Public Radio International interviewed me yesterday about journalists being called upon to testify, against their wishes, at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. If you have an idle six minutes in which you would enjoy nothing more than listening to the interview, click here and scroll down to “Peter Maass Interview.”

If a prize existed for the oddest diary of the year, Dragisa Blanusa would be the surefire winner. He was the governor of the Belgrade jail in which Slobodan Milosevic was held for 89 days before being extradited to the Hague. Last year Blanusa published his diary in Serbia, and Granta has just translated extracts of it. Some highlights:

April 1: At four-thirty a.m., the Interior Ministry warned me that Milosevic was on his way. Within minutes, a Chrysler jeep and two BMWs with darkened windows swept through the gates and screeched to a halt in the jail yard. Slobodan Milosevic stepped out of one of the BMWs. He was talking into his mobile phone, pleading with his wife to calm down. “Mira…Mira…” he said. Milosevic was taken to our reception department, where a guard confiscated his belt, shoelaces and tie. “Don’t worry,” Milosevic smirked. “I’m not going to hang myself.”

April 8: Milosevic’s daughter, Marija, came to visit with Mira. Milosevic was delighted to see his daughter. “Where have you been?” he bellowed. “My little terrorist!”

April 16: I wondered whether it might be better for him to see his wife and daughter less often. Whenever they visited, they took his blood pressure and talked all the time about doctors and drug treatments. This irritated Milosevic immensely. Yet his blood pressure would jump with worry if Mira was even five minutes late. On one occasion, he told the prison doctor: “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. Marija screams, Mira cries, and I have to put up with it all.”

May 3: Goran Cavlina delivered The Hague indictment. “I won’t even touch that pile of shit,” Milosevic declared. The judge was not deterred. He put the envelope between the bars of Milosevic’s cell. Milosevic asked the guards to take it away. “We’re very sorry, but we can’t do that,” they said. So the indictment sits between the bars, with Milosevic grumbling that it’s been left there without his consent.

May 5: Milosevic reads a great deal both in English and in Serbian. He reads thrillers mainly, as well as mysteries and spy novels. Among the books he has read are: Wilbur Smith, “The Seventh Scroll,” Robert Ludlum, “The Corsican Story,” Ivo Andric, “The Bridge on the Drina,” Petar Petrovic Njegos, “The Mountain Wreath,” Joseph Murphy, “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind,” John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,” C. S. Forester, “Captain Hornblower” and “Lieutenant Hornblower” and “Admiral Hornblower.”

May 22: I told the ex-president that the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights wants to come and visit him. “I’m not an animal to be displayed for everyone to stare at,” Milosevic snorted. “Let them stick it up their mother’s cunt. They are world-class shits. Scum.”

May 27: Mira and Marija came again. Whenever Slobo and Mira meet they indulge in long romantic kisses. They look like a young couple in love and they don’t seem to care who’s watching them. Mira will kiss his hands and he’ll kiss hers. I once saw her kiss his knee. Mira calls Slobodan “My little one,” and he says it back to her. She’ll call him “My puppy,” and he’ll call her “My little kitten.” Sometimes the kisses go on for so long that the guards have to pull them apart. Marija gets very upset at this and her father tells her: “Marija dear, they are simply doing their job.”

Not in President Bush’s vocabulary. According to The Washington Post, “a search of the White House Web site indicates Bush has not made an unprompted mention of bin Laden’s name since March 8. That day, at a GOP gathering in Florida, the president spoke of ‘this bin Laden fellow,’ and vowed: ‘We’re going to find him.’ The last time Bush spoke the hated name in any public forum was a July 8 press conference, in which he was specifically asked if he would find bin Laden.”

File this in the “department of little-known tales about the Special Forces”: the Taliban, fearful and confused, believed the Americans possessed a “death ray” that could incinerate any target. This and other colorful nuggets about the Special Forces can be found on an excellent website for a PBS documentary that aired a few weeks ago. A Special Forces soldier recalled how General Rashid Dostum exploited, to ingenius advantage, the Taliban misperceptions: “At Kunduz, we were negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They were saying, ‘We’ll surrender, we’ll march into your camp, but we want to keep our guns.’ Dostum finally said, ‘Put your guns down, take your jackets off, march in here or we’re turning the Americans onto you with the death ray.’ Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter, because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out.” Another Special Forces soldier provided the best explanation, or at least the most colorful one, of the strangeness of the war: “This whole situation is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons.”

Today’s Washington Post has an intriguing story about the Pentagon’s plans for invading Iraq. A rapid assault is being considered in which a softening-up bombing campaign could be as short as two or three days, followed by fast-moving land attacks aimed not at troops, bases and bridges but “regime targets,” such as Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit. “Our interest is to get there very quickly, decapitate the regime, and open the place up, demonstrating that we’re there to liberate, not to occupy,” one military planner tells the Post. The paper quotes another planner as saying, “The Iraqi military will be told, ‘if you come out of your staging areas, you’ll be destroyed, but if you stay, you’ll live.’” If the fighting goes well, it could be over in a week, according to the best-case scenario.

Two other articles worth reading about Iraq: this one, by Jim Fallows in The Atlantic, notes the great difficulty we may have governing Iraq after Saddam has been ousted. And in this story, in The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann argues that the war on Iraq distracts America from the threat posed by Al Qaeda. The piece includes the following quote from Steven Van Evera: “Defining it as a broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don’t take your eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iraq. Instead, the Administration defined it as a broad war on terror, including groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and never will. It leads to a loss of focus. Al Qaeda escapes through the cracks…We’re not out of Bosnia and Kosovo yet, and Iraq is much bigger. It’s a huge occupation and reconstruction. We aren’t good at this.”

What’s with the emergence of exceptional novels by Eastern Europeans or about Eastern Europe? The trend began a few months ago, with new books by Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart and Arthur Phillips. Joining the list is Aleksandar Hemon, whose new novel, “Nowhere Man,” is being released this week. Hemon, a Bosnian who lives in the U.S. and writes in English, has a wonderful literary touch, so I hope to find the time to read his newest offering, about which Shteyngart has written a rave review in The New York Times.

It’s possible to disagree with the Bush team, but it’s not possible to accuse them of being stupid. One of the levers they are using to gain support for an invasion of Iraq is the control of oil resources after Saddam becomes a former dictator. As The Washington Post helpfully explains, countries that support the invasion will find their oil companies rewarded with reconstruction and exploration contracts. Governments that drag their heels or oppose the U.S. will be shut out of a country that holds the world’s largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, is blunt about the situation: “France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we’ll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them…If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them.”

A sign of the times: a high school in southern California is using wireless cameras to track every person and car arriving on campus. Hall monitors will soon carry wireless computers to access the database, and the school is considering an upgrade to face-recognition software. According to The Los Angeles Times, these measures are a response to the twin fears of terrorism and school shootings. Jerry Parli, who has two granddaughters at West Hills High School, doesn’t mind: “It’s a terrible thing, but it’s time to embrace Big Brother.”

If you are not already suffering 9/11-itis, you will after reading this. A game-show winner has been invited to sing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial tribute.

I was in the Balkans when the WTC attack happened last year, so I’m less emotionally invested in its anniversary than my New York friends. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, which I believe I’m not, I think the media is going overboard in its coverage. Surprising? Not at all. But the game-show ridiculousness at the Lincoln Memorial is just one indicator of many that the remembrance of a tragedy is being turned into a promotional farce. September 12 cannot arrive soon enough.

Jacky Rowland, who reported for the BBC from Belgrade for several years, did not see Slobodan Milosevic in the flesh until this week, when she testified against him at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague. It was an intriguing encounter that she writes about in today’s Guardian. Amusingly, when Rowland visited, before her court appearance, the prosecutor of the case, Geoffrey Nice, she noticed a comedy show on his television, and when she asked what to expect from Milosevic’s cross-examination, Nice told her not to worry. “Oh, old Grumpy Paws will probably want to ask you a few questions,” he said.

Old Grumpy Paws?

Tony Kushner has never been to Afghanistan yet in a hallucinatory passage in his play, “Homebody/Kabul,” he conveys the utter strangeness of the country and its unfortunate people. The script has recently been published and the passage in question, though losing some of its power on the printed page, still strikes me as brilliant and far better at communicating the disfigured Afghan psyche, and the difficulty we have understanding it, than anything I have read in newspapers or magazines (or written myself).

The passage comes in the first act, which is a monologue by an English housewife who is the “homebody” of the play’s title (she will travel to Kabul and disappear there). She is sitting in her London home and recalls her recent purchase of ten hats; the shopkeeper happened to be an Afghan whose right hand lacked three fingers. The italics in the passage, which is a fantasy (or maybe not—in the play, truth is like a wisp of smoke), are Kushner’s:

“I ask him to tell me what had happened to his hand. And he says: I was with the Mujahideen, and the Russians did this. I was with the Mujahideen, and an enemy faction of Mujahideen did this. I was with the Russians, I was known to have assisted the Russians, I did informer’s work for Babrak Karmal, my name is in the files if they haven’t been destroyed, the names I gave are in the files, there are no more files, I stole bread for my starving family, I stole bread from a starving family, I profaned, betrayed, according to some stricture I erred and they chopped off the fingers of my hand. Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? The streets are as bare as the mountains now, the buildings are as ragged as mountains and as bare and empty of life, there is no life here only fear, we do not live in the buildings now, we live in terror in the cellars in the caves in the mountains, only God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God’s Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now, only The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice can save us now, only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now. You will never understand. It is hard, it was hard work to get into the U.K. I am happy here in the U.K. I am terrified I will be made to leave the U.K. I cannot wait to leave the U.K. I despise the U.K. I voted for John Major. I voted for Tony Blair. I did not, I cannot vote, I do not believe in voting, the people who ruined my hand were right to do so, they were wrong to do so, my hand is most certainly ruined, you will never understand, why are you buying so many hats?”

I’ve owned a digital camera for more than two years, and I’ve had this blog for more than half a year, and finally I’ve figured out how to put them together. To mark the occasion, I’ve selected a photo (above) that I shot in the parliament building in Belgrade a day after it was stormed by protesters demanding the removal of Slobodan Milosevic. The graffitti, which is in Serbian, calls on Milosevic to perform a particular sexual act upon himself.

While we’re on the subject, the picture that’s below is of a ransacked perfume shop owned by Milosevic’s much-hated son, Marko, who was known for the fast cars he drove and the spectacular crashes he got into with them. The graffitti suggests that he perform the previously-mentioned sexual act upon his father.

Genius. Go.

My book may not have been turned into a movie, but it had a cameo role in one, about which there has been some mystery, until now.

The backstory: there’s a scene in “High Fidelity” in which the character played by John Cusack is lying in bed with his girfriend, who will leave him for the guy who lives upstairs. The camera pans to the girlfriend, who is reading my book; you cannot miss the title because you are intended to see it. She will sleep with her neighbor and is reading a book entitled “Love Thy Neighbor”—get it?

“High Fidelity” is a smart movie (based on a great novel by Nick Hornby) that appeals, apparently, to readers of my book, because I received a lot of emails about its cameo. How had I arranged such fantastic product placement? I was as surprised as everyone else, and I’ve always wondered how LTN earned its moment of celluloid fame. Did the makers of the movie search Amazon to find a book with a useful title for the scene? Did a lowly production assistant suggest it at the last minute, as in, “Hey, this might be a good prop”? Unlikely as it might be, was LTN’s appearance related in any way to its (award-winning) content?

A good friend who was in L.A. last week happened to share a meal with one of the screenwriters of “High Fidelity.” My friend, may he be blessed for eternity, popped the question: How did LTN get into the movie? The screenwriter said he was familiar with LTN and thought the title would make for a cute joke about the girlfriend’s fling. He also thought that for the very modest portion of the audience who might be familiar with my book, it would convey another message he wanted to put out—that the girlfriend was intelligent and thoughtful, because she was reading a book that is not unchallenging to its readers.

Mystery solved, happily.

Remember those generous and sensible promises to rebuild Afghanistan, so that it would not become, after the dismissal of the Taliban, a black hole of chaos and violence? The Washington Post reports that a marquee aid project has collapsed because the Asian Development Bank, which pledged to reconstruct the cratered road from Kabul to Kandahar, wound up offering loans to the Afghan government, not grants. The impoverished government refused, noting that it is in no position to assume $100 million in debt for the project.

If you grew up in Los Angeles, as I did, you just lost a close friend. Chick Hearn, the play-by-play announcer of the Lakers, died yesterday. He broadcast 3,338 consecutive games, from 1965 until last year, and invented phrases that define today’s game—air ball, slam dunk, finger roll, garbage time. He was the voice of the Lakers and of Los Angeles, and in lots of homes, kids heard him speak more than their fathers. It’s no fun when childhood legends pass away.

U.S. officials are taking a second look at the oil kingdom, according to The Washington Post: “A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States. ‘The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader,’ stated the explosive briefing…A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as ‘the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent’ in the Middle East.”

I admire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He encourages out-of-the-box thinking and is effective at implementing unconventional plans, such as the Special Forces-led war in Afghanistan. In fact, I admire him so much that I think he should resign. His unusual skills are needed at the State Department and—isn’t this convenient?—Colin Powell’s steady hands would be useful at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld and Powell should switch jobs.

It’s not going to happen, but it isn’t an unreasonable notion. If there’s a non-military solution to the problems in the Middle East—and there might be—Rumsfeld would be the one to figure it out and get it done. It would involve a bold and risky diplomatic approach on Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians/Israelis and Egypt. Powell is too cautious for this sort of ruthless diplomacy; he’s a manager rather than an initiator. Yet his experience in the last Gulf War would make him the right man to lead the Pentagon if Secretary of State Rumsfeld was unable to find a non-military solution.

But cabinet members switching jobs? I must be dreaming.

Newspaper editorials are boring; I spend little time reading them. But the main editorial in today’s New York Times is worth the effort, because it demands, concisely, an honest debate about the merits of invading Iraq. Its most controversial passage:

“One argument for war often floated by officials ought to be disposed of quickly. Military action against Iraq may be justified, but not in response to the terrorism of Sept. 11 or Al Qaeda. To date there is no reliable evidence that Baghdad had any serious connection to either. The dangers posed by Iraq have more to do with protecting American interests in the Middle East than with warding off fresh terrorist attacks on American cities. Iraq is believed to have secret stores of the kind of biological and chemical weapons that terrorists would love to get their hands on. But so do Russia and other countries. While a future link between Iraq and terrorism cannot be excluded, there appears to be no evidence so far that Baghdad means to share its deadly arsenal with others.”

We’ve had our share of economic bubbles—the Internet, NASDAQ, the Dow—so why not a political bubble? Today’s Washington Post reports the Bush Administration has failed to provide evidence that Iraq has any factory making biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. A few days back, the Post noted that senior military officers oppose an invasion because the current policy of containment is working. And The New York Times has pointed out that an invasion could severely damage the U.S. economy (most of the $60 billion tab for the Persian Gulf war was picked up by the Saudis). Senate hearings on invading Iraq begin today. It’s not inconceivable that one day people might look back on the idea of invading Iraq and, like the merger of AOL and TimeWarner, say, What were they thinking?

WP on factories: “The decision about war hinges largely on a single issue: whether Iraq is actively seeking biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that could pose a threat to the United States and its allies, and how to respond if so…But intelligence officials and military experts on Iraq express caution. While many analysts are convinced that Iraq is rebuilding its stockpile of weapons, the White House has not publicly offered evidence of a single factory or lab known to be actively producing them. Congressional officials who receive classified briefings on Iraq say the case has not yet been made there, either—in part because of what some officials perceive as a lack of reliable intelligence-gathering on the ground.”

WP on military opposition: “Despite President Bush’s repeated bellicose statements about Iraq, many senior U.S. military officers contend that President Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq to force a change of leadership in Baghdad…The senior officers’ position—that the risks of dropping a successful containment policy for a more aggressive military campaign are so great that it would be unwise to do so—was made clear in the course of several interviews with officials inside and outside the Pentagon.”

NYT on economic fallout: “An American attack on Iraq could profoundly affect the American economy, because the United States would have to pay most of the cost and bear the brunt of any oil price shock or other market disruptions, government officials, diplomats and economists say…Unless the economic outlook brightens, the government could well find itself spending heavily on the military even as the economy recovers falteringly from last year’s recession. Already, the federal budget deficit is expanding, meaning that the bill for a war would lead either to more red ink or to cutbacks in domestic programs.”