Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

George W. Bush

The True Diplomatic Legacy of 1967

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Unfortunately, it’s common in political discussions to hear pundits and commentators say: “Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders.” There’s only one problem with that analysis: There are no 1967 borders. The line that Israel inherited from the War of Independence is the Armistice Demarcation Line of 1949, which is different from the international boundaries that exist elsewhere in the world.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Sometimes I’ll watch an old movie on television and, once in a while, one of mine, such as April Showers (’48) will come on and I’ll watch it. And you know something? I’m always amazed at what a lousy actress I was. I guess in the old days we just got by on glamour.”
—Ann Sothern

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Clinton, Bush, and Osama Bin Laden: The Secret Cables

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The public execution of an Afghan woman known as Zarmina by the Taliban at the Ghazi Sports Stadium, Kabul, November 16, 1999. She was found guilty of killing her husband while he slept, after allegedly being beaten by him. She was executed in front of her seven children. At the right of the frame is a spurt of dust. This is the bullet after passing through her skull and hitting the ground. The U.S. State Department were convinced that the, ahem, moderate Taliban were credible partners. In fact, the only moderate Taliban is a dead Taliban.

Seraphic Secret is still performing (however reluctantly) his civic duty on Jury Duty. Hence, time to blog is severely constrained.

Luckily, David Paulin, a friend of this blog for many years and a fine journalist has provided us with an informative article based on Wikileaks documents that examines the shockingly credulous mind-set of career diplomats in the Clinton and Bush administrations.  The State Department seems to be staffed by overbred, overeducated creatures who nourish clinical delusions about some of western civilization’s most implacable enemies: the Taliban.  Madeleine Albright, in particular, emerges as particularly disconnected to the realities on the ground.

In the months leading up to the September 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration had Osama bin Laden on its radar. He was not a household name in America yet, but top administration officials regarded him as a mortal enemy. Secretary of State Colin Powell was among those deeply concerned about Bin Laden’s ability to launch or provoke serious terror attacks – and to influence large swaths of the Muslim world, where many admired him and were drawn to his hate-filled anti-Americanism.

 Secret diplomatic cables just released by WikiLeaks show that ten years ago, just months before 9/11, top Bush officials were attempting to bring Bin Laden to justice for outrages that included his role in the truck-bombing attacks of U.S. Embassies in the East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.

However, Washington was getting nowhere with the Taliban. [Read more…] about Clinton, Bush, and Osama Bin Laden: The Secret Cables