Even some of the European attendees here at the IPI Conference were surprised to learn that Serbia has a royal family.
They had been in exile for 60 years, having fled in 1941 in advance of Hitler’s invading army, until Crown Prince Alexander II and Crown Princess Katherine took up residence in the Royal Palace in Belgrade in 2001. As best I can tell, the royals have no formal constitutional role in Serbia, but they have returned to a position of some public prominence, in an apparent nod to Serbian nationalism. If nothing else, they had the foresight to be the first to register the domain www.royalfamily.org.
The 62-year-old Crown Prince was himself born in exile, although not technically. In the sort of diplomatic maneuvering that seems entirely of a different age, the British government in the 1940s went to great lengths to assure that Alexander II would be born on Yugoslav soil, according to the Crown Prince’s official bio:
On 17 July 1945 while living in Claridge’s Hotel, Queen Alexandra gave birth to a son – HRH Crown Prince Alexander II of Yugoslavia. Crown Prince Alexander, the heir to the throne, was born on Yugoslav territory as the British Government under the orders of the Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill declared suite 212 in Claridge’s Hotel Yugoslav territory. His Holiness Patriarch Gavrilo of Serbia baptized the newborn Crown Prince in Westminster Abbey with Godparents King George VI and HRH Princess Elizabeth (now HM The Queen Elizabeth II).
A Brit I’ve met here wondered aloud if that designation of Suite 212 in Claridges has ever been revoked. A very good question. If not, would that make it the only Yugoslavia that still exists?
Late Update: Word is that having lived most of his life in Europe and the United States, the Crown Prince speaks Serbian with a pronounced accent.
Nice Army you’ve got there. Would be terrible if something happened to it, says top military contractor KBR.
The Times has a bit more detail about the on-going Inspector General’s and Office of Professional Responsibility probe’s into the US Attorney firings. Seems, as we learned yesterday from the Wall Street Journal, that Bradley Schlozman has moved furthest along toward potential criminal charges. Meanwhile Alberto Gonzales’ attorney, George J. Terwilliger III, assures the Times that Gonzales is not the target of any criminal investigation tied to the US Attorney firings but he was not willing to give any such assurance about whether his client is being looked at for perjury in the NSA wiretaps case.
Last year you’ll remember, former TPMmuckraker.com reporter Laura McCann broke the story of how Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski had gotten a sweetheart deal on a piece of Kenai River river front property from a wealthy campaign contributor and Salmon mogul named Bob Penney — a transaction she failed to disclose on her senate filings. The story eventually got picked up in the state’s big paper, the Anchorage Daily News. And after a couple weeks of hemming and hawing she finally agreed to sell it back.
This years disclosure documents have just come out and it seems Murkowski had even more trouble remembering where all her income came from. In amendments to her 2004, 2005 and 2006 filings, she now come up with roughly $100,000 a annual income that she’d forgot to mention. Kate Klonick has the details.
I don’t know if I can expect anybody else to point this out. But check out the participants list of the McCain campaign’s conference call this morning calling Barack Obama “naive” and “delusional”. Look at the names of the two worthies making these accusations.
Randy Scheuneman and Jim Woolsey. Let’s track back for a moment here. Both were top supporters of disgraced charlatan and accused Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi in the lead up to the Iraq War. Woolsey, in addition to being one of his top DC confidants, was actually Chalabi’s lobbyist. Needless to say both were also big advocates of the most lurid and far-fetched claims about Saddam’s phantom WMDs. And not just the stocks of mustard gas and botulinum toxin that a lot of people in DC believed Saddam had. But truly loopy stuff.
I remember numerous panels I attended at AEI from the early part of this decade when Woolsey, to eager gasps and awws, would describe some ingenious concoction of this or that chemical agent that would not only kill you but turn you inside out and and reduce you to your constituent elements before doing so. Yes, that’s a bit of lyrical hyperbole. But I assure you, not much more far-fetched than a lot of the stuff Woolsey was peddling back in those days — which, to be generous and give him the benefit of the doubt — let’s assume Chalabi and his other fellow hucksters fooled Woolsey into believing.
Delusional and naive? I’d say both of these guys are really overdrawn in that department. These two simply have too much egg on their faces to be hurling those claims at anyone else.
But let’s have a little fun with this. Google is a wonderful thing. What quotes can you find from Scheuneman and Woolsey from 2001, 2002 and 2003. There are a lot. Send in what you find. We’ll print some.
Late Update: Okay, it’s not exactly what I was looking for since it doesn’t have Woolsey talking about some Saddam-invented chemical compound that makes turn into molten rock. But TPM Reader RR sends in these choice quotes from this November 23rd, 2003 article in the Washington Post. McCain on Chalabi: “He’s a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart.” And Woolsey on Chalabi: “He’s a class act.”
Button on sale at the Texas GOP state convention this weekend.
Late Update: Our reporter-bloggers at Election Central got in touch with the folks at the Texas GOP. And they say they didn’t know anything about it, would have prevented it from being sold if they had.
It’s been my assumption for months that John McCain would absolutely crush Barack Obama in Kentucky. And I’m still virtually certain McCain will beat him there this fall. But this SurveyUSA poll has McCain up by only 12 points — 53% to 41%. That’s a very solid lead. But I would have expected substantially more.
Clay Shirky joins us this week at TPMCafe Book Club to talk about his new book, Here Comes Everybody. He opens the conversation by considering a couple of questions about social software– and social status on the web. Are new ways to acquire social status (say, by achieving a level 75 Night Elf Roghe in World of Warcraft) a net gain, or a net loss?
Back on the topic of using Jim Woolsey as your presidential surrogate to call your competitor “delusional” and “naive”, I’d almost forgotten Woolsey’s freelance James Bond mission to England back in 2001 to prove the crackpot theory of Laurie Mylroie who came up with the idea that Saddam wasn’t just behind the 9/11 attacks but was actually behind the original attack on the Twin Towers back in 1993. For a wonderful article on Mylroie, her theories and expertise, see this wonderful article by Peter Bergen — I guy who’s actually interviewed bin Laden, not just had fever dreams about him.
Mylroie’s theory was that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing who is now in the federal supermax facility serving a life sentence, was actually a covert Iraqi intelligence agent sent to America by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center. Like other delusional fantasies, it’s always difficult to know quite how deeply to delve into their internal logic. But in brief, Woolsey and Mylroie’s idea was that the Iraq intelligence agent had stolen the identity of a man named Abdul Basit. In the weeks just after 9/11, Woolsey went to England to check fingerprints on documents Basit had handled in the UK back in 1988 and 1989 and the compare fingerprints of Basit and Yousef to see whether they were in fact the same person.
Like the guy who’s not a doctor but plays one on TV, Woolsey didn’t go in any official capacity representing the US government, but Doug Feith gave him the thumbs up on the idea. So he apparently thought that was good enough. And according to subsequent reports, Woolsey led the Brits on to believe that he actually was in the country on a secret mission from Washington.
We catch some of the antic detail in this October 2001 Knight-Ridder article by Warren Strobel …
Woolsey, in an article in the New Republic magazine last month, said the only way to determine the truth is to “investigate the materials that Abdul Basit handled while in the United Kingdom in 1988 and 1989, which were taken into custody by Scotland Yard.”
Woolsey went to England to determine whether Basit’s fingerprints matched Yousef’s, current and former officials said.
“It was implied that he was doing so on behalf of the U.S. government, but it doesn’t appear it was coordinated through the U.S. Embassy” in London, one official said.
But another official said the former CIA chief “was careful not to hold himself out as representing the U.S. government in any way,” but went “to look at some of the evidence that he thought had not been looked at carefully enough.”
On at least one of the trips, Woolsey visited the Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales where Basit studied, as well as the South Wales Constabulatory. The constabulatory contacted the legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in London to ask if Woolsey was acting in an official capacity, an official in Washington said.
The British “were intrigued” that a former CIA chief “was asking these questions,” another official said.
Several of those with knowledge of the trips said they failed to produce any new evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks.
Anyway, this little excursion became what I think you’d have to generously call both sad and sympathetic eye-rolling by close-watchers of the Iraq story back in the early part of this decade. So I’m more than a little amused that this is the guy who’s advising McCain today.
Late Update: I’d almost forgotten. But TPM Reader DB reminded me: Woolsey also apparently thinks Saddam blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.