General Jan, Reporting From the Front

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer goes to war

Jon Stewart had a segment last night called "Please Tell Me This Is Rock Bottom," based on the bizarre vote by Senate Republicans to block ratification of a United Nations treaty that would basically bring U.N. members up to the long-established standards of the United States on protecting people with disabilities. The Republicans said that the U.N. treaty was an example of socialism, and ratifying it would be a direct threat to Americans who home-school their children.

Well, we have gotta hit rock bottom eventually in bat-shit-crazy Republican politics, but that day has not yet arrived.

Witness the apparition yesterday of Arizona  Governor Jan Brewer, reported AWOL from the state all this week after last week 1. hitting a reporter whose question she did not like; 2. hearing that she was not legally clear to run for another term in 2014 and 3. Being dissed when only two governors turned up to hear her speak at the Western Governors Association conference on the weekend.

To the mattresses she went.


Where's Jan? That was the question when she disappeared without explanation other than a vague comment from an aide that she was on "official state business." Jokes, of course, ensued. Was she  hiking the proverbial Appalachian Trail? Holed up with Sheriff Joe Arpaio checking IDs at the border crossing at Nogales? Naturally, someone noted the fact that although the governor was missing, no one had offered a reward for her safe return.

Well, not to worry! She was in Afghanistan! Reporting from the front! On state business! You know, a person with absolutely no foreign affairs knowledge or previous apparent interest had gone to Afghanistan, on state business, to report back to us bumpkins on the progress of the war and, well, also to get her picture taken with tanks and soldiers, and to wear that swell combat uniform with her name on the pocket, like a soldier.

So there was General Jan on a camouflaged helicopter in Kabul, wearing a helmet (which is so much safer than that tin-foil hat she usually wears). She had gone to Afghanistan secretly, very hush-hush. You know, because the Taliban and al Queda, not to mention the Russians, are constantly monitoring the movements of somebody like Jan Brewer.
 
General Jan had lots to say in a press conference heralding her now-no-longer secret visit to the Front. Here is one gem: “You know, I was so happy and so honored to be able to come, I don’t think the reality really set in with me until I got there. Then, I realized that it was the real deal, you know. We’re flying in helicopters, we have guns, guns hanging out the windows.”

Speaking by telephone to the Tucson paper, she confided the remarkable observation that war is "unimaginable," and added: "As we sit over there on the mainland and see and hear everything going on, it's really different over here."

Hark! Do I hear echoes of Henvy V's St. Chrispen's Day speech in the words thus spake by Gen. Brewer: "It's really different over here?"

Back here on the "mainland," the media, all sense of journalistic hilarity left hanging out the window,  are reporting this stuff with absolutely straight faces.  You know, Politico had a piece last week speculating that Jan Brewer could be among the group of Republicans considering a run for the presidential nomination in 2016. I sincerely hope that some serious journalists start having some fun with this nutty story. Because hope springs eternal! I mean, Jan Brewer actually thinks she might be running for president and has even met recently with that red-haired old multi-billionaire who blew $150 million on losing GOP races, the beautiful Sheldon Edelson. Imagine Jan Brewer at the debates. Hell, that alone would be worth another $150 million of the gambling magnate's dough.

There is no more to say about this. Except to assure Jon Stewart that rock bottom might still be a long way down.

Here's a link to the Stewart segment on the vote on the U.N. treaty, incidentally.

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What the Hell Is Going On in Phoenix?

"And another thing--" Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has a word with the president

 [UPDATED]

Yeah, I  know, you could ask that question ("What the hell is going on in Phoenix?") fairly regularly, but the fact is, strange things are happening (again) in Phoenix.

You haven't heard much about this because the news media in Phoenix and Tucson so far aren't on the story, but here's the latest:

Gov. Jan Brewer -- she of that bony finger stuck in President Obama's face -- seems to have gone missing. Brewer hasn't been in the state all week, though she didn't do what governors are supposed to do, which is announce that they're going away and let people know where they went. The only word about Brewer is a report that she was seen at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland visiting a wounded soldier.

An AWOL governor playing candystriper in Maryland? A news media that isn't motivated, as the media would be in any place I ever worked, to, you know, go find her?

Wait, it gets weirder (it always does, doesn't it). 

Last week, before she went missing, there was a strange contretemps in Phoenix between Brewer and a television reporter who asked her about global warming during a press conference. The question was based on the fact that Brewer was due to speak this week at a meeting on energy policy (which she was a no-show at, subsequently).

After mumbling a reply to the effect that global warming was not caused by humans, Brewer went blank for one of those long vacant stares of hers, you know, the ones that make you wonder if she is seeing visions in her head of demons or prehistoric birds of prey.

That's when it got weird. In a report on the media insider site Romenesko.com, a local news photographer who was there, Michael Clawson, said this:

"After her answer, a handler swooped in and whisked her away, but about three paces out she turned back around to face the reporter who asked the last question. He had turned to a camera operator and seemed to be putting his microphone away. Brewer took her left hand, balled it into a fist and with the back of her hand she slugged the reporter on the back of his right arm. Not hard, but with enough force that he spun around to see what was going on. She leaned in real close and looked up (she’s a shorter lady) and said in a whisper loud enough for most of us to hear, “Where the hell’d that come from?”

A video snippet of Brewer storming away went viral days ago, but the fact that she also actually slugged the reporter had not previously been reported. Not that the reporter was harmed. Despite that Gidget doo from 1963 and the chronic belligerence, Brewer is a tiny old lady, and getting slugged by her would be like being hit by a jelly doughnut.

And after that, Brewer went AWOL. And her fate is still unknown, as they used to say about Charlie and the M.T.A. Pressed by the A.P. this week, a Brewer spokesman would say only that the governor is out of state on undisclosed "official business."

Online, Brewer's AWOL is getting some national attention. Wags online are joking that, oddly, no reward has yet been offered for Brewer's safe return. Others  suggest she's "hiking the Appalachian trail." Or that she went to find John McAfee to have him fix a virus on her computer.

My suggestions are that she's actually out getting her hair done at Maaco. Or that she and fellow loon Sheriff Joe Arpaio are holed up in Laredo, checking Mexicans' IDs. Or that she has been gone all Aimee Semple McPherson and been kidnapped and spirited to Agua Pieta by desperadoes named Steve and Mexicali Rose.

UPDATE: Okay, I said it probably gets weirder and it does. It seems that Brewer's "official state business" is to go to Afghanistan and get her picture taken with soldiers. And here's weird on a stick: Some people think she's positioning herself for a run for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. I mean, people who actually seem to have mailing addresses on this planet.


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United 787 in Emergency Landing, 'Dreamliner' Hype Aside

Media swells being taken for a ride

I'm glad to know that United Airlines got its money's worth flying all of those media and travel-world swells around on a multi-city junket that yielded such effusive publicity for the inaugural flight of its new 787 Dreamliner aircraft last month.  From the media accounts, you'd have thought this was the reincarnation of the supersonic Concorde:

"Even the lavatories are pretty darn cool," the CNBC man gushed. "...The Dreamliner is a fantastic airplane and I'm looking forward to my next ride."  Link.
 
Well, the media slobbering on the junket tour aside, United has already had a problem on a flight with actual fare-paying passengers, on one of the two 787s it has on hand (United has another 48 on order from Boeing).

A United 787 bound to Newark from Houston had to make an emergency landing in New Orleans today because of a mechanical problem. Nobody got hurt. United said it will work with Boeing on finding a solution to whatever the problem is. Link.

[According to Reuters, meanwhile, Boeing says that the F.A.A. has ordered the entire fleet of 787 jets to be inspected for a possible fuel line problem.]

Some media accounts, by the way, left the impression that the 787 Dreamliner is the kind of plane most of us might one day be flying on, rather than, say, one of those crappy 50-seat or 70-seat regional jets that handle most domestic flights.

Forget about it! While United is trying to show off the 787 domestically now, the plane in fact is a premium aircraft designed for long-haul international flights.


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These People Are For Real

...and at least for the ones in the U.S., their vote counts the same as yours.

An amusing collection of photos here from Buzzfeed.

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The Intractable Triviality of the Media

A minor pier-like extension north of the Boardwalk.

Having spent 40-plus years in the major media, I think I can with some authority state that I am frequently astonished by the regular stupidity of some elements of that media, not to mention the occasional stupidity of other elements.
 
That's a theme I think I'll stay with in this column for a while.

Today's example:

The media proclivity to constantly cite and amplify false reporting ("Al Gore claims he invented the Internet!") in subsequent stories, long after the initial story has been debunked. Even if the subsequent reports do acknowledge somewhere along the line that the initial reports have been called into question, the initial reports still form the basis of the new reporting.

Case in point: Section of Atlantic City Boardwalk swept out to sea by hurricane.

Facts: During the hurricane, breathless television reporters on CNN and elsewhere, desperate for visuals and drama, got their hair on fire over a snippet of video taken by emergency helicopter, showing some storm damage to a small, wayward extension of the Atlantic City Boardwalk in the northern Inlet section of town where bay and sea meet (that's far from the familiar, wide, five-mile stretch of famous Boardwalk along the oceanfront). Anyone who knows anything about Atlantic City realized, seeing that video, that this was an inconsequential bit of damage (during an extremely consequential and devastating storm) to an inconsequential section of the boardwalk, and easily repaired with some wood and nails. Bang bang bang, all fixed.


Intractable stupidity: The official hurricane Sandy narrative now always includes an assertion that the Atlantic City Boardwalk sustained major damage. Ergo, no damage to Boardwalk now being evident, a great catastrophe has been overcome.

Evidence: From the increasingly inexplicable USA Today, today: "TV viewers during Superstorm Sandy saw portions of the Atlantic City Boardwalk engulfed by waves and swept out to sea. That's an image that the gambling-driven resort hopes to erase during the crucial holiday season. ..."

Reality: Viewers saw no such thing. They did not see waves sweeping an engulfed portion of the Boardwalk out to sea. They saw a snippet of video, and a still photo or two, showing damage to that small and forlorn section of the boardwalk, basically a long pier, where the waves had indeed intruded on their way to doing serious damage to nearby homes, destroying about a 50-foot section. Period. The actual Atlantic City Boardwalk sustained no significant damage.

The actual Atlantic City Boardwalk, undamaged.

And oh, by the way. The USA Today story is also an example of a journalistic practice I call "recipe writing."

That is, a reporter (or worse, editor) from Publiciation B sees a story in Publication A, and proceeds to "re-report" it, using Publication A as a recipe for the ingredients.

Like this column three weeks ago by Monica Yant Kinney in the Philadelphia Inquirer that appears to have been the recipe for the one in USA Today.

It's a cheesy practice, but not strictly unethical. Just cheesy.


A piece of information in the earlier Inky story (which seems to have been prompted by PR promotion from Atlantic City) that should have been kept in the recipe: "Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck, 41 percent of Americans polled erroneously believed the Atlantic City Boardwalk had washed away; 21 percent had heard the Jersey Shore was still closed to travelers. ..."

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Delta Making a Move on Virgin Atlantic?

Delta Air Lines seems to be making preliminary moves to buy a big chunk of Virgin Atlantic. The most recent indication of that is that Singapore Airlines, which owns 49 percent of Virgin Atlantic, confirms that it wants to sell that stake.

Here's Reuters on it.

Delta won't comment. Delta, which has expressed interest in Virgin in the past, is the most obvious buyer of the Singapore stake, possibly in a combination bid with Air France-KLM. The controlling share of Virgin -- 51 percent -- is owned by its founder, Richard Branson. Delta acquiring the other 49 percent would give it access to Virgin's slots at all-important Heathrow Airport in London, as a deal in combination with its SkyTeam Alliance partner Air France/KLM would circumvent European laws about foreign control of an EU carrier.

Speculation then says that Delta-AirFrance/KLM could even acquire full control of Virgin, with Delta maintaining that minority 49 percent stake to avoid regulatory hurdles.

Virgin is now the second-largest carrier at Heathrow, an airport that is operating at full capacity with no immediate room for adding new slots. So the only way you get slots there these days is to buy them from someone else, and add them to your alliance bundle, in this case SkyTeam.  As Mike Boyd points out today, "Add all the SkyTeam slots, including the Virgin Atlantic access, and SkyTeam will have 650 slots. A pittance to the BA 4,900, but still enough to be in a strong second place."

In his weekly essay at his usual post at the Boyd Group International site, Mike also suggests that maybe the alliance world isn't as monolithic as has been assumed, and may be starting to flounder as members fight over turf. That's very interesting reading.

Meanwhile, to the extent that anybody in the mainstream media actually covers airlines (other than as a weird stock-play, a fare-oriented consumer-interest story, or a lame rehash about international markets like this one in USA Today), this will be reported with bafflement.

But here's the way I see it if Delta in fact does move on Virgin Atlantic:

The biggest story in airlines today, which goes almost unreported, is the move toward consolidation, not just with mergers and acquisitions, but with rapidly growing deals in which airlines basically get around antitrust regulations and act in deep concert, through alliances, code-shares and those strange little special antitrust-exempt deals that let them flat-out collude on prices and supply on specified international routes. The name for this is "cartel."

A combination would accelerate continue that trend, if regulators let it happen.

 Airlines are interested these days not in market share on domestic routes, but in feeding high-revenue passengers into long-haul hub-to-hub routes with lucrative connections, including in cooperation with code-share and alliance partners, to international routes. That's the game being played by the major domestic airlines (Southwest excepted), to the detriment of comprehensive air-service between U.S. markets that are don't produce high-yield business traffic and international feeds.

Oh, by the way: Is anybody looking at Virgin America (which Branson's company has a minority stake in), the feisty and highly regarded American carrier (only five years old and unable to expand much) -- whose main assets are juicy transcontinental routes with high-yield potential international feed?

You bet they are.

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Common Sense and Aviation Disasters, Via France

A French appeals court threw out a criminal conviction for involuntary manslaughter of Continental Airlines for its part in the crash of an Air France Concorde plane in Paris that killed 113 in 2000. Here's the Times report today.

This sensible move -- in effect, "de-criminalizing" an accident that occurred partly as a result of human error -- comes as authorities in Brazil continue the clear folly of criminalizing another accident that was the result of human error, the horrific mid-air collision between a business jet and a 737 over the Amazon in 2006 that killed 154.

In Brazil, in the latest manifestation of stubborn foolishness, prosecutors are now making charges of perjury against a pilot who served as a major defense witness in the criminal trial of the two American pilots of the business jet that collided with the 737.  The rationale? Well, since the American pilots were earlier convicted (in what I have described as a sham trial that was part of the Brazilian authorities' ongoing attempts to cover up the major role that Brazilian air traffic control played in the mid-air crash), why, then, the expert witness for the defense must have lied. Otherwise, you see, the defendants would have been acquitted. This is reasoning out of Alice in Wonderland, of course.


More on that nonsense later today, but now back to the Air France Concorde disaster and the very good ruling by the French appeals court.

Long story short, the Concorde disaster in Paris came about through a series of errors and occurrences, which is almost always the case in major aviation accidents. Continental and one of its mechanics had been faulted for an apparent mechanical error that led to the loss of a metal strip off a Continental plane, which took off on the runway minutes before the Concorde took off and crashed on that runway, after that metal strip punctured a Concorde tire.

There were, of course, other factors in the crash, all of which played a part in the investigation. But the issue, in Paris as it was in Brazil, is the question of criminalizing  an accident, of rushing to assign criminal culpability. In Brazil, one of the most notable consequences of this rush to criminal judgment (the emotional, xenophobic rush to blame the Americans and exonerate Brazilian air traffic control) was that important witnesses, including air traffic controllers, simply clammed up. The result was a wretchedly botched investigation -- and yet another major embarrassment for Brazil in the international aviation community.


[I was one of seven survivors on the American jet, and I was subsequently convicted in Brazil of causing "dishonor" to Brazil by my reporting on the coverup. My case then became a small part of the momentum that led to a new federal law in the U.S. called the SPEECH Act, which forbids a U.S. court from enforcing spurious libel and slander judgments against Americans for speech, made in the U.S., that is entirely protected by the First Amendment.

[And one of the more amusing aspects of that ridiculousness seeking unsuccessfully to silence me came when a group representing Brazilian "journalists," the National Federation of Journalists, belched forth a statement in 2011 supporting the civil and criminal actions against me because I "published posts offensive to Brazil" and showed a "disrespectful manner" when I argued against the Brazilian coverup. This august association of Brazilian journalists then proceeded to repeat obvious lies and asinine whoppers about what I had in fact written. But I digress ...]

Meanwhile, here's a smart statement on the French case by the Flight Safety Foundation. [Italic emphasis mine]:

Foundation Applauds Decision of French Court

Alexandria, VA, November 29, 2012 –The Flight Safety Foundation applauded the decision today by the French appeals court to throw out the convictions against Continental Airlines and one of their mechanics in relation to the tragic crash of the Concorde in 2000.

“We’re very pleased that courts are recognizing that professional human error does not amount to criminal conduct, even where it can lead to catastrophic consequences,” stated Kenneth Quinn, FSF General Counsel. “The tragedy of this accident and others is only compounded by decades-long efforts to find someone to ‘blame,’ rather than focus on human factors, training, and technology to make sure that the tragedy does not reoccur.”

“Undue prosecutorial and judicial interference can not only create further victims of accidents, but more importantly harm the integrity and timeliness of the accident investigation process, with an adverse effect on aviation safety” Quinn continued.

Mr. Quinn is currently also serving as Vice Chair of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Task Force on Safety Information Protection, which will be hosting a listening session on December 5, 2012 in Washington, DC, with many interested stakeholders and family representatives scheduled to attend.


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Flight Chaos Arrives

No need to go on and on about this. You're watching and reading the news:


Number of flight cancellations today, via Flightstats.com -- 7,328

Tomorrow (so far) -- 2,791 (that will at least double by tomorrow

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Flight Cancellations Mounting

Flight cancellations for tomorrow (so far): 5,848, according to FlightAware.com

That's roughly a quarter of the total number of flights.

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Stormfront: Here We Go Again

[UPDATED]

The New York City transit system, with subway stations vulnerable to flooding, is being shut down tonight. Oh, what an adventure Monday morning is going to be in the world's greatest city.

Evacuations are spreading in coastal areas, including the New Jersey barrier islands, which have not experienced a really major coastal storm -- of the sort that can significantly alter geography -- since the 1960s, before those shore towns were so massively developed on fragile barrier islands.

Atlantic City (yes, it's on a barrier island) is emptying out. Atlantic City has been significantly developed since the last two decades of the 19th Century. Check out the amount of development that has occurred since the 1960s on the other barrier islands that form the Jersey Shore from Cape May northward.

So here we go again. A crisis, and a long time coping with and reacting to a crisis. And then we'll resume life just as before.

Why can't we respond to this one, after we've responded on the most basic levels of safety, by asking some questions?

--Isn't it time to cut the nonsense and insist that everybody admit that climate change is for real and we need to accept the reality while trying to undo some of the damage -- or at least not continue letting it get worse?  Why aren't we looking those congressional climate-change deniers right in the eye and saying, "You know what? You're an idiot."

--Why can't we develop emergency plans that go beyond dispatching motorboats with first-responders to rescue those foolish or unfortunate enough to be stranded by a storm everybody sees coming?

--Why don't we move immediately to define and address discrepancies and deficiencies in the satellite networks we depend on for weather forecasting? Why haven't we demanded to know, for example, why there was so little warning to the public when the threat from Hurricane Irene in August 2011 abruptly changed from wind in Atlantic City to flooding in, say, Binghamton?

--There's probably nothing we can do to undo the insanity of having allowed massive development in flood zones, especially on the New Jersey barrier islands. But why do we think that flood insurance should protect this folly? (And on the Jersey shore, we're talking mainly about expensive beachfront homes in literally exclusive shore towns that do everything they can to keep out the public, and are the first to wail for help when their beaches wash away and their homes get damaged.) And why do politicians in New Jersey, in particular, resist any and all discussions about seashore development, the environment and the subsidizing of exclusice communities built for the one-percent on the fundamental assurance that they'll be looked after?

--What about all of those power lines that come down every time it rains and the wind blows, or when it snows and ice forms? In much of the country, in suburbs that have been developed since the 60s, the electricity grid is safely tucked underground. (It's complicated, with ramifications and staggering expenses. Then again, so was the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.)

But New Jersey and the near New York State suburbs were substantially developed over a century ago, and are saddled with aging infrastructure. Power lines exposed to the weather, creaky phone lines that require constant patching even in normal times, emergency plans that are based on air raid response protocols from World War Two. I used to live in Glen Ridge, a pleasant New Jersey town with gas street-lamps that dated to the 1920s. But the phone lines also come from that era, literally a time when Thomas Edison was still running his company 15 miles away. Every time it rained hard, the phones went out. (At least the gas lamps stayed on.)

After Hurricane Irene in August 2011, while the hurricand dramatists were still lovingly rerunning videos of themselves on the strand with wind-touseled hair, the actual issue -- the one we hadn't fully seen coming -- was heavy rains and flooding.

In Atlantic City, which is situated on a barrier island a lot more substantial that, say, Long Beach Island a bit farther north, bays and ocean met each other during the last huge coastal story in 1962. That was a storm surge of 8 1/2 feet. The current predicted surge level is 10 feet.


Rather than these repetitive scenes of hurricane-wind drama queens like New Jersey governor Chris "Thar She Blows" Christie slipping on his official windbreaker and bellowing that citizens need to run away from the threat (which they do need to do, obviously) -- wouldn't it be nice if, after this one blows over, we had a cogent, grown-up civic conversation about perhaps launching a major infrastructure initiative, throughout Old America, to protect our electricity supply against wind and rain and ice, elements that have been with us for a very long time?

Wouldn't it be nice if politicians like Christie started addressing issues like unwise seashore development on vulnerable barrier islands, and how we need to rethink coastal ecology?

Wouldn't it be nice if electricity companies, which are enormously profitable corporations, were required -- by government -- to start accounting for their inability to better ensure the delivery of the power supply? 

These are questions just for starters. Because in weather events of a profound nature, it appears that this is the new normal.

[UPDATE: By mid-afternoon today, long before the storm was due to arrive, some New Jersey seashore towns were flooding, even though it wasn't raining. The reason, obviously, is that a massive storm approaching from the south is pushing around vast volumes of sea water, a storm surge that raises levels in the back bays. This is the classic example of the vulnerability of a barrier island.]

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Frankenstorm and the Boy Who Cried Wolf

[UPDATED Oct. 27]

It's interesting to watch other people's weather when you live in a place like southern Arizona, where the only real changes in weather are from "nice and warm" to "nice and really, really hot."

So here we go once again with all this media carrying-on about the apparently approaching East Coast Storm of a Lifetime, or Frankenstorm, or whatever the TV dramatists are calling it now.

Remember the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  That's kind of what happened on the Northeast Seaboard in 2011. The lesson is apt, because this storm is looking like the real thing, and people who shrug it off may have some 'splaining to do.

Remember August 2011, when a good chunk of the coastal areas of New York City and the New Jersey coast were ordered evacuated by the imperious New York mayor, Michael "Hurricane Mike" Bloomberg and the combative New Jersey governor, Chris "Thar She Blows!" Christie? Turned out that except for flooding in upstate Pennsylvania and New York State, there was no emergency of a degree sufficient to get as excited as these two did. It just rained.

This one could peter out too, though as I said, it sure looks real from here in the Sonoran desert.

You never know, given the degree to which the media will turn on the hysteria pipes at the least excuse. You know it's coming at you full blast when some TV reporter informs you that the supermarkets are running out of toilet paper. (Why can't people take some clues from the prudent Mormons, and maintain well-stocked off-the-grid home supply caches in case of the Second Coming or whatever it is they're preparing for?)

As of now, "Thar She Blows" Christie, who ordered New Jersey's coastal areas to evacuate as Hurricane Irene hysteria mounted in 2011, is playing it less dramatic. "I encourage all families to stay informed, get ready, and reach out to those you know who may be isolated, or in need of extra assistance," Christie tweeted today.

[UPDATE: Christie today ordered the Jersey Shore barrier islands evacuated. Most of New Jersey's seashore communities aere on those narrow, storm-vulnerable barrier islands just off the coast. And those islands haven't been tested in a major direct-hit hurricane/severe winter-like storm since the 1960s, way before most of them became extremely developed.]

This is going to be interesting.

Meanwhile, if you're planning to fly anywhere near the Northeast early next week, I have some advice:

Don't.

The air travel system -- which the airlines have been allowed to shrink to the point where there is absolutely no slack to handle disruptions -- is likely to descend into chaos.

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Big Questions Still Unanswered in Border Patrol Fatal Shooting of Rock-Thrower on Mexico Side

The twice-weekly Nogales International is doing a singularly excellent job covering the aftermath of a shooting by a Border Patrol agent of a 16-year-old who was in a small group throwing rocks at U.S. agents who responded to a smuggling attempt from the Mexican side. Here's a link to the current story.

Reporters for the paper obtained the reports from the scene not of the Border Patrol, but of two local police officers who responded to the disturbance last week.

“I immediately got behind cover, and remained in the area during the gunfire,” one wrote, referring to the gunshots fired across the fence, evidently from a hill, by the U.S. agents. The police officers names are Garcia and Zuniga.

According to the Nogales newspaper, "When the firing stopped, Garcia walked into the open and met with Zuniga and several Border Patrol agents, who told him that a male suspect had been throwing rocks at the agents from Mexico. 'The male subject had been shot by one of the U.S. Border Patrol agents,' Garcia wrote.'I saw that around the immediate area of the scene where the units were stopped at, there were many medium sized rocks scattered on the street and sidewalk,' he wrote."

Good reporting. But I have mentioned previously that reporters and editors across the board these days -- whether in local or national news organizations -- seem to need some drilling in using words precisely. Note the paraphrased word "suspect" in the excerpt above -- when the actual police report refers to the dead youth more neutrally as "subject."  And incidentally, it does not appear that the rock-throwing youth, who was shot at least six times, was one of the two smugglers who agents said tried get over the fence with a backpack of marijuana.

The most serious unanswered (and as far as I can see unasked) question is this: When they saw that rocks were being tossed from the Mexican side, why didn't the Border Patrol agents simply retreat to a place where the rocks couldn't reach them? After all, they do not seem to have been pinned down, and the Mexican rock-throwers were unable to advance over the border.

Among the other questions that remain unanswered:

--How many shots were fired? Mexican reports say that besides the bullet-riddled youth, a nearby building was also riddled with bullets.

--How far away were the Mexican assailants when they tossed rocks across the fence?

--Where specifically were the Border Patrol agents?

The Nogales paper reported that a surveillance video was routinely made of the incident. The video  will answer at least some of the questions.


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Brazil Appeals Court Affirms Criminal Convictions of American Pilots in 2006 Mid-Air Collision That Killed 154 Over Amazon

[UPDATED Oct. 16]

Confusion never ends in the long saga of the attempt by certain elements in Brazil to exact revenge on the two American pilots involved in the 2006 mid-air collision over the Amazon that killed 154.

A regional federal court in Brasilia tonight affirmed the criminal convictions, but said that the original trial-court sentence of community service given to the pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan  Paladino, no longer stands. Instead, the court ordered that the pilots serve time in "open regime" on the highly controversial conviction  of over three years, rather than the four years of community service.

It wasn't immediately clear whether an "open regime" sentence requires a prison term. The new sentence is defined by the court as being "not convertible to community service," however.

[UPDATE OCT. 16 -- The AP is reporting today that the ruling actually is a victory of some kind for the pilots:

"On Monday, judges at a regional federal court in Brasilia ruled that the men do not need to perform community service. They also shortened their sentence to three years and one month — but ruled the men could serve their sentence in an "open" regime, meaning under Brazilian law they need not step foot in prison, just occasionally check in with Brazilian authorities. The ruling can be appealed and prosecutors had earlier indicated that was likely if this ruling did not go their way."]

The pilots lawyer said he would "study the sentence," and possibly appeal. Prosecutors, who I think are responding in part to media pressure from an angry group that represents a small number of the victims' families and has been relentless in villifying the Americans, also will appeal, seeking stiffer sentences.

Thanks as usual to Richard Pedicini, who took the all-night bus from Sao Paulo to Brasilia to cover the appeal verdict. Richard has been an invaluable and indefatigable reporter in Brazil since I first started writing about this strange case, shortly after I was among the seven people who survived the collision between a Brazilian GOL 737 airliner, which went down with all aboard in the central Amazon, and Legacy 600 business jet that somehow managed an emergency landing in the jungle.

The planes had collided at 37,000 feet on Sept. 19, 2006, after a series of errors by Brazilian air traffic control out them on a head-on path. A Brazilian investigation asserted that the American pilots were at fault for various reasons, primarily the fact that the Legacy's transponder was not functioning when the planes collided.  The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which did its own investigation because an American-made plane was involved (the Boeing), found otherwise, stating that the primary cause of the accident was likely systemic and operational fauilts by Brazil's long-troubled, military-run air traffic control.

An atmosphere of intense anti-American emotionalism followed the crash in Brazil, where the media helped fan the flames and passed along false rumors, among them that the American pilots were flying aerial maneuvers at the time of the accident. In fact, the plane was flying straight and routinely, at its assigned altitude, when the crash occurred.

Ten months after the Amazon disaster, following a long air-travel upheaval throughout the country caused by Brazilian air-traffic controllers protesting that they should not be blamed for the disaster, there was another horrific aviation accident when a jet crashed at the airport in Sao Paulo, killing 199 people.

By the way, the report today in Newsday, the newspaper in Long Island where ExcelAire, the company that had just bought the Legacy, is based, does a competent job of covering the incremental news in this, but precision in nuances is sometimes a problem.

Today, for example, the Newsday report states that the American pilots were convicted of negligence "for not verifying that anti-collision equipment and a transponder that would have alerted controllers to their location were functioning in the Embraer Legacy 600 ..." (Italics mine).

This is a quibble, but the words in italics are debatable assertion, given that all evidence shows that Brazilian air traffic controllers were demonstrably not paying attention to the Legacy as it crossed the portion of the Amazon where radar and radio communications are notoriously spotty. Yes, a functioning transponder would have corresponded with Brazilian radar, and more importantly, the anti-collision alert that works with the transponder would have been the last chance to avoid the collision. But to assert that a functioning transponder would have alerted controllers is to stipulate that the controllers were alert.

Which they demonstrably were not.


###

More Questions on Border Patrol Shooting of Mexican Rock-Thrower

[UPDATED]

From today's Los Angeles Times, the only daily American news organization that seems to be interested in doing reporting on the latest incident where U.S. Border Patrol agents fired fatal gunshots at rock-throwing Mexicans on the other side of the border:

"Sonora state police released a statement saying they found Elena Rodriguez's body, "with various gunshot wounds on different parts of the body," shortly after 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, lying next to the curb on Calle Internacional, a street that runs along the border fence. The body was found four blocks from the border crossing in downtown Nogales, at a spot where there is roughly a 10-foot vertical drop from the base of the fence to the street below."

And the latest questions would be:

--Where specifically was the body found, and how far from the fence? The report cited above is somewhat unclear.

--Where was the Border Patrol agent who fired those shots positioned, specifically?

--Did other Border Patrol agents fire into, or at, the crowd across the border?

The other questions, of course, are as outlined here in recent days: 

--Why didn't the Border Patrol agents simply retreat from the physical threat posed by the rock-throwers, rather than firing into the group across the border? The agents weren't "pinned down." Presumably, they could have moved to a position on the U.S. side beyond the ability of the assailants to throw a rock that could hit them. 

--How many shots were fired by the Border Patrol? Mexican authorities now say the dead teenager's body had seven bullet wounds, and that more than a dozen bullets also hit a medical building on the Mexican side of the border. According to The Nogales International, a twice-weekly paper in Nogales, Ariz., that has been aggressively covering the story, the Nogales, Sonora, mayor said that the 16-year-old was killed in a "hail of bullets."

--What is the specific operative law or regulation that the Border Patrol is citing to justify these incidents of firing across the border at rock-throwers?

--What is the identity of the agent who fired the fatal shots? What is the current status of that agent?

UPDATE Oct. 15 -- The Nogales International, a twice weekly newspaper in Nogales, Ariz., has been singularly covering this story as it should be covered. From today's report, this information on the physical site of the incident: (italics mine)

"The physical location of the shooting has raised questions as well. The area from where the agent reportedly fired is on a hill, approximately 10-15 feet above Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora, where [the teenager] was found dead. The border fence rises another 25 feet, creating a challenging angle for a rock-thrower trying to throw over the barrier and hit an agent. However, a well-aimed toss could breach the fence through one of the 4-inch gaps in the bollard-style structure."

Not addressed in that last assertion is, again, why the agents could not simply have retreated to a spot beyond the ability of any "well-aimed toss" that somehow breaches the fence through four-inch gaps in the posts to physically reach them -- given that the rock-throwers were confined to the other side of the border.

###

Border Patrol's Deadly Response to Rock-Throwing from Mexican Side

The Los Angeles Times, unlike the timid local daily papers in Arizona, is following up on the disturbing story of Border Patrol agents riddling a teenager's body with bullets, when that teenager was in a group of rock-tossing Mexicans on the other side of the international border at Nogales.

From today's Los Angeles Times report (Emphasis mine): "Under agency guidelines, repelling rock attacks with bullets can be regarded as a justifiable use of force in part because rocks have inflicted serious injuries on agents. But critics have grown increasingly vocal at the frequency of such incidents and what they call a lack of transparency in follow-up investigations. Wednesday's confrontation was the third incident since September; at least 15 civilians have died in agent-involved confrontations since 2010."

Not addressed yet, and it won't be addressed cogently unless the national media pay attention to this dismaying story that the local daily media are evidently afraid to touch: Why couldn't Border Patrol agents simply have retreated to a spot where the rocks could not reach them, given that the assailants were unable to advance (being on the Mexico side of the border)?

--Also, how many shots did the Border Patrol fire? The dead youth's body was hit with eight gunshots, Mexican authorities said, while at least a dozen more bullets hit a medical building nearby on the Mexican side.

--Also, what was the specific threat that the Border Patrol agents say they responded to? Again, throwing rocks at someone is a crime -- a local crime. Firing wildly across an international border is an international incident, whatever the other questions of manslaughter and inadequate training.

--Also, see the Los Angeles Tiomes story linked to above, which refers to the dead 16-year-old as the "suspected smuggler." There is no attribution for that, and no indication from the reporting that the dead youth was in fact a "suspected smuggler" (though he may have been, of course). In which casse, the crime location was on the Mexican side of the border, Mexican law enforcement was the legal authority, and the question still remains about the use of deadly force, which seems to have included a hail of bullets.  However, from the facts as they have currently been presented, it appears that the 16-year-old was part of a small group of people who tossed rocks at the agents across the border fence. -- in response to what would have been the Border Patrol agents' legitimate attempts to capture on this side, or repel, the actual smugglers who tossed a bundle of what seems to have been marijuana across the fence.

Again, why couldn't the agents have simply retreated from the rocks? Who gave the order to fire?

Less sloppy reporting is required here, on a sensitive topic.

###

Does the Border Patrol Require Better Supervision?

[Border fence between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico.]

The latest fiasco from the Border Patrol, the powerful federal police bureaucracy that has militarized the border region, especially in southern Arizona:

A Border Patrol agent in Nogales, Arizona, fired shots across the border into Nogales, Mexico on Wednesday night, killing a 16-year-old boy who was part of a crowd throwing rocks after Border Patrol agents disrupted smugglers who had tossed a bundle of drugs across the wall.

The Tucson and Phoenix media have the story of course, mostly based on a press release from the Border Patrol. But, per usual, they have not asked basic questions about a very troubling incident involving the Border Patrol:

1. If the Border Patrol agent felt threatened by rock-throwers who were on the other side of the international border, why did he not simply retreat away from the fence? This, after all, was a situation where it would seem that a retreat from the flying rocks, to a position where the rocks simply could not  reach, would have resolved the threat -- given that the assailants were blocked from advancing by a fortified border fence that kept them in Mexico.

2. How many shots were fired by the Border Patrol? (A Mexican newspaper report says the dead teenager had eight bullet wounds, which would fit the description of the phrase "body riddled with bullets." Other reports say that more than a dozen bullets struck a nearby building on the Mexican side).  Did more than one agent fire a gun at the crowd across the international border? How many agents fired?

3. What specific international and national laws pertain when a U.S. federal law enforcement officer opens fire across an international border, killing a citizen of a foreign country?

I don't expect that the timid daily media in Tucson and Phoenix will do much more to cogently report this developing story, given the prevailing fear of right-wing criticism that drives editorial decisions here. After all, the media must be exhausted from all that pious coverage of the Border Patrol agent who tragically (precise use of the word here) died last week near Bisbee -- after that agent had recklessly opened fire on two other agents, who returned fire in the dead of night in the desolate desert near the border. Initially, the media fully went along with speculation by the usual crowd of Phoenix statehouse loons and national right-wing crazies that that incident involved Mexican bandits, rather than Border Patrol agents who were engaged in that most inexcusable of police misadventures, death of a fellow officer by friendly fire.

This was the latest of four fatal shootings by Border Patrol agents of Mexican nationals at the border since January 2010. Two of the earlier ones also involved Mexican nationals throwing rocks from their side of the border. Here's some background on those.

Throwing rocks at a cop is always stupid and ill-advised.

Throwing rocks at anyone at all is a local crime. Shooting across a border is an international incident. Both should be pursued by the appropriate law-enforcement authorities, and the Department of Homeland security owes us a detailed explanation.

By the way, while the daily media in Arizona predictably fear to venture too far into explaining this story (their standard excuse is "we don't have the staff," which is a way of saying, "we stink because we don't make the effort not to stink"), a twice-a-week paper on the border, The Nogales International, is doing actual reporting. See this initial report in The Nogales International by Cesar Barron and Jonathan Clark. 

It quotes a Border Patrol spokesman: "Preliminary reports indicate that the agents observed the smugglers drop a narcotics load on the U.S. side of the international boundary and flee back to Mexico,” McKenzie said in an emailed statement. “Subjects at the scene then began assaulting the agents with rocks. After verbal commands from agents to cease were ignored, one agent then discharged his service firearm. One of the subjects appeared to have been hit.”

But then it goes further, describing how the rock-throwing incident began after the two alleged smugglers fled back into Mexico:

"At that point, four more males arrived on the Mexican side and began to throw rocks toward the fence in an apparent effort to help the two suspects escape. That's when an agent began firing, the witness told Barron. Some of the bullets reportedly struck the walls of a medical office behind Rodríguez. Luis Contreras Sánchez, the physician who operates the office, was quoted by the newspaper Expreso as saying the building was hit 14 times. Other news outlets put the count between five and “12 or more.”

Contreras Sánchez’s building and the sidewalk where Rodríguez's body was found are located below a point at which the border fence begins rising up a hill, and are approximately 12 feet below the base of the 25-foot fence. The fence is comprised of interconnected steel poles with 4 inches of space between them."

That's called reporting, and we need more of it on the border.

###  

Update on American Airlines

American Airlines says it is slowly digging out of its current mess with delays and canceled flights, as it has been grounding flights today after determining that more inspections are needed following several incidents of passenger seats coming loose in its Boeing 757 aircrafts, which carry 180 passengers.

The followingi is from the always useful Flightstats.com:

On Thursday, American's on-time arrival rate was a dismal 63 percent. From Sept. 16 to Sept. 30, only 52 percent of its flights arrived on time. During that time, the airline cancelled 907 flights and experienced 12,531 delays. In contrast, Southwest, Delta, United and US Airways combined for only 435 cancellations during the same period, and averaged a collective on-time performance rating of 87 percent.

September's On-time performance ranking of Major North American Airlines

Alaska Airlines - 89.13%

Delta Air Lines - 88.78%

US Airways - 87.15%

Southwest Airlines - 86.27%

Jetblue- 82.98%

United Airlines - 80.87%

Air Canada - 68.59%

American Airlines - 59.08%

###



.

Border Shooting Media Coverage: Operation Fast and Stupid

[UPDATED OCT. 7]

The knee-jerk proclivity of the media -- local, regional, national -- to buy into pre-existing narrative is on full display this afternoon in southern Arizona, where the story of a Border Patrol agent killed by gunfire early Tuesday morning has gone off-narrative.

I suggested it would probably do just that, when I posted here a few days ago a suggestion that perhaps reporters on the scene might want to start asking some basic questions about the Border Patrol's initial accounts of the incident.

After days of credulous, half-baked media accounts that struggled to fold this particular tragedy into the "fast and furious" narrative, it now is becoming clear that the fatal shooting of the Border Patrol agent was the result of so-called "friendly fire."  In the dead of night, responding around 2 a.m. to a routine alarm of a tripped body-motion sensor in primitive desert five miles from the border, near Bisbee, agents evidently mistakenly fired shots at each other.  One agent, Nicholas Ivie, was killed and another was hospitalized (and later released) with gunshot wounds. A third was not hurt.

The Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix is now covering the story reasonably accurately, as is the woefully understaffed, dispirited Tucson paper -- now that the F.B.I. has handed out a press release. Here's today's story in the Arizona Republic, with confirmation from the F.B.I. that the shootings were accidental and did not involve hostile fire. But note that the story calls this a "stunning development." Well, maybe it seems "stunning" today -- but only if you had failed to see the obvious from the beginning. The story also inaccurately states that the Border Patrol reported that the agents were on foot. Not so. The initial Border Patrol press releases had them on horseback. No one has addressed that oddity.  Oh, wait: The Los Angeles Times, apparently enamored of that Old West cowboy-in-the-moonlight image, still has them on horseback today!]

The two surviving agents -- whose accounts were conspicuously missing from the initial media reports -- have hired lawyers.

(Watch how fast this story gets downplayed and disappears, now that it's clear the media botched it. Absolutely in character when they're dead wrong, reporters still persist in holding onto a bogus report, with half-assed sourcing that seems to stem from something somebody told a Fox News affiliate in Texas, about two arrests made in Mexico. Maybe the Mess'cins did have something to do with it, they are obviously suggesting. Well, maybe you're just covering your butt, I would say.)


From the first reports of this incident, it was apparent to me -- and should have been clear to any reporter with the most basic news instincts -- that something did not add up in the Border Patrol account. The agency's initial report, well into Tuesday afternoon, asserted that the three agents were on horseback when they either were ambushed around 2 a.m. by, or somehow became involved in a gunfight with, assailants who were presumed to be drug smugglers who had crossed the border from Mexico.

Horseback? In the dead of night? In that rugged, rocky terrain? Even though it was a bright moonlit night, that made absolutely no sense to anyone who knows anything about riding a horse.

Then the Border Patrol changed its story -- and the credulous media waltzed along with the new version, never wondering about the difference from the old.  No, wait: the agents were on foot! But did the media then ask, well, where did this horseback information come from? They did not, not that I could tell.

Did reporters on the scene ask what the two surviving agents, who were obviously witnesses, had told their supervisors about the incident? What had they seen? And what kind of gunshot wounds were found? How many shots were fired, by the presumed assailants and by the agents themselves? The most obvious signal that this story did not add up was the absence of any public accounting by the two surviving witnesses.

But no, the media did not ask those questions (or if it did, the stories in print and on the supremely credulous Tucson television news stations did not reflect it). Instead, the media accounts -- local, regional, national -- all curled up in the cozy narrative formed by the right-wing political hysteria over "Fast and Furious," the botched sting by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office out of Phoenix (abetted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix) that inadvertently led to the 2010 murder by a drug smuggler of a Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, who was shot by a gun that was traced back to the Fast and Furious sting.

The usual cheap right-wing opportunists from the statehouse in Phoenix rushed in on Tuesday to politicize this latest shooting, along with a predictable selection of the odious Tea Party rabble-rousers, state and national divisions. 

For example, the notorious numb-nuts sheriff of Pinal County, Paul Babeu, had the case cracked in an Ariaonz minute.

"All information is pointing that this is connected to the violent drug cartel smuggling in this high smuggling area," Babeu said in a statement issued by his office and dutifully repeated by some media. He also appeared on a local Fox News affiliate, authoritatively not only blaming the Mexicans for the death, but even speculating about the kinds of illegal weapons involved.

According to the weekly Phoenix New Times, hands-down the best newspaper in Arizona, the Fox Report had this headline: "Sheriff Babeu: Agent shooting suspects likely using military grade weapons." Babeu said, according to the New Times report:  "Whether they're bandits or whether they're actual cartels members, what they have, oftentimes, is they're armed to the teeth, to the same level, if not, greater than local law enforcement. They have, usually, AK-47s, semi-automatic, sometimes fully automatic weapons."

Babeu, you'll recall, is the worthy who not long ago got jammed up after sending his fetching photo and other particulars to a gay hookup Web site -- causing some surprise his extremely conservative constituents in little Pinal County, until that point unaware that he was gay. His former boyfriend also has accused him of threatening him, and there are official investigations into the operation of Babeu's office.

But he sure does know a Mexican hit squad when he imagines one.

In general during the awful media performance on this story, the facts, or the lack of the facts, did not seem to matter. Killed-by-illegals was the knee-jerk narrative, spun by reflexively politicized local sheriffs in the highly militarized border region, supported initially by the Border Patrol who presumably had some deductive information when the witnesses clammed up, bought into readily by lazy media who failed to ask the most simple questions of the authorities when this occurred:

What happened out there? Who shot whom? And who knew what, when? That's police reporting 101.

The acting sheriff of Cochise County, Rod Rothrock, made this statement in a press conference yesterday when it was announced that Agent Ivie had been shot during gunfire exchanged among the three agents, each firing from defensive postures, once Ivie started shooting.

"Had they been encountering drug smugglers or whoever, their actions would have been appropriate. It's just tragic they encountered each other."

Cochise County has an acting sheriff because the well-liked elected sheriff, Larry Dever, a prominent voice in the right-wing drive to thoroughly militarize the border and flood it with armed agents, died Sept. 18 when the vehicle he was driving rolled over on a Forest Service road. Dever was drunk at the time, the medical examiner's office said this week. His blood alcohol content was a staggering (and nearly comatose) .29.

###

That Latest Shooting on the Border

The media have become startlingly lax on police stories, which is essentially what the latest shooting on the Arizona border south of Tucson is: a police story.

Initial reports yesterday from the Border Patrol said that three agents on horseback had been fired on, with one killed, in the dead of night while responding to an alarm from one of the ground-sensors that the high-tech contractors have installed along that rugged and forlorn portion of the border.

Horseback in the middle of the night, in primitive terrain? I was shaking my head over that one when, by mid-afternoon, the Border Patrol story had changed. No, the men were on foot.

Weirdly enough in the southern Arizona area, the Los Angeles Times newspaper usually has the sharpest regional reporting fopr the Tucson area, given the nearly total surrender of the feeble Tucson news media and the inability of the Phoenix daily, which really does try, to overcome the fact that at least half of its readership is made up of delusional people.

Here's the L.A. Times story.

Here are the two major things missing in all of the reporting,  local and national:

1. What do the two surviving agents say about what occurred?

2. What was the nature of the gunfire? Did the agents fire, and if so, how many rounds?

There is a kind of breathless lunge in the news accounts I've read to circle this into the politically charged narrative of the "Fast and Furious" scandal that involved guns being allowed to fall into the hands of Mexican drug gangs as part of a hapless sting operation run out of the Phoenix office of the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agency, abetted by a feckless federal prosecutor's office in the Arizona capital.

That may be the case, but let's make a simple request of the media at this point:

How about you can the speculation for a day or two, do some reporting, and get the facts?

###

Man With a Gun

There was a big fat guy sharing a confidence with a dealer in very large firearms yesterday at the Crossroads of the West gun show in Tucson.

"I know a guy high up in Homeland Security," the fat man was saying with self-assurance. "If Obama gets reelected, the first thing they're going to do is take guns away from anybody who's a member of any organized church."

The gun dealer nodded gravely, but actually he was looking over this lunatic's shoulder, searching for potential buying customers, of which there seemed to be few among the throngs of people who wandered the crowded aisles by counters and booths stocked with a staggering selection of rifles, shotguns and handguns, ammunition, magazines, martial-arts gear, hunting and survival knives, and even the occasional table full of religious end-times books. Will the religious nuts in America -- and I include even the perpetually alarmed nuns who taught me in grade school in the 1950s -- ever get tired of predicting the imminent end of the world, as a consequence of political opponents, insufficient public holiness, or (the 1950s nuns here) causing offense to the Virgin Mary in word, thought or deed.

They're wearing me out, these people.

Anyway, at the gun show, I was surprised to see the sign out front telling attendees that they had to check their own guns at the door. Maybe I miss the point of that, but it seemed to me that the gun show people were signaling that they are as wary as the rest of us might be of a crowd of armed gun-nuts assembled in a large group.

The Wall Street Journal the other day had a story saying that gun sales were going to go up sharply if Omaba gets reelected.

Says the Journal, "Even though there haven't been any substantial changes to gun-control laws under Mr. Obama, Cabela's, Bass Pro Shops, Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. SWHC -2.41% and Olin Corp., OLN +0.52% the maker of Winchester bullets, are anticipating another bump in sales this winter if President Obama is re-elected. Smith & Wesson raised its full-year sales forecast last week to $530 million ..."

Noted. But I saw no sign of the imminence of that at this gun show, where the lookers were in far, far greater strength than the buyers. Nor do I find the gun-show spectacle as alarming as this overwrought piece in Salon seems to have found a similar show in Phoenix.

I simply do not see a lot of guns being bought at these events, though there are a whole lot on sale.

Dunno: Maybe the gun market is sated? I mean, anybody who wants a gun -- for whatever reason -- probably already has one or more. And guns are extremely well manufactured. Buy one and it lasts pretty much forever.

As I've said before, I have no personal objection to gun ownership. I have always known hunters, even before I moved to a part of the country that used to be known as the Wild West. I have friends who are cops and other law enforcement agents. I'm a Vietnam veteran. I don't get hysterical about guns -- well regulated, to borrow a few words from the Second Amendment.

On the other hand, I recently declined to renew my membership in the National Rifle Association because the NRA -- which used to do important work in gun-safety and firearms training education -- has now become nothing more than a propaganda arm for the lunacy wing
of the Republican Party. And frankly, it just bugs me that the $1 million-a-year head of the NRA, the pompadoured Wayne LaPierre, is one of those loud-mouthed faux warriors who, like so many others in his cohort, is a draft-dodger who somehow managed to avoid going to Vietnam, back when there was real shooting.

Also, I wish the gun crowd, including those who are responsible gun dealers with genuine regard for firearms training and safety, would drum out the most indisputably ugly and unacceptable wares at those gun-show tables.

Nazi flags? Not okay.

###

RIP Gaeton Fonzi

Gaeton Fonzi has died, age 76. He was one of the most dogged investigative reporters of his generation and the author of what is widely regarded as the most persuasive book arguing that President Kennedy was murdered in a conspiracy that the Warren Commission willfully chose not to investigate fully.

Here's the obit in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I remember Fonzi from the incipient glory days of Philadelphia journalism, when the city had three daily newspapers (later four), three aggressive local TV news operations and a monthly magazine, Philadelphia, that defined the dawning era in national city-magazine investigative journalism.

Like most serious investigative reporters, Fonzi could seem like a nut, especially when he was intensely focused. But he usually delivered, even if some of the prose was purple.

I think he indirectly helped clear the way for Gene Robert's fabled Philadelphia Inquirer that gained traction starting in 1972. In the late 60s, Fonzi and Greg Walter broke the story, in Philadelphia Magazine, of the old Inquirer's master shakedown-artist, a thoroughly corrupt reporter named Harry Karafin, who was blackmailing major Philadelphia businesses and institutions when the Inquirer was owned and operated by another scoundrel, Walter Annenberg, a gangster's son who had parlayed the Inquirer into an enormously successful business empire that included TV Guide and television stations.

Fonzi also wrote a book about Annenberg, who evidently decided by late 1969 that Philadelphia had become too inhospitable, or at least insufficiently malleable, and sold his paper to the reputable Knight Newspapers chain, which later became Knight-Ridder. The rest was journalistic history. Annenberg, who had prostituted the Inquirer shamelessly, received his reward from Richard Nixon, who named him ambassador to Britain.

While Annenberg went to the Court of St. James (and would later become better known for his and his wife's philanthropy), Karafin went to prison.

Fonzi, I always thought, had helped Annenberg make up his mind to sell the paper and blow town. And like a surprising number of other Philadelphia journalists from that era, he had started out at the then-scrappy Delaware County Daily Times -- where I myself had my first job right out of the military, as a columnist, before I went to the Inquirer in 1970.

Incidentally, I never got the chance to share with Fonzi my own take on the Kennedy Assassination, which I call the Sharkey Unified Theory. To wit:

Lee Harvey Owsald did it, acting alone that day. But at the same time there were at least two ongoing conspiracies to kill JFK in various stages of planning and preliminary execution at the time Oswald fired those three shots. Kennedy, clearly, had an array of powerful and resentful enemies.

Oswald, known for being unstable even to conspirators who might have met him, had some association with at least one of those conspiracies. But he nevertheless acted on his own that day. When he killed Kennedy, members of the actual conspiracies -- which overlapped at the edges -- were dumbfounded, and assumed that the the deed had gone down, somehow. Hence the mob's hair was on fire, as was the hair of the Bay of Pigs renegades. None of these players were known for a high degree of competence, after all.

The Sharkey Unified Theory accounts for all of the anomalies unearthed in the endless conspiracy-theory speculations, including Jack Ruby, lashing out in the mistaken belief that Oswald was working with the mob conspiracy. Both (or all) of the conspiracies to kill Kennedy were dangerous and ruthless, but also half-assed in their planning and organization. Hey, no one ever said the Bay of Pigs exiles or the mob were geniuses!

So the truth has actually been out there hiding in plain sight all along, in fractured pieces lying among among all of the incorrect shards and theories. And my guess is that some aged villains to this day believe they were part of the plot, unaware that Oswald, for his own twisted reasons, beat them to the trigger.

Fonzi might not have bought it, but he would have considered the possibilities.

###

Member to NRA: Drop Dead

I joined the National Rifle Association some years ago, after moving to Arizona, because I liked their work in gun-safety education and in firearms understanding. I'm not a hunter, but I know hunters. I'm a military veteran, so guns are not unknown to me. And I live in what used to be called the Wild West.

But I'm not renewing my membership.

The NRA, which has always had radical right-wing elements, has become nothing more now than an armed subsidiary of the extremist wing (and is there any other these days?) of the Republican Party, its publications foul with nasty propaganda, outright lies, and incessant Omaba-hating.

This has occurred under the aegis of the NRA's boss, a fellow named Wayne LaPierre, who wears a pompadour the likes of which I haven't seen since the Lawrence Welk Orchestra's trombone section was on a bus. LaPierre, who snarls like a warrior, is actually one of those faux warriors I love to identify -- a guy about my age who loudly supports war but who himself managed to dodge the Vietnam draft when he was a young man. They are called "chicken-hawks," and the list is long and sad.

And by the way, what the hell kind of a name is "Wayne LaPierre?" Sounds like something W.C. Fields would have cooked up.

Now my membership renewal in the NRA is predicated on the need to "defeat President Obama" who, LaPierre tells me in my renewal letter, plans to "dismantle the heritage of our country and tear down the foundations of our liberties."

LaPierre makes a cool $1 million as the guy leading the NRA into this folly.

My $25 renewal fee is not coming your way this year, LaPierre. The NRA is no longer an organization that has value as a representative of gun-owners and gun-safety advocates who are not also right-wing screwballs (and draft-dodgers).

###

9-11

Anniversary stories are a particularly chintzy form of journalism, and I'm grateful to the Times today for not going overboard on the 9-11 anniversary. (The amusingly irrelevant Poynter Institute and its professed shock aside, perennial anniversary stories can become, over time, as empty and forced in sentiment as Hallmark anniversary cards.)

There was, however, an important story in the paper today -- not a commemorative waddle through the oft-said, but rather a sharp and crucial piece on the op-ed page by Kurt Eichenwald, who used to be one of those bylines you looked for when he was on the staff of the Times.

Eichenwald's article examines the chronology of a series of urgent memos and other warnings from the C.I.A. to the Bush White House in the months right before the horrific, spectacular Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Yes, we've known about the memo of Aug. 6, 2001, in which Bush's daily presidential briefing file began with a top-secret warning: "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S." Famously, Bush and his cronies chose to shrug off that warning -- fixed, as they were, in the stubborn and absurd mind-set that Saddam Hussein was the enemy, not Al Qaeda.

Not well-known, though, are other briefing memos from the C.I.A. that Eichenwald describes preceding the Aug. 6 one, posing warning after warning that an Al Qaeda attack was coming, and that agents of the terrorists were already in place in the U.S. planning that attack, with potentially "dramatic consequences." These also were ignored by Bush and his cronies, to the profound frustration of officials and agents in the C.I.A.

You might want to read the Eichenwald piece using this link, because as it appears in the print edition of the paper it's a little difficult to read. Someone on the op-ed page thought it would be a good idea to allow one of those infernal "graphics" people to set the article in negative type (white letters on a black background), in two twin columns meant to resemble the fallen towers. But as I said, it's difficult to read in pribnt because somebody got too cute with the graphics.

And incidently, along with the online interest, there have been some sharp demurrals in reaction to the Eichenwald article, which is evidently part of the promotion for a book he has out. Essentially, the criticism is that all of this stuff was already on the record.

Anyway, I'm glad for the subdued 9-11 news-pages coverage, if only because I don't have to read some reverential reporting on the reappearance at the site of the odious Rudy Giuliani -- you know, the faux warrior and Vietnam draft-dodger who installed his palatial, shockingly luxurious "emergency command center/tryst pad" inside one of the World Trade Center towers after that complex had already been attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists in the 1993 bombing that killed six and injured more than 1,000.

Meanwhile, the breathtakingly expensive memorial at the World Trade Center site continues to be a source of controversy and scandal.

And it raises questions about what, exactly, we are commemorating at this complex -- the horror and valor of 9-11, or the excessive, freedom-choking security-industrial state that it spawned.

In Slate, Mark Vanhoenacker has this compelling article looking at the issues of the stringent, ridiculous security that greets visitors to the memorial, and what those measures signal as the cost to a free society.

Among the past articles he links to in his article is a piece by me in this space, which I wrote last spring after a visit to the memorial. Here it is:

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A Visit to the 9/11 Memorial in New York Where Silly Security Shows That the Terrorists Did In Fact Win

"Remove your belt!"

I'm passing through the crowded security checkpoint at the new 9/11 Memorial on the site of the World Trade Center ruins in lower Manhattan and I realize this goon in a blue shirt that says "SECURITY" is yelling at me.

He is also poking some kind of a wand into the tray holding my camera and cellphone, knocking them around a bit before they pass through the magnetometer.

"Be careful with that stick you're banging my camera with," I tell him.

"Remove your belt," he repeats loudly, in a tone that not even the rudest TSA screener would dare to use at an airport. He glares at me in a way that says, "If this was Guatemala, you'd be on the ground right now, pal."

Welcome to the 9/11 Memorial where, given the absurd degree of pointless security that abounds, the terrorists have clearly won.

There is not a sign, and barely a reminder, of the courage and fortitude shown by New Yorkers on that terrible day as those huge buildings crumbled and all of those people died at the hands of religious-fanatic murderers who were determined to bring this great city to its knees.

No, there is just the security, the fear that is so obviously on display, now that the actual threat is gone.

You need to go online and arrange a pass and a time to visit the memorial site, which is dominated by two giant sunken pools with waterfalls cascading into the pits where the Twin Towers each once stood.

I know that ground well, because I worked for years at the Wall Street Journal, pre-Murdoch, when Dow Jones was based at the World Financial Center across the street from the World Trade Center. When I go there today, I see not those holes in the ground, so tastefully designed to eradicate all memory of the offense of the horror, but the vast and unspeakable emptiness in the air. All of that mass, gone, and yet I still feel it there.

The security, I am deeply saddened to say, spoils any sense of reflection or reverence at the site. Instead, the fear is everywhere, in the humorless faces of all those rent-a-cops, all those real cops, all on guard. All that law-enforcement presence, and for what?

Against what?

I wanted to tell the hump who ordered me around at the metal detector, Listen, Skippy, you are aware, are you not, that this place has already been blown up? That there is nothing left to destroy? That the threat to American freedoms is from the likes of you in your quasi-military blue uniform and your Guatemala militia manners? The terrorists have moved on. There is no opportunity at this place now.

The New York City police commissioner, Ray Kelly, has given interviews about the security at this site and come up with little more than an expressed concern that some people might be so overwhelmed with grief that they might feel the impulse to jump into one of those reflecting pools. I am not kidding.

"People might commit suicide," Kelly said in one interview. "We're concerned about the possibility of somebody jumping in. This is what we're paid to think about."

It does not matter, because common sense has died, that anyone with a desire to end it all can merely cross the street, stroll a block west, and hop a low railing right into the churning Hudson River.

No, we have a memorial at the World Trade Center site, the site of such courage and resolve when the enemy was real, and the memorial is to fear. And to the growing security state. And in a very sad way, it is a pathetic tribute to the murderers who sought on 9/11 to make that hideous statement about the vulnerability of America.

I'd post a photo or two of the site that I took yesterday but I cannot. As I left the security area, I turned around to snap a picture, and one of the glowering rent-a-cops blocked my exit.

"You can't take a picture. You have to delete it," he ordered me.

I insisted that he call an actual police officer, and two responded. Yes, they agreed, I would have to delete the picture.

I wasn't sure how to do that, so the rent-a-cop took my camera and did it for me. Deleted all. And then dropped the camera, which no longer functioned properly.

This, of course, would be an illegal act in America. But not here, I guess. Not at this tasteful memorial to fear, where the security state rules.

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