Eventually the truth is revealed

New York Times report casts doubt on al Qaeda involvement in Benghazi

Mark Morgenstein and Chelsea Cantor CNN

Attackers set the U.S. Consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, on fire on September 11, 2012. The U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. nationals were killed during the attack. The Obama administration initially blamed a mob inflamed by a U.S.-produced movie that mocked Islam and its Prophet Mohammed, but later said the storming of the consulate appears to have been a terrorist attack. View photos of protesters storming the U.S. Embassy buildings in 2012.

Attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya

(CNN) -- A New York Times report on the September 11, 2012, attack that killed four Americans -- including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens -- in Benghazi, Libya, calls into question much of what Republicans accusing the Obama administration of a cover-up have said about the incident.

The three main points of contention have been whether the attack was planned, whether it was sparked by an anti-Muslim video, and whether al Qaeda was involved.

However, the Times says, the administration's version, focusing on outrage over the inflammatory video, and first delivered by then-ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on Sunday morning talk shows five days later, isn't exactly right, either.

"The reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs," according to David D. Kirkpatrick's article in the Times.

It's a conclusion that CNN has drawn in its previous reporting.

The attack at the Benghazi diplomatic compound has become a political flashpoint in a long-running battle between the White House and Republicans, who accuse the Obama administration of not bolstering security before the attack, of botching the response to it and of misleading the public for political gain less than two months before the November election.

The GOP suggests the administration removed specific terror references and stuck to the explanation advanced by Rice -- later proved untrue -- that the attack was the result of spontaneous demonstrations over the U.S.-produced film "Innocence of Muslims," which contained scenes some Muslims considered blasphemous.

The White House and its allies in Congress have said any confusion and conflicting information in the early hours and days after the assault stemmed from the "fog of war," not any deliberate effort to mislead the public.

The White House had no comment when CNN requested a response to the Times article.

After reading it, Obama's former national security spokesman Tommy Vietor unleashed a series of tweets, including these, condemning Republicans who've spent more than a year lambasting and investigating the Beghazi incident:

-- "If Rs spent 1/50th as much time as @ddknyt learning what really happened in #Benhazi, we could have avoided months of disgusting demagoguery."

-- "Republicans inflated the role of al Qaeda in #Bengazi to attack Obama's CT record. They were wrong, and handed our enemy a propaganda win."

-- "Credit to @ddknyt but also disconcerting that his #Benghazi article offered more insight into what happened than all Congressional hearings."

The Times' article, which includes interviews with several Libyan militia leaders who helped bring down Col. Moammar Gadhafi's dictatorship in 2012, says no evidence supports speculation about al Qaeda's involvement in the Benghazi attack. To the contrary, the Times reports that the diverse and fractured opposition militias, many of whom were at least somewhat friendly toward U.S. interests, most likely contributed to the attack.

That dovetails with the findings of the State Department investigative panel report on Benghazi.

"The Benghazi attacks also took place in a context in which the global terrorism threat as most often represented by al Qaeda (AQ) is fragmenting and increasingly devolving to local affiliates and other actors who share many of AQ's aims, including violent anti-Americanism, without necessarily being organized or operated under direct AQ command and control," the report said.

The Times report zeroes in on militia leader Abu Khattala as well as the like-minded Islamist militia Ansar al Sharia.

In a recent interview with CNN's Arwa Damon, Khattala acknowledged being at the Benghazi mission after the attack but denied any involvement.

Damon spent two hours interviewing Khattala at a coffee shop at a well-known hotel in Benghazi. He allowed Damon to use an audio recorder to tape the conversation, but refused to appear on camera.

Khattala's narrative of the events that night was sometimes unclear and, at times, seemed to be contradictory, Damon said.

He admitted to being at the compound the night of the attack, but denied any involvement in the violence.

Asked about allegations he may have masterminded the attack, Khattala and two of the men he brought with him to the interview "burst out laughing," Damon said.

Khattala told CNN that he had not been questioned by either Libyan authorities or the FBI.

The militia leader was one of those whom U.S. prosecutors charged in the attacks, as CNN first reported.

Ansar al Sharia is more a label than an organization, one that's been adopted by conservative Salafist groups across the Arab world. The name means, simply, "Partisans of Islamic Law."

In Benghazi, Ansar al Sharia was one of many groups that filled the vacuum of authority following the overthrow of Gadhafi.

The group's central belief is that all authority is derived from the Prophet Mohammed, that democracy is un-Islamic and that other branches of Islam, such as the Sufi, are heretical.

There do not appear to be organizational links between Ansar al Sharia and al Qaeda, but there is solidarity.

Among the group's Benghazi membership is Mohammed al-Zahawi, who fought to overthrow Gadhafi and praised al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in a BBC interview. He said al Qaeda's statements "help galvanize the Muslim nation, maintain its dignity and pride."

A different Ansar al Sharia is affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and budding franchises are said to exist in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt.

CNN's Tim Lister, Paul Cruickshank and Evan Perez contributed to this report.

It's Over

Gay Marriage

Josh Mershall Talking Points Memo

Since the Supreme Court ruling in June, the writing has been on the wall for banning of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples in the United States. Since June the number of states with marriage equality has jumped from 12 to 18. But last week's lower court decisions in Utah and Ohio leave little doubt that the political fight over gay marriage is now essentially over and that gay marriage will be the law of the land in every state in the country in the pretty near future.

The fact that gay and lesbian couples are now lining up to get married in Utah of all places - arguably the most conservative state in the country - might tell you this on a symbolic level. But the logic that points to the end of the political fight over gay marriage is more concrete, specific and undeniable.

Utah, rightly, got the most attention. But there were two cases last week. The other one in Ohio dealt with a much narrower question: whether the state had to recognize gay marriages in the issuance of death certificates. But both cases rested on the same essential premise: that if the federal government can't discriminate against gay couples, states - by definition - cannot either.

As Judge Timothy Black put it in the Ohio case: "The question presented is whether a state can do what the federal government cannot -- i.e., discriminate against same-sex couples ... simply because the majority of the voters don't like homosexuality (or at least didn't in 2004). Under the Constitution of the United States, the answer is no."

Both judges, perhaps with an element of trolling or humor, cited Justice Scalia's furious dissent in United States v Windsor, in which he claimed that the Court's decision to overturn DOMA would lead logically and inevitably to overturning every state gay marriage ban in the country.

Now, this might all be written off as the work of two federal trial judges. But the tell is in the response of the 10th Circuit, one of the country's more conservative. When Utah appealed to the 10th Circuit to block further gay marriages until its appeal could be heard on the merits, the judges said no. Because the two standards for such a denial are 'irreparable harm' and likelihood to prevail on appeal, the appellate judges - one Bush appointee, one Obama appointee - seemed to be hinting that Utah is likelihood to lose.

In other words, the inexorable Scalia logic appears clear to them too.

Now there are some conceivable federalism grounds where you could maybe eke out a reason why the Constitution bars the federal government from doing something but allows it to states. But it's a big stretch and probably an impossible one in a country where opposition to same sex marriage is declining rapidly every year.

There's also the real world reality that the 10th Circuit denial of a stay seems certain to guarantee a pretty substantial population of same sex couples in Utah by the time the appellate Court actually comes to a decision.

In this sense - and not to be overly dramatic - it's almost reminiscent of the Fall of the Berlin Wall - when actions on the ground, literally on the ground, swept a lot of details and technicalities before it and presented authorities with faits accompli, which they were likely to accept eventually, much more rapidly than they would have preferred.

So yes, this will percolate a bit, as they say. Decisions will come up through the individual Circuits. In pretty short order, the Supreme Court will be forced to revisit the issue. And their logic in the Windsor case will join forces with the march of public opinion to make it almost impossible for them not to issue a broad ruling which invalidates every gay marriage ban in country.

I think everybody, on each side of the issue, has realized for the past two or three years that it is only a matter of time until this happens. But the decade or so of different policies from state to state now appears quite unlikely. I don't want to end without noting that a lot of lawyering remains to be done. Nothing is ever certain. And even when it's all but certain it's still not easy. But I see little way to look at the last week and not conclude that gay marriage will be the law of the land in every state in the country in the near future. Probably during the Obama presidency and maybe sooner still.

Mike Huckabee’s Bully Pulpit: Economic Populism

Lloyd Green The Daily Beast

How can the pious candidate pivot when polls show voters shifting away from religion? The ex-governor and Baptist minister should look at Republicans’ real base—working Americans.

These days, Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, Baptist minister, and current Florida resident, has among the highest favorability ratings among GOP presidential contenders. He is a natural fit for a party that has grown ever more Southern, and one which has become the political venue for White America at Prayer. As a reminder, in 2012 evangelicals cast half of all votes in contested Republican presidential primaries, up from 44 percent in 2008.  

The Daily Beast

Yet the very things that give Huckabee credence with the Republican base may prove to be a hindrance with an electorate that’s growing ever more secular and single, and in which unmarried women now numerically equal regular churchgoers as a voting bloc. Indeed, just last week, a cluster of polls showed that deism is on the upswing in America. (Deism is the belief in a supreme being who is a creator who does not intervene in the universe.) All of this should make any presidential aspirant who would wear his religion on his sleeve step back and take notice.

For the first time in more than three decades, less than a majority of Americans think of the clergy as ethical or honest, with the numbers showing a stark divide based upon political affiliation. Republicans view the clergy more favorably than do Democrats or independents, and that is no surprise. 

But more disturbing for Huckabee and the GOP is that America’s diminished satisfaction with its religious leaders is not just about errant ministers, priests, and rabbis. Rather, it’s about religion itself.   

Nowadays, less than three-quarters of Americans believe in God, and even a majority of Catholics reject the idea that God intervenes in daily life. More than a fifth of Americans describe themselves as not at all religious, while fewer than half of Republicans believe in creationism.

Attitudinally, a mainstream politician like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie can greet these numbers with a shrug, and get on with his campaign and his life. But it’s a challenge for a faith-based candidate like Huckabee, for whom religion is a significant part of his agenda and identity. 

Going forward, if Huckabee’s message is simply about religion, he will have an uphill climb on Election Day, assuming he were to win the Republican nomination.  Historically, voters have been uncomfortable with politicians whose religious or regional identities overwhelm their candidacies, with William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith and Jimmy Carter offering the clearest examples. Of the three, Carter was the only one to win and then only by a narrow margin, and he was a one-term wonder.

Bryan twice lost to William McKinley, in 1896 and 1900, and then again in 1908, to William Howard Taft. Bryan is best remembered for his “Cross of Gold Speech,” in which he made his stand as an economic populist, and for his role at the Scopes trial, in which a Tennessee schoolteacher went to jail for teaching evolution. Bryan aided the prosecution and testified that the flood recorded in the Book of Genesis occurred precisely in 2348 B.C.

Smith, a four-term governor from New York, lost to Republican Herbert Hoover in a landslide after Smith had made “Sidewalks of New York” his campaign song, while his opponents battered Smith over his Catholicism. In the end, Smith even failed to carry his home state.

In 1976, Carter, who was then Georgia’s governor, became the first known born-again Christian to win the presidency. On the trail, Carter repeatedly injected his faith into the race. But even in the aftermath of Watergate, Richard Nixon’s resignation, and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Carter won with just 50.8 percent of the popular vote against Ford.

So what should Huckabee do if he cares about reaching beyond his cultural core? For starters, he should actually take a page from Bryan’s playbook and talk about the concerns of working Americans—the GOP’s base.

Huckabee should deliver a jeremiad lambasting Washington for its role in fostering the housing collapse and the Great Recession. He should hammer home how the government precipitated economic calamity by juicing up the housing market, and turning housing policy into a taxpayer-funded vehicle for vote-buying. And Huckabee should not hesitate to use the recent words of federal judge Jed Rakoff, who was appointed by Bill Clinton to the federal bench to make his point.

In Rakoff’s telling, “in the year 2000, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo increased to 50 percent the percentage of low-income mortgages that the government-sponsored entities known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were required to purchase, helping to create the conditions that resulted in over half of all mortgages being subprime at the time the housing market began to collapse in 2007.”   The judge leaves no doubt as to who is to blame.

Still, playing on resentments has its limits. Criticizing Natalie Portman for first becoming a mother and then a wife—as Huckabee did in 2011—is bad politics. According to the Pew Research Center, single mothers make up one in four households with children under 18; and, as Chris Cilizza of The Washington Post notes, they vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

So Huckabee needs to show some non-judgmental leg on modernity, and going after Portman is not the way to do it.  Instead, he should also talk about launching a war on Alzheimer’s disease, as baby boomers now file through retirement. Just as FDR set in motion the March of Dimes to eradicate polio and Puritan minister Cotton Mather went after smallpox in early 18th-century Boston, Huckabee should make eliminating this malady a stated priority. If 2012 teaches the Republicans anything, it is that simply bashing Obamacare is not enough to get you to the White House.

To get beyond the Iowa Caucuses and the South Carolina primary, Huckabee also must be prepared to articulate a synthesis of modernity and religion. Is he up to it? As Ron Fournier of the National Journal retweeted, “Last time I underestimated Huckabee was when he wandered into my Arkansas office, an unknown minister and first-time pol.”

Al Qaeda Growing Rich Off Ransom Payments

Jamie Dettmer Daily Beast

As the British government urges the UN to crack down on ransoms to terrorist groups, jihadists in the Maghreb are upping their hostage prices.

Al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and the Middle East are increasingly funding themselves from ransom payments, which now average over $5 million when it comes to the going rate for the release of a Western hostage in the Sahara. And the problem of kidnapping is only going to worsen unless Western governments, businesses and non-profits observe a ban on paying up, say British officials.

In the past three years, jihadists groups linked to al-Qaeda and other radicals have raked in at least $70 million in ransom money—and with each year, the average financial demand from abductors has jumped, according to the British Foreign Office. A year ago, the average ransom paid in exchange for a Western hostage in the Sahara was $4 million—up from $2 million a couple of years before that.

Jihadist kidnapping is on the rise across North Africa, Yemen and Nigeria, British officials say, and has skyrocketed in the last year in Syria, where more than 30 journalists have been abducted as well as several civil-society and aid workers.

With more jihadist groups emerging in the region and with al-Qaeda affiliates multiplying, British officials are now pushing a draft resolution at the United Nations to remind member states of their obligation to uphold and abide by bans on extortion money. “Paying ransoms fuels the problem and increases the risk of kidnapping,” says a British spokesman for the UK delegation to the UN.

But security industry insiders say that though the 15-member Security Council  is bound to adopt the UK resolution, most countries will continue to pay for the release of nationals, or allow their corporations and NGOs to do so.

“They can talk all they like at the UN but the French, the Italians and the Poles among others will cough up,” says an American private security consultant who has been involved in hostage negotiations this year in Syria. “Everyone knows it is a bad idea and they say they don’t do it but everyone apart from the Americans and the British will persist in dropping cash from helicopters over the Sahara or transporting suitcases stuffed with money across the Turkish border into Syria.”

A UN resolution adopted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks banned countries from financing terrorism, including through ransoms for their kidnapped citizens. And in the summer at the G8 Summit held in Northern Ireland, the leaders of the top eight industrial nations expressed alarm at “the increasingly fragmented and geographically diverse threat posed by terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and its affiliates,” and at “the threat posed by kidnapping for ransom by terrorists,” as they said in an official communiqué. They also rejected “unequivocally…the payment of ransoms to terrorists”

“Payments to terrorists from Sahel to the Horn of Africa helped fuel instability in the region, and contributed to large scale attacks,” the G8 leaders said in the communiqué, which warned that ransom money helps jihadists recruit and improve their operational capabilities. The leaders of France, Italy, Canada and Germany all endorsed the no-ransom agreement but all those countries have paid out ransoms for their kidnapped citizens or provided tacit approval for payments made by businesses and NGOs—perhaps since the G8 summit—say diplomats and security industry insiders.

The British draft resolution is a follow-up to the G8 communiqué.

Payments recently have included $22 million to Al Qaeda in Yemen for the release of Swiss, Austrian and Finnish hostages. French newspaper Le Monde claimed in Octoberthat France paid Al Qaeda in the Maghreb $34 million in exchange for four Frenchmen who had been held captive for three years after being seized from a uranium mine operated by French nuclear company Areva in the northern Nigerian desert town of Arlit.

At a ceremony to greet the freed men at an airport south of Paris, French President François Hollande said their return was a moment of “immense joy.” One of the hostages didn’t at first notice the French leader and fell weeping into the arms of his wife and two daughters. Speaking on French television, the country’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, insisted that no ransom had been forthcoming and the hostages’ employer Areva also was adamant it had paid no money to AQIM.

In January, Hollande said unlike his predecessors in the Elysée Palace he had adopted a no-ransom policy.

Last April, a leaked confidential Nigerian government report noted that $3.15 million had been paid to the extremist Islamist group Boko Haram for the freeing of a family of seven French hostages in April. Cameroon released several Boko Haram detainees to sweeten the deal. The report did not detail who had exactly paid the money. The French government denied any involvement in a ransom payment and Nigerian officials declined to comment after the report had been leaked.

The U.S. adopted a no-ransom policy back in the Nixon presidency. The only breach came with Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra deals for the return of American hostages held in Lebanon. Britain’s no-concessions policy dates back to the 1970s.

“There has been a noticeable uptick in hostage-taking since the early 2000s,” says Jonathan Schanzer, a Mideast expert with the Washington DC-based think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “And it is providing windfalls for the terrorists. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors involved with the denials by governments that they don’t pay.”

For governments, though, a powerful political and PR dynamic comes into play when their citizens are held hostage and their plight displayed publicly on videos uploaded on YouTube and other social media sites. Failure to secure their quick release can erode voter confidence and advertise the impotence of government.

Critics of the U.S. and British hardline position say that while withholding ransoms denies terrorist organizations funding, it doesn’t deter jihadists from seizing Americans and Britons. “Americans and Britons still get kidnapped,” says a private security adviser. It can also seal their fate. In 2009, four European tourists were seized in Mali and three of them—two Swiss and a German—were freed after $2.8 million was paid. The Briton, Edwin Dyer, was murdered.

Al Goldstein, Pioneering Pornographer, Dies at 77

By ANDY NEWMAN NY TIMES

Al Goldstein, the scabrous publisher whose Screw magazine pushed hard-core pornography into the cultural mainstream, died on Thursday at a nursing home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. He was 77.

The cause was believed to be renal failure, his lawyer, Charles C. DeStefano, said.

Mr. Goldstein did not invent the dirty magazine, but he was the first to present it to a wide audience without the slightest pretense of classiness or subtlety. Sex as depicted in Screw was seldom pretty, romantic or even particularly sexy. It was, primarily, a business, with consumers and suppliers like any other.

The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was succinct. “We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ,” it read. “We will apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We will be the Consumer Reports of sex.”

Mr. Goldstein, who lived to shock and offend and was arrested more than a dozen times on obscenity charges, stuck around long enough for social mores and technology to overtake him. By the time his company went bankrupt in 2003, he was no longer a force in the $10-billion-a-year industry he pioneered. But for better or worse, his influence was undeniable.

“He clearly coarsened American sensibilities,” Alan M. Dershowitz, the civil liberties advocate and Mr. Goldstein’s sometime lawyer, said in 2004.

“Hefner did it with taste,” Mr. Dershowitz added, referring to Hugh Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy, which predated Screw by 15 years. “Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.”

Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ‘70s.

A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr. Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show, “Midnight Blue,” to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself and, most troubling to his defenders, his own family.

“I’m infantile, compulsive, always acting out my fantasies,” he told Playboy in 1974. “There’s nothing I’ll inhibit myself from doing.”

Alvin Goldstein was born on Jan. 10, 1936, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, one of two sons of Sam and Gertrude Goldstein. His father was a news photographer.

Mr. Goldstein spent much of his childhood stuttering, wetting the bed, getting beaten up by bullies and amassing the portfolio of grudges that would fuel his passions. A lifelong habitué of psychoanalysts’ couches, he blamed a meek father and an adulterous, insensitive mother for his complexes.

Before he found his calling, Mr. Goldstein served in the Army, captained the debate team at Pace College and briefly followed his father’s footsteps into photojournalism, shooting Jacqueline Kennedy on a 1962 state trip to Pakistan and spending several days in a Cuban prison for taking unauthorized photos of Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl. He married miserably, sold insurance successfully by day and sought solace in pornographic movie houses and brothels by night.

After his marriage failed, Mr. Goldstein drifted. According to Gay Talese’s book “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” Mr. Goldstein ran a dime-pitch concession at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair; sold rugs, encyclopedias and his own blood; drove a cab; and landed a job as an industrial spy, infiltrating a labor union. That experience so appalled him that he wrote an exposé about it for The New York Free Press, a radical weekly.

The article did not make the splash Mr. Goldstein was hoping for, but he became friends with one of The Press’s editors, Jim Buckley, and persuaded him that there was money to be made covering the growing commercial sex scene, which the establishment press mentioned only to vilify.

Investing $175 apiece, the two men published the first issue of Screw in November 1968: a 12-page Baedeker to the underworld featuring blue-movie reviews, nude photos, a guide to dirty bookstores and a field test by Mr. Goldstein of an artificial vagina.

Although they had difficulty finding a willing distributor for a tabloid whose first cover featured a photograph of a bikini-clad brunette stroking a large kosher salami, Screw’s circulation soon reached 100,000 — or so Mr. Goldstein claimed (it was never audited) — and the magazine stepped up its ambitions.

As quasi-legal, discreetly misnamed “massage parlors” multiplied across the city in the early 1970s, Mr. Goldstein assigned himself to visit and rate each one. He claimed that his early, enthusiastic review of the movie “Deep Throat” helped turn it into hard-core pornography’s first bona fide mainstream hit.

An issue in the 1970s with frontally nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sold more than a half-million copies, Mr. Goldstein said — a fraction of the seven million Playboy sold in those days, but enough to raise Mr. Goldstein’s profile considerably.

With renown came obscenity arrests and lawsuits, which Mr. Goldstein in turn milked for maximum publicity. (He also wrote countless scathing editorials accusing his accusers of hypocrisy, often accompanied by crude photo collages showing them engaged in humiliating sex acts.) Mr. Goldstein, claiming First Amendment protection, beat most of the charges, occasionally paying nominal fines.

In 1973, though, a United States Supreme Court decision made it easier to prosecute pornographers. Before then, one legal test for obscenity was whether a publication was “utterly without redeeming social value.” The 1973 decision broadened the definition to include material that lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” and it empowered communities to set local standards for whether such material was obscene.

This led federal prosecutors to direct some postmasters in Kansas to order copies of Screw. Upon delivery, Mr. Goldstein was charged with 12 obscenity and conspiracy counts and faced up to 60 years in prison.

His lawyers argued that the anticensorship diatribes in Screw made the magazine sufficiently political, though Mr. Goldstein himself ridiculed this defense, insisting that a reader’s erection “is its own redeeming value.” After three years and two trials his conviction in the first was overturned, and the second ended in a hung jury. Mr. Goldstein’s company, Milky Way Productions, paid a $30,000 fine in return for the dropping of personal charges against him and Mr. Buckley.

Mr. Goldstein also won a copyright suit filed by the Pillsbury Company after Screw depicted its signature doughboy in flagrante, and an invasion-of-privacy suit filed by an actress in a cracker commercial that Mr. Goldstein repurposed for “Midnight Blue.”

Screw made Mr. Goldstein rich enough to afford a townhouse down the block from Bill Cosby on the Upper West Side. But as time went on and hard-core pornography became widely available, the magazine seemed less and less radical, and he began losing interest.

“There is a pattern to American life that what is avant-garde becomes commonplace,” Mr. Goldstein said in 1981. “The mass market eventually assimilates that which is innovative or revolutionary.”

Mr. Goldstein began a dozen other magazines, with titles like Death, Smut, Cigar and Mobster Times, all of which failed. He bought a mansion in Pompano Beach, Fla., where he made an abortive run for county sheriff in 1992.

Gradually, Mr. Goldstein’s empire declined. The Village Voice and other newspapers, many of them free, siphoned off the ads for escort services that were Screw’s mainstay. Mr. Goldstein failed to stake out strong positions in the booming sectors of video and Internet pornography.

Meanwhile, his vendettas came to seem more petty and personal. He was convicted in 2002 of harassing a former secretary in the pages of Screw, though that conviction, too, was overturned. After his son, Jordan, disinvited him to his graduation from Harvard Law School, Mr. Goldstein published doctored photos showing Jordan having sex with various men and with his own mother, Mr. Goldstein’s third ex-wife, Gena.

Mr. Goldstein eventually married five times. His survivors include his son. Mr. Goldstein was long estranged from his fifth wife, Christine.

In quick succession starting in 2003, Mr. Goldstein lost his company, his Florida mansion and a series of subsistence jobs in New York, including one as a greeter at the Second Avenue Deli. In 2004, while living in a homeless shelter, he was arrested and charged with stealing books from a Barnes & Noble store.

His long decline found him bouncing from his in-laws’ floor in Queens to Veterans Affairs hospitals to a cramped apartment in Staten Island paid for by his friend, the magician Penn Jillette, to the Brooklyn nursing home where he spent most of his final years.

There were some late bright spots, though. He was briefly a star catering salesman for a Manhattan bagel store. He blogged for Booble, a website devoted to the pornography business.

And at age 69, he was nominated for best supporting actor at the Adult Video News Awards for his age-defying role in “Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed.”

“Only in America,” Mr. Goldstein said.

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The Real Walt Disney, Not the ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ Version

Andrew Romano The Daily Beast

Many of us either think of him as a deity—innocent and imaginative—or a demon—fascist and racist—but what was the man really like? Is the truth anywhere to be found in the new film Saving Mr. Banks?

Who was the real Walt Disney? There is a moment about three-quarters of the way through Saving Mr. Banks, the new Disney movie about Uncle Walt’s attempts to wrest the rights to Mary Poppins from her very protective creator, author P.L. Travers, that strikes me as a winking reenactment, courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures, of our continuing curiosity about the real man behind Mickey.

Hart Preston/Time & Life Pictures via Getty Images

In the scene, Travers (Emma Thompson), who is prim, snappish, repressed, and almost supernaturally English, marches into the Disney executive suite demanding to see the genial, resolute Walt (Tom Hanks). She is upset about those blasted dancing penguins. Disney promised her no animation.

Disney’s secretaries try to deter Travers. You can’t go in there, they squeak, tottering in her wake. Mrs. Travers, please! It seems that something is happening in Walt’s inner sanctum that no living soul is supposed to witness.

Travers doesn’t care. She throws open the door anyway.

And there, at last, is Walt: daydreaming at his desk, a halo of family photographs on the wall behind him—and a cigarette (gasp!) in his hand. “I’m sorry,” Disney sighs as he puts out the butt. “I’d hate to set a bad example for the kids.”

It’s true that Walt Disney wasn’t perfect, the movie seems to be saying. After all, he smoked!

How you react to this “revelation” depends on what you believe about the fellow. Disney was fairly uncontroversial while he was still alive. But ever since he died in 1966 from (what else?) lung cancer, he’s been inspiring some very mixed feelings.

If you’re the sort Disneyphile who thinks Walt could no wrong—and there are lots of you out there on the Internet—you’re likely to see Saving Mr. Banks and say to yourself, Good for Walt Disney Pictures. They were under no obligation to show the old man warts and all—but they did. Bravo.

If, on the other hand, you’re a Disneyphobe—and there are lots of you out there on the Internet, too—you’re likely to have the altogether different reaction. Warts? you might say. What warts? When Travers barrels into that office, we should have gotten a glimpse of what Walt Disney was really like behind closed doors.

At which point you might recite the now-standard litany of “dark” Disney secrets. “Walt was a fascist.” “Walt was an anti-Semite.” “Walt was a racist.” And (if you’re the sort of Disneyphobe who dwells in the deepest, darkest corners of the web) “Walt was an Illuminati pedophile who liked to wear his mother’s dresses and lipstick and was obsessed with the human buttocks.”

Why do some of us need to believe that a figure like Walt Disney was a saint? Why do the rest of us need to believe that he was a dastardly, irredeemable creep? Why isn’t the truth about Disney good enough? It’s certainly much more interesting than either of these reductive caricatures—as the truth usually is.

The guy was hardly perfect. In 1941, Disney’s animators staged a strike that took four months—and the intervention of the federal government—to resolve. Walt was convinced that leftist agents had stirred up trouble on behalf of Screen Cartoonists Guild, and from then on he was a virulent anti-communist, even though he wasn’t particularly political. (He would go on to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness.)

In the 1940s, Disney’s fellow right-wingers convinced him to join an organization dedicated to ridding Hollywood of commies: the Orwellian-sounding Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Many of its members were known anti-Semites—so much so that Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, both anti-communists themselves, refused to join. Disney had no such qualms. He also approved a pair of cartoons, Three Little Pigs and The Opry House, that poked fun at Jewish stereotypes—the former by disguising the Big Bad Wolf as a hook-nosed peddler and the latter by having Mickey dress and dance like a hasid.

Disney’s cartoons could be racially insensitive as well. In Mickey’s Mellerdrammer, the iconic mouse appears in blackface. The original version of Fantasia featured a half-donkey, half-black centaurette servant named Sunflower; in the pop-up book, she eats a watermelon. And the full-length film Song of the South was controversial even in its own time; upon its release the NAACP said it “perpetuate[d] a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.” While casting the movie, Disney himself used the term “pickaninny,” and during a story meeting for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs he “referred to the dwarfs piling on top of each other as a ‘nigger pile,’” according to Neal Gabler’s exhaustively researched 2006 biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

‘Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination’ by Neal Gabler. 912 pp. Vintage. $22. ()

Disney even tangoed with Nazi sympathizers on occasion. Animator Art Babbitt claimed to have seen his boss at a pre-World War II meeting of the German American Bund, an immigrant association with “a definite pro-Nazi slant.” and former Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl once said that when she was looking for work in Hollywood after Kristallnacht, “no studio head would even screen her movies except Walt Disney.” (According to Riefenstahl, Disney “told her he admired her work” but was worried about damaging his reputation “if it became known that he was considering hiring her.”) In The Wayward Canary, from 1932, Minnie Mouse seems to own a lighter with a swastika on it, for some reason.

And yet even though Disney seems to have uttered some racially insensitive remarks, associated with anti-Semites, and met a Nazi or two, he doesn’t seem to have been a racist, bigot, or fascist himself. As Gabler—Disney’s most objective biographer and the first reporter to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives—has written, “there is no evidence whatsoever in the extensive Disney Archives of any anti-Semitic remarks or actions by Walt,” and while he did use “a variety of crude terms for blacks … there didn’t seem to be any malice in these words, just obtuseness.” Disney hired a Jewish left-wing screenwriter, Maurice Rapf, to draft a screenplay of Song of the South, and he later approached several African-American luminaries—actor Paul Robeson, actress Hattie McDaniel, NAACP secretary Walter White, Howard University scholar Alvin Locke—for input on the film.

According to Gabler, “most of what we hear about Disney as a racist or anti-Semite was circulated by animators who had struck in 1941.” When one of them, David Swift, left Disney Studios for Columbia Pictures that year, he complained that Walt’s last words to him had been “it’s where you belong, with those Jews.” But Swift returned in 1945 and later said he “owed everything” to Disney. When Swift left again in the 1950s, Disney reportedly told him “there is still a candle burning in the window if you ever want to come back.” (Swift went on to write and directPollyanna and The Parent Trap for Disney). And Walt “never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority,” again according to Gabler’s research.

In short, Disney was a fairly typical product of his era: a man who probably absorbed some racial and ethnic biases as a child in the early years of the 20th century, then worked to overcome those biases as an adult in the 1950s and 1960s—sometimes with mixed results. (He eventually distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance and was named “1955 Man of the Year” by the B’nai B’rith chapter in Beverly Hills.) As Gabler puts it, “the truth about Walt Disney seems much more complicated and nuanced than either his enemies or supporters would have you believe.”

So why do we still have such a bipolar relationship with Walt? I suppose both impulses—to build him up and to knock him down—make a certain kind of sense. Instinctively, many of us want to trust the man who, perhaps more than any other, shaped us as children, and who will go on to shape our children and our children’s children. Because we welcomed him into our lives when we were innocent, we’d prefer to think that Walt Disney was as innocent as we were—that his motives were always pure, his intentions were always good, and that he always had our best interests at heart.

The flip side is that, by promoting himself as an exemplar of wholesomeness and decency and childlike wonder, Disney invited our scrutiny as well. Like a pedophile priest or closeted ant-gay politician—anyone, in short, who conveys one image in public and betrays it in private—Disney is a prime target for cynics who believe that any claim of righteousness inevitably masks some sort of secret depravity. He’s good hypocrite material.

But insisting that Disney was a hero, or a villain, makes him a little less human—and a lot less fascinating. (The same is true of any celebrity, really.) Saving Mr. Banks is a perfect example. In the film, P.L. Travers is eventually persuaded to relinquish the rights to her beloved Mary Poppins when Disney shows up at her house in London, dials up the sincerity, and demonstrates that he really understands Mary—and, by extension, Travers herself. A few minutes later, Travers is sitting in a darkened theater at the star-studded premiere, smiling and weeping and singing along to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”

It’s happy ending. It’s just not true. Travers did, in fact, cry throughout the premiere of Mary Poppins in 1964. But those weren’t tears of joy; they were tears of frustration. Unlike in Saving Mr. Banks, Travers was never won over by Disney, his minions, or the movie they made together. Even at the premiere she was still pleading with Walt to axe the animated penguins. Disney’s response was brief and barbed. “Pamela, the ship has sailed,” he said. Then he walked away. Travers “spent the rest of her life maligning what she saw as the maudlin mess her Mary Poppins had become on the big screen”, and when she agreed to a stage an adaptation in the 1990s, she insisted, right there in her last will and testament, that no Americans, and certainly no one who had been involved in that dreadful Disney film, would be allowed to participate.

The Walt Disney who could have that effect on P.L. Travers and still make a great children’s movie—that’s the real Walt Disney. And he’s an inspiring Walt Disney because he’s a human Walt Disney—neither deity nor demon.

Sadly, he’s nowhere to be found in Saving Mr. Banks. At the end of the day, the man behind Mickey was hardly some sort of bitter-tasting medicine. But he wasn’t a spoonful of sugar, either.

It Is Not About Gays Any More

Kundalini Majumder Tehelka.com

Photo: Shubhashish Dey

I was horrified as the lawyer of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) gave a sound bite on 11 December regarding being the original petitioner in the case that saw the Supreme Court of India declare sexual minorities as criminals once again. I still remember the day when the Delhi High Court had struck down Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality. I was studying as an exchange student in Paris. In the country that gave the slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’, I was proud to be an Indian. I was proud to be part of a country which gave equal rights to all minorities – religious, regional, caste, gender and then sexual. I was proud to be the inheritor of a Constitution that guaranteed all these rights. Being a constitutionalist by ideology, I proudly declared to my non-Indian friend – “We have the longest constitution in the world which protects everyone. It should be a bible for the free world.” How wrong I was.

Nearly five years later, I was shocked by my own Supreme Court. The guardian of the Indian Constitution, the father of so many landmark judgments that gave rights to so many minorities in this country – Muslims, Christians, Dalits, women – simply left it to the Parliament to legislate on this matter. Today I know how it feels to be a minority in your own country. Today I know how Dalits feel when upper caste men burn down their houses and declare them untouchable. Today I know how Muslims feel when Hindu fanatics declare them as non-Indians. Today I know how Ahmadis feel when a majority of their own community think that they do not have the right to live. Today I know how Christians in Odisha and Karnataka feel when their churches are vandalised. Today I know how it feels when young men and women are forced to follow diktats from khap panchayats. Today I know how it feels when Kashmiris are declared terrorists. Today I realise what it feels like when the same Kashmiris refuse to accept the pain of their fellow Kashmiri Pandits. Today I know how it feels when Manipuris are called foreigners on the streets of Delhi. Today I know what feels to be a lone woman walking on a deserted street. Today I am a minority, a criminal in my own country.

What hurts more is that the same people whose rights you have been advocating for years refuse to accept that you have rights too. Stuck in their medieval mental setup, they believe that the only minorities in the country are from their own religions, the only equality that should exist should be for their own communities, the only intolerance that exists in the country is from others. It amazes me that the same AIMPLB which talks about minority rights would be instrumental in denying sexual minorities their rights. Sections of other religious groups, including Hindu ones, have contributed to creating this human rights disaster. I find each and every argument put forward by these homophobic groups highly disturbing as there is a danger that in the future (There have been instances in past as well) the same arguments would be used against religious minorities. For instance, the argument of personal choice becomes laughable as religion might be a choice, but sexuality or gender isn’t.

The Supreme Court’s judgment regarding section 377 is not about the gaycommunity anymore. It has to be taken to the very beginning when our forefathers sat down to frame the constitution and decided the kind of India we should inherit. Like it or not, it is about the idea of India. Today, more than 65 years after independence, we are still stuck at the beginning. What kind of India do we want? The fight is still between two currents of thought – one that supports equality for all across caste, religion, sex and sexuality; and another that still believes in a country where certain sections of the society are more equal than others and some not equal enough.

Mars rover finds chemical ingredients for life to have thrived

Amina Khan Los Angeles Times

Billions of years ago, when early life was just taking hold on Earth, Mars was home to an ancient lake filled with the right chemical ingredients for life to thrive, scientists said Monday.

Drilling into dry rock, NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs that Gale Crater was once watery, perhaps ringed with ice and snow, and could potentially have hosted an entire Martian biosphere based on a type of microbe found in caves on Earth. Such primitive organisms, called chemolithoautotrophs, feed on chemicals found in rocks and make their own energy.

"Ancient Mars was more habitable than we imagined," said Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, lead scientist for the Curiosity mission. This wet, potentially Earth-like environment could have lasted for tens of millions of years, giving life a wide-open window to emerge.

The findings, described Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and detailed among half a dozen papers published in the journal Science, impressed scientists who were not involved with the mission.

"They're really quite amazing," said Malcolm Walters, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia who helped find some of the earliest microfossils on Earth. "Now we have enormous detail on the chemistry of sediments [on Mars]. It's a great leap forward."

Still missing is evidence of the type of organic matter that forms the basis for most life on Earth. Curiosity's search will now focus on that — and thanks to some clever manipulation of the rover's inner laboratory, scientists now know exactly where to look for it.

"I think it's a critical turning point in the mission, to accept a much more significant challenge," Grotzinger said.

Mars' geologic history is inscribed in its layers of sedimentary rock, and Curiosity set out to read it after landing in Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover's primary goal was to search for life-friendly environments at Mt. Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound whose clay-rich layers could reveal details about Gale's environment over the eons.

But rather than head straight to Mt. Sharp, the rover took a months-long detour to an intriguing spot called Yellowknife Bay. There, Curiosity drilled into two mudstone rocks, named John Klein and Cumberland.

It was a risk to turn away from the planned mission, and it paid off, Grotzinger said.

The rocks, dated to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, have turned up a smorgasbord of elements needed for life, including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus. They also show signs of sulfates, sulfides and other compounds that would have been fuel for chemolithoautotrophs.

What's more, the water that transformed these rocks had a neutral pH and would have been drinkable, unlike the highly acidic water detected by NASA's rover Opportunity at Meridiani Planum, on the other side of the planet.

Most likely, the lake would have been "suitable for quite a wide range of microorganisms as opposed to just extremophiles" that can survive salty, acidic environments, said David Catling, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new studies.

Curiosity has not yet found any organic carbon, the type that's combined with hydrogen and is a mainstay of life on Earth. That may be partly because its inner lab cooks soil samples to analyze the gases they form, and the test ends up destroying some crucial information in the process.

Life could certainly evolve and thrive without organic carbon. In a past watery environment, chemolithoautotrophs would have done just fine with the ingredients already found on Mars. That said, scientists do want to find organic carbon because it would indicate that the planet once had a wider range of life-friendly habitats.

But scientists feared that the surface had been exposed to cosmic radiation for so long — perhaps hundreds of millions of years — that any traces within reach of Curiosity's drill were long gone.

It was "a pretty serious concern," said Kenneth Farley, a Caltech geochemist and lead author of one of the Science papers.

So Farley directed Curiosity to analyze several soil samples and found telltale gases — such as helium-3, neon-21 and argon-36 — that helped pin down the age of the Martian surface. It was about 78 million years old, much younger than scientists had expected. That meant the amount of cosmic radiation exposure was also lower than they expected.

This was a relief, but how was it possible? The team noticed a small cliff, called a scarp, located some distance away. The geologists soon realized that the edge of the scarp had once extended to the top of the rocks they were sampling; over timeit eroded, leaving the rocks newly exposed to radiation.

And while they couldn't dig underneath the scarp, they could drill right by the base of it, where cosmic radiation exposure was still minimal.

If any organic carbon exists in Gale Crater, the foot of one of these scarps would be the best place to search for it, the scientists concluded.

The scientists plan to take this information and run with it — at least as fast as good judgment (and Curiosity's theoretical top speed of 1.57 inches per second on flat ground) will allow.

In about two months, Curiosity will take a detour to an outcrop called KMS-9, Grotzinger said Monday. Scientists are not sure whether it held a lake, but they hope to ride right up to a protected spot and deploy Curiosity's drill.

"You just never know what you'll encounter," said NASA scientist Douglas Ming, who led the organic carbon study. "One thing I've come to expect doing Mars research is to expect the unexpected."

amina.khan@latimes.com