Madmen of Benghazi

A masked Libyan gunman stands on a street in the eastern city of Benghazi, early on July 29, 2014, as violence flares (AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma)

All inflamatory, all anti-ISIS, all the time. We start with my book report.

The Madmen of Benghazi by Gerard De Villiers

I picked this book up from the bargain shelf at Powell's. It is not a very good book, if fact it was quite awful, but unlike many other bad books that I quit reading after a chapter or nine, I read this one all the through. It helps that it wasn't a long book. In many ways it is similar to a series I read many years ago. This sentence from the back cover might help:

Originally published from 1960 until his death in 2013, his bestselling SAS series of 200 spy novels, starring Malko Linge, has long been considered France's answer to Ian Fleming with Malko as his James Bond.

The book does have several points in it's favor. It's a spy thriller, and I like stories of espionage. It's set predominately in Cairo, Egypt, and Benghazi, Libya, and I haven't seen many stories set in these places. It's semi-current: Qaddafi dies halfway through the story. The names of several known terrorists play outlying roles, and Qatar (the country) is the root of all evil. And then we have the recurring image of the super-model stuffed into a skin tight blue dress. Her appearances in the story covers a multitude of sins, both literary and religious.
      On the downside the reasoning employed by the characters borders on incompetent. Then again, these are spies, and if LeCarre's The Looking Glass War is even remotely accurate then what we have here is a realistic portrayal. That's a scary thought. So it was kind of fun, it provided a little exercise in geography, and it gave a small glimpse of life in North Africa, but it's not what I would call a good book.

P.S. SAS might refer to Special Air Services, except that was a British organization, and this book was originally written in French. On the other hand, there is no mention of any French Intelligence operations. Huh. Wonder how that happened.

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A friend of mine put this up on Facebook:

I may have po'd some people out there.. That was my intent. I feel we all sit back than bitch! Nothing like going to work..unarmed and being cut down..what was more than likely ISIS. I do know in 1982- 86. I lived in Chicago. Met a Syrian here on a work visa. Opened minded at the time.. He scared me with his response to, HOW DO U LIKE AMERICA? He spit and said I hate ALL AMERICANS. I SPIT on YOUR COUNTRY!

It doesn't take many encounters like this to convince people that the only good mussleman is a dead one.

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Dustbury put up a post about a Muslim Anti-ISIS demonstration in Oklahoma City, which included this line:

[T]he majority of signs held by the pro-peace crowd at Northwest Expressway and Pennsylvania Avenue by Penn Square Mall, were to drive the point home that terrorist group ISIS is not a representation of Islam, as some held the sign saying “ISIS DOES NOT REPRESENT ME!”

This is very nice, but it's not what we're really looking for. Being blood-thirsty American Imperialist running-dogs (to use our full third world title), we want to hear something more like "DEATH TO ISIS" or "KILL ALL THE JIHADISTS". Oh wait, that's kind of what being a Jihadist is all about isn't it? How do you tell the good Jihadists from the bad Jihadists? Especially when the only good Jihadist is a dead one? So I can sort of see why they went with their milder slogan.

Quote of the Day

View The Madmen of Benghazi in a larger map

Would that we had the stones to actually carpet bomb.  You haven't won until your enemy knows in his bones that it's over.  Precision pinpricks don't do it.  If they want jihad we really need to show them how that tune is played. - jsallison commenting on the USA's assigned task in Iraq War 3.0  (on one of Dustbury's posts).

P.S. I'm reading The Madmen of Benghazi, a thriller by Gerard de Villiers. He's talking about all these towns in Egypt and Libya, so I decided to find out if they were real, and if so, plot them on a map. Many of the names recall WW2 battles.The light blue markers are in Libya. Tripoli is the farthest left and Benghazi is next. That was a surprise. I thought Benghazi was a suburb of Tripoli. The reddish ones are in Egypt. The purple ones mark Cairo. The blue marker is Eilat, Israel.
    I was surprised to find that they were all along the coast. I thought there was some kind of green along the North African coast, but I guess not. And there is no sign of Qaddafi's great irrigation project, at least not at this scale.

Quarantine

Monrovia, Liberia. A US airman uses razor wire to delimit an Ebola treatment center. 

(AFP Photo/Pascal Guyot)

We've been watching The Blacklist. It's a very formulaic cop show with lots of secret spy stuff. One episode from last season had a guy die in a bank. An official somebody was on the scene in seconds and declared that he had died of a contagious disease and placed the bank under quarantine, which means the coppers drew guns on all the customers in the bank who were rushing for the door. On one hand it was very silly, on the other hand the show was only 40 odd minutes long, so it's understandable that the writers would want to compress a week-long procedure into a two minute long scene. I mean, we have a bunch more stuff we have to cram in here.

All this talk about Ebola reminds me of Typhoid Mary, which is where a lot of these public health issues first got some attention.

The basic premise of The Blacklist is that there are all kinds of people operating outside the law, and some of them are very organized and very powerful, and possibly insane. For instance, some of the tragedies we hear about, like where a ferry capsizes or an airliner crashes, are not accidents at all, but deliberate acts taken to kill one particular person (see "The Freelancer"). All the other people who die in the tragic accident are of no concern to the killers, just so much collateral damage.

The same idea was floated in The Madmen of Benghazi: the 747 was blown up over Lockerbie Scotland in order to kill one person. It wasn't done to call attention to themselves, that was a mere side effect. What's worse is the person they were trying to kill was not even on the plane. It's doubtful the "true" reason will ever be proven, and even if it is proven to some people's satisfaction, there will always be some who won't accept that version of the story.

There are a couple of reasons I like The Blacklist. One is that I like the idea that there vast criminal operations going on all over the world. I much prefer it to the Disneyfied version we keep telling ourselves. The other is the idea that someone not restrained by rules of evidence and those nasty constitutional amendments can obtain all the information they need to make a snap judgement. Oh, yeah, forget about the 'reasonable doubt' thing as well. All we need is one good whiff and boom! We know who the culprit is. Makes for a much more satisfying story.

Update: Posthip Scott sent me a link:

NBC's Medical Correspondent Is Quarantined for Ebola, Goes Out Anyway