Month: December 2008

Felix Salmon says that "you can’t simply look at Madoff’s astonishingly regular returns and conclude that he was stealing money. In fact, it’s quite easy to replicate those returns entirely legitimately." He concludes:

If Madoff is causing a crisis of confidence in the markets, it might be for this reason: that he’s driven home the fact that you can never know for sure that your money is safe and that it will be there tomorrow. That’s always a good reason not to invest in hedge funds, even when fraud isn’t a problem at all. And it’s a problem which even the most perspicacious fund-of-fund manager can’t get around.

A reader writes:

I would agree with Ross Douthat’s point that the difference between the theory of "stress positions" and the reality of their systematic application is a distinction that is easier to maintain in the abstract than in the real world. The problem is that the actual visualization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" takes a kind of difficult, forced empathy that is very easy to glide over unless you sit still mentally and actually take your mind to the circumstances, the conditions, the minutes of what that experience might be like.  And if you don’t do that, it becomes that much easier to rationalize the behavior.

In some horrific way, Abu Ghraib removed the last excuse to rationalize it. And that is why I find the over-reach of the Bush-Cheney administration more explicable early on, and utterly indefensible thereafter. To persist in the policy even after Abu Ghraib, and to insist that the right to torture anyone is a permanent power inherent in the American executive is simply unforgivable. I cannot imagine any founding father agreeing that the constitution allows an American president to name anyone he wants an "enemy combatant" and to seize him indefinitely and torture him at will to procure confessions to justfy the seizure in the first place.

Now look again at the photograph of US citizen Jose Padilla above. Again: it’s just a glimpse of the hell Cheney created. Padilla was charged with planning to detonate a dirty bomb in a major city, picked up on American soil, and thrown into a torture chamber until he was made insane. The original charges were dropped and the ones he was convicted on relatively trivial. He’s no angel — but Americans do not need to be angels to be free of this kind of brutality.

Now look at the manacles on hands and feet; and look at the goggles; and the ear-muffs; and the armed guards – as if he were any threat. Why is he wearing those goggles and ear-muffs? To sustain an environment of total human isolation and sensory deprivation, to maintain the endless torture (that would still leave no permanent physical marks) that eventually broke his body and his soul and his mind:

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

This is an American citizen to whom all this was done by the American government before he ever got a day in court.

A plea to my fellow conservatives: a government that has the inherent power to do this to an American citizen is the effective abolition of America. Now you no longer have to defend the Bush administration, please think about this; and what it means for all of us.

Trust in Republicans hits a record low.

Ross wants:

"a defender of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld approach to interrogation to write an extended review of Mayer’s The Dark Side – as a joint review with Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency, perhaps, or with any other book or report that seems relevant – and respond directly and in detail to the narrative she’s pieced together, and to the direct and circumstantial evidence she marshals for a connection between the decisions made in the White House and the abuses that happened on the ground."

That would be a start.

Packer tackles Penn:

Why does someone like Penn think he can do this job, which isn’t his job? Perhaps because he can write down and relay the words of famous people to whom his own fame gives him access, and because certain thoughts pass through his mind while he’s writing them down. Penn’s moonlighting shows a kind of contempt for journalism, which turns out to be rather difficult to do well. It also shows that he’s missed one of the main points of Obama’s election, which has Penn shedding tears at the end of his dispatch. Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy. In a meritocracy, actors who act well get good roles. They don’t get to be journalists, too—a job that, in a meritocracy, should go to those who do journalism well. Nor should any journalist, however accomplished, expect to land a leading part in Penn’s next movie.

Then: Caroline Kennedy. I mean seriously: get a throne or something.

Regret The Error rounds them up. A favorite:

In the June 20 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals.

Defending the Warren pick, Damon Linker says that the Democrats are better on gay rights, so we should roll over:

Andrew might be right that Obama will not prove to be a champion of gay civil rights (at least when it comes to the issue of marriage). But we can be absolutely sure that no presidential candidate of the current Republican Party would be anything other than a rabid opponent of these rights. And that means: What benefits Obama and the Democrats — and what harms the Republicans — contributes (if perhaps only negatively) to Andrew’s cause. And that should be what counts.

I guess I come back to the view that the job of a civil rights movement is to make our case and take on the administration, whichever party controls it, if they’re doing or saying things we disagree with. Sure, being part of a broader coalition in both parties means sacrifices – and the sacrifices gay Democrats now have to make are nothing compared with those of gay Republicans. But what the gay rights movement must never do, in my view, is become a sub-group of any single party. Look where that got African-Americans.

Stand up. Make our case. Engage our opponents. Refuse to be rolled by our allies.

The NYT takes a stand, the only credible legal stand, given where we now are:

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

That must include the commander-in-chief and his vice-president. This is where the criminality came from and it’s unjust to punish people down the line more than those at the very top. If Obama wants to avoid even the appearance of retribution, he should first appoint a Truth Commission of independent, outside but experienced public officials from both parties – along the lines of the 9/11 Commission – to establish the full facts of the past seven years. In my view, it should be restricted to war crimes alone – far graver than the question of warrantless wire-tapping.