Annals of Anonymity: We can hardly expect a gov't official to talk on the record about kinfolk of a tyrant who faces a "delicate future"

Plus a final note of apology re. Hurricane Irene



From the HuffPost World report: "With its panoramic views and opulent furniture, the seaside home of Hannibal Gaddafi more closely resembles a luxury resort than a private residence. But a closer inspection of the home following Libyan rebels' ransacking has now revealed some of the unspeakable horrors to have allegedly taken place on its premises -- even among those trusted to take care of the colonel's grandchildren."



by Ken



Sometimes, faced with a tempting link of a NYT e-newsletter, I find myself trying to establish criteria for clickworthiness sort of the way Elaine on Seinfeld, faced with the impossibility any more than her current supply of her preferred contraceptive sponge, took to evaluating prospective male companions for "spongeworthiness." Worse still are the times I forget and impetuously click through without taking time for a proper evaluation of clickworthiness. (Luckily, the stakes are less portentous than those Elaine faced.)



So I can't really say that my interest level in the story reached true clickworthiness, but you can't take back a click once delivered, and there I was this afternoon looking at the story, "Qadaffi's Wife and 3 of His Children Flee to Algeria." No doubt I was primed from having earlier read an AOL-highlighted piece about the Ethiopian nanny of Colonel Qaddafi's son Hannibal's children, "whose wounds appeared to be in desperate need of medical attention" even as she whined about having been tortured by Aline (Mrs. Hannibal) Qaddafi for refusing to beat one of the young uns -- and, oh yes, having worked for a full year in family's seaside home, "with its panoramic views and opulent furniture," which "more closely resembles a luxury resort than a private residence," without being paid a cent.



As it turns out, the "3 of His Children" admitted into Algeria ("admitted through one of the more southerly crossing in the Sahara desert, arriving in a Mercedes and a bus" -- imagine Qaddafis reduced to fleeing the country by bus!) includes, as announced by the Algerian Foreign Ministry and confirmed by Algeria's U.N. ambassador, not just Colonel Q's daughter Aisha and two of his sons, Mohammed and the aforementioned Hannibal, but also their spouses and children! Oh, were you too thinking of the "children" in that headline as being, you know, children?



Oh, there were children packed on that bus -- "many children," according to Algerian U.N. Ambassador Mourad Benmehidi. But they're Colonel Q's grandchildren, not children. Presumably among the party were Mrs. Hannibal and their insufficiently beaten offspring. One can only hope that their new Algerian hosts will be able to provide referrals for a new nanny, though it may not be easy to find one who works as cheap as her predecessor.



Now this may or may not be of interest to you, but none of this is why I bring it all up. Well, not exactly. We have sort of grazed up against the delicate question of why exactly the Qadaffi party's Mercedes and bus were allowed into Algeria, and their occupants apparently given refuge in Algiers. In case you were wondering, the NYT report reports:

An Algerian Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of Colonel Qaddafi's future, said the members of his family who came to Algeria were all in Algiers, the capital. The official noted that none of them had been named in warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes charges, unlike Colonel Qaddafi himself, his son Seif al-Islam and his former intelligence chief. [Emphasis added.]

The person I associate most with the War on Anonymous Sources is Salon's Glenn Greenwald, and we've occasionally eavesdropped on some of his righteous screeds on the subject -- with which, let me say, I couldn't agree more. As Glenn has had far too frequent occasion to point out, the new habit among classier outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post of explaining why an anonynous source was granted anonymity hasn't so much curbed the practice as given it some fancy new window dressing. The Times policy appears to be that we won't grant you anonymity unless you can come up with a really entertaining reason, while the Post's policy appears to be that we won't grant you anonymity unless you ask.



But even by these, er, relaxed standards, my eyes underwent some major popping confronted with this specimen. Let's run this through one more time. The Algerian Foreign Ministry official was --

speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of (deposed Libyan dictator) Colonel Qaddafi's future.

Um, er, huh? "Because of the delicacy of Colonel Qaddafi's future"? What does that mean? (Suggestion to NYT Foreign Desk: Couldn't you have given us something more solid, like, say, "speaking on condition of anonymity on account of how it's a month without an 'R' in it"?)





FINAL NOTE OF APOLOGY TO THOSE WHO WERE

PEEVED BY ALL THE ATTENTION PAID TO IRENE



Downtown Brattleboro, Vermont -- as the state suffers perhaps its worst flooding in 100 years. But gee, it's only Vermont, and in truth it's probably less than 100 years.



First, to those outside Irene's path, forced to put up with all our yammering: So sorry! I realize how tedious are impending natural disasters that may permanently change the lives of other people. And then when they turn out to be not such a big deal, well, jeez! (Though don't tell that to the folks in Vermont and upstate New York, suffering "Worst Flooding in 100 Years," but what's 100 years really? And heck, they didn't even get a hurricane, just a ratty tropical storm!)



And speaking of the hurricane turning out to be less big a deal than the worst-case scenarios, to those inside Irene's path who were dissatisfied by the outcome: Again, so sorry! What's the point of planning for those worst-case scenarios if they don't happen? This group, by the way, includes people who are offended by official "overreaction," like shutting down New York's transit system, which -- to add insult to injury -- then took hours and hours to begin to restart. Just because these folks are too stupid or too lazy to try to understand (a) why it was thought appropriate to shut the system down (and never mind all the damage that was done by the "disappointing" storm, or what would have happened if, say, populated subway trains had been trapped in flooded tunnels, or populated buses had been struck by some of those 600-plus trees that fell), (b), why the shutdown had to be announced so early and put into effect so long before the brunt of the storm was expected, and/or (c) why the system took so long to reboot (including, for example, the tiresome requirement that every foot of subway track be walked before the trains could be restarted), well, I truly am sorry.



Sorry, folks, next time we'll try to arrange a disaster that lives up to your exacting specifications -- and then just keep it to ourselves. So sorry!



ONE LAST NOTE: You may remember the expedition to Constitution Island, in the Hudson River opposite West Point, I was planning for Saturday but aborted thinking I could get up there as scheduled before the noon Metro-North shutdown but would have no way of getting back to the city from. It turns out that the great Reenactment Day festivities were canceled. The tour leader has called to my attention that there's still one more weekend opportunity to visit Constitution Island this season, on Saturday, September 24. I've got my Municipal Arts Society "Starchitecture" tour that day. I thought I might be able to slip up there in time for the tail end of the Constitution Island day, but as I read the schedules (hastily!), the earliest train I could catch would arrive at 3:02, two minutes after the last bus pickup from the station parking lot!



Oh well, as they say, wait till next year.

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Storm diary (continued)

Sure, it's a matter of appearance rather than reality, but Governor Cuomo conveys the appearance of a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat. (He's surrounded here by National Guardsmen because he was announcing a doubling of the Guard presence this weekend to deal with . . . well, whatever.)



by Ken



Apologies for not mustering a more reasonable type of post. I understand better now, now that I'm going through it, how/why Floridians go into all-storm all-the-time mode from the time a big storm begins to take aim on the mainland, even when for the foreseeable future there's no new "news" and nothing more to be done in anticipation, at least nothing that we haven't already been informed about a few zillion times in the days before.





As I pointed out last night, even then we were a full 24 hours, if not more, away from the arrival of the brunt of the storm in the tri-state Greater New York area. Today we've watched Irene attack the Carolinas, and as I write, the New Jersey coast is beginning to feel Irene's presence more directly. We've been told that the storm winds have lowered noticeably, and don't seem likely to pick up again, but we've also been told that the size of the expected storm surge is "locked in." (Apparently storm surges don't have the flexibility of, say, slimy pols who can be coaxed to a more "reasonable" point of view with a modest infusion of cash. Okay, maybe not so modest if it's, say, an influential senator or a House committee or important subcommittee chairman you're buying.)



Now in New York City it's being estimated that the worst of Irene is likely to hit us between midnight and 3am, setting up the worst conditions on the ground for later Sunday morning, 8am-ish. The winds may proves less ferocious than they were yesterday but are still pretty hefty, and are being talked about in turns of even scarier "gust" numbers. And even if in the city itself we get "only" 5-10 inches of rain, that's still a lot of rain, in an area that's already saturated from a very wet August, meaning that the ground isn't likely to be able to absorb much new water. Also, as I saw one TV talking head protest to her Expert Meteorologist Guy, there's quite a difference between five inches of rain and ten inches -- though I think at that point she was talking about the difference between six and 12 inches. Indeed there is, but EMG assured her that no, there are too many variables for us to have any idea where within that range we're going to fall until the rain finishes falling.



So here we all still are on a day that outwardly has all the hallmarks of a perfectly normal rainy Saturday in the city -- except of course that nothing is "normal." There hasn't been any public transport for a third of a day now, so those of us who depend on public transport to get us anywhere beyond walking range clearly aren't going anywhere. And of course much of the talk on the tube is still of the mandatory evacuations in the city and coastal localities from New Jersey to Connecticut. From what I've seen on TV, some people in the areas subject to "mandatory" evacuation evacuated and some didn't. As officials point out when pressed by the TV talking heads, there really isn't any way that they can force people to leave.



ONE OBVIOUS NOTE TO BE APPLIED TO THE NEXT BIG STORM



One obvious note, in line with what I wrote last night about storm preparedness normally developing in reaction to the rightness or wrongness of the response to the last big storm: If it turns out that the preparations ordered by our government leaders, based on the worst-case scenarios, was disproportionate to what the storm actually delivers, you can expect that the next time we're presented with such a drastic prospect, even fewer people will take the threat seriously. And there's nothing to be done about it. How can you blame those leaders for planning for the totally realistic prospect of those worst-case scenarios? And the fact is that they're clearly influenced by the city's drastic underanticipation of last December's blizzard.



MEANWHILE, THERE'S SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR ENFORCED INACTIVITY



It's a luxury for me, since these days I find my time so heavily overscheduled. Finally I'm making dents in the pile-up on my DVR -- finally sorting out, for example, which still-unwatched In Plain Sight and Law & Order: Criminal Intent episodes are stored there and which ones I'll have to try to track down online. Armed with that information, I've begun attacking the backlog, and have enjoyed beginning to catch up with the recently completed In Plain Sight season. At some point I'll probably have something to say about all this.



POSSIBLY FINAL SATURDAY-NIGHT STORM NOTES



(1) I just double-checked the MAS website and the "tour hotline" ("in case of severe weather") to see if there's news of my scheduled walking tour of the Tompkins Square neighborhood of the East Village tomorrow afternoon, and found no news. Perhaps tomorrow? I guess it's academic, since with the subways and buses idled, there's no way I could get there anyway. (For that matter, tour leader Francis Morrone would normally be taking the subway into Manhattan from Park Slope, Brooklyn.)



(2) I caught some of Governor Cuomo's public appearance today, and boy, does he not inspire leaderly confidence. This is almost a totally matter of perception rather than reality. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, oozed authoritativeness in those crisis situations, and I never felt that that authority corresponded with reality. Mayor Mike too commands a certain amount of authority. Governor Andrew, by contrast, even while taking ownership of yesterday's decision to shut down our public transport system today at noon, sounded like a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat.





SUNDAY UPDATE: FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH --

TODAY'S MAS TOMPKINS SQUARE TOUR IS POSTPONED



I just noticed that tour leader Francis Morrone offered the above info in a comment this morning. Thanks, Francis!

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