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Trouble in Thailand -- and Elsewhere

Censorship is on the rise, and that's not good news for anybody who wants to make a buck (or just make some noise) with pen or keyboard. Take the case of Harry Nicolaides. He's an Australian novelist who was tossed in jail in Thailand under an antiquated lese-majeste law. His particular crime? One of his books contained a single paragraph describing the sexual heavy-handedness of a fictional Thai prince. That's right -- fictional prince.

Then there's the decision by Yale University Press to back out of a commitment to publish a book containing the Danish Muhammad Cartoons. The cartoons, originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, depicted the prophet Muhammad in ways that brought sharp criticism from Muslim organizations. Riots followed; embassies were stormed. Yale said it nixed the book deal due to fear of violence. That's a reasonable-sounding explanation, but what about academic freedom? What about showing a little backbone?

China is the Big Daddy of censorship, with government agencies controlling all forms of media in the country. There's a constant cat-and-mouse game between anonymous bloggers, netizens, and censors. But this isn't like Tom and Jerry squabbling of a chunk of cheese. Getting caught in China with illegal material, especially material critical of the government, is a serious crime.

So what's going on here? Some have argued that it's all about economics. There's certainly something to that in the case of Yale. Being offensive to Muslims could hurt the bottom line, as in reduced endowment contributions. But there's a bigger issue than money. It's culture under attack. Thailand, China, the worldwide Muslim community -- they all feel threatened. Western movies, music, books, and web sites are undermining traditional balances. Once those balances are gone, then what? As Louis XV supposedly said, "After me, the flood." Holding the line on tradition means keeping out the barbarians, and their ideas. Thus, censorship.

The end game seems inevitable. Barriers will come down; the barbarians will get in. Still, the current situation is intriguing. Consider a novel about a hapless world traveler who is blogging about his adventures. Unwittingly, he posts something terribly offensive to the locals. Government agents stir into action. If the country is France, and the offense is to criticize an award-winning Sauvignon Blanc, then the story is farce. If the country is Burma or Cuba or Venezuela, then some real thrills could be in store.

And what about the United States? Could any of this happen here? The First Amendment pretty well guarantees that the government won't engage in censorship. But what about an angry mob, and a little recreational book burning? It could happen. In recent months there has been a lot of seething going on in America. It all circles back to the same thing: somebody's fear that their culture is under attack.

Rumors and Lives

In the U.S. it’s election day, so I’m going to write about . . . France. But first, a word about the presidential campaign. Are you as sick of it as I am? I mean really, how much blood and gore can we stand? It reminds me (figuratively; I’m not that old) of the John L. Sullivan/Jake Kilrain heavyweight championship. It was the last big fight under bare-knuckles rules, in 1889. Went seventy-five rounds of a scheduled eighty. Sullivan won, thus becoming the first to earn the title "World Heavyweight Champion." I’ll just bet there were a lot of spectators that day who got more than they bargained for. Can't you inagine the whispers? Throw in the towel! Stay down! Do us all a favor and don’t answer the damn bell! That’s how I felt halfway through the third Obama/McCain debate. I kept hoping one of them would say, "Enough already. Let’s all go get a beer."

Anyway, France. The character who caught my attention this week is Yves Bertrand. Bertrand was formerly the head of Renseignements Generaux, the French domestic spy agency. The French tolerate a lot more domestic spying than most countries. In fact, they have a law on the books that allows the government to spy on anyone who has a "significant political, economic, social or religious role" in the country.

Bertrand used his spying powers with gusto. He had his people keep tabs on rock stars, politicians, cardinals, and business magnates. (I wonder if France has the equivalent of Joe the Plumber? If so, there’s a file on that guy, too.) Because Bertrand had so many agents looking into so many things, he heard a lot of gossip, much of it plain unvarnished tripe. He wrote it all down, longhand, in twenty-three spiral-bound notebooks. There’s the rub.

Bertrand’s notebooks were seized by government agents investigating the Clearstream affair, a complicated French political and business scandal. Someone with the police or magistrate’s office leaked the contents, and the juicer bits were published in Le Point, a popular magazine. There was the usual sexual tittle-tattle (in great detail), vague allusions to bribery and extortion, drug deals, and political favors owed and paid off. One entry said Jacques Chirac, while president, "had a facelift in Canada." Other entries were more personal to Bertrand, like "go to dentist," and "buy more cat litter."

There are a lot of problems here, but perhaps the biggest is that most of this "information" was just rumor. Even Bertrand claims eighty percent of it is probably false. Why on earth did he keep track of it all then? He says it was his job: he would have looked like an idiot if his bosses in the government heard about gossip before he did.

Now the lawsuits are flying, with the most prominent a libel suit filed by current president Nicolas Sarkozy against Bertrand (but, interestingly, not against Le Point). It all leads to a few intriguing questions. What should public officials do about gossip? Ignore it—at their peril? Follow up and turn gossip into fact? Or, as Bertrand did, just jot it down for future reference? And what "zone of privacy" can the big-wigs of society expect in our time of instant news? Should domestic life be off limits? Or the narrower category of sexual activities? What about their children: should they be subject to the public spotlight?

Intriguing questions, yes, but I’m more interested in Bertrand, the man. Bertrand left his job with RG in 2004. If he was no longer in government service, why didn’t he just destroy the notebooks? Were they even "his" to keep, or should they have been left behind as background information for his successor?

Bertrand lives alone with his three cats. That sounds like a lonely and dull existence, after being a spy. I can imagine him curled up by the fire with his kitties, reading back over his notebooks, nodding and chuckling. That has all the creepiness of J. Edgar Hoover, and the makings of a fine first chapter for a thriller.

The Pendulum Swing

I’m back from summer break and ready to pick up my blogging duties. Lesson from vacation trip this year: don’t drive in urban Italy unless you have Formula 1 experience. I still have a bad case of the shakes whenever I get behind the wheel.

The last few months have provided some great new grist for thriller writers. First there was Bruce Ivins, the Ft. Detrick, MD, biological researcher whom the FBI claims was the sole person behind the 2001 U.S. anthrax attacks. Those attacks killed five people and infected over a dozen others. After Ivins’s death in July, which was ruled a suicide, the FBI moved to close the case, stating that the evidence against him was overwhelming.

Still, questions abound. How did the FBI eliminate all other suspects? How did Ivins prepare the anthrax spores? Where did he do the work? Why was no trace of the spores found in his house, his automobile, the lab where he worked? How did he get to Princeton, N.J., the location of the post box where postal inspectors said the tainted envelopes were mailed? And perhaps most confounding, what was Ivins’s motive?

There have been calls for an independent review of the Ivins case, but so far the Justice Department isn’t playing along. They’d rather turn the page, letting the questions fade. As one FBI investigator put it, "There will always be spores on the grassy knoll."

Another case involving the FBI is equally intriguing. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani native who came to the U.S. in 1991 to attend college. She received a bachelor’s degree and doctorate and also obtained U.S. citizenship. In 2003, she was again living in Pakistan. One day she left home in a taxi, and simply vanished. At about that time, the U.S. Justice Department had begun investigating her for alleged ties to al-Qaeda.

Siddiqui resurfaced this summer in Afghanistan. The FBI claims she was seen acting suspiciously near a provincial governor’s residence and was taken into custody by local police. According to court filings, she had in her possession a "mass casualty attack" list of locations in America – Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty. She also allegedly was carrying instructions for making bombs and biological weapons.

After her arrest, Siddiqui was questioned by a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents. The government claims that during the questioning, Siddiqui got hold of an M-4 rifle and started shooting at the interrogators. She was wounded in the exchange of gunfire. She is now in New York, where she had been indicted in federal court on charges of attempted murder.

Questions? Here are a few. Where was Siddiqui from 2003 to 2008? No idea, says the government. Why was she carrying such sensitive information around Afghanistan and where did it come from? Can’t say, replies the government. How could she, a woman of only ninety pounds and no known military training, get her hands on a rifle while in U.S. Army custody? And most intriguing, why is the government charging her only with attempted murder and not with any terrorist-related offenses?

My point is not to paint Ivins and Siddiqui as innocent victims of government conspiracy. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Instead, the real lesson is how far the pendulum has swung in recent years. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans strongly supported government efforts to stop terrorism. Now, in the popular press and around the kitchen table, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA – all the agencies involved in fighting terrorism – are viewed with skepticism, even cynicism.

This isn’t the first time Americans have been willing to believe the worst of their own government. Check out some of the top thrillers from the 1970s, like James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor or Loren Singer’s The Parallax View (both of which were made into fine movies.) It took decades for America to outgrow the hangover from Vietnam and Watergate. It’s sad to think it may take as long for America to come out of its current tailspin, brought on by the war in Iraq, by Abu Ghraib, by excessive government secrecy, by botched terrorist investigations.

Still, I won’t complain too loudly about any of this. Like I say, it’s a great time to be a thriller writer.

Latter-Day Witches

Witches are back in the news. Recently in two villages in western Kenya, eleven people were burned alive by mobs of young men. The dead were accused of casting evil spells on children. Local residents won’t cooperate with the police, so arrests for the murders are unlikely. But were the killings really murder, or community defense?

Belief in witchcraft is deeply felt in sub-Saharan Africa. Every witch, it is thought, can perform both good and bad magic. The good includes fertility rights for crops and people, spells that cast out disease, and matchmaking spells. The bad includes hexes that injure one’s business or reputation and poison spells that cause people to become ill and even die.

Who are the witches? They don’t carry union cards, but in each community they are generally known. People will whisper, "This one has the power, and that one." Whenever anything bad happens, the gossip mill begins to churn. Who is responsible, and why?

The gossip isn’t idle chatter. If people feel threatened, they may take action. Witches can be banished or put to death. That happened with striking regularity in South Africa during the 1990s. Economic times were tough and, with the end of white rule, the political landscape was unsettled. Gangs attacked scores of people, often old women, hacking or burning them to death. The explanation was always the same: the victim was a witch who had turned to evil ways.

In modern-day America, we’ve given up on witches. They’re just characters for fairy tales. These stories often involve an innocent outsider who ends up crossing paths with an evil witch or witches. The hero ultimately prevails, as much from pluck and good-heartedness as anything. That’s the pattern in the greatest witch tale of them all, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to turn the standard western witch tale on its head. What would happen if an African witch haplessly crossed paths with a group of western non-believers? Say a self-effacing African hero is forced by some government edict to come west to study at an American university. He would see witchcraft everywhere; the Americans would miss it all, both the dangers and the opportunities. Through much of the story, the witch would race about saving his new friends from their own ignorance, while they laughed at his quaint ways. Then in the finale, something truly inexplicable would happen, and that would give rise to a crisis of belief for everyone.

The point is that for those who truly believe in it, witchcraft is as real as gravity is to a westerner. It’s an undeniable force that acts on everything in the world. That’s the starting point for understanding why anyone would decide to burn a neighbor for being a witch, and why the Kenyan police expect to make no progress in solving the recent crimes there.