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In December the Chicago Tribune reported on the sloppy work done by the CIA operatives who allegedly kidnapped an Egyptian-born cleric in Milan in 2003, which helped expose the U.S. program of extraordinary rendition. Among the cited examples of the agents’ insufficiently clandestine activities: they failed to remove the batteries from their cell phones before the abduction, allowing Italian authorities to track their movement along the route from the spot where the cleric was seized to an American air base several hours away; while in Italy during the weeks before the kidnapping they used their phones indiscriminately, apparently making personal calls to friends and family in the U.S.; in some cases they registered at Milan hotels using their real names and home addresses; and one operative who may have used an alias nonetheless provided hotels with her real-life frequent-flier number so she could get the extra miles.
Could Have Been Worse
New York’s Newsday reported in December on David Mocknick, a 49-year-old Philadelphia literary agent, and the stress-relief technique detailed in his book Who’s Fred, Ha! Mocknick, who acknowledges he has no background in medicine or psychology, attributes curative powers to the name Fred: to use his system, you try to steer a conversation so that someone says a word rhyming with “Fred”–e.g., “bread”–and then call out “Bread! Fred! Who’s Fred, ha!” According to Mocknick, this makes you feel better.
America’s Gun Problem
