A brief comment for the IHT.
Category: Newspapers
Jonathan “Jack” Idema, the pseudo-mercenary who was jailed after being convicted of operating a private prison in Kabul, died of AIDS in Mexico last week.
For the International Herald Tribune, I visited his semi-abandoned office building in Fayetteville, N.C., and found chains on the doors. Idema’s adjoining apartment, where he allegedly conducted his assignations, had a poster for the Broadway musical Urinetown on the wall and a single cowboy spur rusting in the grass outside.
Which is scarier: a government that hunts down and kills dozens in cold blood, or a government that hunts down and kills dozens by accident?
Read more at the IHT.
I reviewed Simon Mann’s memoir, Cry Havoc, for The National.
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Dh51
Everyone’s favourite kind of coup d’état is the bloodless one: El Presidente is surprised in his pyjamas, or while shopping in London, his trusted military aides turn out to be snakes, and he ends up, along with his loyalists, either under house arrest or in exile – padded at first, then increasingly threadbare as the secret accounts are frozen, one by one. Meanwhile, if you are an average citizen of his beleaguered country, not much changes. The money flows to anyone but you: meet the new Presidente, same as the old Presidente.
Simon Mann, one of the most famous living mercenaries, set out in 2004 to manage what he insisted would be a bloodless coup to topple Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. But the Wonga Coup was so bloodless that it barely got started. Mann chartered a Boeing 727 full of armed men and planned to fly into the capital of Malabo, where an advance team led by the South African mercenary Nick du Toit intended to take over the airport. Mann hoped to install Severo Moto, the leader of a government-in-exile headquartered in Spain, as president, and in return reap millions in oil revenues.
I visited Nag Hammadi for the IHT and found an Egyptian Wild West.
Read my story here.
I visited the northern oil fields of Afghanistan.
Read about it at the IHT Global Opinion site.
Originally published on the IHT‘s Latitude blog.
CAIRO — It has been nearly three months since the last really big, unmanageable crowd converged on Tahrir Square and threatened to stay until its demands were met. On the eve of Ramadan, in early August, the Egyptian military smacked and clubbed that group — a broad but woefully inarticulate coalition opposing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ hold on power — out of the square. And much to the protesters’ horror, the majority of Egyptians seemed fairly satisfied with the pushback, preferring a return to order even if it came with a military policeman’s truncheon.
Originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Inside Scientology
By Janet Reitman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 444 pages, $28
The Church of Scientology, founded in 1950 by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, is not a church that turns the other cheek. In the early 1990s, the Internal Revenue Service went after it for taxes; Scientology unleashed an enfilade of lawsuits and complaints that eventually brought the IRS to heel and won the church tax exemption. In “Inside Scientology,” Janet Reitman says that when the church was charged criminally in 1998 over the death of a parishioner, the organization overwhelmed the medical examiner in Clearwater, Fla.; within two years she had resigned and later suffered a nervous breakdown. According to Ms. Reitman, David Miscavige, the church’s leader, called these acts a ” ‘holy war’ of litigation.” If the English language has a more frightening phrase, I haven’t come across it.
Graeme Wood 