Krupke at 2:46 AM
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14 March 2004

The current death toll for the bombings in Madrid stands at 199 as of this writing. Some of the 1,400 injured will probably die. Apparently the Spanish are already referring to the carnage as "3-11". Just the date.

After 9-11 happened, I remember being vaguely unsettled by the slow, invisible consensus on choosing a name for what had just happened. The media's use of just the date seemed too mute, too drenched in practiced, polished neutrality for my liking (somewhat like the press services which continued, even after the Bin Laden Jihadi Video Club had claimed responsibility, to refer to Al-Qaeda as "the group blamed by the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks"). A calendar entry didn't even begin to summarize what I felt, staring skyward from that loading dock in Springfield, wondering if the medevac birds flying back and forth from the Pentagon would ever end.

I was wrong, though. The use of just the date wasn't about minimizing (the formulation "recent tragic events in New York and Washington", which made a vicious enemy attack on primarily civilian targets sound like a fucking earthquake, was another story entirely). It was instead an unacknowledged recognition that sometimes, there just aren't any words. The name "9-11" was shell shock writ small.

Whenever terror strikes Spain, there is an immediate instinct to fix blame on the ETA. The Aznar government was quick to point the finger that way, and not without some justification: two ETA operatives had been caught in December getting on a commuter train with explosive devices mechanically similar to the ones used on 3-11. The explosives used in the attack were chemically matched to explosives seized from a van carrying ETA members into Madrid. Still, aspects of 3-11 correlated with the operational signature of Al-Qaeda: synchronized explosions at multiple locations, without an immediate claim of responsibility or any specific demands. And, finally, after a flurry of denials from ETA (another sign the world has changed: terrorist groups used to jump at the chance to claim freebie responsibility for any attack) and a likely phony claim from the Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades, which also claimed "responsibility" for the August blackouts in the Northeast, came the discovery of a tape purportedly from an Al-Qaeda subsidiary saying that the bombings were "an answer to the crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq."

We don't have all the facts yet. It may yet turn out that 3-11 was a joint operation, with Al-Qaeda subcontracting ETA or vice versa. It wouldn't be the first time terrorist outfits with seemingly divergent worldviews have made common cause. The political effect in Spain was immediate, though: Aznar's successor was beaten by a Socialist who had been a long shot before the bombing. Analysts seem to agree that the electorate blame the Aznar government's alliance with the U.S. for the bombings. If true, this is worrisome, another sign that Europe is still willing to regard Al-Qaeda as some kind of misguided pressure group, instead of the apocalyptic death cult they have repeatedly shown themselves to be.

The new Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Zapatero, has at least said, "My most immediate priority is to beat all forms of terrorism." That's good, but it sounds like boilerplate. Much less promising is his declaration that he will pull all Spanish troops out of Iraq if the U.N. isn't in charge by June. In the absence of forceful action against Al-Qaeda in response to 3-11, such a move will be seen by the terrorists as a major retreat by a Western power. You'll never beat terrorism by rewarding it. Given Zapatero's tenuous majority in Parliament, he will most likely have to make coalition with the Communists, who are even less likely to support any effective response. Most likely, they will appeal to the E.U. to threaten Al-Qaeda with the prospect of a long and tedious international conference to investigate the possibility of laying the groundwork for a summit to begin a dialogue on arranging talks to debate the issuance of a declaration to the effect that terrorism is bad.

Anyway, send a message of condolence and support to the Spanish embassy by clicking here.

Ofc. Krupke at 10:33 PM
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11 March 2004

Sen. John Kerry said recently that the balance of the world is on his side:

"I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that."

Which is a shame, since they can't, you know, vote or anything.

Anyway, it's tempting to dismiss this as unprovable campaign-season vanity, but it turns out that he's right.

Ofc. Krupke at 12:53 PM
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As we work ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy over President Bush's 9-11 campaign ads, perhaps a little historical perspective is in order.

Money quote, from Sen. Samuel Jackson (Shaft! Daaaaamn right...): "How many battleships would a Democratic defeat be worth to Tojo? How many Nazi legions would it be worth to Hitler? . . . We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler's secret weapon."

Karl Rove, call your office.

Ofc. Krupke at 12:08 PM
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09 March 2004

Super Fun Republican Video Action!

Just click here.

Ofc. Krupke at 12:14 PM
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06 March 2004

Well, as another great warrior once said, it looks like I have the conn.

Since I'm new here, I thought I'd open with a kind of meet-the-reactionary-troglodyte FAQ. The only problem is that since I haven't actually posted anything, I haven't gotten any actual questions as of yet. So, in the time-honored tradition of the New York Times, I'll just make some shit up:

KRUPKE'S UNILATERAL PREEMPTIVE COWBOY FAQ:

Q: So, who are you anyway?

A: I am the new chief contributor to Analogcabin: The Right. I got this job by virtue of the fact that I am a Republican and Analogcabin knows me. I guess the guy sent over by the Vast Right-Wing Temp Agency didn't work out.

Q: You're a Republican, huh? You fascist. I bet you like to eat women and minorities raw, don't you?

A: No, I prefer them in a light saute.

Q: So what's with the screen name? Are you a cop?

A: Yes. In real life I'm a street patrolman in the inner-city section of a medium-sized city in the South. Much of the material for my on-line rants will come from that. My employer will go here by the pseudonym Southern City, and I as Ofc. Krupke, for the reason that I like my job (also, saying I work for the "SCPD" conjures fond memories of Bob and Doug McKenzie. "Freeze, eh? You hoser."). In this I will follow in the tradition of Marcus Laffey at the New Yorker and Jack Dunphy of National Review, who are, respectively, the Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken of American policing. I probably can't hope for much better than Alfred E. Neuman.

Before I was a cop, I logged time as an active-duty rifle grunt in the Marines. But I once had a fitrep marked "Not Observed" and my first battalion commander probably wouldn't remember seeing me around Camp Lejeune if you asked him today, so I guess that makes me a "deserter". Bummer.

Q: Are you one of those neocons?

A: Neocon? Isn't that the big gathering of "Matrix" devotees they have in Vegas every year?

Q: So do you just march in lockstep with the Republican agenda?

A: I'm having a good day if I can march in lockstep with ANYBODY. My utter lack of rhythm is one of my most enduring Republican traits.

Okay, okay, fair imaginary question. And the answer is no. I pick and choose my issues, like everybody else. There are things that the Republicans do that drive me bonkers, but in most cases the Democrats are even worse. As a general rule, I'm more of a kill-people conservative than an order-people-around conservative. I have a thin but nasty libertarian streak. When I'm really keyed up about something, you'll probably know.

That's about it. Move along, now. Nothing to see here.

Ofc. Krupke at 12:52 PM
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