i L i n d . n e t

A reader posed a question about my observation that it’s sometimes easier to browse hard copies of documents.

Seeing as how Google and several other foundations are working hard to make books and other hard copy documentation available online, I’m curious as to why it is easier for you to review things quickly via hard copy. Is there no search functionality available in the State Ethics Commision online records? Or is there something fundamental about having a tangible item in your hand that makes things easier for you?

In this case, I was trying to do a quick inspection of hundreds of disclosure statements filed by registered lobbyists. The ethics commission does make these available online, but each is a separate pdf file that has to be downloaded and opened. Moving from one to another is cumbersome, and jumping back and forth between separate reports to check impressions or recollect details is difficult. The same records fill a large 3-ring binder which looks clumsy but is actually a remarkably efficient mode for easy review and retrieval. I have the same problems with ebooks. The technology just isn’t as efficient for the reader as hard copy. Someday, perhaps, but not yet.

A NY Times story reprinted in Sunday’s Star-Bulletin caught my eye with the headline, “Hard-liner picked to fight Thailand’s Muslim rebels”. It reports on the appointment of a notorious retired general and former professional assassin, Pallop Pinmanee, as top security advisor to the generals now in control of the government of Thailand. A friend and former Kaaawa resident had been deployed several times for jungle “training” exercises involving Marines from Hawaii and elsewhere, so I had a personal as well as political interest in the issue.

The version published in the Star-Bulletin is considerably shorter than the story as originally published by the NYT. In this case, the story was cut after the first section but, in addition, key sentences did not appear in the S-B version. Here are the last several paragraphs from the story as it appeared in the Star-Bulletin. The sentences in bold appeared in the NYT version but were not printed by the S-B:

General Pallop, who turned 71 on Friday, speaks about his days as an army-appointed assassin in a casual, matter-of-fact tone and offers little to dispel his tough-guy reputation. He was the leader of what he called the “killer team,” a secret seven-man army unit in 1970 that carried out extrajudicial killings. “The assignment was to kill the leaders of Communist groups all over Thailand,” he said.

He said he was also a guerrilla mercenary for the Central Intelligence Agency along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the 1960s.

But he is perhaps best known for his decision to raid the Krue Se mosque in southern Thailand in 2004, a move that left 32 insurgents dead. The raid helped worsen the insurgency, which has caused about 2,000 deaths in the past three years.

“Diplomacy is not his strong point,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. “His expertise is to kill people and deal with things by force.”

I doubt that these cuts were done deliberately, but their effect in my view was to dull the danger signs for readers. Pallop is a former CIA mercentary involved in an assassination program, from the description likely to have been part of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix of the 1960s, and now appears to have been put in charge of directing an ongoing counterinsurgency war in which the U.S. is already involved through this program of training and military assistance that has put U.S. troops directly into the area.

This is obviously an area of the world that Hawaii has more than a casual interest in. We probably need to read more rather than less about the situation.

And to top things off, the NY Times also published this sobering account of the attitudes of at least one set of U.S. troops in Iraq who describe themselves as disillusioned by the discovery that Iraqi army members they have trained and armed are among those attacking them.

And this is Ms. Lola, one of a trio of excited dogs that greet us daily as we walk past their house down on the beach. She featured, along with a few others, in today’s Morning Dogs gallery. Just click on her photo for the day’s visual treat.