Steal this Book!

The political books clogging the market place at the moment are beginning to bore me. The idea that anyone could vote for someone fundamentally as unserious as John Kerry in this epoch of children being shot in the back is beyond my comprehension. Enough of that.

But the detailed accusations in this book by Bill Gertz have my complete attention and I intend to buy it.

One top-secret National Security Agency report featured in TREACHERY: HOW AMERICA’S FRIENDS AND FOES ARE SECRETLY ARMING OUR ENEMIES shows that electronic intercepts expose how China was supplying missile technology to Iran’s radical Islamist regime as early as 1992. Another report labeled “secret” disclosed how Russia supplied Iran with a wind tunnel used in missile aerodynamics development.

It goes on and on in the above Drudge Report. How much of it is accurate I have no idea, obviously. The CIA — the part that did not leak the secret documents to Gertz — is livid. (It would be fascinating to put Gertz’s informants on the stand versus Sy Hersh’s.) My general, first blush, review of this information is “Yikes!” I have always assumed that knowledge is power. But I have to admit too much of it can be scary.

AND SPEAKING OF AUTHORS:… and the words of serious people… Here’s David Brooks on the events in Russia:

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: “All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened.”

It wasn’t a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn’t Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.