Bush team tried to suppress pre-9/11 report into al-Qa'ida

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
11 February 2005

Federal officials were repeatedly warned in the months before the 11 September 2001 terror attacks that Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida were planning aircraft hijackings and suicide attacks, according to a new report that the Bush administration has been suppressing.

Critics say the new information undermines the government's claim that intelligence about al-Qa'ida's ambitions was "historical" in nature.

The independent commission investigating the attacks on New York and Washington concluded that while officials at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) did receive warnings, they were "lulled into a false sense of security". As a result, "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures".

The report, withheld from the public for months, says the FAA was primarily focused on the likelihood of an incident overseas. However, in spring 2001, it warned US airports that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable".

Kristin Bretweiser, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Centre, said yesterday the newly released details undermined testimony from Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, who told the commission that information about al-Qa'ida's threats seen by the administration was "historical in nature".

She told The Independent: "There were 52 threats that were mentioned. These were present threats - they were not historical. There were steps that could have been taken. Marshals could have been put on planes that spring. Condoleezza Rice's testimony is undermined." To the consternation of members of the commission who published the original report last year, the administration has been blocking the release of the latest information. An unclassified copy of this additional appendix was passed to the National Archives two weeks ago with large portions blacked out.

The latest pages note that of the FAA's 105 daily intelligence summaries between 1 April 2001 and 10 September 2001, 52 of them mentioned Osama bin Laden, al-Qa'ida, or both. The report also concludes that officials did not expand the use of in-flight air marshals or tighten airport screening for weapons. It said FAA officials were more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays and easing air carriers' financial problems than thwarting a terrorist attack.

Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, said the agency received intelligence from other agencies, which it passed on to airlines and airports. "[But] we had no specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any countermeasures," she said. "We were spending $100m a year to deploy explosive detection equipment."

The commission's report, issued last summer, detailed missed opportunities that, had law enforcement agencies acted differently, may have provided a chance to prevent the attacks. It also listed recommendations to prevent further attacks. It said the administrations of George Bush and Bill Clinton could have done more to stand up to al-Qa'ida.

But the details, first obtained by The New York Times, are the strongest evidence yet of the widespread warnings and officials' failure to take action. They also support claims by whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, who said she saw evidence that showed officials were aware of the al-Qa'ida threat before 9/11.

Log Cabin Republican - How Gay Was Lincoln?

How gay was Abraham Lincoln? By asking the question that way, it's perhaps possible to avoid the historically futile, binary question of "gay" versus "straight". Futile, because we are talking about a man who lived well over a century ago, at a time when the very concepts of gay and straight did not exist. And C.A. Tripp, author of "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," was, despite the crude assertions of some reviewers, a Kinseyite who believed in a continuum between gay and straight. If completely heterosexual is a Kinsey 1 and completely homosexual is a Kinsey 6, Tripp puts Lincoln as a 5. Reading his engrossing, if uneven, book, I'd say you could make a case that Lincoln was, in fact, a 4. It's going to be a subjective judgment, and I'm no Lincoln scholar. In any particular piece of evidence that Tripp discovers, I'd say it's easy to dismiss his theory. But when you review all the many pieces of the Lincoln emotional-sexual puzzle, the homosexual dimension gets harder and harder to ignore. As conservative writer, Richard Brookhiser, has noted, all we can say with complete confidence is that "on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back." That's a pretty good definition of the core truth of homosexuality.

That Tripp has an "ax to grind" is to my mind unfair. Yes, he sought to understand the homosexual experience better. But he was a Kinseyite social scientist, not a New Left propagandist. His database of Lincoln material is regarded as superb and invaluable to Lincoln scholars everywhere. He had a PhD in clinical psychology; and a mastery of the facts of Darwin's life as well. Yes, he was gay. But being gay can also be an advantage in this respect. The contours of a closeted gay life - the subtle effects of concealed homosexuality on behavior, public and private - are most easily recognized by other gay men, for the simple reason that many have experienced the same things. And the very nature of a closeted life is that it is hard to discern from the surface. I don't doubt that my own view that Lincoln was obviously homosexual is affected by my personal recognition of some aspects of the story, especially in his early years. The danger, of course, is over-identification and projection. But the danger of under-identification is also there - and it may well have impeded real research into what made Lincoln tick. Certainly if you're looking for clear evidence of sexual relationships between men in Lincoln's time in the official historical record, you'll come to the conclusion that no one was gay in the nineteenth century. But of course, many were.

But was Lincoln? Here's what I'd say are the most persuasive facts. Lincoln never developed deep emotional relations with any women, including his wife. Even the few snippets we have of early romances, or his deeply strained courtship of Mary Todd, suggest a painful attempt to live up to social norms, not a regular heterosexual life. His marriage was a disaster, by all accounts. Why? Well, ask Brookhiser in the NYT, who tries to exonerate Todd from charges of being cruel and psychopathic as well as corrupt: "Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening -- remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent." Hmmm. Remote, emotionally unavailable, running away to hang with men whenever he could. Ring a bell? Not in Brookhiser's mind.

Or take this wonderful passage about one of Lincoln's early crushes, Billy Greene, who subsequently remarked that Lincoln's "thighs were as perfect as a human being Could be." Brookhiser remarks: "Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing." Gushing? I'd say. When you also realize that the primary form of gay sex back then was "inter-femoral," i.e. ejaculating by humping between the thighs, you might get a slightly different idea of what Lincoln's intimate was talking about. And, yes, they slept together - in a cot-bed. Remember that Lincoln was well over 6 feet tall. It was a tight fit. As Greene said himself, "when one turned over the other had to do likewise." So just picture the actual scene: two young men inseparable and spooning each night in bed. Gay? Whatever would give you that idea?

For me, the memoir of Lincoln's step-mother was also enlightening. Not that she thought her step-son was gay. Nor even that he "was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me". Merely his reclusiveness, emotional distance, resorting to learning and bookishness, as well as a bawdy, sexually frank side when with peers. Yes not definitive - many straight kids have similar experiences. But Lincoln was also the classic "best little boy in the world" type in childhood - one of the largest categories of gay male childhood there is.

He slept with his first major love, Joshua Speed, for four years. Yes, this was not as odd as it might seem today. But sleeping with him the very day they met? And doing so for four more years - when an aspiring young lawyer could easily have found lodgings of his own? No one denies that their friendship was intense, that they were often inseparable, and that when Speed finally left town, Lincoln had a complete nervous breakdown. (This last, vital fact is omitted from Brookhiser's review). Speed's and Lincoln's letters detailing their approach to marriage are redolent of white-knuckled panic. Any gay man who has experienced the agony of a lover's being propelled by social pressure to marry a woman will recognize the emotional power of this moment in Lincoln's life. (Speed couldn't actually consummate his own marriage.) Yes, Lincoln's fitful, reluctant engagement to Mary Todd had also fallen through. But he had never shown that much interest in her, had been distant and ambivalent in the courtship. But Speed? Inseparable. "Yours forever" as Abe's letters to Speed always ended. And when Speed left him: "I am now the most miserable man living... whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me." In fact, of course, Lincoln suffered from acute bouts of depression for his entire life. It seems loopy to ignore the possibility that this was related to his being denied a real or meaningful love life. But then if you're heterosexual and have never experienced such emotional desolation, why would you look in the first place?

What else? Lincoln slept with another man in the White House when his wife was away. To those who say this was normal for nineteenth century men, I wonder if they could find another example of a president asking a young captain to sleep with him in his bed when his wife was away. They even shared a night-shirt, according to a contemporary source. "What stuff" indeed! Lincoln befriended the younger man instantly, kept him in his close confidence, and refused for a while to let his company be reassigned away from the White House. Tripp finds evidence for several other crushes and possible affairs. Previous historians have noticed a "lavender" streak in Lincoln's life and loves. Tripp's own readings of the literary evidence does sometimes stretch things, but only because he's working from the assumption that if Lincoln had been gay, would these actions, events and relationships make more sense? The reader can make up her own mind. It seems to me that Lincoln's emotional life makes more sense if one assumes his homosexuality than his heterosexuality. But he was not exclusively either.

As for sex, Tripp is very clear at many points that he has no solid evidence. But what evidence of sex was there at the time, except for children? It would scarcely have been reported. But equally, the standard for men in the past must surely not be that they were always celibate. The absence of acknowledgment of sex doesn't mean it didn't happen. Lincoln's extreme comfort with sexual bawdiness does not strike one as coming from someone who practised extreme self-denial. Masturbation was far more stigmatized than it is today. So in those four years sleeping in the same bed as Speed, when and how did Lincoln ejaculate? It seems highly unlikely to me that in over a thousand nights in the same bed, nothing sexual occurred. Lincoln is an icon; but he was also a human being.

The usual suspects have weighed in aggressively to counter these facts. The Weekly Standard, from its sophomoric cover-image of a simpering gay caricature of Lincoln, to its hiring of a crank to denounce the book as a "hoax" and "fraud," is a useful exhibit in the degeneration of conservative discourse. But what's interesting to me is that even if you gloss all Lincoln's male relationships as homosocial or homoerotic rather than homosexual, they still paint a picture that would offend today's Republican establishment. Whatever Lincoln was, he was very at ease expressing love, intimacy and affection for other men. The last thing he was was sexually prudish. His early doggerel poem about the progeny that results from anal sex with another man - he has the two men married no less! - would be regarded by today's conservatives as worthy of protest to the FCC.

But today's right-wingers are right about one thing. The truth about Lincoln - his unusual sexuality, his comfort with male-male love and sex - is not a truth today's Republican leaders want to hear. They are well-advised to attack and suppress it. They are more closely related to the forces Lincoln defeated than those he championed; and his candor, honesty and brave forging of a homosocial and homoerotic life in plain sight would appall them. The real Lincoln is their greatest rebuke; which is why they will do all they can to obscure the complicated, fascinating truth about the man whose legacy they are intent on betraying.

January 12, 2005, The New Republic.

Cyber Love

Sun Feb 6, 3:59 PM ET

AMMAN (AFP) - A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife, state media reported.

AFP/File Photo

Separated for several months, boredom and chance briefly re-united Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an Internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said.

Bakr, who passed himself off as Adnan, fell head over heels for Sanaa, who signed off as Jamila (beautiful) and described herself as a cultured, unmarried woman -- a devout Muslim whose hobby was reading, Petra said.

Cyber love blossomed between the pair for three months and soon they were making wedding plans. To pledge their troth in person, they agreed to meet in the flesh near a bus depot in the town of Zarqa, northeast of Amman.

The shock of finding out their true identities was too much for the pair.

Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" -- the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam.

"You are a liar," Sanaa retorted before fainting, the agency said.

Alan Keyes: Conservative Compassion

Submitted by Oliver Willis on Fri, 02/04/2005 - 4:01pm.

Alan Keyes' daughter is coming out of the closet.

Featuring Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of Alan Keyes and a self-described young queer anarchist who grew up in Darnestown, MD. Maya is speaking publicly for the first time about LGBT issues.

Maya Marcel Keyes, the self-described queer activist who is also daughter of ultra-conservative Alan Keyes, whose recent campaign for senator from Illinois included his calling Mary Cheney a “hedonist.” Maya group up in Montgomery County and will certainly have some interesting things to say about living with someone who is so outspoken in his opposition to gay rights.

Now, if we could just get her Dad to run for President while condemning his daughter (now he's got something in common with Dick Cheney besides radical right wing beliefs!)

UPDATE: Her blog is back, and it looks like Keyes kicked her out of the house...

A couple days ago I got my official two-week warning that I have to be out of this apartment; so finally for real I'm getting cut off. I got no severance or anything like that from my sudden termination of employment (don't I have freedom of speech? the right to protest Bush without losing my job? Hehe... most people would think that working under a parent would be security but for me it's quite the opposite.) and so I definitely don't have anywhere near enough cash to find a new apartment; not even one room rented from someone anywhere. I've been searching craigslist but even places where I'd have enough to pay the first month's rent on some room I never have enough for the deposit as well, so so far I've had no luck at all finding a new home, since shelter requires money. Sad boo.

Winning or Losing? An Inside Look at the War on Terror

Speaker: Michael Scheuer, a.k.a. Anonymous, author, " Imperial Hubris"

Presider: Nicholas Lemann, dean, Hubert R. Luce professor of journalism, Columbia University
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, N.Y.
February 3, 2005

NICHOLAS LEMANN: So, welcome everyone. My name is Nick Lemann. I'm the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and I'm here to ask questions to, and sort of field questions from you to Michael Scheuer, who you all know. I will just read his bio for the sake of formality, but here's the book, "Imperial Hubris," which I am sure many of you read. And let me just read this quickly. [The] New York Times and [The] Washington Post bestseller, "Imperial Hubris" was originally published anonymously, as required by the counterintelligence. Its author is Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, who resigned in November 2004 after nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia. As Anonymous, he is also the author of "Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America." Scheuer has been featured on many national and international television news programs, interviewed for broadcast media and documentary, and has been the focus of print media worldwide, and now the ultimately appearing at the Council on Foreign Relations. [Laughter]

I wanted to start--I was going to just kind of walk you through, or get you to walk us through, the contents of the book, but I thought a nice timely way to do that would be to offer up to you a quotation from last night's State of the Union address by President Bush and get your response. Mr. Scheuer told me before that he did not see the speech, but as I see it--and correct me if I'm wrong--the book is a kind of argument against a thesis, and here we have from last night a succinct statement of the thesis. So give me just two minutes, and I'll read this passage and then ask you what you think: "In the long term, the peace we seek will be"--I'm sorry--"will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America and other free nations for decades. The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the 'evil principle' of democracy. And we have declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anybody else. This is one of the main differences between us and our enemies. They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression, in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life. Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.

"That advance has great momentum in our time, shown by women voting in Afghanistan and Palestinians choosing a new direction, and the people of Ukraine asserting their democratic rights and electing a president. We are witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty, and in the coming years, we will add to that story." So what do you think? [Laughter]

MICHAEL SCHEUER: I'm convinced. I no longer--

LEMANN: You're renouncing--

SCHEUER: Yes, I think it's just warmed-up Wilsonianism. It is finding a port in the storm after you've made a tremendous mistake--we can cover it with ridding the world of tyranny. But clearly--and the president fell back on the idea that bad economics and poor education, bad sanitation and the rest of that stuff, is the spawning of the attacks against us, which is entirely not the case in this particular instance. We're still grasping or groping around to try to find out why we're being attacked, and it has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe in. It has to do with what we do in the world, or at least in the Islamic world. And I still believe that until there is a separation of church and state in Islam, the idea of installing democracies in that part of the world is vacuous.

LEMANN: When you said a minute ago--it was a response to a mistake, what was the mistake?

SCHEUER: The mistake clearly was Iraq. And I'm not at all an expert on Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction, or any other part of Iraqi history, except the fact that it's the second holiest place in Islam, and for better or worse, we are now viewed as occupying the three holiest places in Islam: the Arabian Peninsula first, Iraq second, and Jerusalem, which is held by the Israelis, third. And whether or not 1.3 billion Muslims support [al Qaeda leader] Osama bin Laden--and probably most of them don't, at least in terms of military activities--they're going to be offended by having their sanctities held by Westerners.

LEMANN: Let's go back for a minute--I want to return to Iraq, but let's go back before Iraq to Afghanistan. Now, would you agree--which I know you don't, but for the sake of argument--with the idea that after the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration acted swiftly, surely, and boldly to go in to Afghanistan, where many had failed militarily, scored a quick and convincing victory, ousted the Taliban from power, took al Qaeda's main sanctuary away, and installed a successful pro-Western democracy--you agree with that, right?

SCHEUER: I may question parts of that argument.

LEMANN: So give me sort of the counterargument on Afghanistan.

SCHEUER: Well, a former colleague of mine wrote in Foreign Affairs that the Afghan cities fell very quickly--they always do. And that's exactly what happened. We mistook a battle for the war. We took the cities. We killed very few people. The Taliban went home with their guns, al Qaeda went home with their guns, and we're seeing a slow resurgence of an insurgency in Afghanistan. The recent election really did not, I think, do anything but draw the traditional ethnic lines that have always dominated Afghan politics. The southern tribes of the Pashtuns voted overwhelmingly for [President Hamid] Karzai--not because he was a good leader or because he's a democratic with a small D, but because he was a Pashtun. The other minorities voted for [Northern Alliance leader Younis] Qanooni, because he was a minority [Tajik]. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet in Afghanistan.

And clearly we have not intimidated anyone in Afghanistan. They were attacked by the greatest superpower the world has known, and they looked up, and they said, "Well, the air power isn't very welcomed, but otherwise we haven't been hurt at all." So I think Afghanistan, as always, has many more chapters to go, and I think we're going to see some surprising ones.

LEMANN: What about Pakistan? What's your assessment of the state of things there, before we return to Iraq?

SCHEUER: I think Pakistan is--from our viewpoint, they're the single most important ally we have in the war on terrorism, and I personally, after having worked on it for the better part of two decades, would have never thought [Persident Pervez] Musharraf would have delivered as much as he has. It's one thing for him to help us by arresting--or helping to arrest [al Qaeda operatives] Khalid Sheik Mohammed or Abu Zubaidah in the cities. It's something quite different to send military into the border areas. I would have bet he wouldn't have done that. And I think Musharraf has helped us about the extent he can, without really causing instability in Pakistan, or pushing Pakistan toward a civil war. I think there are some people in Washington who realize that. The last time Musharraf was here, there wasn't the usual chorus of, "Why can't you do more for us?" But I think both Pakistani stability and Musharraf are kind of one step ahead of the locomotive.

LEMANN: If Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan somewhere, which seems to be the leading theory, whose fault is that, and what's to be done about it?

SCHEUER: I don't think there's much that can be done about it. The fault lies with the people who didn't kill him when they had a chance to do it. He lives in an area where now the mountains, the largest on earth--you know, our law enforcement had a bit of trouble in the mountains of North Carolina with [serial bombing suspect] Mr. [Eric] Rudolph [laughter]--he lives in an area where the tribes, part of their culture is protecting a guest at all costs. They're not very likely to turn him over. And although we don't accept it, bin Laden is the single most important Islamic leader or hero in the world today. There's very few "I Love [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak" T-shirts, for example. So as a co-religionist, they're not going to turn him over.

Our military effort in Afghanistan is very minimal. Our conventional forces are mostly in garrison. The people on the cutting edge, who have been a small number of the clandestine service and the U.S. Special Forces. So in terms of pressure, there has been no U.S. military pressure. Musharraf put more pressure on than we did. And I think our obsession with money, too, is probably misleading us. I think they either doubled or are going to double the reward. And before they did that, we have $200 million in reward money out for bin Laden and his lieutenants on the poorest country--one of the poorest countries on the planet, and no one has come forward for it. So whose fault is it? I think it's just a very difficult assignment at this time.

LEMANN: Let me, before again returning to Iraq, which I will do in a minute, read you another intriguing passage from the speech, which I'm sure many of you in the audience noticed, and you may want to weigh in on, too. But I'm curious what you think this is laying down a marker for: "Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying"--"you" being the Congress--"the Syrian Accountability Act, and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom. Today, Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium-enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you." Now, does that mean something is going to happen, and if so, what? Or something is being contemplated?

SCHEUER: I think it means, in addition to Iraq, that they simply don't understand that the threats to the United States are transnational and not nation-state in dimension. And one of the reasons they went to Iraq is they don't understand that. The Clinton administration didn't understand it; this administration doesn't understand it. The idea that Syria is a threat to us is about as credible as me being the next queen of England, it's not. What threat is there?

In terms of Iran, threatening the Iranians, and you know better than I do probably that Iran is a very nationalistic country. One way to save the theocracy is to put pressure on Iran or to try to attack Iran. So I think there's just a basic misperception of the way the world works--partly a holdover from the Cold War, partly because it's genuinely hard to defend America against transnational threats, but partly because they're at the moment addicted to this kind of hands-on Wilsonianism.

LEMANN: Is there a kind of policy-option paper underlying those two paragraphs I just read you? And, if there is, what do you think it says?

SCHEUER: I don't know if there is or not. I frankly wouldn't have had access to that, and I have never worked on either Syria or Iran.

LEMANN: When Senator [John] Kerry [D-Mass.] said over the weekend that he thought he lost the election because of Osama bin Laden's appearance on television the weekend before, do you find that credible, and do you think that election calculations entered into bin Laden's decision to make that tape available when he did?

SCHEUER: Viewed in isolation, that tape may have been--appeared to be pointed toward the election, but it was the fourth in a series of statements by Osama bin Laden since 2002 that talked directly to the American people, that said, "I know how your system works--what we're fighting against are our foreign policies. Your policies remain the same, as long as you vote your leaders in. Vote for someone other than the people who are executing these policies." Now, that was the fourth in a series.

Did he want President Bush to win? President Bush is his ideal target, because he's very articulate in the things that drive--motivate bin Laden's people. But was it designed to affect the election? I don't think so. I think it was a warning that, "We've warned you as much as we're going to do." And then if you remember, [senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al-] Zawahiri followed up later in November and said, "We don't know what's wrong with you guys--you aren't listening, but we're not going to warn you anymore." So it was part of a process that I don't think was too apparent to the media.

LEMANN: I'd like to return to that in a minute, but on to Iraq first. There's this moment of euphoria right now, because of the elections on Sunday. What do you see happening over the next year, say, in Iraq?

SCHEUER: I think more of the same. I think we're kind of in the odd position for the United States to have installed a Shia government, and maybe that's one reason--one way we can get the Iranians to be more cooperative. Iraq has become, I think, an Afghanistan of much more importance than Afghanistan was in the late '70s and early '80s. Afghanistan was an Islamic backwater. Iraq is smack in the middle of the Middle East. It's the second holiest place in Islam. And, moreover, our actions there validated many of the things bin Laden has said. He's always said we wanted Arab oil. There's oil in Iraq of course. That we will destroy anyone who threatens Israel, point two. He said we cannot tolerate a strong Arab government, point three. But, more than that, bin Laden is not the real worry in Iraq. The real worry are the Sunni clerics who declared a jihad against us for invading Iraq, for--and that included people, clerics, who were genuinely supportive of bin Laden, and had been for years, and it included the clerics that receive their paychecks from Mubarak or the Al-Sauds [Saudi Arabia's royal family]. It's going to remain a magnet, if you will, for mujahedeen from around the world. And, in context, Zarqawi's statements that the president quotes--what Zarqawi was basically saying is Muslims are to be ruled by Quranic law, not by man-made law. And he is probably a bit unvarnished, but he's not far from what the clerics would say themselves about democracy.

LEMANN: Do you think, from the American policy point of view, that spreading democracy in the Middle East is either desirable or possible?

SCHEUER: I don't think it's a case of Muslims not being able to be democrats, or not wanting to be, or not being talented enough. I think that's not the case. I think there's a basic logical problem of trying to establish a democracy without a separation of church and state. And that's one of the, I think, extreme problems we've had, not recognizing that.

I also think you can forgive American leaders or excuse American leaders, whether Republican or Democrat, for not knowing the history of Iran or Islam or Saudi Arabia. But you can't forgive them for not knowing our own history. And you know American democracy is not 20 years old. To pick a date, go to Runnymede in 1215, where 800 years of process of building of wars and civil wars and world wars, of trying to define the difference between church and state. Now these guys want to put it on a CD-ROM and give it to [Iraqi politician Ahmed] Chalabi, and say, "You've got six months to do this." So I think the basic motivation is based on either an ignorance or an ignoring of the history and the struggle of American democracy.

LEMANN: When you mentioned a minute ago bin Laden's four appearances, where he's essentially saying, "I warned you--"

SCHEUER: Yeah.

LEMANN: What would listening, the American people listening to his warnings, lead to in policy terms? What would it do?

SCHEUER: I don't know. I don't know really what we would do. But I know that the one thing we've seen since 9/11 is bin Laden tying up loose ends in the Islamic world. He was criticized for three things in the Islamic world by scholars, clerics, jurists: that he killed so many Americans without religious approval, that he didn't warn us sufficiently, and that he didn't give us an offer to convert to Islam. Now, as I said, he's taken care of the first--he's had four direct speeches toward the American people warning us. He's offered three times to serve as our guide and our teacher to convert to Islam. Now, it sounds silly from our perspective, but the prophet always demanded, "Before you attack someone, warn him and offer him a chance to convert." The third thing he took care of in May 2003, when he secured from a radical Saudi sheikh a fatwa, which would allow him to use nuclear weapons in the United States. So the idea of killing too many people next time out won't be a subject of criticism for most of the Islamic world. So what I would say is that what all those things taken together mean is that they're probably ready to attack us again, and are unconcerned with talking to us about it anymore.

LEMANN: Can you make a judgment as to their capability of carrying out the attack successfully and ours of deterring it?

SCHEUER: They can't be--I don't think they can be deterred. Deterrence in my own mind, for their side, has never existed. And certainly given the fact that they don't mind dying, if they have, our ability to deter them is pretty minimal, and our dainty application of military power in the last three years has been kind of a reaffirming in their mind that we're not brutal, we're not bloody, and we're not ruthless. So they won't be deterred.

LEMANN: Well, this leads to--and I'm running toward the end of my allotted Q-and-A time, but I wanted to just spend the last few minutes exploring the question of what should we have done as a response to the September 11th attacks. And, you know, as you point out in the book, that was at the end or maybe in the middle of a string of attacks by al Qaeda. What would have been a better response? What should we do now?

I want to read a passage from your book just briefly, because it stuck in my mind, for reasons you will see when I read it: "To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise counts that will run to extremely large numbers. The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms.

"Killing large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high, or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world." And you know that last line is important. Are you saying on the one hand these--you know, what you're calling failed policies in the Muslim world, have to change? And what would that consist of? Or are you saying this blood bath has to occur? And, if so, could you elaborate on what that would consist of exactly?

SCHEUER: I think in any war America has fought we have applied military power with more vigor than we have in this particular war. But at the same time, we have never been without policies that were in the economic sphere or in the public diplomacy sphere, or in the--whatever other spheres are available--that complement your military activity. And at the moment we're clearly not in a position of winning any hearts and minds at all. We've lost that war for the time being. We're clearly not making a dent in the insurgencies that are either under way or growing. It's simply--when I wrote it, it sounds to me like a statement of fact. Our enemies don't have uniforms. If you choose to defend America, you should defend her with all your tools. If we choose not to do that, then we have to use only the military, and only intelligence services, and we will have to be World War II-like, if you will.

LEMANN: Where?

SCHEUER: Wherever you find them.

LEMANN: Who's "them"?

SCHEUER: Clearly the opportunity presented itself on the 11th or 12th of September to take out a great number of al Qaeda, and especially Taliban people, and we were entirely unprepared to do anything. I can't think of a worse failure of the U.S. military than to have no plans to present the president. Those people went home with their guns, and now they're fighting us again. You have to choose. If you're going to defend America, you have to decide how to do it. And if you don't want to change your policies, and if policies are motivating your enemy, then what other tools do you have left?

LEMANN: Would you favor changing the policies that are motivating the enemy? And, if so, what would that look like?

SCHEUER: I would favor changing them to the extent we can with the simultaneous application of more force and more intelligence--

LEMANN: What policies--just walk us through what policies.

SCHEUER: I would certainly try to rearrange the relationship with Israel so it looked like we were the great power and they were the insignificant power, rather than the other way around. I would certainly think how far we can really succeed in supporting tyrannies across the Middle East for the sake of oil. I would think that at some point--and if we want to disengage from what really is going to be a war within Islamic civilization is, as well as some clash between us and Islam, we will have to move toward alternative energy supplies or further fossil fuel development in North America. I think they're intertwined. And I'm not really recommending it one way or another; I just think these policies have been in a status quo position for quite a while, and need to be looked at.

If you believe that we're being attacked because they hate our liberties and our society and our freedoms, then you don't have to do anything. You don't even have to do military stuff, because you can eventually arrest enough of them and put them in jail. If you think that's not the case, then you better be a little bit more creative.

LEMANN: So you'd advocate changing these policies, on the one hand being sort of withdrawing from the region in a sense, or disengaging, while at the same time raining destruction on the region?

SCHEUER: At every chance I had, I would rain as much destruction on the enemy as I could--not picking a town and destroying it, but if the enemy is there, not being too worried about what we--you know, what they call collateral damage.

LEMANN: Last thing I'll ask is: How should we understand al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? I'm taking somewhat--I don't know if I can quote a direct statement from your book--the sense that you don't have much use for the term "terrorist."

SCHEUER: No.

LEMANN: And you would regard it more in the category of a sort of traditional military enemy. Is that right?

SCHEUER: As an insurgency or a paramilitary threat. The fact is that any other terrorist group that America has ever thought would have been destroyed if it had as much damage visited on it as the directorate of operations at CIA has visited on al Qaeda. The president says we've destroyed two thirds of their leadership and arrested or killed 4,000 of them. And out of the next breath, he's saying they can detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. The plain fact is we, as a country, look at terrorists as criminals and arresting them is the answer. As long as we do that against al Qaeda and its allies, we're going to get licked every time, because it won't work.

LEMANN: And instead, we should regard them as insurgents, which would lead to--?

SCHEUER: Much more aggressive military activity, using the military you have in Afghanistan, for example, to go out and get them, instead of garrisoning or staying in garrison. I don't know how else to do it, frankly.

LEMANN: I'll cheat and ask one more last question on a completely other subject: How do you read the new administration of [Director] Porter Goss at the CIA, accompanied by many leave-takings of long-time officials there?

SCHEUER: I think, clearly, the agency is better off without [former CIA Director] Mr. [George] Tenet and some of his immediate lieutenants. I was of the opinion that Mr. Goss should be given a decent interval to try to put his house in order, because he was following our first rock-star DCI [director of central intelligence], and Mr. Goss is a much more buttoned-up man. Some of the people who have left, particularly Mr. [Stephen R.] Kappes, the deputy director of operations, would probably have been the best DDO [deputy director for operations] we've had in the last 10 to 12 years. There seems to be some civility-challenged people among Goss's lieutenants, but I think it's too soon to tell. You need to give the man a chance.

LEMANN: But I mean the thesis that the hawks in the administration put Goss in to sort of get an agency that tells it what it wants to hear--what do you think of that thesis?

SCHEUER: You just had one. [Laughter]

LEMANN: OK, well, that's a good note in which to go to audience questions. I have some from remote locations here, but let's see if anybody here wants to start. Ma'am?

QUESTIONER: Hi, my name is Kim Marten. I'm at Barnard College at Columbia University, and I want to challenge your World War II analogy, because it seems to me that the reason that all that massive destruction was able to have an effect in World War II is because the people who were followers of Shinto and the people who were followers of Nazism were relatively limited in their geographical areas, which meant once that they were defeated the people in surrounding areas were very happy to see them defeated. And I'd like to make the argument that if we actually go to an all-out horrific military campaign against these enemies, what we will do is create more and more enemies all the way around the world, because they will have more and more sympathy for the people--the civilians in particular--whose infrastructure we're destroying and whose lives we're wrecking.

SCHEUER: My books are pretty nationalist, ma'am. I don't much care. I don't think America is being defended at this moment. I don't know how else to do it. If you have a better suggestion, then I think it needs to be inserted into the debate. But clearly our policy isn't working, the nature of our military activities are not working. What do you do at the end of the day to defend the United States? You also are confronting a culture where violence remains the lingua franca. We have not intimidated them. We have no deterrent value at the moment. They have just ridden out two wars with the greatest power the world has ever seen, and they're not significantly impressed by our military applications. If there's a peaceful way of debate or public diplomacy, then, my God, let's do it. But right now there's not a lot on the horizon.

QUESTIONER: Jennifer Whitaker of the Ralph Bunche Institute. I wonder if you could give your assessment of how effective a peaceful approach or an approach which you sort of vaguely describe as changing, rebalancing our policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, and withdrawing support for tyrannies in the Middle East--how effective might that be in terms of your overall view of the situation?

SCHEUER: I think what we have at the moment, ma'am, is a choice between--not between war and peace, but between war and endless war. I think American policy needs to be, in the first place, more militarily aggressive, but we also have to find a way to cut down on the growth of support for bin Laden or bin Ladenism around the world. And I think the settlement of some kind in Israel and Palestine would begin to cut that down. I also think action by the United States on those policy issues that was substantive and not just rhetorical would be a useful tool, because it might create within the public square in the Islamic world a space where what we identify as moderates or liberals can speak out against Osama bin Laden and his like.

At the moment they're more than willing to speak out against terrorism. But "terrorism" and the term "Osama bin Laden" are very seldom mentioned in the same breath, because if they attack bin Laden they implicitly say it's all right for the Americans to completely support the Israelis, it's all right to support tyrannies like Mubarak and the Al Sauds. So I think we're not at the point where we can talk our way out of this war. If we're going to do anything about policy, it can't be just a promise--it has to be action. It has to be something substantive. But I don't think it's a war-winner in the short term. I don't think there is peace in the short term. It's a matter of cutting down the size of our opponents.

LEMANN: Ma'am?

QUESTIONER: Mercedes [inaudible] Spain. Among the many theories to explain September 11, one of them says that Osama bin Laden actually was trying to provoke a response from the United States of the one that he was, because his relationship with the Taliban government was getting complicated, and he was trying to get the Muslim world together around his cause. I don't know if you share that idea, but certainly what did he really try to do, because I think he must be a very smart person, and he knew that if he was successful, the United States was going to come to attack.

SCHEUER: He was trying to hurt us, clearly, and he did. He's wanted us in Afghanistan since he started speaking publicly in 1995. I often think that he must wake up in the morning and bang his head against the rock figuring, "My God, it took me all these years to get the Americans here, and now they're sitting in their garrisons." I think what surprises him is that we're not out in the bushes chasing him. Clearly he wanted us there. The idea that--when Mr. Tenet testified before the Congress and he said we surprised bin Laden--he didn't think we had the courage to come there--is just fatuous. Bin Laden wanted us there, but he wanted us to be--

LEMANN: Why?

SCHEUER: To kill us. He doesn't think we can stand the pain. And clearly, that was reinforced when we had a chance to get him at Tora Bora and we chose to send in surrogates who had fought alongside of Osama bin Laden against the Soviets in the '80s. They don't believe we can stand the pain.

LEMANN: Sir, back there?

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] Columbia University. With your theory of sort of raining death and destruction, I think a lot of people could absolutely agree with that. But there's a preliminary that has to go through, and that's the targets. I mean, you have got to be able to identify, locate, and presumably not just lash out sort of indiscriminately and go out [and] just kill lots of people. We can do that. I don't think that would accomplish anything. And do we have--I mean, from your experience, do we have that kind of targeting that would in fact help us identify where these people are? And if we're going to rain death and destruction, we ought to have some idea of what we're hitting.

SCHEUER: I entirely agree, and I didn't mean we should lash out uneducatedly. I would refer you to the 9/11 Commission report in which it documents that the clandestine service of the United States provided eight to 10 opportunities to either capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and on each occasion they were refused because there might have been collateral damage or shrapnel might have hit a mosque, or an Arab prince might have got killed in the desert. You have to act when you have the target, you're fairly confident the target is there, and you really have to say, "You know, damn the torpedoes, we're going to go and get this person or this group of people." You know, there's no other way around how to do that.

LEMANN: Let me do a follow-up to that though, because you know all through this period one hears within the administration there was an argument about what that kind of attack would do. And one school, including supposedly [Middle East scholar] Bernard Lewis, would say this is a warrior culture, it understands and respects force, and this would sort of tamp down the insurgent opposition. And another would say for every person you kill, you create five more insurgents. So how do you come down on that, or am I presenting it misleadingly?

SCHEUER: No, I think it's a fair question. And my job in the civil service was to protect America, and if it creates more people, it creates more people, but at least it's one less problem you have to worry about at the moment. And certainly the issue of Osama bin Laden is he is a remarkable man. He has influenced the course of history. He is not, as we so often describe him as, a gangster or a deviant or a madman. He is neither nihilistic nor apocalyptic. He's a very rational actor. And the chance to have killed him would have been worth killing an Arab prince, for example. The world is [inaudible] with Arab princes. [Laughter]

LEMANN: Sir?

QUESTIONER: I am Richard Whalen. I'm a writer, and I'm working on a book that's looking at the preliminaries to World War II, when we last had a debate about whether we should go to war before we were thrust into war. I want to congratulate you on reintroducing some of the fundamental issues and questions that have to be addressed before you go to war in a democratic society. And you have particularly focused on the forbidden subject of whether the United States has any limits with the spoiled child of Western civilization, the state of Israel, which insists upon having its own way, to the extent we must read the Israeli press on the Internet and read [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz so that we see real criticism of a policy that has gone too far. Now, you have taken some criticism for your approach. I'd like to hear what you feel about this subject.

SCHEUER: I always have thought that there's nothing too dangerous to talk about in America, that there shouldn't be anything. And it happens that Israel is the one thing that seems to be too dangerous to talk about. And I wrote in my book that I congratulate them. It's probably the most successful covert action program in the history of man to control--the important political debate in a country of 270 million people is an extraordinary accomplishment. I wish our clandestine service could do as well. The point I would make--the point I try to make basically in the book is we just cannot--we can no longer afford to be seen as the dog that's led by the tail. I've tried to be very clear in saying we have an alliance with the Israelis. We have a moral obligation to try to work through this issue, if we can. But I don't think we can afford to be led around, or at least appear to be led around by them. And I certainly, as an American, find it unbearable to think there's something in this country you can't talk about. That's really my spiel I guess on that, sir.

LEMANN: Gary?

SCHEUER: It was interesting to see the sheet suggested ways to review "Imperial Hubris" that came out from AIPAC [the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee]. [Laughter]

QUESTIONER: I'm curious--Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. If you could just elaborate a little bit on the clandestine ways in which Israel and presumably Jews have managed to so control debate over this fundamental foreign policy question.

UNKNOWN: All you have to do is look at this landscape of American politics and see how many people who have raised this issue of the Israeli relationship.

SCHEUER: Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

QUESTIONER: Your scenario of hit them hardest where we can find them leaves us pretty much alone in the rest of the world.

SCHEUER: It does, sir.

QUESTIONER: And I can't really believe that you mean that we should ignore all of the people who so far are tolerating, and in some cases supporting, what we're trying to do, or tear up the United Nations. Wilsonianism isn't all bad. And I can't really visualize our country go on talking about all the things you want to talk about, and nobody in the world will talk to us or deal with us.

SCHEUER: Well, I think it comes down to how you define your threats, sir. Again, if you think it's a threat that we can afford not to take action when we need to take action ourselves and survive, then I guess we can afford to listen to the U.N. and to the Europeans who, as always, are always waiting for the alligator to eat them last. They--it's a very difficult situation and it comes down to accurately defining the threat. And I think if anything, that's what my two books are about: that if we don't understand the nature of the enemy and what motivates him, we're not going to be able to judge what we have to do to defend ourselves. And as long as we're saying that they're out there to destroy our liberties and our society and all the rest of it, I think it's--I think we're on the wrong track. And at some point, it's going to require a more massive response than we ever imagined. So I guess it's defining the threat satisfactorily before you can really know what you have to do to defend the country. And I don't think it's been defined, but that's just my opinion.

LEMANN: Here, and then here. And I will get to you, Steven, in one second there. I see you.

QUESTIONER: Barney Rubin, Center on International Cooperation, NYU [New York University]. A lot of the discussion has been about sort of your policy prescriptions. But I want to come back--I'm not quite sure how to pose this as a question, but I want to focus on what you just said, which is how we define the threat, because to me, that's the most totally convincing part of your analysis; that is, two points--one is, it's a transnational threat, and second, it is a response to U.S. foreign policy and not to some--it's not some psychological response to their inability to be like us. And what I don't think it is--and here's where I differ--is that the response is so religiously based, purely religiously based, and that there is this massive religiously based rejection of U.S. presence based on occupying the three holy shrines and so on. But there are--you know, there are more political interpretations of things the United States does, which would lead to a more modest description of what it is necessary to do in order to lessen the degree of hatred against the United States in the Islamic world, which wouldn't affect bin Laden, but would affect the environment in which he operates.

But my real question is when you present what seem to me to be two very obvious statements, that it's a network, not a state, that survives on the weakness of states, not the support of states, and that it's based on what we do, not on who we are. What kind of arguments do you get, and how do you define the resistance to what's seen--I can't help but regarding as [a] kind of self-evident fact?

SCHEUER: Yes, if it was rocket science, sir, I wouldn't be here. We are controlled--and I think one of the quotations that was read earlier--we are controlled in the U.S. government, in the intelligence community, by the dread of state sponsors of terrorism, which in essence are our own creation, because we didn't have the courage to attack states who attacked us using terrorists. But the idea that somehow Syria is a threat to us is madness, but that is a controlling factor within the government. There is a feeling that the threat really must come from a nation-state or it's not a real threat. It's [an] enduring problem--not among the people who work [on] the issue on an everyday basis, but within the intelligence community, the leadership is much more comfortable working against the state, whether it's trying to penetrate the central committee of the Communist Party, or the Deutsche Bank, or whatever the target is. That's what people like to do. They don't like to attack transnational issues. They don't like to think about them. They're messy. You get accused of assassination. You have to use difficult interrogation methods. It's very messy stuff. So there's a mind-set that has to be changed there. But clearly, the fact that they made me publish both books with, as you said, less than rocket science in them, anonymously, suggests that they really don't understand the problem.

LEMANN: Let me--I've been abjured to take a question from one of the remote locations that are listening in. So I'll ask this question, which comes from Charles Cogan of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Here's the question: "The New York Times reported on February 1st that funds have been set aside for use by Special Forces with intelligence and covert action assets in foreign countries so that the military won't have to wait for the CIA to come along with the funds, as happened in Afghanistan." I think he's speaking particularly of Iran. "Could you comment on this, and in particular whether there will be congressional oversight?"

SCHEUER: I think the way it [was] pictured in the paper, that it was preparation for war, I can't speak to that, but I think we would be negligent if we weren't trying to find out where the Iranian nuclear facilities were and how they were built and how we could get at them if we needed to. I think there's a terrific amount of oversight. I don't think it's particularly well done. I've never met a group of men and their assistants who can't figure out how to ask the follow-on question. So I think there's a great deal more precise oversight to be done. Whether there needs to be more in volume, I'm not convinced that that's even possible.

LEMANN: Let's see. The man in the blue shirt there.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] Teitelbaum [inaudible] Agency in Hamburg, Germany. Listening to you it sounds as if there is some kind--some sort of Jewish conspiracy about American policy. Can you just tell me in your mind how the Jews make it?

SCHEUER: Are what?

QUESTIONER: How the Jews do it? How do they do it?

SCHEUER: How do they do it?

QUESTIONER: Exactly.

SCHEUER: Well, mostly through abuse in the media. If someone says anything negative about Israel. We do it to ourselves in some way. [Inaudible]

Well, you know, the idea of the Jewish conspiracy is in your mouth, not mine. What I did was compliment Israel on its ability to control debate in the United States. I don't quite know how they do it, but clearly the reaction of most of our media, electronic and print, to anyone who says, "Geez, you know, maybe the Israelis shouldn't have the lead on all these things," is generally negative.

LEMANN: We'll go back to this side of the room. Sir? We're getting to the home stretch here, by the way.

QUESTIONER: Gordon Goldstein, Clark and Weinstock. You referred earlier to al Qaeda's quest for a nuclear capability. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. How far have they progressed in that effort, and what specific steps can the United States take now that are not presently being implemented to address that threat?

SCHEUER: Well, I think it shows the narrowness of my own reading, but I was surprised during the election campaign to hear that Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were arguing when the Soviet nuclear arsenal should be under full control, whether in 2007 or 2010. One would have thought that would have been done already. All I can tell you about the nuclear side of things is that we knew by the end of 1996 that bin Laden had formed an acquisition team that was unlike any other thing we saw in terms of a terrorist group. He had employed scientists and engineers who could distinguish between being sold the real thing and being scammed. We know he has said from the start that he would use it if he has it. He has--certainly he has the money and the tools to acquire them. He now has religious justification to use it. And if we're saying ourselves that control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal is still at least five years off, then I would think we better err on the side of worrying about whether he can acquire some sort of off-the-shelf weapon. Certainly he will use it. He doesn't intend it as a deterrent. It's a first-strike weapon.

LEMANN: Last few. Sir, back there. Yes?

QUESTIONER: I'm Marc Levinson. I'm with J.P. Morgan. We have now had the president of United States criticize and attack a number of purported Islamic terrorists by name. Are we providing free advertising? To what extent are we creating heroes here?

SCHEUER: We're not. I think one of the great--another great indication that we don't realize the danger of the enemy we face is both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush for a while decided to say--not to say bin Laden's name. Now bin Laden kind of goaded him, I guess, during the election, and he's also followed up on Zarqawi. But I think it's kind of a--the idea that America controls everything, that somehow if we didn't talk about these guys they really wouldn't be a problem. They're heroes in the Islamic world. It's--how can I say it? We had a small shelf--a couple of shelves when I was still working about bin Laden just in terms in popularity, and there were candies from the Far East wrapped with pictures of Osama bin Laden. There was an Osama bin Laden cologne that was being made in Europe. There were t-shirts in virtually every language of the world. There were posters from Senegal, from Sierra Leone.

Our function in this is not to make them heroes at all. They are heroes. The desert of leadership capability in the Muslim world is astounding. So it's not only that bin Laden himself is a remarkable man, but he has no competition. As I said, no one has an "I Love Al Saud" bumper sticker. It doesn't happen. But there's something hubristic, if you will, about the idea that we're creating these people, because it's not at all the case. I think media helps. But what's really helped bin Laden was the serendipitous rise of bin Laden the man and Arabic satellite television at the same time. That was a tremendous--not accomplishment, but a tremendous value to him that that came up at the same time. We're not creating these people.

LEMANN: Last couple of questions. Yes, you.

QUESTIONER: Moushumi Khan. I'm an attorney. I have a question about democracy. You mentioned it way in the beginning. Am I understanding you correctly that you define democracy as per se separation of church and state? Because some might argue that the model of governance in the Islamic world may not follow our idea of democracy--and I don't mean the Middle East, but does--you know, it is a functioning democracy.

SCHEUER: Well, again, any kind of democracy is acceptable to me. Would it be acceptable to the people who want to export our democracy, is another question. If you had an election in Saudi Arabia, and you elected someone like bin Laden, if not himself, would that be acceptable to the United States? I don't know. I just often think when I hear what the president says, again that he doesn't know very much about American history, that they wouldn't know an American founder from an Atlantic flounder. [Laughter] There is no--the founders meant our democracy to be a benign sort of example for the rest of the world. We weren't to be the installer of democracy in every nook and cranny. And Bernard Lewis, I think, has eloquently said that within a true application of Islamic law in a country, there would be restraint on a ruler from being a particularly barbaric or unapproachable type of leader. And I think that's exactly right. It probably should be acceptable, but I don't--I'm not sure if it would be.

LEMANN: Last question. Ma'am, why don't you go. You're last. I know you already asked a question, but since no one else has their hand up.

QUESTIONER: It's actually a follow-up question, because I didn't understand your explanation of why Osama bin Laden wants America in Afghanistan. Could you elaborate on that?

SCHEUER: So they can kill us, ma'am. They wanted us there, just like they--they wanted to do to us what they did to the Soviets, make us bleed. They regarded the Soviets as much tougher enemies who can take it. They don't think we can take a lot of blood. And I think the fact that there's so much anger and worry in the United States over 1,400 dead people in Iraq--God wish that it never happened--but 1,400 casualties is very few in terms of a population of 280 million people. And I think our enemy takes aid and comfort from the idea that that's causing a real problem within the United States.

LEMANN: And one last-last question. This gentleman in the back, and then that's it.

QUESTIONER: Keith [inaudible] with GSC Partners. You made it clear here that terrorists are not very impressed with what we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think by extension, you're not very impressed. Knowing what you do about the threat, and making it clear that you think much stronger, more brutal action against the right enemies is necessary, I'd like to know what you would do if you were in control of the levers of power in the military and policy.

SCHEUER: I would not wait for the level of intelligence that we had during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. We were used to intelligence at times that was 80 [percent] or 70 percent certain in knowing what they were up to, or the plans they had. Against this enemy, we're going to be extraordinarily lucky if we ever get to a 40 percent assurance level. So what I would do if I was in charge is I would not, as the National Security Council did in the '90s, say the intelligence isn't good enough, because we're only 30 [percent] or 40 percent certain. That's the way it's going to be on a transnational threat--not only against terrorism, but against proliferation and against narcotics. It's much more difficult to get a degree of assurance--degree of confidence in intelligence against a transnational issue than it was against the nation-state. So I would act on less certain intelligence, sir.

QUESTIONER: And what would you do?

SCHEUER: I would apply military force to the maximum I could. And that's--it has to be complemented by some change in policies or some support in terms of public diplomacy. But right now we don't--we're not addressing those issues. So we have to use the tools that are available to us. As I said in the book, it's not desirable or admirable, but if we're going to willfully neglect to build a tool box of things we can use, then that's what we use.

LEMANN: I was told I have to stop right at 7:00, and it's like 30 seconds after. So that's acceptable, I guess. Thank you very much, Mr. Scheuer.

SCHEUER: You're welcome. [Applause]

Valentine's Day

WASHINGTON, DC—A new videotape of Osama bin Laden broadcast on the Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera Monday beseeched Allah to grant all Americans a "crappy Valentine's Day."

Below: Bin Laden tears up a "putrid Western Valentine's Day trifle" during his videotaped message.

"This Feb. 14th on the Western infidels' calendar, may all Americans receive no valentines from their beloved ones," bin Laden said. "May the homemade construction-paper mailboxes taped to the desks of the American schoolchildren remain empty, as well. May whomever you ask to 'bee yours' tell you to 'buzz off.'"

Bin Laden called for "romantic humiliation for all Americans of courting and betrothal age."

"Allah willing, embarrassment and tearful rejection shall rule this day," bin Laden said. "Paper hearts shall be rent and trod upon, and dreams of love delivered stillborn. Body language shall be misinterpreted, crushes unrequited, and sincere expressions of affection mocked. Invitations to dinner will be rejected, just as Americans have rejected Allah, the one true God."

During a speech before the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association, President Bush condemned the al-Qaeda leader's remarks.

"[Bin Laden's] sinister call for romantic disappointment on Valentine's Day is yet another demonstration of the ruthless hatred this evil individual harbors for the American way of life," Bush said. "He directs rage at even our youngest and most innocent citizens, asking God to quash children's joy by making them receive, and I quote, 'only unwanted valentines bearing the laughable likenesses of out-of-favor pop-culture icons from the recent past, such as the Backstreet Boys and the creatures from Monsters, Inc.'"

"Bin Laden's depravity knows no bounds," Bush added.

According to state officials, bin Laden demonstrated an uncanny knowledge of Valentine's Day customs, in spite of the fact that the holiday is not celebrated in the Arab world. In addition to his allusions to classroom valentines, bin Laden cited heart-shaped candies, valentine personal ads in free alternative weeklies, and foot massages.

"In this infamous February, may all American hearts be crushed like a box of conversation hearts that is tossed carelessly into the bottom of a fellow student's schoolbag," bin Laden said. "We soldiers of Allah pledge with our blood and souls that all pink and red carnations shall wither and drop from their stalks before they make their way to the desks of America's secretaries. Instead of receiving hugs and kisses, they and their extended families shall be besieged with boos and hisses."

Bin Laden added: "May your special Valentine's Day dinner be spent at an overrated restaurant that impoverishes your purse and leaves your stomach churning with indigestible Western cuisine."

Bin Laden did not overlook the innocuous custom of giving stuffed animals as gifts.

"The teddy bear that holds the 'I love you' heart does not love you at all," Bin Laden said. "It is an unliving, unholy thing filled only with stuffing. Just as the Western infidel is not bestowed with the blessings of Allah, so shall he go unloved by the false bear."

The release of the bin Laden tape is consistent with the al-Qaeda leader's inclination to speak out before major American events, such as the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

"Perhaps whoever told bin Laden about Valentine's Day exaggerated its significance," departing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said. "Or, I don't know, maybe he was just itching to release another tape."

The Department of Homeland Security did not raise the terror advisory, recommending that Americans proceed with their Valentine's Day plans. This is in spite of the final words of bin Laden's address.

"Come Monday, as you pry open your fancy, red Russell Stover box, take heed," bin Laden said. "For in the place of tasty caramels and buttercreams, you will find the flaming sword of righteous jihad!"

Bin Laden 

What the New Testament Says About Homosexuality

As anyone who has read any recent literature on the topic will be able to tell, there is no word for homosexuality in Greek or Hebrew so while the Bible condemns many things, what we call homosexuality isn't one of them. First we have to define homosexuality. But that's a digression. Let me leave that aside and turn to the texts.

What does Romans 1 and I Cor 6:9 condemn? In the former case, idolatry. One of the behavioral consequences of idolatry is people who engage in same-sex relations by substituting the truth of God for a lie and who do things that are para physin (beyond nature). Romans 8 makes it clear that even while the pagan world of Romans 1-2 and the Jewish world of 3 falls under the judgment of God, nothing separates either from the love of God. I Cor 6:9 lists behaviors that will not enter the kingdom, including the Greek terms malakos and arsenokoites. When the term homosexuality was invented in the 19th Century, it appeared in some modern translations and replaced earlier translations relating the terms correctly to men e.g. tyndale for arsenokoites "abusers of themselyves with the mankynde." Sometimes an attempt was made in modern translations to separate the act from the person, so for arsenokoites read "practicing homosexuals." (This was at one time proposed for the NRSV).

A way to get at the meaning of arsenokoites is to look at other contexts in which the Greek word appeared independently of Paul. These other occurrences (Sibylline Oracles 2.70-77, Acts of John; Theophilus of Antioch Ad Autolycum) suggest that the word refers to some kind of economic exploitation by means of sex (but not necessarily homosexual sex). Perhaps the more important question is why some scholars are certain the word refers to male-male sex in the face of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps ideology has been more important than philology!

Malakos occurs widely in ancient sources and refers to the softness of expensive clothes, the richness of food, the gentleness of winds and breezes. The term refers to the effeminacy or softness of which penetration by another man is a sign or proof; it does not refer to the sexual act itself. In philosophical texts, the plural term malakoi are those who cannot put up with hard work. Xenophon uses the term for lazy men. In Josephus and Plutarch (both first century writers from different cultural backgrounds), cowards are malakoi.

In the ancient world effeminacy was implicated in heterosexual acts just as much as homosexual. Chariton in his novel Chaeras and Callirhoe provides a typical portrait of an effeminate man: he has a fresh hairdo, is scented with perfume, he wears eye makeup, a soft (malakos) mantle, and light swishy slippers; his fingers glisten with rings. He is off to seduce a woman! Why, given all the ancient evidence, some of which I have mentioned here, was the translation "effeminate" for I Cor 6:9 rejected by Bible translations? Because it reinscribes the misogyny of the term? Because condemnation of something socially embarrassing could hardly be called the word of God?

In short: the allegation that the New Testament condemns homosexuality is not just poor but lazy and inexcusable scholarship. An attempt by some scholars to interpret I Cor 6:9 by taking malakos to mean the passive partner and arsenokoites the active partner is based on circular reasoning. The meaning of arsenokoites is problematic. There is no evidence that malakos was ever considered as a technical term for a passive partner. (There are other terms for passive and active partner in Greek. They never appear in the NT) Malakos' general meaning of effeminate is independent of sexual position or object. To define malakos arsenokoites is to define something already clear by something that is obscure.

May I suggest some books? Brooten: Love Between Women; Nissinen, Homeroticism in the Biblical World. Also Dale Martin has an article on the two terms "Arsenokoites and Malakos: Meanings and Consequences" which I could send to anyone who asks in Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality ed. Brawley from which I took some of the above.

Deirdre Good

General Theological Seminary

The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark

The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark
Review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark
(by Dennis R. MacDonald; Yale University, 2000)
by Richard Carrier



An Incredible Book

This is an incredible book that must be read by everyone with an interest in Christianity. MacDonald's shocking thesis is that the Gospel of Mark is a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek "Bible" of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense "updates" and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus (whose name, of course, means "Savior"). When I first heard of this I assumed it would be yet another intriguing but only barely defensible search for parallels, stretching the evidence a little too far—tantalizing, but inconclusive. What I found was exactly the opposite. MacDonald's case is thorough, and though many of his points are not as conclusive as he makes them out to be, when taken as a cumulative whole the evidence is so abundant and clear it cannot be denied. And being a skeptic to the thick, I would never say this lightly. Several scholars who reviewed or commented on it have said this book will revolutionize the field of Gospel studies and profoundly affect our understanding of the origins of Christianity, and though I had taken this for hype, after reading the book I now echo that very sentiment myself.


Background and Purpose of Mark

MacDonald begins by describing what scholars of antiquity take for granted: anyone who learned to write Greek in the ancient world learned from Homer. Homer was the textbook. Students were taught to imitate Homer, even when writing on other subjects, or to rewrite passages of Homer in prose, using different vocabulary. Thus, we can know for certain that the author of Mark's Gospel was thoroughly familiar with the works of Homer and well-trained in recasting Homeric verse into new prose tales. The status of Homer in basic education remained throughout antiquity, despite the fact that popular and intellectual sentiment had been sternly against the ethics and theology of his epics since the age of Classical Greece. Authors from Plato (400 b.c.e) to Plutarch (c. 100 c.e.) sought to resolve this problem by "reinterpreting" Homer as allegory, or by expunging or avoiding offensive passages, neither of which was a perfect solution.

For the Latin language, the opportunity was afforded for Virgil to solve this problem by recasting the Homeric epic into Roman form, exhibiting Roman ideals and creating more virtuous heroes and gods. Likewise, borrowing and recasting from Homer is evident in numerous works of fiction, which often had a religious flavor, and were proliferating in the very same period as the Gospels. One prominent example (mentioned but not emphasized by MacDonald) is the Satyricon of Petronius, which can be decisively dated prior to 66 A.D. and thus is most likely earlier than any known Gospel, and since this novel was in Latin (and a satire), it is almost certain that many undatable Greek novels, which surely originated the form, long precede this. So rewriting Homer to depict new religious ideas and values was a standard phenomenon. In MacDonald's words, "Homer was in the air that Mark's readers breathed" (p. 8), and all the more so among Mark's Gentile audience. But to smartly recast Homer into a new Greek form, reflecting contemporary Graeco-Jewish ideals, was a task simply waiting to be done. If MacDonald is right, this is what Mark set out to do. So much is clear: the motive, ability, and inspiration were certainly present, and MacDonald rapidly presents all the evidence, backing it up with copious and scholarly endnotes in chapter 1.

Why? In MacDonald's words, Mark "thoroughly, cleverly, and strategically emulated" stories in Homer and the Old Testament, merging two great cultural classics, in order "to depict Jesus as more compassionate, powerful, noble, and inured to suffering than Odysseus" (p. 6), and hence "the earliest evangelist was not writing a historical biography, as many interpreters suppose, but a novel, a prose anti-epic of sorts" (p. 7). In particular, the differences between Mark and Homer need no explanation: the differences are the point, the very objective of the later author. Some of those differences are also the obvious result of a change of scene from the ancient Mediterranean to near-contemporary, Roman-occupied Judaea, or of literary borrowing from Jewish texts. Some may reflect some sort of traditional or historical core story, though it is almost impossible to tell when. Instead, it is the similarities that "cry out for explanation," and contemporary apologists must now begin to address this issue.

Of particular use, for all those who want to develop (or attack) theories of literary borrowing—in the Gospels or elsewhere—is the set of six criteria for identifying textual influence outlined by MacDonald at the end of his first chapter, and demonstrated quite effectively on a passage in Acts. Though no one of these criteria alone carries very much weight, the more criteria that are met in a single instance, the stronger the case. However, one caveat MacDonald does not provide is in regard to his criterion of order. In many cases, matching sequences of passages or themes is indeed significant. However, some cases of matching sequence are such that any other sequence would be logically impossible. Therefore, correlation of this kind can in some cases be coincidence. Nevertheless, even engaging this caution, the sequential evidence MacDonald presents is very often, taken as a whole, not coincidental. Likewise, it should be known that much of Mark's use of Homer is to shape and detail an otherwise non-Homeric story, and the task of deciding what that core story is, or whether this core story in any given case is a Biblical emulation, or a historical fact, or a legend, or something of the author's deliberate creation, or any combination thereof, is not something MacDonald even intends to undertake in this book, although he makes some suggestions in his concluding paragraphs.



Modeling Odysseus

The Odyssey is rife with the theme of the suffering hero, and MacDonald builds a solid case in chapter 2 for the philosophical veneration of Odysseus as the best example of a man. If Jesus could be made to one-up and even replace Odysseus, Mark would achieve a literary and moral coup. And there are in the overall story obvious if not overly-telling similarities: "Both [men] faced supernatural opposition....Each traveled with companions unable to endure the hardships of the journey, and each returned to a home infested with rivals who would attempt to kill him as soon as they recognized him," and "both heroes returned from Hades alive" (p. 17). Some parallels are a little more startling but less significant to the historian than to the literary critic: the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk. 12:1-12), and the passage capturing the famous phrase "for you do not know when the master of the house will come" (Mk. 13:34-5), both evoke the image of Odysseus returning in disguise to surprise the suitors who have turned his house into a den of sin (MacDonald develops this theme further in chapter 5, and again in chapter 14, and in the conclusion). Do not be like them, Mark is saying to his readers. But of course Jesus himself could have said that, intending the very same allusion. Examples like these can make good material for sermons, and serve well the connoisseurs of visionary prose, yet don't really prove whether Mark has himself deliberately crafted the story. But in conjunction with what follows, this becomes part of a cumulative case for Mark's inversion of Homer.

Who knew, for instance, that Odysseus was also a carpenter? The companions are another general link with the Odyssey. MacDonald points out how Mark is the harshest evangelist in his treatment of the disciples, while the others sometimes go out of their way to omit or alter this disparagement when they borrow from Mark. Why were the disciples such embarrassing nitwits, "greedy, cowardly, potentially treacherous, and above all foolish" (p. 20)? As history, it is hardly credible. As a play on Homer, it makes perfect sense: for the companions of Odysseus were exactly like this. Homer cleverly employed the ineptitudes of the crew to highlight the virtues of Odysseus, making him appear even more the hero, enhancing his "wisdom, courage, and self-control" (p. 23). MacDonald briefly explores five other general similarities between the two "entourages" in chapter 3, including the fact that in the one story we have sailors, while in the other, fishermen—who do a lot of going about in boats, even though the vast majority of Judaea is dry land.

Chief among these similarities is the comparison between Peter and Eurylochus. Both spoke on behalf of all the followers, both challenged the "doomsday predictions" of their master to their own peril, both were accused by their leader of being under the influence of an evil demon, and both "broke their vows to the hero in the face of suffering"—in effect, both "represent[ed] the craven attitude toward life" (p. 22-3). Again, this could be a mere veneer woven through an otherwise true story by Mark, and some of MacDonald's ideas (such as developed in chapter 4) are intriguing but too weak to do much with. But it is true that both epics announce from the start a focus on a single individual, both center on a king and his son reestablishing authority over a kingdom, both involve an inordinate amount of events and travel at sea. Both works begin by summoning their own Muse: Homer, the Muse herself; Mark, the Prophet Isaiah. In both stories, the son's patrimony is confirmed by a god in the form of a bird, and this confirmation prepares the hero to face an enemy in the very next scene: Telemachus, the suitors; Jesus, Satan. And eventually the odd links keep accumulating, and compel one to question the whole thing.

Stark Examples

"Once the evangelist linked the sufferings of Jesus to those of Odysseus, he found in the epic a reservoir of landscapes, characterizations, type-scenes, and plot devices useful for crafting his narrative" (p. 19). Of course, all throughout MacDonald points out coinciding parallels with the Old Testament and other Jewish literature, but even these parallels have been molded according to a Homeric model in every case he examines. Consider two of the many mysteries MacDonald's theory explains, and these are even among the weakest parallels that he identifies in the book:

* Why do the chief priests need Judas to identify Jesus in order to arrest him? This makes absolutely no sense, since many of their number had debated him in person, and his face, after a triumphal entry and a violent tirade in the temple square, could hardly have been more public. But MacDonald's theory that Judas is a type of Melanthius solves this puzzle: Melanthius is the servant who betrays Odysseus and even fetches arms for the suitors to fight Odysseus—just as Judas brings armed guards to arrest Jesus—and since none of the suitors knew Odysseus, it required Melanthius to finally identify him. MacDonald also develops several points of comparison between the suitors and the Jewish authorities. Thus, this theme of "recognition" stayed in the story even at the cost of self-contradiction. Of note is the fact that Homer names Melanthius with a literary point in mind: for his name means "The Black One," whereas Mark seems to be maligning the Jews by associating Melanthius with Judas, whose name is simply "Judah," i.e. the kingdom of the Jews, after which the Jews as a people, and the region of Judaea, were named.

* Why does Pilate agree to free a prisoner as if it were a tradition to do so? Such a practice could hardly have been approved by Rome, since any popular rebel leader who happened to be in custody during the festival would always escape justice. And given Pilate's reputation for callous ruthlessness and disregard for Jewish interests, it is most implausible to have him participating in such a self-defeating tradition—a tradition for which there is no other evidence of any kind, not even a precedent or similar practice elsewhere. But if Barabbas is understood as the type of Irus, Odysseus' panhandling competitor in the hall of the suitors, the story makes sense as a clever fiction. Both Irus and Barabbas were scoundrels, both were competing with the story's hero for the attention of the enemy (the suitors in one case, the Jews in the other), and both are symbolic of the enemy's culpability.

Of course, Barabbas means "son of the father," and thus is an obvious pun on Christ himself. He also represents the violent revolutionary, as opposed to the very different kind of savior in Jesus (the real "Savior"). On the other hand, Irus was a nickname derived from a goddess (Iris), and MacDonald fails to point out that her name means "rainbow," which to Mark would have meant the sign from God that there would never again be a flood (Ge. 9:12-13). Moreover, Irus' real name was Arnaeus, "the Lamb." What more perfect model for Mark? The Jews thus choose the wrong "son of the father" who represents the Old Covenant (symbolized by the rainbow, and represented by the ideal of the military messiah freeing Israel), as well as the scapegoat (the lamb) sent off, bearing the people's sins into the wilderness, while its twin is sacrificed (Lev. 16:8-10, 23:27-32, Heb. 8-9). MacDonald's own analysis is actually confirmed by this additional parallel that he missed, and that is impressive.

MacDonald goes on to develop many similar points that not only scream of Homer being on Mark's mind, but also explain strange features of Mark. The list is surprisingly long:

Why did Jesus, who nevertheless taught openly and performed miracles everywhere, try to keep everything a secret? Why did Jesus stay asleep in a boat during a deadly storm? Why did Jesus drown two thousand pigs? Why does Mark invent a false story about John the Baptist's execution, one that implicates women? Why are the disciples surprised that Jesus can multiply food even when they had already seen him do it before? Why does Jesus curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season? How does Mark know what Jesus said when he was alone at Gethsemane? What is the meaning of the mysterious naked boy at Jesus' arrest? Why does Jesus, knowing full well God's plan, still ask why God forsook him on the cross? Why does Mark never once mention Mary Magdalene, or the other two women at the crucifixion, or even Joseph of Arimathea, until after Jesus has died? Why is the temple veil specifically torn "top to bottom" at Jesus' death? Why is Joseph of Arimathea able to procure the body of a convict so soon from Pilate? Why do we never hear of Joseph of Arimathea again? Why does Jesus die so quickly? Why do the women go to anoint Jesus after he is buried? Why do they go at dawn, rather than the previous night when the Sabbath had already ended?

All these mysteries are explained by the same, single thesis. This is a sign of a good theory. With one theoretical concept, not only countless parallels are identified, but numerous oddities are explained. That is very unlikely to be due to chance. And there is evidence of so many plausible connections, that even though any one of them could perhaps with effort be argued away, the fact that there are so many more makes it increasingly unlikely that MacDonald is seeing an illusion. Finally, his entire theory is plausible within the context of what we can deduce to have been Mark's cultural and educational background.



Crescendo of Doom

MacDonald's book is built like a crescendo: as one reads on, the cases not only accumulate, they actually get better and better, clearer and clearer. In the story of the Gerasene swine (Mk. 5:1ff.) MacDonald finds that 18 verses have thematic parallels in the Odyssey, 13 of those in exactly the same order! And even with some of those out of order the order is not random but is inverted, and thus a connection remains evident. In the story of Salome and the execution of John, MacDonald finds seven thematic parallels with the Murder of Agamemnon, all of them in the same order, and on top of that he details two other general parallels. And the two food miracles, forming a doublet in Mark, contain details that match a similar doublet of feasts in the Odyssey, and contain them in the same respective order: "Details in the [first] story of Nestor's feast not found in the [second] story of Menelaus appear in the [first] feeding of the five thousand and not in its twin," while, "details in the [second] story of Menelaus not found in the [first] story of Nestor appear in the [second] feeding of the four thousand and not in the first story," so that "the chances of these correspondences deriving from accident are slim" (p. 85).

These examples of a connection between Mark and Homer are far more dense than the two examples I detailed earlier, and cannot be explained away even by the most agile of thinkers. Consider the last case, which even has the fewest parallels relative to the other two: in the first feasts, the main characters go by sea, but in the second, by land; in the first, only men attend (even though there is no explanation in Mark of why this should be), but in the second there is no distinction; in the first, the masses assemble into smaller groups, and lie on soft spots, but not in the second; more attend the first than the second (and the numbers are about the same: 5000 in Mark, 4500 in Homer). On the other hand, in the second feasts, unlike the first, someone asks the host a discouraging question and yet the host shows compassion anyway—in Mark, this is particularly strange, since after the first miracle the disciples have no excuse to be surprised that Jesus can multiply food, so the doubting question can only be explained by the Homeric parallel; finally, in the second feasts, as opposed to the first, there are two sequential courses—bread, then meat. In both authors, the feasts serve an overt educational role: in the one case to educate the hero's son about hospitality, in the other to educate the disciples about Jesus' power and compassion, drawing attention to the difference in each story's moral values. There are even linguistic parallels—Homer's feasts were called "symposia" (drinking parties) even though that word usually referred to smaller gatherings; likewise, Mark writes that the first feast was organized by "symposia," despite the fact that only food is mentioned, not water or wine. Several of these details in Mark, as noted, are simply odd by themselves, yet make perfect sense when we see the Homeric model, and therein again lies the power of MacDonald's thesis.

MacDonald does similar work illuminating the Transfiguration, the healing of Bartimaeus, the Hydropatesis (water-walk), the Marcan Apocalypse, the Triumphal Entry, the Anointing, the Passover Feast (including a definite connection with cannibalism that offers a possible ideological origin for the Eucharist as a transvaluation of Homer), the Prayer and Arrest at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Burial, and some details of the Empty Tomb narrative. His theory provides an excellent reason to suppose that the naked boy at Jesus' arrest is the same as the boy the women find in the empty tomb—and he is a marker of resurrection: a type of the ill-fated Elpenor. Likewise, his theory puts a serious damper on the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea and the burial account in Mark: Joseph is a type of Priam, who rescued the body of Hector for burial in a similar way.

What I found additionally worthwhile is how MacDonald's theory illuminates the theme of "reversal of expectation" which so thoroughly characterizes the Gospels—not only in the parables of Jesus, where the theme is obvious, but in the very story itself. Though MacDonald himself does not pursue this in any detail, his book helped me to see it even more clearly. James and John, who ask to sit at the right and left of Jesus in his glory, are replaced by the two thieves at Jesus' crucifixion; Simon Peter, Jesus's right-hand man who was told he had to "deny himself and take up his cross and follow" (8:34), is replaced by Simon of Cyrene when it comes time to truly bear the cross; Jesus is anointed for burial before he dies; and when the women go to anoint him after his death, their expectations are reversed in finding his body missing. Later Gospels added even more of these reversals: for instance in Matthew Jesus' father, Joseph, is replaced by Joseph of Arimathea when the duty of burial arose—a duty that should have been fulfilled by the father; likewise, contrary to expectation, the Mary who laments his death and visits his tomb is not Mary his mother, but a prostitute; and while the Jews attack Jesus for healing and doing good on the Sabbath, they in turn hold an illegal meeting, set an illegal guard, and plot evil on the Sabbath, and then break the ninth commandment the next day. This theme occurs far too often to have been in every case historical, and its didactic meaning is made clear in the very parables of reversal told by Jesus himself, as well as, for instance, his teachings about family, or hypocrisy, and so on. These stories were crafted to show that what Jesus preached applied to the real world, real events, "the word made flesh."



Death and Resurrection

MacDonald's book concludes with an analysis of how Jesus as a character in Mark is also an inversion of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad. Both Jesus and Achilles knew they were fated to die and spoke of this fate often, but whereas Achilles chose his fate in exchange for "eternal fame," and for himself alone, Jesus chose it in exchange for "eternal life," for all humankind. This is one among many examples of how Mark has updated the values in Homer, highlighting this fact by crafting his narrative in deliberate imitation of Homer's epics. In a similar fashion, while the death of Hector doomed Troy to destruction, Jesus' death doomed the Temple to destruction. According to MacDonald, these themes and others guide Mark's construction of the passion narrative, and though borrowing from the Old Testament and other Jewish texts in the passion account is far more prevalent than anywhere else in his Gospel, there is still a play on the Iliad evident in various details.

For example, MacDonald finds more than 11 parallels between Mark's account of the crucifixion and the death of Hector, all but one of those in the same order (and that one exception is in inverted order), and 11 more parallels between Mark's account of the burial of Jesus and Homer's account of the burial of Hector, all in the same order. It is notable that resurrection, anastasia, was a theme in the Iliad: the concept appears three times, twice in declarations of its impossibility, once in a metaphor for Hector's survival of certain death. It thus contained a fitting challenge that Mark was happy to answer with a simple prose epic that everywhere flaunted the fact that anastasia was indeed possible, and real. While Hector, Elpenor, and Patroclus were all burned and buried at dawn, the tomb of Jesus was empty at dawn; while the Iliad and Odyssey were epics about mortality, the Gospel was an epic about immortality.


The Ending of Mark

I have one point of criticism for chapter 21, where MacDonald diverges from his central thesis to explain why Mark ends his Gospel as he does. MacDonald proposes an explanation from the historical context of the author. It is quite likely that many Christians were killed, and the original Jerusalem church destroyed, in the Jewish War of 66-70 A.D. MacDonald in several places relates how Mark most likely wrote his Gospel after the conclusion of the war (there are, to be sure, ample references that assume this, as well as that the world would end soon thereafter—cf. especially MacDonald's third appendix). So Mark, MacDonald argues, was faced with explaining why Jesus had not forewarned his disciples to evacuate Judaea. Mark's explanation, so the theory goes, is that Jesus did warn them, but they never heard the warning—in particular, they were supposed to go to Galilee after the resurrection to see Jesus, but the women failed to report this to the disciples and so they never went (and this tactic also allows the disciples to get off the hook: those at fault were mere fickle women).

The problem with this theory should be obvious: it is not the fact that it fails to explain how Mark could know the story if no one told it—for this did not stop him from relating what Jesus said in private when no witnesses were at hand, nor did it stop Matthew from relating secret conversations of the Jews; rather, the problem is that it fails to explain how Christianity started. Even assuming Mark is inventing this account apologetically, how did Mark imagine that the resurrection ever began to be preached if no one was ever told about the empty tomb and no one saw the risen Jesus, even in visions or dreams? Since the earliest accounts, in Paul, clearly suggest post mortem sightings of Jesus, and even tie these to the origin of the Gospel itself (and I have in mind the revelation to Paul mentioned in Galatians, and the visions to Peter and the others mentioned in 1 Corinthians), it does not seem plausible for Mark to expect his readers to reject this tradition, as would be required for his alleged hidden point even to be noticed, much less understood. I thus cannot buy MacDonald's theory on this point.

My own hypothesis is that Mark ended the Gospel thus in order to set up a pretext for why little of his particular story had been heard in the Christian community until he wrote it down. If we suppose that the resurrection as preached by Paul was of a spiritual nature, and therefore had nothing to do with empty tombs, then to suddenly disseminate such a story would raise eyebrows unless the author were ready with an explanation. And by building an explanation into his story he essentially covers himself. It is possible that Mark originally concluded his tale with an assertion that the women later reported the story to him, an ending that would be struck out and replaced to suit the new physicalist Christology that would follow, as well as in support of the new reliance on apostolic authority which seems never to have been a concern for Mark. But it is also possible that this would not have mattered. The faithful would not necessarily be too bothered about Mark's sources, since Revelation itself could always provide (in his letter to the Galatians, Paul himself claimed he learned the Gospel through direct revelation from God). Even if they were to ask, Mark or the sellers of his story could easily have provided persuasive oral explanations to satisfy any believer, who would be more than ready to believe anything that agreed with their values and doctrine and glorified and magnified the power of their beloved Lord. Ultimately, if Mark invented the empty tomb, he may also have inadvertently caused the invention of a physical resurrection—since an empty tomb, though meant as a symbol, if taken as a fact could imply a physical resurrection, leaving room for future evangelists to spin the yarn further still.

Conclusion

What is especially impressive is the vast quantity of cases of direct and indirect borrowing from Homer that can be found in Mark. One or two would be interesting, several would be significant. But we are presented with countless examples, and this is as cumulative as a case can get. In the end, I came away from this book with a new appreciation for Mark, whose Gospel tends to be derided as the work of a rather poor, simple Greek author. Though Mark's Greek is extremely colloquial, not at all in high literary style, this itself is surely a grand and ingenious transvaluation of Homer: whereas the great epics were archaic and difficult, only to be mastered by the educated elites, only to be understood completely by those with access to glossaries and commentaries and marked-up critical editions, Mark not only updated Homer's values and theology, but inverted its entire character as an elite masterpiece, by making his own epic simple, thoroughly understandable by the common, the poor, the masses, and lacking in the overt pretension and cleverness of poetic verse, written in plain, ordinary language. The scope of genius evident in Mark's reconstruction of Homeric motifs is undeniable and has convinced me that Mark was no simpleton: he was a literary master, whose achievement is all the greater in his choice of idiom—his "poor Greek" was deliberate and artful, as was his story.

Another theme that becomes apparent throughout this book is how quickly Christians lost touch with this allegorical meaning. Even the other Evangelists, when borrowing from Mark, stripped out the key and telling details and thus obviously missed the point; and only one other author, that of the Acts of Andrew, did anything overtly comparable in comprehensively recrafting Homer. By itself, this might be evidence against such a meaning actually being in Mark. But the evidence that this meaning is present is overwhelming on its own terms, and we can only conclude of early Christian ignorance, instead, that the real origins and message of the earliest Christians was all but lost even to the second or third generation. By the time there was a church in a significant sense, Christianity had been radically changed by the throngs of its converts, and, amidst the din of outsiders who stole the reigns, the very essence of that original Church of Jerusalem faded, powerless to survive under the mass of superstition and arrogance.

Having read this book, I am now certain that the historicity of the Gospels and Acts is almost impossible to establish. The didactic objectives and methods of the authors have so clouded the truth with literary motifs and allusions and parabolic tales that we cannot know what is fact and what fiction. I do not believe that this entails that Jesus was a myth, however—and MacDonald himself is not a mythicist, but assumes that something of a historical Jesus lies behind the fictions of Mark. Although MacDonald's book could be used to contribute to a mythicist's case, everything this book proves about Mark is still compatible with there having been a real man, a teacher, even a real "miracle worker" in a subjective sense, or a real event that inspired belief in some kind of resurrection, and so on, which was then suitably dressed up in allegory and symbol.

However, the inevitable conclusion is that we have all but lost this history forever. The Gospels can no longer support a rational belief in anything they allege to have occurred, at least not without external, unbiased corroboration, which we do not have for any of the essential, much less supernatural details of the story. And if Alvar Ellegård is right (Jesus One Hundred Years Before Christ, Overlook, 1999), Mark was almost entirely fiction, written after the sack of Jerusalem to freeze in symbolic prose the metaphorical message of Christianity, a faith which began with a Jesus executed long before the Roman conquest, who then appeared in visions (like that which converted Paul) a century later, in the time of Pilate, to inspire the new creed. What is important is not that this can be decisively proven—nothing can, as our information is too thin, too scarce, too unreliable to decisively prove anything about the origins of Christianity. What is important is that theories like Ellegård's can't be disproven, either—it is one among many distinctly possible accounts of what really happened at the dawn of Christianity, which MacDonald's book now makes even more plausible. And so long as it remains possible, even plausible, that the bulk of Mark is fiction, the contrary belief that it is fact can never be secure.