Obsidian Wings

Magic!

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"The rest of the nation may be getting back to basics, but on Wall Street, paychecks still come with a golden promise.

Workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began, because of the strong start of the year for bank profits.

Even as the industry's compensation has been put in the spotlight for being so high at a time when many banks have received taxpayer help, six of the biggest banks set aside over $36 billion in the first quarter to pay their employees, according to a review of financial statements."

The fact that the very banks who just caused the world's economy to collapse are helping themselves to the same pay they made when they were earning record profits has occasioned a certain amount of snark from the class warriors of the hard left. But I think they're wrong. The banks' profits in the first quarter absolutely justify enormous paychecks, since they had to be made to appear where the uninitiated might see no profits at all. 

Consider Citi: it made a profit of $1.6 billion, of which $2.7 billion was gains booked because -- get this -- its creditworthiness went down. To those of us outside the financial services industry, this might sound fishy: how can the fact that people think you're getting more likely to default mean that you are doing better? Here's the answer:

"When the debt declines in value, the banks have to assume at the end of the quarter that they bought the debt back and retired it. The banks would “buy it back” at a lower price, so they get to make a profit. Here’s an example: Imagine that a bank has a bond that was once worth 100 cents on the dollar and is now trading at 60 cents on the dollar. At the end of the quarter, the bank has to assume it would buy that debt back at 60 cents — which is essentially a profit of 40 cents.

That’s what happened to Citigroup in the first quarter. Citigroup had a rough quarter in which investors showed little faith in the bank’s future by widening the spreads on the bank’s credit-default swaps. As those spreads widened, they sent the message that investors believed Citigroup would be less profitable. In a nice twist, the widening spreads also triggered an accounting rule that allowed Citigroup to record a profit."

Citi would have booked over a billion in losses without this -- and that's without getting into the other fascinating ways in which they made their earnings look more impressive than they otherwise have seemed. Bank of America did the same thing. Wells Fargo also deserves credit for using other accounting rules to make profits appear where none had been before.

But all of these feats of accounting pale before the astonishing achievement of Goldman Sachs, which is on track to pay employees almost as much, on average, as it did in 2007. That might seem excessive -- until you realize that in order to book a profit, Goldman Sachs had (among other things) to make an entire month disappear -- a month with a pretax loss of $1.3 billion. That's not easy to do -- but the intrepid Goldman employees made it happen. I'd say that deserves a raise.

If it weren't for the magicians on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs might have had to make do with twelve months like everyone else. Citi and Bank of America would not have been able to transform their deteriorating credit into big profits. Their actual loans disintegrate before our eyes, along with the rest of the economy; there seems to be no relief in sight; and lo! they make profits appear out of thin air. If Penn and Teller deserve their millions, why not Wall Street? 

Your Weekend Snark

by publius

Today's Week in Review has an article on various American Presidents' affinity for Shakespeare.  Total juvenile snark, but this is still great stuff from the Artist Formerly Known as the Decider:

George W. Bush knew Shakespeare, too: he told an interviewer that on vacation in 2006 he had “read three Shakespeares,” but he didn’t disclose the titles.

Somehow, I had missed that.  But I'm clearly not referring to the plays as anything other than "Shakespeares" henceforth.

Swine Flu

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"The World Health Organization rushed to convene an emergency meeting Saturday to develop a response to the "pandemic potential" of a new swine flu virus that has sparked a deadly outbreak in Mexico and spread to disparate parts of the United States.

Health officials reported that at least eight students at a private high school in New York City had "probable" swine flu. They also confirmed three new cases -- two in Kansas and one in California -- bringing the total number of confirmed U.S. cases to 11. The president of Mexico, where the outbreak has killed as many as 81 people, issued an order granting his government broad powers to isolate patients and question travelers. (...)

The virus, for which there is no vaccine for humans, has nearly brought Mexico City to a halt. Normally congested downtown streets in this city of 20 million were almost empty Saturday, and of the few people who ventured outside, many said they did so only out of necessity. Soldiers posted at subway stations handed out face masks to passersby from the back of armored vehicles. Some pedestrians covered their mouths and noses with scarves and rags.

"We can't escape the air," said Antonio Gonzáles, 56, who wore a surgical mask outside a public hospital. "If it was something in the food, we'd have a chance."

The Mexican government reported more than 1,300 suspected cases of the virus, which mixes animal and human strains of flu. Bars and nightclubs, schools, gallery openings and sporting events were cancelled until further notice. Authorities advised people to wash their hands regularly and avoid the customary greeting of kissing on the cheek. The government issued a decree giving the Health Ministry power to enter people's homes, close public events, isolate patients, and inspect travelers and their baggage.

The Associated Press reported that 24 new cases of the flu emerged Saturday in Mexico."

Thus far, the Mexican version seems to be much more virulent than the US version, despite the fact that "partial comparisons of the genetic sequences of the Mexican and American cases shows them to be essentially the same". There could be any number of explanations for this: "some difference in the information (looking at severely ill versus routine surveillance of outpatients), some difference in the virus (while the viruses are said to be "genetically identical" this is true only in the parts that have so far been compared) or some co-factor (e.g., co-infection with another pathogen)."

However, it seems likely that there has been human-to-human transmission, which is worrisome. Moreover, the casualties in Mexico seem to have been disproportionately healthy young adults. On NPR today, Laurie Garrett gave two possible explanations for this: it might be that children and the elderly got the regular flu vaccine, and that it confers some protection to this new strain of influenza, which would be good; or it might be the dreaded cytokine storm: basically, a lethal overreaction by the immune system. This is thought to be the reason why young adults were disproportionately represented among the casualties of the pandemic of 1918: since they have stronger immune systems, the overreaction was more likely to be fatal.

If we're lucky, this will continue to be relatively mild in this country, and the steps Mexico is taking will do the trick. Just in case, though, now might be a good time to download this flu manual (pdf; h/t DemFromCT at dKos.) Unnecessary preparation beats being caught unprepared by a flu pandemic.

Good blogs on this topic: Effect Measure, H5N1, Aetiology, DemFromCT at dKos, ScienceInsider.

My Allegedly Vengeful Heart

by hilzoy

In an unprecedented, shocking development, David Broder is against any sort of accountability for what he refers to as "torture": 

"If ever there were a time for President Obama to trust his instincts and stick to his guns, that time is now, when he is being pressured to change his mind about closing the books on the "torture" policies of the past."

I normally think that there's a presumption in favor of enforcing the law, and that people who think it should be ignored have the burden of proof. So what sorts of arguments does Broder offer in support of his view? Well:

"Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more -- the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps -- or, at least, careers and reputations.

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability -- and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance."

To which I have two responses. First, who died and made David Broder Sigmund Freud? How on earth does he presume to know what the actually motivates those of us who think that the people who authorized torture should be investigated? Speaking for myself: I have never met David Broder. As far as I know, he has no idea that I exist. So how does he know that underneath my "plausible-sounding rationale" lurks "an unworthy desire for vengeance"? And how, stranger still, does he presume to know this about everyone who thinks this -- a group that (as Greg Sargent notes) included 62% of the American public before the latest memos were released? 

Second: let's just stipulate for the sake of argument that all of us who favor investigating torture do, in fact, have "an unworthy desire for vengeance". So what? Suppose our "plausible-sounding argument" is actually true: "without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability -- and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations." In that case, by not investigating torture now, we would be setting ourselves up for future government lawbreaking. Isn't it obvious that preventing this matters more than anyone's motives? 

What matters is whether this is the right thing to do. If it is, then we should do it. If it isn't, then we should not. Motives don't matter here -- any more than it would have mattered if some of the people who favored getting into World War II had an unreasonable hatred of Germans in general, or the people who brought Brown v. Board really just wanted to get into the history books.

Broder's best stab at an actual argument is this:

"The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places -- the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department -- by the proper officials.

One administration later, a different group of individuals occupying the same offices has -- thankfully -- made the opposite decision. Do they now go back and investigate or indict their predecessors?

That way, inevitably, lies endless political warfare. It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas. That way lies untold bitterness -- and injustice."

When people talk about "criminalizing policy differences", there's a crucial, question-begging assumption, namely: that no one actually broke the law. If that's right, and if we know that it is, then of course investigating previous administrations for law-breaking is just a "vendetta". But whether or not laws were broken is precisely the point at issue. 

If laws were broken, then the fact that they were broken as the result of "a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places" is no excuse -- if anything, it makes investigation and prosecution all the more important. And it also means that the people who favor prosecution are not the ones who "criminalize politics". 

That honor goes to the people who broke the laws while holding public office. If we care about the rule of law, and about the idea that ours is a country of laws, not of men, then we should investigate those who break the laws, especially when they hold high office. The Presidency is a public trust, not a license for criminality.

Best News I've Heard All Year

by publius

The agreement to use reconciliation for health care is huge – it’s arguably the single best development since Obama’s inauguration.  It not only means that health care reform will be much easier to pass – it means that the ultimate legislation will also be much better (with a public plan, etc.).

And that’s how it should be.  Obama ran on an ambitious health care platform and won convincingly.  The American people put him and a 59-strong Democratic majority in charge.  And they – rather than Susan Collins and Ben Nelson – should get to decide whether and in what form health care gets passed.

I have no qualms whatsoever about bypassing the filibuster – if 51 Republicans think they can dismantle it next term, let them try.  I promise not to raise a single objection to using reconciliation.

The main justification, however, for the Democrats' attempt to enact reform through reconciliation is simply that the filibuster has gotten completely out of hand.  More precisely, the move is justified because of the combination of filibuster abuse with the GOP’s non-interest in good faith negotiation.

Numerous people have written about the skyrocketing filibuster rates since 2006 – the filibuster was never intended to be used this often and in this manner.  And so it’s inevitable – just as a matter of Newtonian physics – that these repeated knee-jerk obstructions will trigger a reaction.  A majority party simply isn’t going to tolerate ubiquitous filibusters – eventually, something’s got to give. 

Interestingly, Republicans have lost some of the moral high ground in the reconciliation debate by over-invoking the filibuster in recent years.  If they had invoked filibusters more selectively on matters of intense interest (which was supposed to be the point), then maybe they’d have more of a leg to stand on here. 

But the nation simply can’t allow 40% of the Senate to block everything – particularly given that the Senate is already malapportioned and that the 40% already overrepresents the more sparsely populated states.

The second part of all this was the blind opposition to Obama’s stimulus plan.  Here too, I think Republican obsession with short-term tactics and news cycles have undermined their long-term position.  More precisely, the virtually-unanimous opposition to the stimulus has undercut their credibility in the reconciliation debate.

If the Republicans were genuinely interested in cooperating and negotiating in good faith to produce legislation, then it would be much more difficult to invoke reconciliation.  In this world, the Dems would appear to be ramming legislation through.

But that’s the not the world we have.  We have an administration that is arguably too interested in including Republican input.  Obama actually went out of his way – and risked his own credibility – to try to incorporate GOP input on the stimulus.  And his reward was party-line opposition and demagoguery.  The stimulus vote showed that Republicans have no interest in doing anything other than blindly opposing everything, and then running on Obama’s inability to pass anything.

If that’s the way the game will be played, then Obama would silly to keep playing it in the same way.  The GOP doesn’t care about negotiating, so Obama shouldn’t pretend like they’re needed when they’re not.  If anything, the reconciliation approach is more likely to yield true bipartisan negotiation (if that’s your thing) because of the credible threat of shutting Republicans out completely.

In short, this is very good news.  National health care will no longer be hostage to Susan Collins and Ben Nelson.  And I have exactly zero sympathy for GOP complaints about using the reconciliation process.  None.

Make It So

by hilzoy

From the LATimes:

"The Obama administration is preparing to admit into the United States as many as seven Chinese Muslims who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in the first release of any of the detainees into this country, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Their release is seen as a crucial step to plans, announced by President Obama during his first week in office, to close the prison and relocate the detainees. Administration officials also believe that settling some of them in American communities will set an example, helping to persuade other nations to accept Guantanamo detainees too.

But the decision to release the Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, is not final and faces challenges from within the government, as well as likely public opposition. Among government agencies, the Homeland Security Department has registered concerns about the plan.

The move would also incense Chinese officials, who consider the Uighurs domestic terrorists and want those held at Guantanamo handed over for investigation. U.S. officials no longer consider the Chinese Muslims to be enemy combatants and fear they would be mistreated in China."

Dear Obama administration: as a member of the public, let me assure you that you need fear no opposition from me. On the contrary: by being willing to step up and do right by some of the people we have imprisoned, you would earn even more of my respect than you have already. 

Even the Bush administration tribunals found that the Uighurs were not enemy combatants. They have been imprisoned for seven and a half years. It is long past time to set them free. 

The Limits of "Effectiveness"

by publius

Via Andrew Sullivan, Steve Chapman raises a really good point – there’s simply no way that the effectiveness of torture can solely justify its use.  And I think he poses a difficult logical problem for torture supporters.

Chapman notes that if “effectiveness” is all we care about, any form of torture would necessarily be ok.  One could, for instance, drag in a detainee’s child and begin torturing him or her in front of the detainee.  I assume that even the most hardened torture advocates would draw a line there.  If they didn’t, that tells you pretty much all you need to know.

But if they do concede that certain methods go too far (i.e., that such things are relevant), then they’re stuck having to argue that the methods we used simply aren’t that bad.  In other words, if they concede a line exists, then they’re forced to argue that these methods don’t cross it.

And defending these methods seems very difficult, if not completely disingenuous.  I mean, it requires saying that heinous acts like slamming heads into walls, waterboarding, stress positions, striking faces, and locking people up in small boxes are all ok.  And remember – those are just the formally legalized tactics.  They exclude the grotesque acts that these tactics inevitably mutated into – things like murders and electrodes to testicles at Abu Ghraib.

All in all, it’s a fairly clarifying debate – one that will be remembered for some time.

Learned Helplessness

by hilzoy

I wanted to highlight a point from yesterday's NYT article on the decision to use torture:

"By late 2001, the agency had contracted with James E. Mitchell, a psychologist with the SERE program who had monitored many mock interrogations but had never conducted any real ones, according to colleagues. He was known for his belief that a psychological concept called "learned helplessness" was crucial to successful interrogation.

Martin Seligman, a prominent professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who had developed the concept, said in an interview that he was puzzled by Dr. Mitchell’s notion that learned helplessness was relevant to interrogation.

"I think helplessness would make someone more dependent, less defiant and more compliant," Dr. Seligman said, "but I do not think it would lead reliably to more truth-telling."

Still, forceful and brainy, Dr. Mitchell, who declined to comment for this article, became a persuasive player in high-level agency discussions about the best way to interrogate Qaeda prisoners."

The role of learned helplessness in the development of our torture policies has been reported before. However, it's worth unpacking this a bit. 

Learned helplessness works as follows. When an animal, human or non-human, is exposed to repeated trauma that it cannot control, it sometimes just gives up trying, even when, later, it is possible to escape that trauma. Martin Seligman first hit on the idea when doing conditioning experiments with dogs: he gave the dogs shocks in a hammock from which they could not escape, and then put them in a box that allowed them to escape from shocks (which were delivered through the floor) by jumping over a barrier. 

Normally, dogs scramble around trying to escape from the shocks, jump the barrier by accident, figure out (after a few tries) that this is how they can escape from the shocks, and then jump the barrier as soon as the shocks start. But the dogs who had been shocked in the hammocks, in which they could neither escape nor control the shocks, didn't do that. They ran around for about thirty seconds, and then just lay down on the floor and whimpered. 

In the book in which he describes learned helplessness, Seligman cites an even more striking finding: another researcher held wild rats in his hand until they stopped struggling, and then put them in a water tank that they could not escape from. Normal wild rats will swim for 60 hours before drowning. The rats who had been held until they stopped struggling, however, swam for thirty minutes and then drowned. 

Learned helplessness happens to humans too:

"Extending the ramifications of these findings to humans, Seligman and his colleagues found that human motivation to initiate responses is also undermined by a lack of control over one's surroundings. Further research has shown that learned helplessness disrupts normal development and learning and leads to emotional disturbances, especially depression."

That's learned helplessness. You put an animal, human or non-human, in a situation in which bad things happen that it can neither escape nor control, and eventually it just gives up. And that's what the CIA was trying to do to its detainees.

The reason I bring this up is this. As I have noted before, acts intended to produce "severe mental pain or suffering" count as torture under the US Code. "Severe mental pain or suffering" is defined as "the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from" various things, one of which is "the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality." A lot of the discussion of techniques like sleep deprivation in the torture memos consists of arguments that since their effects are (according to the memos' authors) short-lived and reversible, they do not produce "prolonged mental harm", and thus cannot be considered torture under the law. 

But there is just no way -- no way at all -- in which you can describe interrogation procedures designed to produce learned helplessness as not intended to cause "prolonged mental harm" via techniques calculated to disrupt personality profoundly. You just can't. Recall: learned helplessness "leads to emotional disturbances, especially depression." From Wikipedia:

"Apart from the shared depression symptoms between human and other animals such as passivity, introjected hostility, weight loss, appetite loss, social and sexual deficits, some of the diagnostic symptoms of learned helplessness -- including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation -- can be found and observed in human beings but not necessarily in animals."

I'd like to see Steven Bradbury try to argue that this doesn't count as a profound disruption of personality, or that it does not constitute "prolonged mental harm". From where I sit, it fits the statutory definition of torture perfectly.

Why We Fight

by hilzoy

I'm late getting to this, from McClatchy:

"The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. (...)

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly -- Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 -- according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said."

If I were Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the idea that there might be a just God would make my bones freeze with terror.

A Perfect Storm

by hilzoy

The NYT has a damning piece about the decision to use torture:

"In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved -- not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said."

In general, I wouldn't think it was a problem not to know the origins of a technique, except for political reasons. But not knowing that the SERE program was designed to help soldiers withstand interrogations that had produced false confessions is inexcusable, especially since this was our program. Not knowing that the psychologist who persuaded the CIA to go for this had never conducted an actual interrogation is similarly mind-boggling. The fact that no one knew what the actual interrogators thought of all this is standard for the Bush administration, but it should not have been.

There are all sorts of experts in our government, including experts on interrogation. There's also more than enough institutional memory to inform the administration about the origins of the SERE program. But the Bush administration, typically, did not bother with them. They preferred to make things up as they went along, because, after all, they always knew better. 

This is what happens when we stop demanding minimal competence in our Presidents; when we start caring more about who we would rather have a beer with than, oh, who would be most likely to seek out the best advice and listen to all sides of an argument before making an important decision, or whose judgment we can trust. We end up with people who toss aside our most fundamental values because someone who has never conducted an interrogation before thinks it might be a good idea, and no one bothers to do the basic background research on what he proposes.

Here's a sort of ironic coda to the whole thing:

"One former senior intelligence official who played an important role in approving the interrogation methods said he had no idea of the origins and history of the SERE program when the C.I.A. started it in 2002.

"The agency was counting on the Justice Department to fully explore all the factors contributing to a judgment about legality, including the surrounding history and context," the official said."

They were counting on John Yoo. Roll that one over in your mind a few times to get the full effect. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.