Compassionate Curmudgeon

Back Up

Well, I'm back. My DSL connection went down on Friday morning, so I was down for the whole weekend.

A new DSL bridge has solved the problem. More later.

A Horrific Crime

(Note: out of concern for their privacy, I'm omitting the couple's last name.)

There are times that I wish I hadn't turned on the news. This is one of them.

The WPVI news reader was droning on about an elderly couple who had been brutalized in their home in Center City, and I wasn't paying too much attention. Then I heard the address: the 400 block of Jessup Street. Wait a minute. I know a couple who live there. It can't be... I rewound the PVR to play back the story from the beginning to get the names: "Eighty-two-year-old Hiram B---- and his wife 80-year-old Irma were victims of a horrific crime..."

There was a period about ten to fifteen years ago when I was attending the Philadelphia Orchestra's Sunday afternoon chamber music concerts regularly. The seats were unreserved, so I'd get there early to be assured of a good seat. Without fail I shared my place near the head of the line with a wonderful, sweet couple named Hiram and Irma. We'd chat, mostly about music, but often about politics or whatever, and over the course of the five or so years, I looked forward to our chats as much as the concerts themselves.

Did I mention how gentle and caring they were? One day I skipped a concert. That evening my phone rang, and a familiar woman's voice asked, "Hello, you may not know us, but are you the fellow that goes to the chamber concerts..."

"Irma? Is that you?" I asked.

"We weren't sure if this was your number," she continued, "but when you didn't show up for the concert this afternoon, we got worried. So we looked up your name in the phone book. We wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I'm speechless. Thank you so much..."

She laughed. "We've lost so many friends lately, and at our age we can't afford to lose any more."

Eventually I did stop going to the concerts, but I'd occasionally see them in and around Center City; they always greeted me warmly. It's been three or four years since I last saw them, and I had been wondering how they were doing.

The Big Story is the search for a man police say brutally beat an elderly couple in a home invasion. Eighty-two-year-old Hiram B---- and his wife 80-year-old Irma were victim of a horrific crime that happened in broad daylight at the elderly couple's Center City row home.

It was around four in the afternoon, the couple was returning to their home, in the 400 block of Jessup near 11th and Lombard. They were turning the key in the lock when the suspect came up from behind them and forced them inside.

Police say the suspect then brutally beat the B----s; dragged them around the house, hit them repeatedly with a soup can and threw a frail Hiram B---- down the basement steps.

Police found blood everywhere when they entered the home to begin their investigation. Residents who live along the narrow, tree-lined street of quaint row homes in the heart of Center City looked on as the crime scene unit searched for clues, fingerprints, and perhaps even DNA directing them to a suspect.

In fact, one neighbor said the B----s have shared this home for the last 40 years, recently their health has declined. Irma doesn't come out as much, but when she does, like on a pretty weekend like this, the couple is known to sit outside on the front step and walk down Jessup hand in hand.

People who know them say this quiet, peaceful couple would have no ability to fight back against such a violent attack.

Mrs. B---- is now out of the hospital. Her husband is hospitalized in stable condition.

It's at times like this that I feel utterly helpless. I can only hope that they have friends or family or neighbors who can help them through this awful experience.

Rejuvenating the Hundred Steps

It looks like the rejuvenation of the Hundred Steps has begun. A work crew has put up fencing to keep all people out. The plan is to restore the steps to what they looked like when they were new, over a hundred years ago. That includes new railings, new capstones, rebuilt landings, etc.

Hobart and Julia

I've just added some photos of Hobart and Julia to my nature gallery.

If a tree falls...

So when I got home this evening, I took a look out my living room window, down into the Wissahickon Valley, and eventually it registered on me. That fallen tree at the bottom of the Hundred Steps hadn't been there yesterday.

That's the way government works

Here's another passage from Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. Having worked in the federal government for the last 24 years, I felt a shock of recognition.

Once again, CIA's career management saw my proposal to aid the Northern Alliance as a risk to CIA. For those who had spent fifteen, twenty, or more years in CIA, there was a clear pattern: Whoever was in the White House would get worked up over the cause du jour. He would be unable to get the rest of the government to produce results, so he would turn to the CIA. He would push the CIA to do risky, potentially controversial things. Later, after things went badly, the White House people would be gone and CIA would get the blame. It was through this template that the Agency saw the Northern Alliance: Sure, Massoud was a good guy now, but later the Congress, or the media, or some other White House staff would focus on the fact that he sold opium, abused human rights, and had killed civilians. They would blame CIA. Audits of the CIA assistance would undoubtedly show that some funds had gone for questionable purposes. In the final analysis, the CIA proclaimed the Northern Alliance was feckless and no match for the Taliban.

Although CIA staff would admit their Agency's bias to me in private, in official meetings they nodded and said they would prepare to help Massoud and his Northern Alliance. Of course, they first needed their internal legal review. The money to help Massoud, apart from token aid that the CIA called "trinkets," would have to be given to the Agency over and above all funds already available to them.

This reluctance to fund the Northern alliance without "found money" caused me to wonder exactly what CIA was doing with all of the counterterrorism budget increases that the White House had given them through several Emergency Supplemental budgets. Working with the Office of Management and Budget and CIA's own auditors, we discovered that almost all of the Agency's activities against al Qaeda were being paid for by the Emergency Supplementals. There were almost no baseline CIA funds going into the effort. In 2000 and in 2001 we asked CIA to identify some funds, any money, earmarked for other activities that were less important than the fight against al Qaeda, so that those funds could be transferred to the higher priority of countering bin Laden. The formal, official CIA response was that there were none. Another way to say that was that everything they were doing was more important than fighting al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda delenda est!

Back in the days of the Roman Republic, Rome's fiercest enemy was Carthage. By the middle of the second century B.C.E., Cato the Elder began to insist that Carthage must be destroyed: "Carthago delenda est!"

In his riveting book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke describes how he borrowed Cato's phrase to label a plan for destroying al Qaeda during the latter years of the Clinton administration^*.

He goes on to describe the attempts to seek out and destroy al Qaeda's training camps and kill Usama bin Laden and concludes:

I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afgans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him. [...] The Principals and the President did not want to open the Pandora's box that the Israelis had found after Munich, they did not want a broad assassination policy and hit list, but the President's intent was very clear: kill bin Laden. I believe that those who in the CIA who claim the authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.

It's worth reading Clarke's book and considering his arguments very carefully. It's not the screed against the Bush administration that it's sometimes portrayed to be.

^* Minor quibble. He erroneously dates the phrase's origin to 201 B.C.E. rather than the 150s.