Today’s New York Times includes a factual error of stupidity. In a piece about the National Security Agency and its post-9/11 domestic surveillance programs, James Bamford writes, without irony, that Afghanistan had pay phones in 2001:
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.’s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, “The match begins tomorrow,” and the second said, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not “targeted” but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands,” General Hayden said.
With all due respect, Hayden is a goddamned fucking liar. And, with more due respect, since Bamford is too stupid to see through his lies, the New York Times ought to employ at least one editor smart enough to recognize them.
Afghanistan did not have a single pay phone in 2001, at the end of the Taliban regime. It did not have a standard land-based telephone system. Electricity was virtually non-existent, with the exception of scattered impromptu electrical grids set up in some neighborhoods in some cities by regional warlords. In fact, according to the Afghan government’s ministry of communication, which is still trying to get them installed, there are still no pay phones in the entire country. Anyone who wanted to place a call from Afghanistan did it, as I did in the fall of 2001, via satellite phone. And satellite phones have, for the most part, unique users. They are easy to trace and, because they use radio waves, are not even illegal to intercept.
Of course, this is the same paper that once ran a half-page feature on the strategic importance of Kyrgyzstan because of its “border with Afghanistan.” Trouble is, there is no such border. The two countries are separated by the nation of Tajikistan. When I wrote the paper to point out that they might invest in a globe, a one-inch correction appeared amid a myriad of others.
