Mr. Mark Leon Goldberg wrote:

Nevertheless, as a parting gift to the person she built a career slandering . . .

I love it: the compound question fallacy (tell me, Mr. Goldberg, do you still beat your wife?) and the poisoning the well fallacy (because Claudia has made a career out of exposing Mr. Annan and the UN, her claims about them are untrue), all to construct an ad hominem attack (another logical fallacy)!

And all in one sentence! I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it!

Still, I must agree with you on one thing: it does seem like Claudia has built a career both on UN corruption, and Mr. Annan’s failure to address it in the UN, if not his active participation in the corruption itself.

And I would criticize Claudia for this: Why, with all the material at your disposal, Claudia, have you built only one career out of exposing UN corruption, incompetence and malfeasance? What’s wrong with you that you haven’t built a dozen more careers on it all?

It’s not like you lack for raw material, after all . . .

But seriously . . . I’ve read much of what Claudia’s written, seen her on the tube a couple of times, and heard her interviewed. She may be the malevelant witch Mr. Goldberg portrays her as, but if so, she keeps it remarkably well hidden, at least from me. Perhaps she’s cast a spell that blinds me to her true nature . . ..

But even if she were as wicked, nasty, basely-motivated and self-serving as you, Mr. Goldberg, evidently believe her to be, so what?

The UN is what it is: you, Mr. Goldberg, cannot erase the corruption of the massive Oil for Food scandal; Mr. Annan’s lethargy (my most charitable term) towards uncovering its details and who’s responsible in the UN for it (much less punishing them); the human rights abuses committed by unpunished peacekeepers while under the UN banner; or the averted eyes of that august body as genocide was committed in Rwanda, Bosnia and is now being committed in the Sudan. (Please recall that it was the hated Great Satan — the US — which first used the term “genocide” to describe what’s happening in the Sudan.)

The appartment issue may not be huge in your mind, Mr. Goldberg, but it does raise issues of impropriety in my own, and it is consistent with Mr. Annan’s history (like the Mercedes, and his sons employment . . .).

Oh — you may be right about Claudia “panicking,” but somehow I don’t think so . . .

Brian