O Contraire

In 2010, a computer virus now known as Stuxnet went out of control. Originally created to infect and disable Iranian nuclear plants, Stuxnet, in concert with another malicious program called Flame, went—as you might expect almost any virus to do—out of control, in fact it went crazy.

It infected, for example, Chevron, a Fortune 500 company that only admitted contracting the Stuxnet infection in November, although for over two years it kept the devastating intrusion a secret. Around the same time as the Chevron assault, published reports by Symantec, the software security giant, indicated that not simply Iran, but Indonesia and India also found their systems infected: in all, some 15,000 unintended consequences.

Several of you know that my family was unable to move to Prague for a variety of reasons. Christmas 2011 was the only time my three children were able to visit Prague. At that time, slightly more than a year ago, I made a promise to my son that I would be home permanently in time for his 16th birthday in February, 2013. I have never wavered in this commitment. My closest associates at RFE/RL have known of my intention since early last summer when I began the first draft of this letter.

In addition, my father is ill. He is in his eighties and his time may be short. I am simply no longer willing to spend his last years separated by 5,000 miles and six time zones.

No one appears to know what to do at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty any more. And no one appears to know what to do about it. There was supposed to be a formal meeting of the Board of Governors today, Monday. Now there is simply an informal one, with no official decisions to be made. Steven Korn, the demonstrably unfit and arrogant RFE/RL president, was supposed to tender his resignation today, but no one appears to know if this will happen now. Other important matters remain woefully unresolved. For instance, Jeffrey Trimble, International Broadcasting Bureau acting deputy director, will not have completed his analysis of what went wrong at the devastated Radio Liberty, bereft now of some of its best reporters. This is because Trimble has six months—that’s right—in which to tell his colleagues how Korn, Korn’s top aide Julia Ragona, and Masha Gessen, their new director of the Russian service, wrecked an outfit that for decades has provided, as its name suggests, liberty. Uncensored news, opinion, and free speech broadcast to audiences who yearn for all of these: such were RFE/RL’s hallmarks.

As it turned out, you really and truly needed a ticket to get into the December meeting of the Broadcasting Board of Governors to try to figure out what’s going on with the complete disintegration of the taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty. Or to find out the fate of its highly problematic president, Steven Korn, a former CNN executive who has both led and fueled its meltdown. And as it also turned out, the board representatives were in no hurry to give that ticket to the press or, once the meeting was over, to encourage the press (i.e., me) to linger in order to discover what was bubbling beneath the blather. Korn especially wasn’t open to chat, his ruddy face as grim and rigid as Stonehenge, and his response to my interview request—a terse “I’m going on vacation”—as true a thing as he’s ever said.

Now that the orange-tinted, hair-transplanted, irrepressible john and convicted tax fraudster Silvio Berlusconi has decided, yet again, to run for Italy’s highest office, it may be time to examine what exactly is going on in the minds of that nation’s electorate.

Is Israel planning suicide? I ask this because in the wake of the United Nations’ decision on the status of Palestine (an overwhelming level of support by an overwhelming number of nations that no one needed psychic powers to predict), Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister, decided to retaliate.

Excuse me: Netanyahu’s plans for retaliation were likely formed before the vote occurred, and announced only after. Specifically, the prime minister plans to build 3,000 new homes between Jerusalem and a West Bank settlement in order to prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state.

Many years ago, a diplomat from an African nation famous for its cruelty and barbarism toward dissenters approached me at a dinner party to discuss his least favorite topic: the foreign press. His country of origin, said the diplomat, had been reviled in the media—not the media people of his own nation of course, they’d been taken care of, but those who toiled for the vicious foreign media. In fact certain members of his country’s leadership had been smeared so consistently and unfairly, added the diplomat, that there was little left for them to do but salve their shredded egos with lawsuits. Which would also, he assured me, take place abroad.

And these leaders knew exactly where to go.

“What do you think of England?” asked the diplomat before hastily answering his own question. “It’s a democracy with a free press! And yet, this is a nation that is very fair towards those who have been insulted.”

So tell me exactly how it’s possible for the nation of Mohamed Morsi, an Egyptian president who has pledged unparalleled affection for Hamas, to help broker a peace between Israel and Hamas? On Tuesday, the same day this is being written, Morsi promised “positive results,” while predicting “Israeli aggression” would soon end.

On that same day a Palestinian rocket landed on the outskirts of Jerusalem—then 140 more rockets hit Israel. From Gaza there’s a daily barrage of missiles fired at southern Israel—a fair indication of just how swiftly Hamas’s once primitive weaponry has evolved.

Morsi may want to grab the mediator role once flaunted by his predecessor Hosni Mubarak, but as an Islamic Brotherhood puppet who received just 51 percent of the Egyptian vote in the last election, he does not quite have the cachet to pull it off. He is—for all his posturing, his dreams of leadership—essentially a weakling.

I don’t know. What is it with men? Within one week an incoming chief executive gets fired from a mega-defense company with lengthy and close personal relationships to the Pentagon because he had—to quote Lockheed Martin—“a lengthy close personal relationship” with a subordinate. At the same time General David Petraeus has to resign as head of the CIA because he had a lengthy close personal relationship with a good-looking nutcase.

How happy is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the results of this week’s US presidential election? Let’s put it this way: A guy who embraces Romney in August isn’t likely to bask in Obama’s warmth in November. A guy who shows the UN General Assembly a large piece of cardboard bearing a felt-tipped illustration of a ticking bomb that looks like it’s been pulled straight out of a Road Runner cartoon isn’t one who’s likely get Obama’s devoted attention in the future.

The bomb was of course Netanyahu’s stab in late September at trying to pull the US into yet another war, this one with Iran, and when that stunt failed, he tried another tack: with every breath the right-wing prime minister seemed to castigate his American counterpart for what he made clear through implication were Obama’s pusillanimous demurrals.

So here’s a question for you: When exactly do you think Silvio Berlusconi, the longtime Italian prime minister, and now just your basic ordinary tax-cheating citizen, will go to prison? Because a year of prison is the sentence for the tax fraud charge of which Berlusconi has, much to his amazement and usual sense of outrage, just been convicted.

If your answer was Never, not a day in prison because the guy’s a multi-billionaire media mogul who more than likely got his start thanks to mafia connections—you were right on the money, pun absolutely intended. In Italy the only people imprisoned are (a) those without clout, (b) those without Italian citizenship, and (c) those without guilt (cf: Amanda Knox). Being guilty in Italy actually improves your chances of acquittal by a huge margin because extreme guilt tends to sharpen the desire for gifted and expensive lawyers—and gifted and expensive lawyers, in turn, can drag out cases or appeals of untoward verdicts for so many years that the statute of limitations for whatever crime one chose to commit runs out.

Here’s what’s been going on in the cyber universe. In Saudi Arabia, a country for which the Iranian regime has little use, cyber attacks erased files in more than 30,000 computers owned by Aramco, the oil company. That was in August. Then cyber attacks hit JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and more than likely Wells Fargo.

It must be nice to be a member of the Nobel committee that determines who or what gets the Peace Prize. You are accountable to no one. You can make idiotic decisions about who is a peace promoter as well as, for that matter, what constitutes peace. You can give the prize to Henry Kissinger, a guy almost singlehandedly responsible for rescinding a do-not-assassinate warning to certain murderous South American dictators, among them General Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

Five days after the cancellation of that warning, Orlando Letelier, a dissident Chilean politician and economist, and Ronni Moffitt, a young American woman, were both killed in Washington, DC, when the Chilean secret police arranged to have the car they were riding in blown up. The media used to say that this was the first foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Well, that was then …

According to his lawyers, Abu Hamza al-Masri suffers from sleep deprivation, depression, and the effects of being confined in an unrelentingly “harsh environment.” In other words, he sounds a lot like my son who is taking his midterms at vet school, only a bit more upbeat.

So—very much like the judges of the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg—I naturally feel a certain affinity for Abu and am, also like the judges, concerned about his mental and physical health. Perhaps he could use one of those Sleep Number beds, so he can relax more in the US, which is where he finally happens to be after far too long.

Il Giornale used to be an excellent Italian newspaper. Or at least, since most Italian newspapers aren’t what you and I would call real newspapers (meaning they’re purveyors of opinions, not news), a well written one.

True, the paper was pretty right-wing, and also true, ultimately purchased by Silvio Berlusconi, which is always sooner or later the death knell for quality. But for a while Silvio kept his hands off his newsprint acquisition. Then he became prime minister, and didn’t. He fired the editor and made his brother the new owner. Il Giornale became a rag.

How much of a rag? Well in August, the newspaper printed a front-page headline above a photo of Angela Merkel, in the unfortunate posture of raising her right arm. The caption: “FOURTH REICH.”