This Week in Babylon

Congress Should Eject From V-22 Osprey

Now that the Pelosi coronation is over, the new Congress should take a look at the V-22 Osprey, a boondoggle by Bell Helicopter Textron and Boeing. The V-22, which takes off like a helicopter but flies like an airplane, has been in development for 25 years and had its first test flight in 1989. So far, huge cost overruns and development problems have caused it to miss deployment to Bosnia (1995), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003).

The Osprey has countless technological bells and whistles that drive up costs (and profits), and as a result it's an extraordinarily complex piece of machinery—and thus prone to failure. There have been four Osprey crashes so far, including a 2000 incident which killed 19 marines, and the Center for Defense Information has issued a new report called “V-22 Osprey: Wonder Weapon or Widow Maker?,” which suggests that the project be canned. Harry Dunn, an Air Force veteran, former pilot, and aerospace engineer who served in Vietnam and worked on the Hill for 21 years as a military liaison with Congress, sent me the emergency procedures checklist (1.8M PDF) for the V-22. At 144 confusing, overly detailed pages, Dunn said, it is “beyond any pilot.”

I've written before about Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who loved the V-22 like a child. He lost his seat last fall, and will be replaced by Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat from Hawaii, as chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces. Abercrombie has been a strong critic of the Iraq war—but he's also a big backer of the V-22, and the Pentagon has said that it hopes to dispatch V-22s to Iraq later this year. It seems likely that, unless Congress intervenes, the Widow Maker will soon debut over Baghdad, even though this war has created enough widows already.

General Oded Tira: A man with a plan

“President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran. As an American strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and U.S. newspaper editors.” That rather alarming statement is from Israeli Army Reserve Brigadier General Oded Tira, in an article posted December 30 on Israeli news website Ynetnews.com (I learned of the article at Angry Arab News Service).

Israel is confronting one of “the most critical periods in its history in security and strategic terms,” wrote Tira. Instead of aggressively confronting Iran's nuclear program, he continued, the world “continues to talk nonsense and play with illusions regarding the success of moderating diplomatic moves.” Hence, Israel needs to “turn to Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they publicly support immediate action by Bush against Iran.” Israel should also lobby European countries to “clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabia so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran,” and help arrange for the use of airbases in Azerbaijan. And if all else fails, Tira wrote, “we'll do it ourselves, because there are no free rides and our existence isn't guaranteed.”

Justice Rehnquist and the mysterious “however”

Inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, Chief Justice William Rehnquist once had tacky gold stripes sewn on his black robe. According to C-SPAN, in that operetta, “the Lord Chancellor,” dressed in judicial black with gold highlights, is called upon, to “settle a dispute among a colony of fairies.”

Now we learn from recently released FBI files obtained via FOIA request that William Rehnquist was a Placidyl junkie (1,500 milligrams a day in 1981), and that once, when he was coming down off the drug, he decided that he was the target of a CIA plot and tried to escape from a hospital in his pajamas. His doctors were forced to put him back on the pills so that he could be weaned off slowly.

Several hundred pages of material were withheld from the FOIA request, and some documents that were released were censored. One intriguing redaction appears in a 1971 memo which was abruptly cut off after a line that read: “No persons interviewed during our current or 1969 investigation furnished information bearing adversely on Rehnquist's morals or professional integrity; however . . .”

It's fun to think of what could have been redacted, especially in light of what we know now. Three possibilities:

“. . . however, he has a buried passion for Elvis-style gold lamé that could later prove embarrassing.”

“. . . however, he likes to ‘ride the white horse’.”

“. . . however, he suffers from visions of wood sprites.”

The Bush Presidential Library: Cave ab homine unius libri

I was in Angola a few years ago and came across the Eduardo dos Santos Library and Playground, named for the country's hideously corrupt leader. The library didn't have a single book in it, and the site was surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire, to keep children off the playground.

In a totally unrelated story, the website PoliticalMoneyLine reported yesterday that a foundation set up to establish the George W. Bush Presidential Library started to collect money, with one big check for $194,904 coming from the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign. It's impossible to know how much more money has been raised by the foundation, or who gave it, because donations to presidential libraries can be kept secret and there's no limit on much can be donated (the only exception is that donations from registered federal political committees must be disclosed, which is why the money from Bush-Cheney became public). The House passed a disclosure law for presidential libraries in 2002, but it was not approved by the Senate. I'll go out on a limb and predict that the Bush Library collection will grow to at least 10,000 volumes when you include The Pet Goat , The Plague by Camus, and 9,998 Bibles.

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