Radio War Nerd EP #376 — Salammbô, pt. 2 + Who's Afraid of Pentagon Leaks?

I read Salammbo just to avoid hearing spoilers in this episode. I have to admit I'd never heard of it until now. It's a truly mesmerising, sickening, horrific sleepwalking psychedelic nightmare of a novel and I will never get it out of my head (my eyes, the goggles do nothing). The chapter Moloch which you didn't specifically touch on much was particularly soul-rending. It made me think of something John said re: a caged peacock about the amount of suffering in the world we will mercifully never be aware of. Cf. "The roar on the other side of silence" or whatever the George Eliot line is - maybe relevant to the silence of Victorian literature on the sufferings inflicted by the Victorian empire. Side note I read once that the eighteenth century French referred to England as "Carthage", the mercantile rogue naval power opposed to the centralising European military power of France, implicitly likening itself to Rome obv

To continue where Leigh & Xander left off, yes: there is only one “in.” The second word of the quoted line (after “but”) is “if,” not “in.” And the three last quoted words—“we live in”—are actually two words: “we’re livin’.” So there’s only one “in;” it precedes “which.”

These episodes inspired me to read Salammbo. Newfound respect for Flaubert, not to mention Carthage.

yeah, one of the things that made America 2000-2005 such a depressing shithole was how people would fly into a rage about the danger of video games but were totally happy with war crimes in Iraq

Doug Cartel

Hardly any of the usual California Chauvinism this episode. Well done boys!

PW

As former/forever Masshole and a current NYC resident, I enjoyed the back to back discussion of why people still live in NY and how Teixeira is pronounced. Don't overthink it guys, people in Dighton certainly don't.

John

The two major claims that I've read as potentially damaging with respect to the leak are: 1. that the disclosed information compromised planning for the pending Ukrainian offensive and forced Ukraine to modify its plans. The second bigger issue is that it has created risks with respect to air defense. It's possible if not likely that Russia may have already had this information through its own independent sources. However, I don't really see what kind of public interest is served in telegraphing to the Russian military that "x" type of air defense system will be depleted by X date, as has apparently been the case. Much in the same way that we can't prove that climate change is responsible for a specific weather event, we probably can't prove that a disclosure regarding air defense has resulted in specific civilian deaths. Although given the news over the past week, these disclosures may be a factor. The Pentagon Papers, I see as much more clear cut, if we are talking about a public interest standard. As far as Petraeus goes, a mitigating factor is the degree to which the information was disseminated. If his Broadwell had posted the information on an internet forum, that was then disseminated around the globe to millions of people, I would like to think that Petraeus would have faced more severe penalties. Obviously his rank and connections insulated him from the maximum penalty to a degree that won't be the case for a much lower ranking reservist.

J P 3

You're more right than you know... Dolan and Ames kind of buried the lede with this kid; he was junior intelligence whatever for his state's Air National Guard. Why would any of the fifty states need an Air National Guard, why would the state Air National Guard need its own intelligence people, and why would those intelligence people have access to anything to do with the war in Ukraine?

a clash of purple

Yeah, but Americans love it. And the more they claim to love America and freedom and whatever, the more horny they are for a brutal, omnipresent, omniscient police state.

a clash of purple

seems to me like a lot of the issue is that the US has set up the greatest surveillance system in history, but the problem is that that means that they have access to more data than ever before in history, most of it meaningless. in order to sift through all that data and actually use it they have to give more and more people access to that data, which means that it is less and less secure. considering the number of people who seem to have access to top secret intelligence it seems obvious that it isn't that hard for Russia or china to get their hands on anything they want, so in reality the US basically gathers all the worlds data together so that it can be used by everyone.

Alexander white

On the remarks about Teixeira: I have to admit I've treated this case as more or less of a joke when talking to others. Like it was just the folly of an unsympathetic fuckup, and even implied that this guy deserves it in some sense. But Mark's point is really true here, and deserves more discussion. The Espionage act is an absolutely barbaric law, and the penalties include life imprisonment, it's used as a resistance-is-futile cudgel. The big evolution in the past few decades is that the clause in the Espionage act that the information taken or disclosed must be "to the advantage of a foreign power" has become more and more broadly interpreted to the point where pure public disclosure is taken as the same act as stealing documents and giving them to a foreign intelligence service. This type of prosecution fell apart with Ellsberg but has been just accepted as a fait accompli just a little over a decade later. (Side note: To my surprise i have met several people name Teixeira here in massachusetts who pronounced their own name as just 'TEX-ERA', but i think they may have just been surrendering to local Townie-fied proununciation. EDIT: Should have read the criminal complaint before I spoke the "advantage of a foreign power" language comes from the part of the Episonage act that was folded into Section 794, Teixeira is charged under Section 793, still incredibly repressive.

Isaac Kalish

Awesome ep- def gotta pick up the book. What are Mark’s and John’s favorite novels btw?

John Waaben

I never read Flaubert because his very French name and most famous novel being called Madame Bovary offended my pseudo masculinity, but this book kicks ass. The Punic religion and customs are so foreign (destroyed so thoroughly in the historic record) that it feels more like a novelization of Conan the barbarian than a historical drama.

Connor