Obsidian Wings

Faust Tarp

by Eric Martin

Barry Ritholtz on a recent piece by Joseph Stiglitz:

Over the past few months, I have criticized CEA director Lawrence Summers “Sacred Cows/Save the Banks” approach, rather than a save the financial system approach. And the mad attempts to bailout the bond holders also came in for some harsh words. Joseph Stiglitz agrees:

The Obama administration’s bank- rescue efforts will probably fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, isn’t large enough to recapitalize the banking system, and the administration hasn’t been direct in addressing that shortfall, he said. Stiglitz said there are conflicts of interest at the White House because some of Obama’s advisers have close ties to Wall Street.

“We don’t have enough money, they don’t want to go back to Congress, and they don’t want to do it in an open way and they don’t want to get control” of the banks, a set of constraints that will guarantee failure, Stiglitz said.

The return to taxpayers from the TARP is as low as 25 cents on the dollar, he said. “The bank restructuring has been an absolute mess.”

Rather than continually buying small stakes in banks, weaker banks should be put through a receivership where the shareholders of the banks are wiped out and the bondholders become the shareholders, using taxpayer money to keep the institutions functioning, he said.”

No matter how you slice it, the Obama approach pushes the onus (and massive bill) on taxpayers, and away from shareholders and bondholders.  The common retort is that shareholders have been effectively wiped out already, so what's the point.  Only, so long as shareholders aree still holding their shares, their "wiped out" position will wipe back in once the stock price rebounds after we funnel hundreds of billions in taxpayer money in to recapitalize the banks.  On the other hand, if we took the banks into receivership, the taxpayers (not the supposedly "wiped out" shareholders) would capture the increase in value of the recapitalized banks when they are eventually resold to the public.

Besides, the bondholders haven't taken their haircut yet.  And they should - at least, ahead of taxpayers who elected to bear none of the risk.

Further, with the same management in place, the same enormous "too big to fail" structures intact, the same divorced-from-performance, ludicrously massive compensation packages, the same outsized influence in Washington, we will merely be teeing up the ball for the next bailout some time in the near future.   

This will not end well. 

"Prolonged Mental Harm"

by hilzoy

As I noted in my last post, the US Code defines torture as an act that (among other things) is intended to produce "severe physical or mental pain or suffering", and defines "severe mental pain or suffering" as "prolonged mental harm" resulting from one of several types of act. Naturally, then, the torture memos spend a lot of time arguing that none of the techniques they discuss will actually produce "prolonged mental harm". (Not a single one! What a surprise!)

When you read these sections, it might help to have this report from Physicians for Human Rights in the back of your mind. PHR tracked down eleven people who had been detained in Iraq and Guantanamo, and assessed their medical and psychiatric condition. They were not detained by the CIA, but many of the techniques used on them were similar. Here are the results of their psychiatric evaluations, from the Report's Executive Summary:

"With one exception, the former detainees have experienced and continue to experience severe psychological effects of torture and ill-treatment as a result of their detention in US custody. All but one feel utterly hopeless and isolated, and lack the ability to sleep well, work, or engage in normal social relationships with their families. Seven individuals disclosed having contemplated suicide either while in detention or after being released. 

Most of the released detainees, to this day, live with severe anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, including intrusive recollections of trauma suffered in detention, hyperarousal (persistent symptoms of increased arousal, e.g., difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger, and hypervigilance), avoidance and emotional numbing behavior. PHR’s clinicians determined that these symptoms were directly related to the torture and ill-treatment reported having taken place while in US custody, even after taking into account the fact that the released Iraqi former detainees are living in a war-torn environment. Amir explained, "These are the memories that I can never forget. I want to forget, but it is impossible."

For the four detainees who had experienced symptoms of depression or other mental disorders prior to detention, torture and ill-treatment by the US Personell severely exacerbated these conditions, and in one case it ignited such deep despair and dysfunction as to lead the detainee to repeated suicide attempts while at Guantanamo."

Just something to keep in mind.

No One Could Have Predicted...

by publius

Bybee Memo (2002):

[W]alling involves quickly pulling the person forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall.  You have informed us that the sound of hitting the wall will actually be far worse than any possible injury[.]  The use of the rolled towel around the neck also reduces any risk of injury.  While it may hurt to be pushed against the wall, any pain experienced is not of the intensity associated with serious physical injury. 

Washington Post, March 2009 (describing Red Cross Report):

In a federal court filing, Abu Zubaida's attorneys said he "has suffered approximately 175 seizures that appear to be directly related to his extensive torture -- particularly damage to Petitioner's head that was the result of beatings sustained at the hands of CIA interrogators and exacerbated by his lengthy isolation."

Bybee Memo:

[A]lthough the confinement boxes (both small and large) are physically uncomfortable because their size restricts movement, they are not so small as to require the individual to contort his body to sit . . . .  You have also orally informed us that despite his wound, Zubaydah remains quite flexible, which would substantially reduce any pain associated with being placed in the box.

Washington Post:

Abu Zubaida said interrogators wrapped a towel around his neck and slammed him into a plywood wall mounted in his cell. He was also repeatedly slapped in the face, he said. After the beatings, he was placed in coffinlike wooden boxes in which he was forced to crouch, with no light and a restricted air supply, he said.

"The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in my leg and stomach became very painful," he told the ICRC.

Bybee Memo:

Walling does not in and of itself inflict severe pain or suffering.  Like the facial slap, walling may alter the subject's expectation as to the treatment he believes he will receive.  Nonetheless, the character of the action falls so far short of inflicting pain or suffering within the meaning of the statute that even if he inferred that greater aggressiveness was to follow, the type of actions that could be reasonably [] anticipated would still fall below anything sufficient to inflict severe physical pain or suffering under the statute.

Washington Post:

During interrogations, the captives were routinely beaten, doused with cold water and slammed head-first into walls.  . . .  "On a daily basis . . . a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room," the report quotes detainee Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as Walid Muhammad bin Attash, as saying. 

Something Is Missing

by hilzoy

I'm still digesting the torture memos, and probably won't say anything comprehensive about them tonight. I did, however, want to flag one thing that is missing. 

The US Code defines torture as "an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control. "Severe mental pain or suffering", in turn, is defined as: "the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from", among other things, "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."

Suppose there were something that these memos said, in passing, was done to detainees (see e.g. here, p. 4), and that we know independently was done to detainees in US custody; that was known to reliably induce terror and pyschosis in fairly short order; that was described as doing so in government documents that are among the obvious antecedents of the interrogation procedures described in these memos; and that was used precisely in order to produce its psychological effects. 

You'd expect the memos to consider whether this technique might count as an act intended to produce "severe mental pain or suffering", since it involves a mind-altering procedure "calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality", and might well produce "lasting psychological harm", right?

Wrong. There is no consideration of sensory deprivation as a form of torture in these memos.

Here's an account of early CIA experiments on sensory deprivation:

"Dr Donald O. Hebb at McGill University found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in a subject within 48 hours. Now, what had the doctor done? Hypnosis, electroshock, LSD, drugs? No. None of the above. All Dr Hebb did was take student volunteers at McGill University where he was head of Psychology, put them in comfortable airconditioned cubicles and put goggles, gloves and ear muffs on them. In 24 hours the hallucinations started. In 48 hours they suffered a complete breakdown. Dr Hebb noted they suffered a disintegration of personality. Just goggles, gloves and ear muffs and this discovered the foundation, or the key technique which has been applied under extreme conditions at Guantanamo. The technique of sensory disorientation. I've tracked down some of the original subjects in Dr Hebb's experiments of 1952 and men now in their 70s still suffer psychological damage from just two days of isolation with goggles, gloves and ear muffs."

Here's the CIA's Kubark Manual:

"Drs. Wexler, Mendelson, Leiderman, and Solomon conducted a somewhat similar experiment on seventeen paid volunteers. These subjects were "... placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress.... The vents of the respirator were left open, so that the subject breathed for himself. His arms and legs were enclosed in comfortable but rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact. The subject lay on his back and was unable to see any part of his body. The motor of the respirator was run constantly, producing a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus. The room admitted no natural light, and artificial light was minimal and constant." (42) Although the established time limit was 36 hours and though all physical needs were taken care of, only 6 of the 17 completed the stint. The other eleven soon asked for release. Four of these terminated the experiment because of anxiety and panic; seven did so because of physical discomfort. The results confirmed earlier findings that (1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects."

Doesn't that sound like the sort of thing that might constitute  a mind-altering procedure "calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality"? It does to me. And guess what? Just sixteen months after this memo was written, the Army published a brand new field manual that said:

"Separation does not constitute sensory deprivation, which is prohibited. For the purposes of this manual, sensory deprivation is defined as an arranged situation causing significant psychological distress due to a prolonged absence, or significant reduction, of the usual external stimuli and perceptual opportunities. Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior. Detainees will not be subjected to sensory deprivation."

So I'm wondering: didn't it occur to anyone to ask the OLC whether sensory deprivation was a form of torture? If so, where's that memo? And if not, why not?

Time to Become a Card-Carrying Member

by publius

I'm still digesting the torture memos and commentary, but Glenn speaks the truth here:

Finally, it should be emphasized -- yet again -- that it was not our Congress, nor our media, nor our courts that compelled disclosure of these memos.  Instead, it was the ACLU's tenacious efforts over several years which single-handedly pried these memos from the clutched hands of the government.  Along with a couple of other civil liberties organizations, the ACLU (with which I consult) has expended extraordinary efforts to ensure at least minimal amounts of openness and transparency in this country, something that was necessary given the profound failures of these other institutions to do so.

Pretty much.  And you can join here.  Reward good behavior.

The Obvious Comparison

by hilzoy

"You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects.(...) As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure you are outside the predicate death requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death."

OLC memo of August 1, 2002, signed by Jay Bybee.

"'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

"The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.'"

George Orwell, 1984

Redactions

by hilzoy

I am presently reading through the torture memos that the Obama administration released today. I will comment on them when I have had a chance to work through and digest them. I do want to say one thing now, though.

Yesterday, various news outlets began reporting that these memos would be released. The fight seemed to be about how heavily they would be redacted. From the WSJ:

"The Obama administration is leaning toward keeping secret some graphic details of tactics allowed in Central Intelligence Agency interrogations, despite a push by some top officials to make the information public, according to people familiar with the discussions. (...)

Under one option, the outlines of which were described by current and former government officials close to the discussions, the administration would ask a judge to keep secret large parts of the Bradbury memos. Two of the memos contain particularly explicit details of methods and describe combinations of tactics that were deemed to fall within the bounds of the Geneva Convention on torture, according to people who have read them.

Two or three proposals that would reveal varying degrees of detail contained in the memos about the CIA program are before the president, another senior administration official said."

The memos are not heavily redacted at all. I skimmed through them looking for redacted bits; most of them are very short redactions -- names, or things like: "as the CIA informed us in [REDACTED]", where the redaction is less than a line. These are perfectly defensible redactions. The number that are longer than that is very small. (I count eleven, none in the Bradbury "Techniques" memos discussed in the WSJ piece.)

On this one, the right side won.

Children Of The Taliban

by hilzoy

There's a really good segment on Pakistan on Frontline World called 'Children of the Taliban'. I can't seem to embed the video here, but just click through and watch it, or at least read the synopsis, which is long enough to give a lot of the details, but a lot quicker than watching the video. It focuses on children who have been affected by the war against the Pakistani Taliban: children whose schools have been destroyed by the Taliban, children who have lost relatives in air raids, children who are being recruited as suicide bombers. 

Besides the interviews, which are fascinating and heartbreaking, it also shows footage from the Swat valley and the tribal areas, where not many journalists manage to go and do in-depth reporting these days. You can see the destruction from the war and the drone strikes in the tribal areas; there's footage from one town in Bajaur that seems to have been entirely flattened. 7,000 people used to live there. Much of the population of Bajaur, one of the tribal agencies, is now in refugee camps. 

Pakistan would have been in very tough shape even if we had not made a series of awful mistakes there and across the border in Afghanistan. But we have made it much, much worse. Just imagine, for instance, what a difference it would have made had we not let the leadership of al Qaeda escape into Pakistan from Tora Bora. We could have prevented that. If Donald Rumsfeld had not been so eager to show how few troops he could use in Afghanistan, we would not have had to rely on Afghan and Pakistani troops to block the passes. 

If the al Qaeda leadership had not fled into Pakistan, we would not have had to try to catch them there, in a country we had not invaded, and whose sovereignty we needed to respect. That means that we would not have had anything like the same reasons to launch drone attacks in Pakistan, with their inevitable civilian casualties, and populations radicalized by the simple means of having watched their relatives killed and their homes destroyed. 

Moreover, the list of things we needed the Pakistani government to help us with would have lost one hugely important item. That would have given us much more freedom of action, and more leverage to use on other things, like, oh, I don't know, economic development, or moving back towards democracy. It would also have made it more difficult for them to use the periodic capture of al Qaeda members to conceal or compensate for their cooperation with the Taliban.

Obviously, doing a much better job of fostering stability, economic development and the rule of law in Afghanistan would have been enormously important as well. Likewise, doing more that directly helped the Pakistani people, as opposed to the Musharraf government, would have done a lot. But using our own troops at Tora Bora, when we knew that we had Osama bin Laden in our sights, would have prevented an enormous amount of damage.

No country likes having another country launch air strikes on its population. No army likes being deployed against its own citizens, especially when the reason for doing this is widely perceived to be orders from the same country that is launching the air strikes. We wouldn't like it if, say, China was routinely bombing New Mexico and Arizona, and if we were fighting a war there and had flattened towns from Tucumcari to Flagstaff at their request, and if, moreover, we had spent eight years living under a military dictatorship supported by these same Chinese. Pakistanis don't much care for it either. And the Taliban is more popular that it would otherwise be because they are fighting us. 

We can debate whether the drone attacks and the war in the tribal areas is justified or not, but it would surely have been much, much better if there had been no need (or: much less need) of it to start with.

Tea Party Atonement

by publius

Ah, Tea Party Day.  Loves it.  There’s already been much ink spilled on the manufactured nature of these things.  But that’s not the most interesting part.  What’s more interesting is the motivation of the people actually going to these things (and cheerleading them).  To me, the tea parties are serving a psychological function – they’re allowing conservatives to subjectively reaffirm their ideology and to relieve the cognitive dissonance of the Bush years.

It’s hard to know what being a conservative means these days.  There are so many internal contradictions that I’m not sure it lends itself to any easy definition.  But one thing that all conservatives tell themselves is that they’re somehow opposed or skeptical of “big government.”  There are of course different and diverse camps (some more thoughtful than others) – but in general, the ideological glue that holds the concept together in one’s mind relates in some sense to “small government.”

For obvious reasons, this ideological self-image came under a fairly withering assault by the Bush administration.  Whether you look at Bush in terms of spending, deficits, imperialism, executive power, or surveillance, it’s hard to squeeze the past 8 years into any sort of “small government” ideological box.  Procrustes wields a capable knife and all, but he’s not that good.

To be fair, a lot of conservatives were genuinely uneasy with these developments – but many chose to ignore or repress their anxiety because they really hated Democrats, or because they wanted a piece of the action, or whatever.  But most stood silently by, except for the much-maligned Ron Paul contingent.  (By the way, Glenn has a must-read showing the somewhat-hilarious hypocrisy of conservative bloggers complaining about the DHS report on rightwing extremist movements).

The tea parties, however, don’t have much to do with logic.  I’m sure our modern-day Samuel Adamses aren’t supporting big military spending cuts.  I doubt they care that taxes are unchanged or lowered on 95% of families.  I suspect they had almost nothing to say about the spending and executive overreach of the Bush years.  Logical consistency, remember, isn’t the point.

The point is that tea parties give them an opportunity to reaffirm their own ideological self-image.  In their own heads, they want to be “small government” people.  In this sense, the tea parties are simply atonement – trying to “out out” the damned spot. 

Perhaps all this seems unfair, but I think it’s actually the most charitable interpretation.  Because if they’re actually protesting Obama’s policies on the merits, it shows a fairly large disconnect from reality.  Under this less charitable interpretation, these people are protesting because 5% of the richest Americans are getting an extremely modest (by historical standards) tax increase. 

Tyranny doesn’t get much clearer than that.

More, still

by von

Ezra Klein tries to push back on the notion that American top quintile pays a disproportionate share of federal taxes, particularly when compared to most European countries. (See My prior post & Clive Crook.)  Klein doesn't wholly join the argument, which involves, among other things, a comparative analysis between the US and relevant EU countries.  Instead, he misinterprets his own graph:

When you look at percentage of total tax liabilities, the rich do in fact bear a heavier burden. But it's because they have so much more money. They are not bearing a heavier burden as a percentage of their incomes. They're bearing it in relation to everyone else's incomes.

Umm, no.*  Even if you are in the fifth quintile, 25.8% is still a greater percentage of your income than 17.6% (the fourth quintile burden).  You may have more money left over after you pay your taxes:  the fifth quintile might be, in absolute terms, better off than quintiles First through Fourth.  But the fifth quintile is unquestionably bearing a heavy burden based on the percentage its income.  It's not bearing a heavy burden "in relation to everyone else's incomes," as Klein erroneously asserts.

Tom Maguire has much more, and he is worth a read.

You can misunderstand the numbers, but the numbers don't change. The US is almost unique among developed countries in that taxes are disproprotionately paid by the wealthy.  Moreover, even as the wealthy have (and are) bearing a greater absolute tax burden, the gap between US rich and poor has widened. 

These gaps are not sustainable over the long term.  You cannot have a smaller and smaller percentage of the population bearing more and more of the ultimate tax burden. Leave aside the stimulus package: Taxes are going to go up on everyone solely because of Obama's structural deficits in his budget.  Moreover, thus far, we have not been able to progressively tax our way out of the income disparities between rich and poor.  Tax policy is not the right lever for that concern.  The 'ole class warfare ain't working, folks. 

*For the sake of argument, I'll grant Klein the fuzzy numbers presented on his graph. (Tom Maguire explains why Klein's numbers are fuzzy here.)