Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Here's yet another fascinating and captivating article about the company of Special Forces soldiers who were working with Hamid Karzai in the crucial middle and final phases of the war in central Afghanistan. This the company that lost two men late in the fighting due to a friendly fire incident. The company captain, Jason Amerine, who was wounded in the friendly fire incident, described much of the tale for the Washington Post from a hospital bed in Germany. Read the story. I'm sure at some point a movie will be made about this one team's exploits.

The author of the piece says that for micropayments to work they'll need to become invisible, not something you're constantly clicking on to okay a payment. Sorta like the way the phone bill works or your electricity. It just pops up increment by increment as you go. The author - Jakob Nielsen - also gives a big thumbs down to subscriptions and advertisements. He says they'll never work, except in a few cases where special circumstances apply.

As the editor, chief writer, and CEO of Talking Points Memo, this whole issue is of more than academic concern to me. And I'd like to see a way for small sites to support themselves. Somehow, though, this vision of how the web will function just seems off to me. (TPM accepts contributions to help defray the expense of running the site. And by all means make a contribution! But if TPM were run on a balance sheet it would have stopped publishing long, long ago.)

Way back when in the early 1990s, unless you were a college student, you had to buy connectivity by the hour. Maybe a hundred

hours a month for some reasonable fee. Or if you had a service like AOL you literally paid by the hour. Eventually, competition and experience changed the business model and pretty much all ISPs went over to some sort of flat rate.

Certainly, there were many reasons that went into the change. But for my part at least having a meter running on your web usage took much of the pleasure out of the experience. I found a similar frustration with online services like AOL or CompuServe where there were different fees for looking at different material or using different services. One other problem with paying a small fee for every individual thing you look at is that, for me at least, the vast majority of things I click on to look at I don't stay to read. I give a quick glance and I'm off.

For my money, far better to just pay a flat fee. The issue is not the aggregate expense. It's having concern over price and expense creeping into the process of hopping around the 'net and finding new info here and there.

It's true that phone service operates by a sort of micropayments system, but only for long-distance. And I suspect that's a legacy of the now bygone era when calling long distance was a sort of extravagance. Or at least not something done without a second thought as it is today. For local service, we pretty much all opt for the flat rate, in part I suspect to avoid the annoyance of having the meter running or just needing to think about it at all.

In any case, this invisible micropayment vision of the web's future is not one that seems inviting to me in the least. For all the difficulties people have encountered, I suspect ads are still the future of selling content online. The recent proliferation of pop-ads - especially from prestige sites like the New York Times - could not be more annoying. And I hope and suspect there will be some backlash.

But the more I think about it, the economics of selling web content, for better and worse, seems quite like that of other media.

Thank God I didn't throw away those micro-initiative policy memos! That's what Dick Morris must be telling himself.

Morris' latest column criticizing

Bill Clinton for being soft on terror looks pretty much like a catalog of Morris' own poll-tested micro-initiative ideas that the president refused to sign off on.

"The weekly strategy meetings at the White House throughout 1995 and 1996 featured an escalating drumbeat of advice to President Clinton to take decisive steps to crack down on terrorism. The polls gave these ideas a green light ..."

Not exactly. More like a bogus anti-terrorism tie-in to the motor-voter law, which actually sounds a lot more like a crack-down on illegal immigrants micro-initiative that Morris has retrospectively dressed up as an anti-terror initiative. That and a shifty retelling of the debate over sanctions against Iran which would penalize European businesses.

Dems of good faith have to concede that there were some anti-terror screw-ups under Bill Clinton. But trust me, this ain't one of 'em.

In the Times OpEd, Perle tags himself as "a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, [and a former] assistant secretary of defense" when in fact, as TPM readers know, he's also the current Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.

Not only is the DPB an official Pentagon advisory board, which gets Perle an office in the Pentagon's E-Ring.

But he's used the Board to lobby within the administration to move against Iraq immediately and embrace the almost comically feckless Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi.

The logic employed in the piece is precisely the sort of weekend-warrior dilettantism you'd expect. But one would like to expect more from the Times.

I'm not sure what the new bin Laden tape tells us about the fate of OBL.

But I think it gives us some pretty definitive info on the fate of Suleiman Abu Ghaith. And the word is, he's toast. Either that, or maybe he's already entered into negotiations with Ari Fleischer.

As TPM readers well know, Suleiman Abu Ghaith is the Press Secretary and Spokesman for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. There are several key signs that he's no longer providing his services to OBL and may perhaps even have been killed in the Tora Bora bombing.

First, on the most recent tape bin Laden pretty

clearly seems to have been reduced to writing his own material, which has reduced his effectiveness both in sowing terror and communicating his message.

Second, OBL appears with bad lighting, making him look pale, washed-out, and frankly rather languid. A good flak never lets this happen.

I would have preferred to have been proven wrong on this one. But I'm feeling pretty vindicated in my December 13th prediction that the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament would end up being a much bigger deal than the "bin Laden tape, the supposed severing of ties between Israel and Arafat, or US pulling out of the ABM treaty." This stand-off in South Asia could really scarcely be more serious. More on this in an opinion column to run tomorrow.

The Richard Reid story seems to be coming into focus. Conversion to Islam, fell in with

the wrong crew at the local mosque, fab vacation getaway to Pakistan, all ending up with the martyrdom operation gone awry.

What really strikes me though is some of the talk coming out of the Brixton Mosque in South London.

When looking at cultures other than our own, certain traits and tendencies can appear alien even though they should actually be quite familiar.

In college I once went to a seminar on violence and misogyny in rap music (how I found my way there I honestly don't remember). There were a bunch of Afro-Am studies scholars and literary critics there on the panel (Arnold Rampersad is the only one I remember clearly) and one white dude who I think was like the rock critic from the Village Voice or something. There was a great deal of erudite chatter about how rap was the authentic voice of the inner-city and so on and so forth.

But the rock critic was the only one on the panel who said something which struck me as really insightful. Perhaps this wasn't something about African-American culture, maybe it was just something about adolescent men. Isn't Heavy Metal music and the hard-up losers who listen

to it pretty much the same thing?

Anyway, I had a similar feeling when listening to the comments of Abdul Haqq Baker, the Chairman of the Brixton Mosque, where Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui worshipped before hooking up with Al Qaeda.

The military fatigues is what really strikes me. And the talk of arrogance and belligerence comes up again and again in descriptions of these guys. To be honest, take out the words Muslim and Jihad and they sound like a lot of the guys I grew up with in Southern California in the eighties.

The weirdest thing we've learned so far about 'Richard Reid' is that his name actually seems to be Richard Reid. According to the Wednesday London Times, fingerprints from the FBI have positively identified the shoe-exploding suspect as a small-time British criminal named Richard C. Reid. A British national with an English mother and a Jamaican father, Reid had a "string of convictions for street crime such as muggings" and converted to Islam while in prison.

Articles in various other papers also provide

a host of details which give a pretty clear sense of where this story is going. The AP says Reid had belonged to an Islamist organization called "Tabliq" but quit because they were "not radical enough." The London Times said Reid's mom went looking for him at the local mosque a few months ago after he went to Pakistan and stopped communicating with this family.

Perhaps most disturbing is the report that Reid attended the same Mosque that was home to Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, who has just gone on trial in Virgina. AbdulHaqq Baker, chairman of the Brixton Mosque, says he's sure Reid couldn't have been acting alone basically because Reid was too much of a doofus to have cooked up the whole plan by himself - a charge which seems amply supported by the just-released mug-shot, above.

I guess we could call this

'crony-watch.' Here's the scoop. Last Friday, long-time Gore insider Peter S. Knight sent friends an email informing them that he was taking a job as managing director of Metropolitan West Financial. That's the LA-based asset management company Al Gore signed on with as Vice Chairman last month.

Even absolute rulers have to delegate, right? Well, someone's got to tell the Sultan of Brunei - the oil-rich, mini-state perched on the edge of Malaysia. The Sultan's bio on the Brunei national website says:

Not the fog of war perhaps, but maybe we should call this the fog of terrorism. In the last post we noted

the Washington Post report that 'Richard Reid' - alleged shoe-igniter - was really Sri Lankan national Tariq Raja.

Now CNN - relying on a Scotland Yard spokesman - seems to imply that the man really is a British national and perhaps even is Richard Reid, but changed his name to Abdel Raheem after converting to Islam.

More striking still, one of the subduers of the man in question - a Frenchman who happens to be a journalist - says the man had "light skin." That seems hard to square with the picture opposite unless the FBI guy is the stoned-looking dude on the right with the pull-over hood.

I'm not sure whether it was admirable discretion or facile, unhelpful

political correctness (I'm leaning heavily toward the latter) behind the networks' initial decision to ignore or keep mum about the question most everyone, yesterday, was likely asking about 'Richard Reid,' the guy who tried to light his shoes on fire aboard that flight from Paris to Miami: his seeming ethnic extraction.

For better or worse, people trying to discover whether this was Al Qaeda-related would want to know whether the suspect was a Muslim.

His apparent identification as 28 year old Sri Lankan national Tariq Raja doesn't completely resolve the matter. 'Tariq' is an Arabic name, as far as I know. And in South Asia I would assume it signifies being a Muslim. Yet, according to the CIA, Sri Lanka is only 7% Muslim. Of course, how little we know about what's happening here is driven home by the fact that some government officials are refusing to rule out the possibility that the guy was just trying to light a cigarette.

Look, I don't want to take anything from Rudy Giuliani. The Fall of 2001 has been his finest hour. Actually, hold on.

I'll take a bit away from him: I hear that for the last month or so he's been completely checked out on his job and has been focusing on lining up gigs for his post-mayoralty consulting gig. But I'm not gonna give him a hard time over that. His performance in the midst of tragedy will go down in history, and his mayoralty - though certainly a more mixed picture - seems unquestionably historic.

But Time's decision to make Giuliani its Person of the Year represents a colossal failure of nerve and honesty. And it may even be a small sign of the baleful effects of media industry conglomeration.

Time's self-described criteria for the designation is "the one person on Earth who has had the biggest effect on history throughout the year -- for better or worse."

Can anybody say with a straight face that that person is Rudy Giuliani and not Osama bin Laden?

I've gotten another request that TPM add a section or recurring item featuring reader comments. I'm considering it. One of the things I like about TPM is its simplicity and relative featurelessness. But perhaps this would be a good addition.

Okay, a few quick points to run down. This piece at ABCNews.com has a helpful run-down of the various political and faction leaders in and around the new Afghan government.

This article from the New York Times makes it look like I'm pretty much definitely going to have to pay out on that bet with my friend from the Washington Post over whether John Walker is going to end up doing time.

I've gotten a lot of folks suggesting that I post the list of news and commentary links that I work from on my computer desktop each day. I use it as my homepage, and a number of my friends now do as well. Of course, it'd only be useful as your homepage if you're interested in the selections of domestic and foreign news and commentary sites it contains. In any case, you be the judge.

Good December 19th post by Marshall Wittman on new GOP Chairman Marc Racicot (I wish Marshall had links to specific posts like TPM, but alas ...). Racicot is insisting on remaining a corporate lobbyist while serving as GOP party chair. One might be forgiven for snarkily commenting that, in practice, shilling for the GOP and "energy, agricultural and recording industry interests" probably doesn't amount to such a conflict after all. But Marshall's got a good point. If Racicot gives a damn about the Republican party, he'll take Marshall's advice and make a choice between the job and the bucks. Of course, as a Dem, I just assume he keeps the job and brings on a few more clients. At the top of my list would be the Asbestos Council, Association of PCB Manufacturers, or maybe the Saccharine Institute.

Finally, am I the only one who wonders why there's a dorky, goofballian singing segment at the end of Larry King Live ever since September 11th? I mean, isn't it bad enough we have to endure terrorism?

I'm not sure when the New York Times is going to stop calling the 'B' Section 'A Nation Challenged,' but today's section is packed with interesting pieces.

This article shows how the rule of the Taliban was in many ways an example of a common process one sees recurring throughout history: circumstances wherein the collapse or mutual destruction of urban elites leads to armies from the countryside taking over and imposing the backward ways of rural villages on the cities (sorta like GOP control of the House of Reps! ... okay, sorry, just kidding ... back to our story). As the article explains, in many ways, the rigid rule we associate with the Taliban - enforced-burqa-wearing, no education for girls - has always been standard fare in many villages of southern Afghanistan, the region where most of the Taliban leaders came from. What was new was the imposition of these severe customs on the more educated and cosmopolitan cities, as well as their enforcement in other regions of the country where such a harsh code had never been known.