Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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First White House memo on Al-Qaeda made public: contradicts Condi's sworn testimony |
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Thursday, 10 February 2005 |
Oh, man. This is the second day in a row with fresh documentary evidence destroying the White House's version of events.
The genuine patriots over at the National Security Archive
(a group founded by journalists and scholars to enhance the integrity
of our government's declassified paper trail, making over two million
pages available to the public for free) have just uploaded the Bush administration's very first memo regarding Al-Qaeda, authored by Richard Clarke, dated January 25, 2001, five days after Bush took office.
It's no longer a matter of what Richard Clarke said vs. Condi's version -- we can all now easily read the internal memo in question. Download the memo in .pdf form and see for yourself.
Clarke's basic gist is right in the very first paragraph [emphasis and spelling exactly from the original]:
We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al Qida network.
(Notice that Clarke put italics and underlining on the word
"urgently." Dude was begging. Not that it helped. As you probably
know, the Principals meeting wasn't held for over
six more months... just one week before 9-11.)
The new memo directly contradicts Rice's version of events: we were so not asleep at the wheel! Rice's position (and that of the rest of the White House) is most simply put in her March 22, 2004 column published in the Washington Post:
In response to my request for a presidential initiative, the
counterterrorism team, which we had held over from the Clinton
administration, suggested several ideas, some of which had been around
since 1998 but had not been adopted.
No al-Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration. [Emphasis added.]
Really? Because the declassifed January 25th Richard Clarke memo proves otherwise [Emphasis added]:
Attached is the year-end 2000 stategy
on al Qida developed by the last Administration to give to you. Also
attached is the 1998 strategy...
Those sure look like, um... plans.
Developed by the Clinton administration. At the end of the year, after the election. Specifically to give to the Bush administration.
But Condi says there was no plan. OK, let's look more closely. The attachments to the memo are titled:
Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects
Tab B September 1998 Paper: Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida
In Rice's view, apparently, these plans -- and yes, see, that's the
word, right there, you can see it -- were merely "ideas." And so, see, they weren't
plans, no, not at all.
Somewhere Lewis Carroll is smiling.
Does the new memo reveal Rice as a perjurer? Actually, there were a ton of falsehoods immediately detected, many of which you can find here. But just looking at what's new thanks to this memo... let's review her sworn testimony attempting to dismiss the urgency of Richard Clarke's warnings:
In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions
sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that
needs to be done about them.
I actually can't find a damn thing in this memo about sleeper cells;
maybe I'm just blind, or maybe Rice's memory understandably merged a separate verbal discussion
with the memo. That's pretty normal. OK. But as to her clear implication of a
lack of urgency... um, the entire second half of the memo is under the heading:
Pending Time Sensitive Decisions
... the discussion of which was precisely the reason the very top of Clarke's memo was screaming, in italics and underline, for a high-level meeting.
One might consider this a "mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done."
Or, one might put off the Principals meeting for over six months, including a month-long vacation.
As a side note of far lesser import, one thing I find interesting -- in
the sense that I'm not sure what it means, and want to find out -- is
that the memo was declassified in response to a FOIA action by the
National Security Archive on April 7, 2004 -- the very day before Condi's sworn testimony before the 9-11 panel. Maybe coincidence. Maybe somebody wanted
it in the panel's hands while she was testifying (and it's clear from
the transcript they did have it). Maybe one of the panelists made a few
calls. Just curious. I'd like to know more.
In any case, last I checked, lying under oath is supposed to get people impeached.
But then, a lot of stuff that's supposed to happen hasn't since Bush took office.
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