Category: Daily

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The Fakir of Ipi

Originally appeared in The Daily.

They don’t make Pakistani safe houses like they used to.

Contrary to popular opinion, the most successful fugitive jihadist that Pakistan has ever known was not shot through the eye by a Navy SEAL over the weekend. He died peacefully, surrounded by friends and admirers in his home district of Waziristan, on April 16, 1960, when Osama bin Laden was still a 3-year-old brat in Saudi Arabia. Mirza Ali Khan — known to the British as the Fakir of Ipi — evaded a 12-year manhunt, then basked for another 13 years in the warm glow of victory. If bin Laden had studied up on the Fakir’s evasion techniques, he might have lasted a few years longer.

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Portrait of a Pope

Carl Franzen and I produced a file on Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) for The Daily.  Check it out here.

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Tale of a Lost City

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Bashar Assad’s father Hafez destroys Hama and kills thousands

Up until Friday, it was possible to imagine that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad had a softer touch than his brutal father Hafez. One hint: His American biographer, the former minor-league baseball pitcher David W. Lesch, reported in 2006 that Bashar likes the soothing tones of Phil Collins music. But over the last few days, Bashar has responded to protests by killing at least 120, including dozens at funerals in cities all over Syria. If Hafez Assad is gazing up at his son from Hades, he can be certain that the family business of brutality is still going strong.

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The Bay of Pigs

The cartoonish Bay of Pigs plot falls short in every way

Originally appeared in The Daily.

When Fidel Castro kicked the capitalists out of Cuba in 1959, he created an embittered exiled class only too eager to help his main enemy, the United States of America, oust him as soon as possible. If you want to topple a government, its exiles can be a tempting tool: They have money, spies on the inside and a level of rage so incandescent, you could read a map by it on a moonless night. Unfortunately, as President John F. Kennedy learned 50 years ago today, all that and a few hundred million dollars in military training won’t buy regime change.

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Holy Treasure

Originally appeared in The Daily.

In December 1945, an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali Samman and his brother wandered away from their village in central Egypt, hoping to scoop up a few buckets of soft dirt to fertilize his crops. Digging next to a large boulder, Muhammad Ali found a mysterious earthenware jar about 3 feet tall. He and his brother backed away from it, worrying that it might contain a genie. Then, on further reflection, they considered that it might contain gold, and they smashed it apart, thereby releasing a force in some ways more disruptive to traditional Christianity than any genie could have been.

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A Libyan Misadventure

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Last week, two American aviators crashed their F-15E fighter jet outside Benghazi, leaving it a smoking wreck on the ground.  When the airmen parachuted unharmed to safety, they may have wondered about a historic precursor, a lanky 24-year-old Norwegian-Englishman who crashed in eastern Libya more than 60 years earlier and was not so lucky. That pilot nearly died. And if he had, the world would be a poorer place because that pilot was Roald Dahl, among the world’s most beloved children’s authors. Dahl’s books (including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach”) make children and adults squeal with delight and shudder with horror, in part because his own life had its share of delight and horror both. On the night of Sept. 19, 1940, Dahl nearly burned to death under the stars in the Libyan desert.

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Tragedy at a Nuclear “Playground”

Originally appeared in The Daily.

The Idaho Falls meltdown killed three, but American nuclear experiments continued

 

According to the United Nations, the plume of radiation from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors has already started hitting the United States, starting with Alaska and reaching California this weekend. The doses of radiation will be minute, scientists say — ranging from completely undetectable to detectable but harmless, similar to the amount one gets from eating a few healthy supermarket bananas. In other words, when it comes to radiation exposure, the American West has had worse.

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The Barbary Pirates

North African pirate states meet the U.S. Navy

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Two U.S. Navy vessels, the Ponce and the Kearsarge, are nearing the Libyan coast, officially to provide humanitarian aid and evacuate straggling Americans. The shores of Tripoli are well known as a historic landing ground for the U.S. Marines. But for the U.S. Navy, the coast is even more hallowed as the site where it came into its own as a fighting force, where it executed one of the most daring raids in naval history and where, for the first time, the young nation’s sailors truly kicked ass.

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