Another Leonard Peltier Scandal in the Making

U.S. Extradition Attempt of John Graham for Allegedly Murdering Anna Mae Aquash

By Kahentinetha Horn
From MNN Mohawk Nation News
2007

John Graham, an Indigenous man from the Northwest Territories in Canada, is being accused by the U.S. authorities of participating in the murder of Indigenous woman, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, another “Canadian”. This happened more than 30 years ago. Both were members of the American Indian Movement [AIM]. Since when did the U.S. ever go after someone for killing an Indian? What’s behind it? John Graham is currently awaiting an extradition hearing in Vancouver, scheduled for May 17th, 2007. He has been under house arrest there since his apprehension in December 2003.

John Graham is well known for his lobbying on Turtle Island and Europe against Uranium mining in Canada and the Black Hills in South Dakota. This could be a factor in his being victimized by the U.S. and the FBI. They want to destroy an articulate Indigenous spokesman. Due to his strict bail conditions he can’t work. His main resource is worldwide support for his advocacy.

Forgotten by the U.S. and FBI is the reign of terror in the 1970s on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. This was after the take over of “Wounded Knee” by the Lakota and their supporters. There has never been an investigation into the deaths of 64 native people. Many of these cases have been well documented and made public since then. Authorities have done nothing to try to achieve justice in these cases.

Just like the Leonard Peltier case, true to form, U.S. government agents are not using real evidence against Graham because they have none. Their case is based on hearsay “evidence” concocted by coerced witnesses. Peltier was convicted over 30 years ago for allegedly killing two FBI agents in a shoot out on Pine Ridge reservation. It’s all been discredited. This time they are relying on testimony of another Indigenous man even though it is “so full of big holes you could drive a truck through it,” as John Graham’s lawyer has put it.

A well known FBI tactic used as part of COINTELPRO [counter intelligence program] was “bad-jacketing” where AIM members were falsely accused in order to cause internal conflict. Other well documented FBI tactics are infiltration, also with the purpose of causing internal conflict, and falsely charging and jailing innocent people. One of the first rumors initiated by the FBI was that Anna Mae was an FBI informant. This was ridiculous! After her death, the FBI then spread the rumor that she was killed by AIM.

A lot of people know John. No one has seen any evidence that he is capable of violence. No matter what our people do, we don’t have a tradition of killing our own. We are not Europeans.

There are all kinds of weird issues like the two autopsy reports. After the first autopsy, the FBI said she died of exposure. The family insisted on a second autopsy, which clearly showed she was shot in the back of the head. There have been lots of violations of due process. Canada has not even asked to look at the evidence.

Why is Canada so anxious to turn John Graham over to the U.S.? Is it to legitimize an unethical extradition treaty? It’s a standard tactic to tie people up in court, take their resources and keep them from doing resistance work. This reflects the Canadian government’s racist approach. Canada is taking an unexamined approach to this case, passively following the U.S. lead.

The US and Canada have essentially agreed to rely on a handshake and a brief procedural review of the documents. Canada pretends to assume the US Government will act in good faith when prosecuting a case against a Canadian citizen. The lawyers are not allowed to see the evidence, even though they have raised many important issues which are not being addressed.

It is unconstitutional and a violation of international law for the Canadian Government to uphold only the rights of the United States in these proceedings. These practices do not allow Canadians to be protected as in other court proceedings. In this case, as an Indigenous person who never agreed to become “Canadian”, John isn’t a “citizen”. He’s deemed to be a citizen by the colonial state of Canada.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and sovereignty are in question when it allows a foreign nation with such an evil history of prosecutorial abuse to override its laws. Canada fears defending this individual against the foreign government's claim, even though there is plenty of reason to expect that the charges are false and malicious.

At the very least the Government of Canada, and the Ministry of Justice should make sure there is hard evidence submitted that can withstand reasonable scrutiny; that John Graham be provided with sufficient funding to mount a complete defense; and that the proceedings for extradition be open and accountable to the public.

The U.S. is in the habit of walking all over Canada. They’ve done it time and time again. Amnesty International has condemned the FBI for using false evidence to extradite Leonard Peltier from Canada in 1976. He’s been in jail every since. Amnesty International has called for his immediate release on the grounds that he no longer has adequate recourse to justice.

Once again the US authorities are presenting questionable evidence, this time to extradite John Graham. Violations of established legal standards seems to have become habitual in the U.S. Note the international outcry over U.S. violations at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. We have to wonder why Canada is pandering to a known human rights abuser.

Amnesty International in 2003 demanded that “there must be scrupulous respect for due process and fair trial proceedings…” They demand to know about “possible political interference in the course of justice”.

This case is another example of what the U.S. does. They want to destroy Indigenous opposition by publicly crucifying us. They know we have the legal interest to the land and resources and will protect it. This is a tactic to scare us, by extraditing us and putting us on big public trials and a media show to try to paint us as criminal and unworthy people. The U.S. way relies on fascist policing and terrorizing the opposition.

The world community has to get involved. Human Rights organizations, First Nations Chiefs, trade unions and other groups have expressed their concern about John Graham's case. Please add your voice now in defense of justice by emailing or writing to the following:

The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson,
Justice Canada
East Memorial Building, 4th Floor, 284 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0H8
Telephone: (613) 992-4621 Fax: (613) 990-7255
E-mail: nicho.r@parl.gc.ca

Honourable Peter MacKay, Minister of Foreign Affairs Canada
E-mail: MacKay.P@parl.gc.ca

Contact: The John Graham Defense Committee, 15 Firth Road, WHITEHORSE Yukon Y1A 4R5 CANADA Phone 001 – 867 – 456 – 4340 info@grahamdefense.org
website: www.grahamdefense.org



Film Review: Unrepentant - Kevin Annett & Canada’s Genocide

By Brent Erickson
From Briarpatch Magazine
2007

“Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate, disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.”
- Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas, from Brief Account of the The Devastation of the Indies, 1542

When Kevin Annett accepted the position of Minister at St. Andrews United Church in Port Alberni, BC, in 1992, he was a little naive. After leading his first service he asked a colleague why no First Nations people attended the church, considering that over one-third of the city’s population was First Nations. Unsatisfied with the answer he received, Annett began a journey of discovery that would get him fired and physically assaulted, and destroy his reputation and marriage, but would produce a film that is of monumental importance to our country’s efforts to come to terms with its own history.

Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide is a 106-minute documentary that chronicles the deliberate genocide of Canada’s Indigenous people, from early colonization and the first use of biological warfare, to church-run residential schools, to the ongoing theft of resource-rich Native land. Solid historical information and first-hand testimonies of residential school survivors are interwoven with Annett’s own story to create a powerful and educational film.

Unrepentant is based on Kevin Annett’s self-published 2001 book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, an important and moving work in its own right. The Unrepentant project was a completely self-funded, grassroots effort, and the low budget is evident in the production quality of the film. Unlike other recent political documentaries, Unrepentant is not witty, cute, or campy. It has no ironic music, clever editing or technical wizardry, just a straightforward, stark, and often disturbing account of a people who survived over four hundred years of ethnic cleansing, and of a man willing to sacrifice everything to help tell their story.

It may be difficult for many non-Native Canadians to come to grips with the information presented in Unrepentant, as it has been long suppressed and denied. Beatings, electric shocks, forced sterilization, medical experimentation, starvation, rape, and the deaths and disappearance of more than 50,000 First Nations children in residential schools-Annett’s film exposes the depth of Canada’s savagery towards Aboriginal people.

Unrepentant draws on personal testimony and eyewitness accounts to bring this history to life, while drawing upon Annett’s own experiences to demonstrate the systematic denial of the historic and ongoing violation of Aboriginal people. “I witnessed the murder of Maisie Shaw,” testified Harriet Nahanee, Native Elder of the Pacheedaht Nation (1935-2007). In December 1946, Alfred Caldwell, then Principal of the Alberni Residential School, kicked fourteen-year-old Maisie Shaw down a flight of stairs to her death. Annett reported the Maisie Shaw murder the day he learned about it, in December 1995, but encountered a familiar resistance when requesting an investigation. “They had the same response to any of the deaths I reported, year after year. Complete refusal,” he says.

But Kevin Annett wasn’t fired for helping to expose the murders of First Nations people. Instead, it was his exposure of the colonial lust for land and resources, which continues to define our society’s relationship to its Aboriginal people, that provoked such severe censure. As Annett states, “The Achilles heel here is the issue of the land.”

In the course of my work with residential school survivors while I was still a Minister in Port Alberni,” he explains, “I stumbled over the fact that the church had engaged in the theft and speculation of Aboriginal land in Ahousat, B.C., in order to profit its corporate benefactor, the logging company MacMillan-Bloedel.” In October 1994, Annett wrote a letter to church officials expressing concern about the issue of stolen Native land. “A week later,” he says, “Presbytery officials began meeting secretly with my church board to arrange my removal as Minister at St. Andrew’s.”

“Unrepentant is many things, but for me it is a mirror, held up to my own Euro-Canadian culture and people,” he states. For Annett, our antipathy towards the original people of this land represents a deep and abiding disrespect of life itself. “I am counseling and speaking to the dying in this film: to the members of a collapsing culture whose ways are causing their own planetary self-destruction in the wake of their extermination of millions of Indigenous people.”

With the film recently garnering a Best Director Award at the 2006 New York Independent Film and Video Festival, and winning the award for Best International Documentary at the 2006 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, Annett’s efforts are finally being recognized.

Unrepentant can be ordered from www.hiddenfromhistory.org, and the trailer can be viewed online at video.google.ca.

Baghdad Burns, Calgary Booms

By Naomi Klein
From Znet
2007

The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history. All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely "tax holidays" and pay a laughable 1 percent in royalties to the government.

This isn't the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law--that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta. For four years now, Alberta and Iraq have been connected to each other through a kind of invisible seesaw: As Baghdad burns, destabilizing the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms.

Here is how chaos in Iraq unleashed what the Financial Times recently called "north America's biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush." Albertans have always known that in the northern part of their province, there are vast deposits of bitumen--black, tarlike goo that is mixed with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world.

It is possible to turn Alberta's crud into crude, but it's awfully hard. One method is to mine it in vast open pits: First forests are clear-cut, then topsoil scraped away. Next, huge machines dig out the black goop and load it into the largest dump trucks in the world (two stories high, a single wheel costs $100,000). The tar is diluted with water and solvents in giant vats, which spin it around until the oil rises to the top, while the massive tailings are dumped in ponds larger than the region's natural lakes. Another method is to separate the oil where it is: Large drill-pipes push steam deep underground, which melts the tar, while another pipe sucks it out and transports it through several more stages of refining, much of it powered by natural gas.

Both techniques are costly: between $18 and $23 per barrel, just in expenses. Until quite recently, that made no economic sense. In the mid-1980s, oil sold for $20 a barrel; in 1998-99, it was down to $12 a barrel. The major international players had no intention of paying more to get the oil than they could sell it for, which is why, when global oil reserves were calculated, the tar sands weren't even factored in. Everyone but a few heavily subsidized Canadian companies knew that the tar was staying put.

Then came the US invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, the price of oil reached $35 a barrel, raising the prospect of making a profit from the tar sands (the industry calls them "oil sands"). That year, the United States Energy Information Administration "discovered" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta--previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil--was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States.

All this has meant that Iraq's oil boom has not been delayed; it has been relocated. All the majors, save BP, have rushed to northern Alberta: ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, which alone plans to spend $9-$14 billion. In April, Shell paid $8 billion to take full control of its Canadian subsidiary. The town of Fort McMurray, ground zero of the boom, has nowhere to house the tens of thousands of new workers, and one company has built its own airstrip so it can fly in the people it needs.

Seventy-five percent of the oil from the tar sands flows directly to the United States, prompting Brian Hall, an energy consultant with Colorado-based IHS, to call the tar sands "America's energy security blanket." There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the "security" it was looking for right next door.

It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an "explosion of innovation in alternatives," as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process"--embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth.

And that's the Alberta tar sands for you: The industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the industry plans to more than triple production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sand, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta.

Developing the sands is devouring trees and wildlife--the Pembina Institute, the leading authority on the tar sands' environmental impact, warns that boreal forests covering "an area as large as the State of Florida" risk being leveled. Now it turns out that the main river feeding the industry the massive quantities of water it needs is in jeopardy. Climate scientists say that dropping water levels are the result--fittingly enough--of climate warming.

Contemplating the collective madness in Alberta--a scene even the Financial Times has labeled "some dystopian fantasy"--it strikes me that Canada has ended up with more than Iraq's displaced oil boom. We have its elusive weapons of mass destruction too. They are out near Fort McMurray, in the jet-black goo beneath the earth's crust. And with the help of trucks, pipes, steam and gas, these weapons are being detonated.


Why Ecosocialism Today?

By Joel Kovel
From New Socialist Magazine

Homo sapiens has been contending with its effects on nature since Paleolithic days and the first great extinctions wrought by hunting bands. But it was not until the 1970s that these became experienced as a great ecological crisis threatening the future of the species. The modern environmental movement was born in that moment, with its Earth Days, green parties and innumerable NGOs signalling that a new, ecologically aware age had arisen to contend with the planetary threat.

The optimism of those early years has now quite faded. Despite certain useful interventions like greater recycling of garbage or the development of green zones, it is increasingly apparent that the whole mass of governmental regulations, environmental NGO’s and academic programs has failed to check the overall pace of ecological decay. Indeed, since the first Earth Day was proclaimed, the breakdown in crucial areas such as carbon emissions, the loss of barrier reefs and deforestation of the Amazon basin has actually accelerated and even begun to assume an exponential character.

How do we explain this grim fact, the awareness of which should inspire the most vigorous efforts to go beyond the limits of present-day environmentalism? Perhaps Margaret Thatcher should be heeded here. In the later years of the 1970s, the very decade that was to usher in the environmental era, the “Iron Lady” Prime Minister of the UK announced the rise of “TINA,” the acronym for her slogan “There Is No Alternative” to the given society, and certainly no alternative of the sort envisioned by the first wave of environmentalists.

What had happened was that environmentalism had missed the point, and was dealing with external symptoms rather than the basic disease. Thatcher did not spell it out in detail but there is no mistaking what she had in mind and stood for: There was to be no alternative to capitalism—to be exact, the born-again, harder-edged kind of capitalism which was being installed during the 70s in place of the welfare-state capitalism that had prevailed for much of the century. This was a deliberate response to a serious accumulation crisis that had convinced the leaders of the global economy to install what we know as neoliberalism. Thatcher was emblematic, along with Ronald Reagan in the US, of its political face.

Neoliberalism is a return to the pure logic of capital; it is no passing storm but the true condition of the capitalist world we inhabit. It has effectively swept away measures which had inhibited capital’s aggressivity, replacing them with naked exploitation of humanity and nature. The tearing down of boundaries and limits to accumulation is known as “globalization,” and is celebrated by ideologues like Thomas Friedman as a new epoch of universal progress borne on the wings of free trade and unfettered commodification. This blitzkrieg or bombardment simply overwhelmed the feeble liberal reforms which the environmental movements of the 1970s had helped put in place in order to check ecological decay. And as these movements have had little or no critique of capital, they drift helplessly in a time of accelerated breakdown.

Thus it is time to recognize the utter inadequacy of first-wave environmentalism’s basic premises and forms of organization. There is a certain urgency to this recognition, for nothing less than profound and indeed unprecedented changes in human existence are forewarned by the ecological crisis. And that this path has now opened before us can be attributed to capital itself, which places us on a track to ecological chaos. While there are many complexities corresponding to capital’s responsibility for the ecological crisis, there is but one overriding tendency: capitalism requires continual growth of the economic product and since this growth is for the sake of capital and not real human need, the result is the continual destabilization of an integral relationship to nature. The essential reason for this lies in capitalism’s distinctive difference from all other modes of production, that is, that it is organized around the production of capital itself—a purely abstract, numerical entity with no internal limit. Hence it drags the material natural world, which very definitely has limits, along with it on its mad quest for value and surplus value, and can do nothing else.

We have no choice about the fact that the ecological crisis portends radical change. But we can choose the kind of change, whether it is to be for life or death. As Ian Angus puts it in his listserve, Climate and Capitalism, the choice is simple enough: “EcoSocialism or Barbarism: There is no third way” (To learn about and/or join this list, contact Angus at ecosocialism@gmail.com).

This is a paraphrase of the great Rosa Luxemburg’s saying of the early twentieth century, that the real choice before humanity was between “Socialism or Barbarism.” This is quite true. The failure of the socialist revolutions (both immediately as in the case of Luxemburg and the Spartacist uprising in Germany, and later with the failure of the other socialisms of the twentieth century, especially those organized around the USSR and China), has been a condition for the present triumph of barbaric capitalism, with its endless wars, nightmarish consumerism, ever-widening gap between rich and poor — and most significantly, ecological crisis. So the choice remains the same, except that capitalist barbarism now means ecocatastrophe. This is because the capacity of the earth to buffer the effects of human production has become overwhelmed by the chaos of its productive system. Any movement for social transformation in our time will have to foreground this issue, for the very notion of a future depends on whether we can resolve it or not.

For this reason, a socialism worthy of the name will have to be ecologically—or to be more exact, “ecocentrically”—oriented, that is, it will have to be an “ecosocialism” devoted to restoring the integrity of our relationship to nature. The distinction between ecosocialism and the “first-epoch” socialisms of the last century is not merely terminological, as though for ecosocialism we simply need worker control over the industrial apparatus and some good environmental regulation. We do need worker control in ecosocialism as we did in the socialism of the “first epoch,” for unless the producers are free there is no overcoming of capitalism. But the ecological aspect also poses a new and more radical issue that calls into question the very character of production itself.

Capitalist production, in its endless search for profit, seeks to turn everything into a commodity. Only in this way can accumulation continuously expand. By releasing us from the tyranny of private ownership of the means of production, socialism, whether of the first-epoch variety or as ecosocialism, makes it possible to interrupt the deadly tendency of cancerous growth, which is effectively driven by the competition between capitals for ever greater market share. But this leaves open the question of just what will be produced, and how, within an ecosocialist society.

It is plain that production will have to shift from being dominated by exchange—the path of the commodity—to that which is for use, that is for the direct meeting of human needs. But this in turn requires definition, and in the context of ecological crisis, “use” can only mean those set of needs essential for the overcoming of the ecological crisis—for this is the greatest need for civilization as a whole, and therefore for each woman and man within it.

It follows that human beings can only flourish in circumstances in which the damage to nature that capital has wrought is overcome, as for example, by ceasing to transfer carbon to the atmosphere. Since “nature” is the interrelated set of all ecosystems, production within ecosocialism should be oriented toward the mending of ecosystemic damage and indeed, the making of flourishing ecosystems. This could entail ecologically rational farms, for example, or—since we ourselves are natural creatures who live ecosystemically, in communities—ecologically directed human relationships, including the raising of children, the relations between genders and indeed, the whole spiritual and aesthetic side of life.

This article is far too brief to allow the development of these themes. But from what has been said so far it should be apparent that in talking of ecosocialism we are saying much more than that our economy or technology must change. Ecosocialism is no more a purely economic matter than was socialism or communism in the eyes of Marx. It needs to be precisely the radical transformation of society—and human existence—that Marx envisioned as the next stage in human evolution. Indeed, it must be that if we are going to survive the ecological crisis. Ecosocialism is the ushering in, then, of a whole mode of production, one in which freely associated labour produces flourishing ecosystems rather than commodities.

Most definitely, this raises far more questions than it answers, which is itself a measure of how profound the ecological crisis is. What, after all, would life look like if we stopped pouring carbon into the atmosphere and allowed the climate ecosystem to re-equilibrate, that is, be healed? How, really, are we to live fully human lives in harmony with nature given the tremendous horrors built into our system of society? There is no certainty of outcome. But there is one certainty we have to build: there must be an alternative.

There will be a meeting to found an International Ecosocialist organization this coming October 7th, in Paris. Please contact Joel at jskovel@earthlink.net, or Ian Angus at ecosocialism@gmail.com for further information.

[Joel Kovel’s two most recent books are Overcoming Zionism (Between the Lines) and The Enemy of Nature (2nd edition forthcoming 2007, Zed)]

Point - CounterPoint - The Carbon Tax Tango

By Jack Mintz and Mark Jaccard
From Alternatives Journal

Point - CounterPoint makes its debut in this issue of Alternatives Journal. In it, a powerhouse pair of internationally recognized economists apply the syncopated beat of the tango to the thorny issue of how to best tackle greenhouse gas emissions. Jack Mintz, named the 27th most influential tax expert in the world by the UK magazine Tax Business, says the time for a carbon tax has not arrived. Mark Jaccard, whose ideas on climate change were recently touted by The Globe and Mail as being “Jaccardian,” begs to differ.

We encourage you to participate in the dance by voicing your opinion on Alternatives’ discussion forum, or by sending us your letter to the editor.

Jack Mintz says;
We will see if the public policy mess caused by the abject failure of the Liberal government’s Project Green plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions will be improved by the Conservative government’s new Clean Air Act. Canada’s emissions are now 25 percent above 1990 levels, certainly well above the promised six percent reduction by 2012. Costly policies such as voluntary controls, subsidies and tax giveaways, and Rick Mercer’s One-Tonne Challenge have been ineffective, expensive ventures. They failed to overcome an ill-thought-out Kyoto target agreed upon in 1997 by former prime minister Jean Chrétien.

The target, taken because it would reduce Canada’s greenhouse gases marginally more than the United States, was chosen with little study as to whether Canada could accomplish the objective at a reasonable cost. Since 1997, the federal government has been stymied in trying to achieve the impossible. One idea being thrashed about is a proposed levy on energy sources (oil, gas, coal and others), varying according to the product’s carbon content. Long after being dismissed by the Chrétien government, carbon taxation has recently reared its ugly head with Liberal leadership contender Michael Ignatieff proposing to implement it federally.

So would a carbon tax be a good policy to deal with greenhouse gas emissions? Recent economic literature argues that carbon taxes can lead to a “double dividend,” whereby emissions would be reduced (a green dividend) and the revenues could be recycled to cut harmful taxes, thus improving the efficiency in the tax system (a blue dividend). Actually, I like to think of environmental taxes as providing a third dividend, red, which is related to the distributional consequences of the policy. The case for the triple dividend argument, however, is not so clear. Here is why.

The argument for a carbon tax yielding a green dividend is that consumers will avoid purchasing highertaxed products with greater carbon content. However, the tax approach may achieve little in the way of environmental objectives. The demand for such products as gasoline and heating fuel is less sensitive to price, since the tax also falls on necessary, almost essential, services such as heating and transportation. The carbon tax is also a highly inflexible tool since it cannot be easily adjusted for changing emission levels. Further, governments become reliant on the revenue and are less willing to adjust the tax rates downward when emissions decline. For these reasons, some experts have argued regulations that limit emissions, including tradable permit regimes, can be more effective and more flexible.

The blue dividend from a carbon tax could include recycled revenues spent on environmental programs. Dedicated taxes are anathema to finance departments since they introduce a rigidity in which the revenue must be spent on a bureaucratic-devised program regardless of whether the money is needed. Instead, greater bang for the buck could be achieved if carbon tax revenues were to replace economically harmful levies with high marginal tax rates on earnings, investment and risk-taking. You can bet your bottom tax dollar, however, that recycled revenues would likely be spent on transfers and politically driven public programs instead. Thus, no assurance can be given that the blue dividend would even be positive.

A carbon tax most likely results in a negative red dividend because it falls most heavily on the poor, whose consumption of gasoline, electricity and heating fuel tends to be a larger share of their resources compared to the rich. To get around this, some of the carbon tax revenues would be paid out as rebates to low-income Canadians to offset higher energy costs, thus negating the purpose of the policy.

So carbon taxes have little appeal in the sense that the green and blue dividends are far from certain and the red dividend is undoubtedly negative.

While current gas taxes are used to fund highways, roads or other infrastructure, proposals have often been made to raise the gas tax to curb greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. A broad-based environment tax on energy, however, would be far better than a narrow-based environmental tax such as the gas tax. The case for turning the federal gas tax into a broadbased environmental tax on various forms of energy was made by the Technical Committee on Business Taxation eight years ago. By keeping environmental revenues constant, the gas tax would be lowered in favour of new taxes on forms of energy, reflecting environmental damage.

In the end, the carbon tax is an idea whose time has not come. If governments are to be serious about reducing greenhouse gases, they need to look for more effective policies surgically directed at emissions rather than using blunt instruments. Carbon taxes won’t be much better than Project Green in achieving environmental or economic objectives.

This first portion of the article was adapted from the Financial Post (June 28, 2006).

Mark Jaccard replies;
Jack Mintz Argues that carbon taxes are inappropriate for curbing greenhouse gases compared to “more effective policies surgically directed at emissions,” but it is unclear what these superior alternatives would be. I assess his arguments against carbon taxes and then examine the alternatives. (By carbon taxes, I assume he means taxes on CO2 at the point of emission.)

First, Jack argues that carbon taxes would scarcely reduce emissions because they raise the price of essentials like gasoline and home heating fuel.He also argues that the inflexibility of carbon taxes hinders governments’ ability to adjust to falling revenues as emissions decline. In other words, he is criticizing carbon taxes for both causing and not causing emissions to fall. Which is it?

The more likely reality, as experienced in countries that have had modest carbon taxes for over a decade, is that these instruments induce a gradual shift toward lower emission technologies without a significant downward effect on energy use. It is important to remember that emissions are the issue, not energy use. Emissions can be reduced while using more energy if consumers switch to lower carbon fuels and the fossil fuel industry adopts carbon capture and storage. In any case, these shifts occur gradually, meaning that carbon tax revenues generate predictable income for governments. The important thing is to set a modest carbon tax initially, and clearly announce its scheduled rise over the coming decades.

Second, Jack is willing to bet tax dollars (I’d prefer he bet his own money) that governments will blow carbon tax revenues on political largesse instead of reducing productivity-hindering taxes. But this is like saying, “Government should not implement carbon taxes and recycle the revenue to reduce undesired taxes because government would not do it.” This response is equally appropriate for any of Jack’s excellent past proposals for tax reform. “Government, do not implement Jack’s proposal because you won’t implement it anyway.”

Third, Jack argues that carbon taxes hurt the poor more than the rich, and that compensation payments to low-income Canadians would emasculate the policy. Actually, the rich use a lot more energy per capita and even as a percentage of income the difference between high and low earners is not great. In any case, side compensation to low-income Canadians on a percapita or income basis will not negate the carbon tax’s influence on technology choices.

Finally, Jack’s second-to-last paragraph confused me. He says, “A broad-based energy tax, however, would be far better than a narrow-based one such as a gas tax.” But it is emissions, not energy use, that is the problem. A tax on energy would unnecessarily harm the economy with little benefit. Then he seems to reverse himself in saying, “The gas tax would be lowered in favour of new taxes on forms of energy, reflecting environmental damage.” But this is what a carbon tax is – a tax on environmental damage.

Since Jack sees as ineffective both carbon taxes, and the subsidies and information policies of the nowdefunct Project Green, this leaves regulations as the only option. I can support regulations. I see much evidence that they can be designed to achieve long-run environmental objectives with minimal short-run costs. Impacts on electricity rates were imperceptible as the United States emission cap and trade system – a market-oriented regulation – dramatically lowered acid emissions over the past two decades.Vehicle prices have been equally unaffected over 15 years as the California vehicle emission standard forced manufacturers to produce and market low-emission vehicles like the hybrid-electric car. Industry numbers show that a multidecade obligation on the fossil fuel industry to capture and store a gradually growing share of the carbon it processes would cause energy costs to rise less than one percent per year.

But I cannot find a single applied economist in this field who argues that these regulations are superior to carbon taxes in terms of the arguments presented by Jack. Both regulations and environmental taxes must be carefully designed to not force premature retirement of capital stock, to not destabilize government and industry revenues, to not shock consumer prices, and to protect our trade competitiveness. By providing a consistent signal throughout the economy, however, carbon taxes are the most efficient and effective means of achieving our environmental objective.

Jack Mintz responds;
I Appreciate Mark’s comments – and especially his past effective analysis that has convinced me that environmental policies should be directed at emissions, not the consumption of products that contain emissions. I am afraid, however, that Mark has not understood my main point in differentiating between environmental and tax policy objectives, where the latter takes into account revenue-raising, efficiency and fairness objectives, not just environmental concerns.

A carbon tax will not be an effective environmental policy compared to regulations accompanied by flexible tradable permit trading, since taxes are set rigidly for two reasons.

First, governments do not have full information about the carbon content of all products and the potential demand and supply responses needed to be known to properly assess the optimal tax rates needed to curb emissions. As Martin Weitzman pointed out years ago, quantity controls may be superior to price controls depending on the market characteristics unknown to the government and the responsiveness of supply and demand to price changes. Using this basic analysis, a regulation accompanied by tradable permits is superior to a carbon tax if unknown demand is less responsive to prices than supply.

Second, governments are unwilling to adjust tax rates in the face of changing technologies that reduce carbon content in products, given their reliance on the revenues. As noted in past literature, sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco reduce consumption, but governments have also set tax rates to maximize their revenue rather than more effectively curb consumption. The same will happen with carbon taxes where revenue-raising objectives will compromise environmental policy. For this reason, I believe regulations with tradable permits would be better since governments do not get a slice of the pie and will focus more on environmental concerns.

So far, I have seen little analysis comparing which policy is more effective in achieving environmental objectives, but I would bet my bottom tax dollar that tradable permits are far better, even with imperfect monitoring.

It is not out of place to think of the use of environmental taxation as part of an overall tax system that would go in part towards achieving environmental objectives and helping fund government activities. This is a different public policy issue – taxes based on “bads” rather than just “goods” could be assessed widely on pollution-causing activities (not just carbon) to raise revenues more efficiently and fairly. Just don’t expect environmental objectives will be fully achieved.

Mark Jaccard sums up;
I think Jack and I are not that far apart. In his response, he points to Weitzman’s famous 1974 analysis showing that under some conditions an emissions cap with tradable permits (a market-oriented regulation) can be superior to an emissions tax. I agree. The issue is to determine whether those conditions hold for carbon dioxide emissions. Jack says he has seen few studies comparing these two approaches, but would bet his own tax dollars that regulation is more effective. (I’d prefer he bet his own “after-tax” dollars.) As an environmental economist, I have seen many comparative studies, although these have not left me with a clear conclusion. I note that Bill Nordhaus at Yale University, who is considered the leading economist on climate change policy, noted recently that “price-type approaches [carbon taxes] are likely to be more effective and more efficient.”

Jack is also concerned that governments might set taxes to achieve fiscal stability rather than environmental objectives. Again, I agree. Perhaps his example of alcohol and tobacco taxes provides just the model for carbon. We combine high taxes that discourage consumption with regulations prohibiting smoking in public spaces and drinking while driving. Countries that have carbon taxes combine these with various regulations, such as the emissions cap with tradable permits.

Despite his reservations about a carbon tax, Jack says he’s favourable to environmental taxes in general. And indeed, Canada already levies environmental charges on pollutants ranging from pesticides to batteries to acid emissions with varying degrees of success. So why not tax carbon as well? A number of other countries have been doing so for a decade. In the end, I find it difficult to argue against at least exploring this means of curbing the emissions that scientists deem responsible for the greatest threat to humankind.

Jack Mintz is a professor in Business Economics and director of the International Tax Program, both at the Rotman School of Management. From 1999 to 2006, he was president and CEO of the CD Howe Institute.


Mark Jaccard is a professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. His book Sustainable Fossil Fuels (Cambridge U Press) won the $35,000 Donner prize in 2006.



The Missing Class

By Eyal Press
From The Nation
2007

Sociologist Katherine Newman is best known for her richly documented, fine-grained portraits of the working poor. In books such as No Shame in My Game and Chutes and Ladders, she has chronicled the experiences of low-wage workers struggling against formidable odds to lift themselves out of poverty. Unlike many economists, Newman focuses less on statistics than on the barriers and opportunities people encounter in their daily lives, shedding light on the fault lines of the nation's class divide through intimate accounts of families and neighborhoods.

In her forthcoming book, The Missing Class, written with Victor Tan Chen, Newman has turned her attention to the travails of the "near poor," a vast pool of workers who are neither officially destitute nor comfortably middle class. Recently, Nation contributing writer Eyal Press caught up with her at her home in Manhattan.

Who are the "near poor"?

The near poor are people with household incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 a year for a family of four, or 100 to 200 percent of the poverty line. And there are actually almost twice as many of them as there are people under the poverty line--57 million in the US. They represent, on the one hand, an improvement, forward motion, the promise of upward mobility. But their lives are not stable. They truly are one paycheck, one lost job, one divorce or one sick child away from falling below the poverty line.

Are the members of this class in a more precarious situation today than, say, ten or twenty years ago?

More precarious than in the late 1990s, yes, but not twenty years ago. The reason is that we had this golden period between about 1997 and 2002, when we had record low unemployment, high growth, low inflation, and that's part of what propelled these people forward--employers were looking for more of them, and opportunities opened up. That's less the case today.

What kinds of neighborhoods do the people you're describing live in?

Like the poor, the near poor tend to live in places that have serious problems of infestation--rodents, cockroaches--which means they have very high rates of asthma, childhood asthma in particular, and high rates of lead exposure, since their apartment buildings are older. They are also in neighborhoods with fewer consumer options, places not well served by the big chain stores that have the lowest prices. So basically the poor and the near poor are soaked--everything they buy is more expensive than it should be. It's like a huge tax on them, and there are also health consequences--your access to a decent diet is compromised; it's harder to get fresh fruits and vegetables. Problems like obesity are very pronounced in this population. But the neighborhoods of the near poor are less segregated and have a more diverse income mix than those of the "real" poor.

You call this a "missing class." Is it missing from the consciousness of Republicans or Democrats?

Pretty much both. John Edwards wrote the foreword to this book, so it's on his radar screen, but I haven't heard anybody else talk about these people, neither Republicans nor Democrats. I don't think the political parties reach out to them very much.

Yet I take it that what happens in Washington does have an impact on their lives.

Some of the policies set in motion over the past decade have had a particularly pronounced effect on the near poor. For example, welfare reform propelled a lot of people into the labor market. Meanwhile, No Child Left Behind created a system of high-stakes tests for kids in the public school system. Nobody was thinking about what these two policies would mean when they collided behind the closed doors of a family. But in a family, these things are colliding all the time: the demand placed on parents to be in the labor market and the demand placed on kids to pass those high-stakes tests, which they're far less likely to do if parents aren't around to take them to the library, read to them, look over their homework. There are stories in the book about mothers who had been able to go to their kids' schools, couldn't go anymore, didn't realize they were falling off the deep end, and then that kid ends up on Rikers Island.

Is there more, or less, awareness today of the challenges facing the working poor than when you began your research?

There's greater recognition now that we actually have a population called the working poor. I think that attempts to beat back some of the more successful policy innovations, like the earned-income tax credit, have failed in part because there's recognition that these people exist, that they should be supported and that we need to do something about their health insurance. What I don't see is much attention to fostering mobility out of working poverty. We seem to feel that as long as we've taken people off public assistance, our job is done. But it isn't done--it isn't good enough in a country as wealthy as this to replace welfare-dependent poverty with working poverty.

Yet welfare reform has not led to the disaster some people predicted. Haven't those who feared this, including yourself, been proven wrong?

What I didn't anticipate, and I don't think anyone anticipated, was that in the late '90s we would have really tight labor markets, a roaring economy, very high growth, very low inflation. We basically had the opposite of a perfect storm--we had perfect weather, and that provided a lot of mobility opportunity even for the people I study. But welfare reform won't receive its real test until we see a big recession and we can see what happens to people without any safety net beneath that. We haven't seen that, so it's not easy to know what it would mean.

In your previous book, Chutes and Ladders, you told the stories of two groups: the "high flyers," who succeeded in climbing out of poverty, and the "low riders," who didn't. What was the main difference between them?

For the most part the difference is explained not by their desire for upward mobility but by their family circumstances. Everybody wants a better job and everybody is willing to work for it. But women who had children and no one to help them with those kids were much more likely to get trapped--they couldn't get more education, which limited their job options; their contact with the labor market was more fragile and episodic. Whereas the people who could afford childcare or who worked out elaborate arrangements with extended family members were able to stay on the job, get more training and move upward.

That sounds like an answer conservatives would love--it's all about family.

But when we say it's about family, we're really talking about the burdens people face in simultaneously trying to combine family responsibilities with the demands of the labor market. And we don't make it easy for them to do that. In Italy, you have access to full-time, high-quality childcare from the time your child is an infant. Similarly in France. A lot of families I studied who didn't make it out of poverty were the ones where the childcare options were so dangerous they couldn't leave their kids, so they ended up dropping out of the labor market, which isn't good for them or for their children. I don't think conservatives have much of an answer to this. The only answer I hear them giving is that poor people shouldn't have children at all.

If you could take the platform of the Democratic candidate for President and insert three provisions for the missing class into it, what would they be?

Universal, high-quality, early-childhood education would be very high on my list, because the more we can do for kids when they start out to level the playing field, the better off the whole country will be in the long run. Universal healthcare would be hugely important, not only because of its health consequences but because it frees up income for other things. And opening up and maintaining access to higher education, because the people on the losing end of this economy are the poorly educated. Instead, I fear we're going in the opposite direction--we're seeing increases in public higher-education tuition, which will make it very hard for new generations to succeed.

Jazz and Radical Politics

By Louis Proyect
From Canadian Dimension
2006

Major social changes in the United States have fundamentally determined the evolution of jazz music, just as they have other art forms. The 1930s were the period of the rise of jazz and the organized Left. Concretely, this meant big bands and the Communist Party. Notwithstanding some early dogmatic opposition to jazz from cultural commissar Mike Gold, the party soon threw itself into proselytizing for jazz and fighting segregation in the music business.

Major contributions to jazz writing were made by veterans of this era. Writing as Frankie Newton — in homage to the trumpet player who had joined the party — E.J. Hobsbawm wrote numerous articles that were collected as The Jazz Scene. To Hobsbawm’s credit, the radical nature of jazz is not something conveyed in the lyrics of a song but in the music’s willingness to speak for the pain and aspiration of the most oppressed sector of society.

Paradoxically, it is the simplest and least “political” jazz that has best resisted the temptations of compromise, respectability and official recognition. Bessie Smith, who never sang in white theatres and would not have changed her style if she had, is — like the blues — the least corrupted and corruptible part of jazz, and, therefore, the purest carrier of the jazz protest. (It may be significant that, of all the biographies and autobiographies of jazz artists, those of the women singers express the irreconcilable bitterness of the underdog most persistently.)

Like Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday also expressed this bitterness, especially when she mounted the stage to perform “Strange Fruit.” This bitter denunciation of lynching in the Deep South perfectly expresses the affinity between jazz musician and leftist in the 1930s and ’40s. Written by Abel Meerpol, a Communist high-school teacher and CP member, the song cut straight to the heart of racial oppression in the U.S. Meerpol, writing under the name Lewis Allen, also composed “The House I Live In,” a plea for racial tolerance popularized by Frank Sinatra, who was close to the party when he first performed it. Besides winning recognition for his songs, Abel Meerpol was well known as the adoptive parent of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s children.

John Hammond, Talent Spotter
Holiday premiered “Strange Fruit” at Café Society, a Greenwich Village nightclub that was launched in 1938 by Barney Josephson, who wanted to create an alternative to the snobbery and racism that pervaded uptown clubs. His brother Leon, who worked there, was a party member — and a participant in a plot to assassinate Hitler! Helen Lawrenson, the club’s publicist, maintains that Earl Browder came up with the idea of the club as a way to raise money for the CP.

When Josephson ran low on start-up funds, bandleader Benny Goodman and Columbia Records executive John Hammond each put up $5,000 to help make Café Society a reality. Although John Hammond was never a member of the Communist Party, he was probably the best-known left-wing figure in the jazz community of the 1930s and ’40s. As a record producer, a Nation magazine contributor and a board member of the NAACP, he fought against segregation both within the jazz world and in American society as a whole. In addition, he was instrumental in developing the careers of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and a host of other jazz musicians, many of whom — including these two — became friends of the Left. For an introduction to John Hammond’s legacy that emphasizes his important accomplishments, we can turn to the chapter in Lewis A. Erenberg’s Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture entitled “Swing Left: The Politics of Race and Culture in the Swing Era.” Erenberg writes:

“Goodman’s phenomenal success validated Hammond as a talent spotter, and music industry executives had to pay attention. As a jazz devotee and a cultural radical, however, Hammond was primarily interested in promoting Negro performers who ‘could not get a break because of their race.’ He was Teddy Wilson’s major backer during the 1930s, but he also went out of his way to push the Basie band. After hearing Basie on his powerful car radio, Hammond drove to Kansas City to hear the band in person, and then publicized it endlessly in his Down Beat columns and among his many musical connections. It was the Basie band’s ‘un-buttoned, never-too-disciplined’ style that attracted Hammond. He interpreted it as an ‘authentic’ black band, unlike Duke Ellington’s ’show band,’ which, he believed, had lost touch with its blues roots.”

The John Hammond-Duke Ellington Rift
To get the full dimensions of the Hammond-Ellington rift, we need to consult David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. In chapter two, entitled “Between Conjure and Capital,” there is a detailed account of the polemics that took place between the highly regarded band leader and the leftist jazz producer and critic. Hammond had fired the first shot in 1935 with an article in Down Beatt entitled “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‘Black Prince of Jazz’: A Musician of Great Talent Forsakes Simplicity for Pretension.” He saw Ellington as the musical equivalent of a Black bourgeoisie that had distanced itself from its people: “It would probably take a Granville Hicks or a Langston Hughes to describe the way that he shuts his eyes to the abuses being heaped on his people and his original class.”

In a very real sense, the tensions between the incipient Black nationalist Duke Ellington and the integrationist Hammond prefigure those that would take place years later between LeRoi Jones and Roy Wilkins. There was far more “Afrocentrism” in Ellington’s music than in any other swing band of the 1930s. Ellington wrote a homage to Ethiopia entitled “Menelik, King of Judah” that was not unlike those found in reggae. He also wrote an all-black musical called Jump for Joy (subtitled A Sun-Tanned Revu-sical) that, according to Ellington, was intended “to take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway, and say things that would make the audience think.”

Indeed, one can easily see the influence of Ellington on Charles Mingus, perhaps modern jazz’s best-known Black radical. His autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, contains bitter denunciations of white racism and the struggle to achieve dignity and success in the white-controlled jazz business. It ranks with the autobiography of Malcolm X, and other classics. Like Ellington, Mingus sought to elevate the status of Black people in his music, but with even more of a political edge. Although Mingus started out understandably as a desegregationist in the 1950s, his music and his ideology moved in a more nationalist direction in later years in harmony with broader trends in the Black community.

Black Nationalism vs. Integrationism
Mingus wrote “Fables of Faubus” in 1959 to protest Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus’s decision to call out the National Guard two years earlier to prevent the integration by Little Rock Central High School of nine African-American teenagers. The song was first recorded on the 1959 album Mingus Ah Um *, but Columbia Records deemed it too controversial for release. It was not until 1960 that Mingus was able to release the lyrics on the album *Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, released by the more independent Candid label:

Oh Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!
Oh Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!
Oh Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us!
Oh Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won’t permit integrated schools
Then he’s a fool!

Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your evil plan)

Of course, one might wonder why Columbia Records might have refused to allow these words to be heard, given the fact that John Hammond virtually ran the jazz division. This opens the door to more recent criticisms of Hammond that have questioned both his commitment to Black rights and, just as important, his dealings with Black musicians as a corporation chief. Frank Kofsky, author of John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s, a book that makes the occasionally overstated case that Coltrane’s music expressed Black nationalist sentiments, deals with the question in Black Music, White Business. Kofsky writes that the “tangled relationship of John Hammond and Columbia Records and Bessie Smith” illustrates the political economy of white domination of black music. He also writes:

“The first and most important point to emphasize is that, as author Chris Albertson reveals in his biography of Bessie Smith, Hammond signed the singer to a series of contracts with Columbia Records that gave her a small, fixed fee for each performance she recorded and no royalties. Such contracts were apparently standard practice with the executive, for Billie Holiday unequivocally stated in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues: ‘Later on John Hammond paired me up with Teddy Wilson and his band for another record session. This time I got thirty bucks for making half a dozen sides.’ What is more, when she protested about this arrangement, it was, according to her, a Columbia executive named Bernie Hanighen — and not John Hammond — ‘who really went to bat for me’ and ‘almost lost his job at Columbia fighting for me.’”

Hammond and Billie Holiday
While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a full assessment of Hammond’s role in jazz, suffice it to say that he never broke completely with his class. Consider how he advised a family friend to shun Billie Holiday in his memoir, On Record:

“I couldn’t wait to bring Billie Holiday to Café Society. It was the perfect place for her to sing to a new audience with the kind of jazz players who brought out her best. Unfortunately, her appearances were not the success they could have been, and they proved to be the end of my association with Billie’s career. She was heavily involved with narcotics, and she had hired as her manager a woman from a distinguished family I knew well. I was concerned that she and her family might be hurt by unsavory gossip, or even blackmailed by the gangsters and dope pushers Billie knew.

“It was one of the few times in my life when I felt compelled to interfere in a personal relationship which was none of my business. I told the manager’s family what I knew and what I feared. Soon afterward the manager and Billie broke up, and Billie never worked at Café Society again.”

Political Bebop
After the decline of the big-band era, bebop surfaced as a trend that at first blush seemed to be a retreat from the engaged politics of the 1930s. The small groups that played such adventurous works as “Bloomdido” or “Groovin’ High” never seemed to take up the big issues of peace and racism that the previous generation had, nor did they seem particularly interested in whether you could jitterbug to them. While this is true on one level, on another the bebop musicians were pioneering a new kind of identity that refused to cede an inch to the “entertainment” expectations of largely white audiences. Except for Dizzy Gillespie, these musicians had broken completely with the almost minstrel-like aspects of bandleaders like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. Their music was based on expressions of Black independence and pride.

In What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians, Eric Porter writes: “The politics of bebop’s style reflected this broader ethos, as intellectual practice and sartorial display coincided for musicians and their audiences. Although Eric Lott’s assessment of bebop essentially describes three cohesive and rather narrowly defined cultural and aesthetic politics, his description of bebop’s ’style’ calls attention to the way musicians and fans alike engaged in serious mental endeavours that responded to the world around them. ‘Bebop,’ he writes ‘was about making disciplined imagination alive and answerable to the social change of its time,’ and the style ‘was where social responsiveness became individual expression, where the pleasures of shared identity met an intolerance for racist jive.’ Beboppers and their fans even adopted the personae of intellectuals; goatees, berets and horned-rimmed glasses became the uniform of the subculture. The adoption of this regalia of the intelligentsia not only distanced musicians from the mainstream but also challenged racist ideologies that were based in part on a belief in African American mental inferiority. We may also understand bebop style as a signifier of musicians’ collective search for a better understanding of music theory and the world around them.”

In no short time at all, bebop was superseded by “hard bop.” This style retained the rhythmic and harmonic inventiveness of bebop, but married it to an explicit Black identity that more often than not saw itself as an adjunct of the struggle for equality. Artists like Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan sought to give expression to the Soul of Black Folks, as W.E.B. Du Bois would put it in the title of his book.

Later on, the best of hard bop was integrated into the “New Thing” — avant-garde jazz of the 1960s. This hard-edged and often dissonant style was the artistic counterpart of the urban rebellions and the resistance to the Vietnam War. Music and politics were merged seamlessly in the recordings of Archie Shepp, an outspoken Black nationalist who recorded one explicitly political album after another from 1965 on, and who is still going strong.


Socialism, Internet Style

How the Web Will Transform the World — Again

By Brian Joseph Davis
From "This" Magazine

The single greatest development with the internet this past year has nothing to do with code. It has nothing to do with geek executives drowning in blow and Buffy box sets, and nothing to do with any product that starts with a lower case “i.”

It’s been a shift in how the public perceives the ’net. Thanks to peerto- peer programs, and contributor sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube, as well as millions of blogs, the public has realized that “net” is short for “network.” It’s as if the Pavlovian association of passivity before a glowing screen—learned from decades of television viewing—has been shaken off.

In those dismissals of internet trends that appear every few months in the dailies, most get it wrong. These hubs of snark, passion, insight, cat photos and rampant spelling errors are not storming the gated community of print journalism and criticism. There’s no reason to. Instead, a mobile base camp is being set up next door to do something far more radical than journalism. People are analyzing and editing the raw feed of life for themselves—a small social transformation in the developed world, but one that will dovetail with other, mammoth transformations.

Racist stand-up comedian Michael Richards, for example, had what was left of his career halted by the dissemination of a video that old media would never have touched. Spreading the video wasn’t the action of a filthy, heartless mob. It was the kind of filthy, heartless—yet fair—mob with checks and balances that musician Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields worked with when he was able to defend himself against spurious online charges of being a racist (for admitting during a music conference to liking the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”).

By responding on blogs and online radio, Merritt was exonerated and a dialogue regarding voice, music and race flourished— none of which would have resulted from a newspaper article on the subject. Granted, most of the information shared in these communities amounts to graduation-party puking photos and homebrew karaoke videos, but so what? The inability to understand such charms has always been a disease particular to the fourth estate and it doesn’t take away from the power of the internet. As well, for every Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace, there are 100 sites that aren’t.

Sites like Wikipedia and YouTube and participatory policy development like Creative Commons, as well as online applications like Google Docs, have all recently been collectively dubbed “Web 2.0,” but the principles behind these works are what the internet was built on.

Using online applications and being a stakeholder in websites positions a user as part of something else—something like society—in a way that the alienation of everyday life usually keeps that person from attaining. In terms of the computer itself, these principles will ultimately annihilate the idea of a computer as an expensive TV that you fill with expensive, proprietary programs—a consumer object that, until recently, was absolutely meaningless to the majority of the world’s population.

This is the kind of internet now snaking its way to the developing world, sometimes in the form of projects like One Laptop for Every Child (cheap, hand-cranked laptops with mesh networking capabilities) and, more realistically, in the form of hacked wireless powered by heisted electricity, as is increasingly common in squatted metropolises around Jakarta and Lagos. Here the internet will connect with that other social transformation: the urban population of the planet now outweighing the rural population.

As urban theorist Mike Davis has pointed out, the shift toward superslums and megacities means the superpoor will be talking to one another in a way they haven’t before, and what they have to say could amount to a second age of socialism—comparable to the birth of the metropolises of the industrial age. There is no telling what difference wi-fi and webbased applications will make there, but at least this is certain: The story will be better written this time around, as the internet is not a challenge or add-on feature to conventional media—it’s the world itself, written by us, with profit-based media only a small organ within it. Control save.

U.S. Announces Major Middle East Arms Package

By Sue Pleming and Andy Sullivan
From Reuters
2007

The United States on Monday announced military aid packages worth more than $43 billion for Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in an effort to bolster Mideast allies against Iran and others.

The United States plans to offer a $13 billion package for Egypt over 10 years and a $30 billion package for Israel over the same period, increases over previous military funding, as well as unspecified defense aid to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states, said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Saudi package is expected to upgrade the country's missile defenses and air force and increase its naval capabilities, a defense official told Reuters on Saturday. The package for Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries could reach $20 billion over 10 years, the official said.

The proposed aid packages still have to be approved by Congress and there is expected to be opposition by some lawmakers, particularly over assistance to Saudi Arabia, which is accused of not being helpful in Iraq.

Rice made the announcement hours before leaving with Defense Secretary Robert Gates for a rare joint trip to Egypt and Saudi Arabia where they are seeking more Arab help in stabilizing Iraq.

"This effort will help bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran," said Rice in a statement announcing the defense agreements.

Washington is striving to assure Gulf allies, worried by the growing strength of Iran and war in Iraq, that the United States is committed to the region and will stand by them, with arms sales part of that process, U.S. officials say.

IRAN CRITICAL
But Iran accused the United States on Monday of seeking to create fear and cause divisions in the Middle East by announcing the major package of arms deals.

"America has always considered one policy in this region and that is creating fear and concerns in the countries of the region and trying to harm the good relations between these countries," Iran foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a regular press briefing.

U.S. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns characterized the deals as a continuation of existing policy.

"It's not as if we're introducing some new element in the region," Burns said in a conference call. "Iran is a factor in this but it wasn't the overriding factor."

Burns said he saw no conflict between the aid packages to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose governments have a long record of human-rights abuses, and the Bush administration's long-term goal of promoting democracy in the region.

'CONFRONTING THE THREAT OF RADICALISM'
Rice said the Bush administration was starting discussions with Egypt for the $13 billion military assistance deal which would strengthen Egypt's ability to "address shared strategic goals."

"Further modernizing the Egyptian and Saudi Armed Forces and increasing interoperability will bolster our partners' resolve in confronting the threat of radicalism and cement their respective roles as regional leaders in the quest for Middle East peace and in ensuring Lebanon's freedom and independence," Rice said.

The aid package to Israel steps up annual military support to about $3 billion each year from the $2.4 billion Israel now receives annually under a 10-year plan negotiated by the Clinton administration in 1998, Burns said.

Burns planned to travel to Israel next week to conclude the agreement.

Burns said the final amount for the Saudi and Gulf states arms package was still being negotiated, although he expected it to be in the billions. A final package with a firm price tag will be presented to Congress in September, he said.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are also expected to benefit but no details have been given.




Let Them In!

Why rich countries should open their borders to less-skilled migrants.

By Philippe Legrain
From Ode Magazine.com
2007

We take it for granted that restrictions on the movement of people should exist. In particular, we assume that it is normal and desirable that people in poor countries should be confined within their national borders, just as medieval serfs were once tied to the land. We never stop to think that perhaps we would all be better off if the latter-day serfs were set free, because they would be vastly more productive if they were not confined to their poor native lands.

Just as feudal lords never questioned whether their system made sense because they were comfortable at the top of the pile, people in rich countries tend to assume that immigration controls benefit them by offering protection from the poor in the rest of the world. The controls do protect them - but at what cost? Might we have as much to gain from setting people in poor countries free as we did in shifting from feudalism to capitalism?

The advantages of freer migration could be huge. Rich countries have much more capital - machinery, buildings, infrastructure and so on - and far better technology than poor ones. This makes workers in rich countries far more productive than their equivalents in poor countries. But when workers from poor countries move to rich ones, they can make use of rich countries' superior capital and technology, so they become much more productive. This makes not only them but the world as a whole much better off.

In 2004, Jonathon Moses and Bjšrn Letnes, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, concluded that the gains from free migration could be as high as $55 trillion U.S. They found that even a small relaxation of immigration controls would yield disproportionately big benefits. Even skeptics on the subject admit as much. George Borjas of Harvard University, the leading critic of immigration on economic grounds in the U.S., once wrote, "The principles of free trade ... suggest that the world would be much richer if there were no national borders to interfere with the free movement of goods and people. By prohibiting the immigration of many persons, the United States inevitably shrinks the size of the world economic pie, reducing the economic opportunities that could be available to many persons in the source countries."

It is obvious that migrants would gain by moving to the rich world, because they would earn much higher wages. If for some reason they did not, they could always go home. It is also generally true that migrants' countries of origin benefit too, as their citizens send some of their earnings back home. But the big question for rich countries is not whether immigrants, poor countries or the world as a whole would gain from freer migration, but how much rich countries themselves would gain economically from allowing in more immigrants - and whether any of their citizens would lose.

Economic fears about immigration rest mainly on three common misconceptions:

Myth 1: There are only so many jobs to go around, so every job an immigrant takes is one less for the locals.

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. population has risen sharply. If the number of jobs in the economy were fixed, surely there would now be mass unemployment? Clearly, there isn't - yet the belief that jobs are finite remains pervasive, leading critics to assume that any job filled by an immigrant would otherwise be done by a native. In fact, each person creates work for others, so the more people there are, the more work needs doing. People don't just take jobs; they make them too. The problem for immigrants is that while the jobs they take are visible, the jobs they create for everyone else are largely invisible. Through their willingness to do unskilled work at lower wages than local people would accept, immigrants fill jobs that would otherwise not exist: When nannies cost 5 euros an hour, there will be far more nanny jobs than when they cost 10 euros an hour.

What's more, when immigrants spend their wages, they increase the overall demand for goods and services, which in turn boosts the demand for workers, some of them highly skilled, to produce these goods and services. Far from taking jobs, immigrants generally create new jobs for the existing population.

Myth 2: Immigrants and locals are competing for the same jobs.

Only if immigrants were more or less identical to us would they compete directly for the same jobs. But everyone knows that a Mexican peasant with a poor command of English is no competition in the job market for an American who has finished high school. Immigrants with different skills and abilities allow us to consume goods and services that were not previously available to us or consume existing goods and services at much lower prices. Thus some Vietnamese immigrants have introduced us to their cuisine, while others have boosted the supply of nannies, making childcare more available and affordable.

Immigrants whose skills complement those of native workers will also make them more productive. A Vietnamese childcare worker may not only relieve the burden on a hard-pressed mother, she may also allow her to return to work at her high-flying job in investment banking. Filipino nurses boost the level of care that British and American hospitals can deliver to patients as well as increase the number of patients they can treat. Since it is clear that immigrants are different from us in many respects, there is good reason to believe we could benefit greatly from migration.

Myth 3: Immigrants often come not to work but to live like parasites off the host country.

If people from poor countries can claim more in welfare benefits in rich countries than they can earn working at home, it is certainly conceivable that this would spur some of them to migrate. But there is no evidence for this.

It should be clear that if migration is costly and risky, it does not pay to move to a rich country to try to claim comparatively low welfare benefits when you could earn much more by working instead. In any case, migrants are typically not entitled to most welfare benefits in rich countries. And last but not least, even if rich countries made it easier for people in poor countries to work, and there were signs this was attracting migrants who were coming to claim welfare benefits, governments could restrict the availability of those benefits to citizens or long-term residents.

Here's a bold generalization: Immigrants tend to be younger, fitter, harder-working and more enterprising than local people. Why? Because migrants are a self-selecting minority. Young people have their whole lives ahead of them and so have the most to gain from migrating, while the old and the sick are generally not able to do so. While more than half of the foreigners in the U.S. - and nearly three-fifths of the immigrants who have arrived since 2000 - are in their 20s or 30s, that number drops to one-quarter for natives. More than four-fifths of the East Europeans who have applied to work in Britain since 2004 are between18 and 34.

Just as people who are willing to incur the costs and risks of starting their own businesses tend to be more enterprising and harder-working than most, so too are those who are willing to incur the costs and risks of seeking better job prospects abroad. Hard-working people have more to gain from migrating than lazy people, and enterprising people are more willing to take the risk. For any given wage, in any given job, they are likely to be more industrious. So immigrants directly make an economy more productive - to the benefit of employers and local people who consume the goods and services they produce.

But the major reason why rich countries should let in migrants with fewer skills is that there is a growing shortage of workers to do the jobs that almost anyone can do but Americans and Europeans no longer want to do: dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs. Someone has to clean toilets, collect rubbish and do casual labour. If we do not let in immigrants to perform these tasks, Americans and Europeans will have to be paid much more to induce them to do jobs they do not want to do when they could be doing more pleasant and highly skilled work instead.

A gap is opening between the skills and aspirations of most North Americans, Europeans and Australians and the jobs available in advanced economies. Educated and ambitious workers want to do higher-skilled jobs that offer higher pay and increased social status.

So who is going to do this low-skilled work? To some extent, machines can replace less-skilled workers: We can buy a can of Coke from a vending machine rather than a person. Security guards can be replaced by security cameras; the feeds could even be monitored from abroad. In Japan, where one in four people will be over 65 in 2015 but foreign nurses are steadfastly barred from entry, companies are developing gadgets that keep an eye on - albeit not care for - old people from remote locations. One company has developed an electric kettle, the i-pot, which keeps water hot all day for tea or broth and transmits a message to a computer server when the water-dispensing button is pressed. Twice daily, the usage record is sent to the designated mobile phone or email address of a family member or friend.

Even so, many services in rich countries will continue to be provided by people. London streets, hotels, hospitals and homes can only be cleaned on the spot. New York cabs and buses can be driven by people who live in New Jersey but not by those in New Delhi. The kids of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can only be looked after by nannies in the Bay Area. Tables in Toronto restaurants can only be waited on by workers who make their homes there; sending the dishes to be washed overseas would hardly be cost-effective. Streetlights in Sydney can only be repaired by someone on a ladder under the lamp. Old people in Munich cannot be assisted in cooking and washing over the Internet. Building materials can be imported, but houses must be built where they will stand. Parking tickets must still be given on the spot. Lawns cannot be mowed remotely.

To some extent, teen-agers and students can help with these tasks, although because Americans and Europeans are having fewer children, the number of young people in rich countries is set to fall too. In short, if North Americans, Europeans and Australians are to specialize in higher-skilled jobs, these lower-skilled jobs must primarily be filled by immigrants.

But isn't it demeaning to bring in immigrants to do the dirty, dangerous, ill-paid jobs that natives refuse to consider? Nigel Harris, author of Thinking the Unthinkable, has an eloquent response: "To insist on protecting someone's welfare by not allowing them to work when they are willing to, the work needs to be done and people gain both in the country where the immigrant works and where he or she is from, is perverse. One might as well argue that native workers should be less educated so that they would be willing to do the lousy jobs."

Adapted from Philippe Legrain’s new book: Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (Little Brown, 2007). This book will be published in the U.S. by Princeton University Press in September 2007. Legrain is a British economist and author of Open World: The Truth about Globalisation (Ivan R. Dee, 2004). More information: http://www.philippelegrain.com, www.philippelegrain.com

The Black Sites
A Rare Look Inside the C.I.A.’s Secret Interrogation Program

By Jane Mayer
From The New Yorker
2007

In the war on terror, one historian says, the C.I.A. “didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”

In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

The circumstances surrounding the confession of Mohammed, whom law-enforcement officials refer to as K.S.M., were perplexing. He had no lawyer. After his capture in Pakistan, in March of 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency had detained him in undisclosed locations for more than two years; last fall, he was transferred to military custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were no named witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid information about what form of interrogation might have prodded him to talk, although reports had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said that his testimony was freely given, but he also indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. (The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a statement he had written detailing the alleged mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. authorities had found none. Instead, they had a copy of the video that had been released on the Internet, which showed the killer’s arms but offered no other clues to his identity.

Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A British-educated terrorist who had a history of staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for the crime. But the Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the matter had been delayed a remarkable number of times—at least thirty—possibly because of his reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence service, which may have helped free him after he was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. Mohammed’s confession would delay the execution further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal.

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.” She added, “I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”

Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film “A Mighty Heart”—said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. “K.S.M.’s name never came up,” he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, “My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.” A government official involved in the case said, “The fear is that K.S.M. is covering up for others, and that these people will be released.” And Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father, said, “Something is fishy. There are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say he killed Jesus—he has nothing to lose.”

Mariane Pearl, who is relying on the Bush Administration to bring justice in her husband’s case, spoke carefully about the investigation. “You need a procedure that will get the truth,” she said. “An intelligence agency is not supposed to be above the law.”

Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.

The C.I.A.’s director, General Michael Hayden, has said that the program, which is designed to extract intelligence from suspects quickly, is an “irreplaceable” tool for combatting terrorism. And President Bush has said that “this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives, by helping us stop new attacks.” He claims that it has contributed to the disruption of at least ten serious Al Qaeda plots since September 11th, three of them inside the United States.

According to the Bush Administration, Mohammed divulged information of tremendous value during his detention. He is said to have helped point the way to the capture of Hambali, the Indonesian terrorist responsible for the 2002 bombings of night clubs in Bali. He also provided information on an Al Qaeda leader in England. Michael Sheehan, a former counterterrorism official at the State Department, said, “K.S.M. is the poster boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the reason these techniques exist. You can save lives with the kind of information he could give up.” Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled some key investigations. Perhaps under duress, he claimed involvement in thirty-one criminal plots—an improbable number, even for a high-level terrorist. Critics say that Mohammed’s case illustrates the cost of the C.I.A.’s desire for swift intelligence. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, which is expected eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called his serial confessions “a textbook example of why we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”

The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th. The program has been extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the nomenclature of the intelligence world. By design, there has been virtually no access for outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security. The Justice Department argued this point explicitly last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the government said, had to be prohibited from access to a lawyer specifically because he might describe the “alternative interrogation methods” that the agency had used when questioning him. These methods amounted to a state secret, the government argued, and disclosure of them could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.)

Given this level of secrecy, the public and all but a few members of Congress who have been sworn to silence have had to take on faith President Bush’s assurances that the C.I.A.’s internment program has been humane and legal, and has yielded crucial intelligence. Representative Alcee Hastings, a Democratic member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “We talk to the authorities about these detainees, but, of course, they’re not going to come out and tell us that they beat the living daylights out of someone.” He recalled learning in 2003 that Mohammed had been captured. “It was good news,” he said. “So I tried to find out: Where is this guy? And how is he being treated?” For more than three years, Hastings said, “I could never pinpoint anything.” Finally, he received some classified briefings on the Mohammed interrogation. Hastings said that he “can’t go into details” about what he found out, but, speaking of Mohammed’s treatment, he said that even if it wasn’t torture, as the Administration claims, “it ain’t right, either. Something went wrong.”

Since the drafting of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross has played a special role in safeguarding the rights of prisoners of war. For decades, governments have allowed officials from the organization to report on the treatment of detainees, to insure that standards set by international treaties are being maintained. The Red Cross, however, was unable to get access to the C.I.A.’s prisoners for five years. Finally, last year, Red Cross officials were allowed to interview fifteen detainees, after they had been transferred to Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has been kept from the public. The committee believes that its continued access to prisoners worldwide is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore it addresses violations privately with the authorities directly responsible for prisoner treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”

The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.

Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in this case. Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

Concern about the legality of the C.I.A.’s program reached a previously unreported breaking point last week when Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the intelligence committee, quietly put a “hold” on the confirmation of John Rizzo, who as acting general counsel was deeply involved in establishing the agency’s interrogation and detention policies. Wyden’s maneuver essentially stops the nomination from going forward. “I question if there’s been adequate legal oversight,” Wyden told me. He said that after studying a classified addendum to President Bush’s new executive order, which specifies permissible treatment of detainees, “I am not convinced that all of these techniques are either effective or legal. I don’t want to see well-intentioned C.I.A. officers breaking the law because of shaky legal guidance.”

A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the agency’s detention and interrogation policies, said he worried that, if the full story of the C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel could face criminal prosecution. Within the agency, he said, there is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution” for the interrogation program. If congressional hearings begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. officers have taken out professional liability insurance, to help with potential legal fees.

Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., denied any legal impropriety, stressing that “the agency’s terrorist-detention program has been implemented lawfully. And torture is illegal under U.S. law. The people who have been part of this important effort are well-trained, seasoned professionals.” This spring, the Associated Press published an article quoting the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Silvestre Reyes, who said that Hayden, the C.I.A. director, “vehemently denied” the Red Cross’s conclusions. A U.S. official dismissed the Red Cross report as a mere compilation of allegations made by terrorists. And Robert Grenier, a former head of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, said that “the C.I.A.’s interrogations were nothing like Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. They were very, very regimented. Very meticulous.” He said, “The program is very careful. It’s completely legal.”

Accurately or not, Bush Administration officials have described the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as the unauthorized actions of ill-trained personnel, eleven of whom have been convicted of crimes. By contrast, the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency’s director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, “Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was signed off by the C.I.A. director.”

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had virtually no trained interrogators. A former C.I.A. officer involved in fighting terrorism said that, at first, the agency was crippled by its lack of expertise. “It began right away, in Afghanistan, on the fly,” he recalled. “They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world.” The former officer said that the pressure from the White House, in particular from Vice-President Dick Cheney, was intense: “They were pushing us: ‘Get information! Do not let us get hit again!’ ” In the scramble, he said, he searched the C.I.A.’s archives, to see what interrogation techniques had worked in the past. He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model. A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A. from 2001 to 2004, said that the agency turned to “everyone we could, including our friends in Arab cultures,” for interrogation advice, among them those in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of which the State Department regularly criticizes for human-rights abuses.

The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, “On the Brink: How the White House Compromised U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no experience in detention. Never. But they insisted on arresting and detaining people in this program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You can’t mix intelligence and police work. But the White House was really pushing. They wanted someone to do it. So the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to please the principal. We got stuck with all sorts of things. This is really the legacy of a director who never said no to anybody.”

Many officials inside the C.I.A. had misgivings. “A lot of us knew this would be a can of worms,” the former officer said. “We warned them, It’s going to become an atrocious mess.” The problem from the start, he said, was that no one had thought through what he called “the disposal plan.” He continued, “What are you going to do with these people? The utility of someone like K.S.M. is, at most, six months to a year. You exhaust them. Then what? It would have been better if we had executed them.”

The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”

Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

The U.S. government first began tracking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1993, shortly after his nephew Ramzi Yousef blew a gaping hole in the World Trade Center. Mohammed, officials learned, had transferred money to Yousef. Mohammed, born in either 1964 or 1965, was raised in a religious Sunni Muslim family in Kuwait, where his family had migrated from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. In the mid-eighties, he was trained as a mechanical engineer in the U.S., attending two colleges in North Carolina.

As a teen-ager, Mohammed had been drawn to militant, and increasingly violent, Muslim causes. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of sixteen, and, after his graduation from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro—where he was remembered as a class clown, but religious enough to forgo meat when eating at Burger King—he signed on with the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, receiving military training and establishing ties with Islamist terrorists. By all accounts, his animus toward the U.S. was rooted in a hatred of Israel.

In 1994, Mohammed, who was impressed by Yousef’s notoriety after the first World Trade Center bombing, joined him in scheming to blow up twelve U.S. jumbo jets over two days. The so-called Bojinka plot was disrupted in 1995, when Philippine police broke into an apartment that Yousef and other terrorists were sharing in Manila, which was filled with bomb-making materials. At the time of the raid, Mohammed was working in Doha, Qatar, at a government job. The following year, he narrowly escaped capture by F.B.I. officers and slipped into the global jihadist network, where he eventually joined forces with Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. Along the way, he married and had children.

Many journalistic accounts have presented Mohammed as a charismatic, swashbuckling figure: in the Philippines, he was said to have flown a helicopter close enough to a girlfriend’s office window so that she could see him; in Pakistan, he supposedly posed as an anonymous bystander and gave interviews to news reporters about his nephew’s arrest. Neither story is true. But Mohammed did seem to enjoy taunting authorities after the September 11th attacks, which, in his eventual confession, he claimed to have orchestrated “from A to Z.” In April, 2002, Mohammed arranged to be interviewed on Al Jazeera by its London bureau chief, Yosri Fouda, and took personal credit for the atrocities. “I am the head of the Al Qaeda military committee,” he said. “And yes, we did it.” Fouda, who conducted the interview at an Al Qaeda safe house in Karachi, said that he was astounded not only by Mohammed’s boasting but also by his seeming imperviousness to the danger of being caught. Mohammed permitted Al Jazeera to reveal that he was hiding out in the Karachi area. When Fouda left the apartment, Mohammed, apparently unarmed, walked him downstairs and out into the street.

In the early months of 2003, U.S. authorities reportedly paid a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for information that led to Mohammed’s arrest. U.S. officials closed in on him, at 4 A.M. on March 1st, waking him up in a borrowed apartment in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The officials hung back as Pakistani authorities handcuffed and hooded him, and took him to a safe house. Reportedly, for the first two days, Mohammed robotically recited Koranic verses and refused to divulge much more than his name. A videotape obtained by “60 Minutes” shows Mohammed at the end of this episode, complaining of a head cold; an American voice can be heard in the background. This was the last image of Mohammed to be seen by the public. By March 4th, he was in C.I.A. custody.

Captured along with Mohammed, according to some accounts, was a letter from bin Laden, which may have led officials to think that he knew where the Al Qaeda founder was hiding. If Mohammed did have this crucial information, it was time sensitive—bin Laden never stayed in one place for long—and officials needed to extract it quickly. At the time, many American intelligence officials still feared a “second wave” of Al Qaeda attacks, ratcheting the pressure further.

According to George Tenet’s recent memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” Mohammed told his captors that he wouldn’t talk until he was given a lawyer in New York, where he assumed he would be taken. (He had been indicted there in connection with the Bojinka plot.) Tenet writes, “Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.” Opponents of the C.I.A.’s approach, however, note that Ramzi Yousef gave a voluminous confession after being read his Miranda rights. “These guys are egomaniacs,” a former federal prosecutor said. “They love to talk!”

A complete picture of Mohammed’s time in secret detention remains elusive. But a partial narrative has emerged through interviews with European and American sources in intelligence, government, and legal circles, as well as with former detainees who have been released from C.I.A. custody. People familiar with Mohammed’s allegations about his interrogation, and interrogations of other high-value detainees, describe the accounts as remarkably consistent.

Soon after Mohammed’s arrest, sources say, his American captors told him, “We’re not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very brink of your death and back.” He was first taken to a secret U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan. According to a Human Rights Watch report released two years ago, there was a C.I.A.-affiliated black site in Afghanistan by 2002: an underground prison near Kabul International Airport. Distinctive for its absolute lack of light, it was referred to by detainees as the Dark Prison. Another detention facility was reportedly a former brick factory, just north of Kabul, known as the Salt Pit. The latter became infamous for the 2002 death of a detainee, reportedly from hypothermia, after prison officials stripped him naked and chained him to the floor of his concrete cell, in freezing temperatures.

In all likelihood, Mohammed was transported from Pakistan to one of the Afghan sites by a team of black-masked commandos attached to the C.I.A.’s paramilitary Special Activities Division. According to a report adopted in June by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, titled “Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees,” detainees were “taken to their cells by strong people who wore black outfits, masks that covered their whole faces, and dark visors over their eyes.” (Some personnel reportedly wore black clothes made from specially woven synthetic fabric that couldn’t be ripped or torn.) A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful.

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

Mohammed is said to have described being chained naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several other detainees who say that they were confined in the Dark Prison have described identical treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice water. The practice, which can cause hypothermia, violates the Geneva Conventions, and President Bush’s new executive order arguably bans it.

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. “Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.” This last time, Kazimi was given more tranquillizers, and chained in a more confining manner.

The case of Khaled el-Masri, another detainee, has received wide attention. He is the German car salesman whom the C.I.A. captured in 2003 and dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous intelligence; he was released in 2004, and Condoleezza Rice reportedly conceded the mistake to the German chancellor. Masri is considered one of the more credible sources on the black-site program, because Germany has confirmed that he has no connections to terrorism. He has also described inmates bashing their heads against the walls. Much of his account appeared on the front page of the Times. But, during a visit to America last fall, he became tearful as he recalled the plight of a Tanzanian in a neighboring cell. The man seemed “psychologically at the end,” he said. “I could hear him ramming his head against the wall in despair. I tried to calm him down. I asked the doctor, ‘Will you take care of this human being?’ ” But the doctor, whom Masri described as American, refused to help. Masri also said that he was told that guards had “locked the Tanzanian in a suitcase for long periods of time—a foul-smelling suitcase that made him vomit.” (Masri did not witness such abuse.)

Masri described his prison in Afghanistan as a filthy hole, with walls scribbled on in Pashtun and Arabic. He was given no bed, only a coarse blanket on the floor. At night, it was too cold to sleep. He said, “The water was putrid. If you took a sip, you could taste it for hours. You could smell a foul smell from it three metres away.” The Salt Pit, he said, “was managed and run by the Americans. It was not a secret. They introduced themselves as Americans.” He added, “When anything came up, they said they couldn’t make a decision. They said, ‘We will have to pass it on to Washington.’ ” The interrogation room at the Salt Pit, he said, was overseen by a half-dozen English-speaking masked men, who shoved him and shouted at him, saying, “You’re in a country where there’s no rule of law. You might be buried here.”

According to two former C.I.A. officers, an interrogator of Mohammed told them that the Pakistani was kept in a cell over which a sign was placed: “The Proud Murderer of 3,000 Americans.” (Another source calls this apocryphal.) One of these former officers defends the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t done to the interrogators themselves”—a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”

One day, Mohammed was apparently transferred to a specially designated prison for high-value detainees in Poland. Such transfers were so secretive, according to the report by the Council of Europe, that the C.I.A. filed dummy flight plans, indicating that the planes were heading elsewhere. Once Polish air space was entered, the Polish aviation authority would secretly shepherd the flight, leaving no public documentation. The Council of Europe report notes that the Polish authorities would file a one-way flight plan out of the country, creating a false paper trail. (The Polish government has strongly denied that any black sites were established in the country.)

No more than a dozen high-value detainees were held at the Polish black site, and none have been released from government custody; accordingly, no first-hand accounts of conditions there have emerged. But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”

Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.

In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. “It was all part of the conditioning,” the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.” Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.

A C.I.A. source said that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding only after interrogators determined that he was hiding information from them. But Mohammed has apparently said that, even after he started coöperating, he was waterboarded. Footnotes to the 9/11 Commission report indicate that by April 17, 2003—a month and a half after he was captured—Mohammed had already started providing substantial information on Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, according to the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, he was kept in isolation for years. During this time, Mohammed supplied intelligence on the history of the September 11th plot, and on the structure and operations of Al Qaeda. He also described plots still in a preliminary phase of development, such as a plan to bomb targets on America’s West Coast.

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.”

By 2004, there were growing calls within the C.I.A. to transfer to military custody the high-value detainees who had told interrogators what they knew, and to afford them some kind of due process. But Donald Rumsfeld, then the Defense Secretary, who had been heavily criticized for the abusive conditions at military prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, refused to take on the agency’s detainees, a former top C.I.A. official said. “Rumsfeld’s attitude was, You’ve got a real problem.” Rumsfeld, the official said, “was the third most powerful person in the U.S. government, but he only looked out for the interests of his department—not the whole Administration.” (A spokesperson for Rumsfeld said that he had no comment.)

C.I.A. officials were stymied until the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling, which prompted the Administration to send what it said were its last high-value detainees to Cuba. Robert Grenier, like many people in the C.I.A., was relieved. “There has to be some sense of due process,” he said. “We can’t just make people disappear.” Still, he added, “The most important source of intelligence we had after 9/11 came from the interrogations of high-value detainees.” And he said that Mohammed was “the most valuable of the high-value detainees, because he had operational knowledge.” He went on, “I can respect people who oppose aggressive interrogations, but they should admit that their principles may be putting American lives at risk.”

Yet Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later the State Department’s top counsellor, under Rice, is not convinced that eliciting information from detainees justifies “physical torment.” After leaving the government last year, he gave a speech in Houston, in which he said, “The question would not be, Did you get information that proved useful? Instead it would be, Did you get information that could have been usefully gained only from these methods?” He concluded, “My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

Without more transparency, the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate. Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.” When pressed, one former top agency official estimated that “ninety per cent of the information was unreliable.” Cables carrying Mohammed’s interrogation transcripts back to Washington reportedly were prefaced with the warning that “the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” Mohammed, like virtually all the top Al Qaeda prisoners held by the C.I.A., has claimed that, while under coercion, he lied to please his captors.

In theory, a military commission could sort out which parts of Mohammed’s confession are true and which are lies, and obtain a conviction. Colonel Morris D. Davis, the chief prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions, said that he expects to bring charges against Mohammed “in a number of months.” He added, “I’d be shocked if the defense didn’t try to make K.S.M.’s treatment a problem for me, but I don’t think it will be insurmountable.”

Critics of the Administration fear that the unorthodox nature of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program will make it impossible to prosecute the entire top echelon of Al Qaeda leaders in captivity. Already, according to the Wall Street Journal, credible allegations of torture have caused a Marine Corps prosecutor reluctantly to decline to bring charges against Mohamedou Ould Slahi, an alleged Al Qaeda leader held in Guantánamo. Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. analyst, asked, “What are you going to do with K.S.M. in the long run? It’s a very good question. I don’t think anyone has an answer. If you took him to any real American court, I think any judge would say there is no admissible evidence. It would be thrown out.”

The problems with Mohammed’s coerced confessions are especially glaring in the Daniel Pearl case. It may be that Mohammed killed Pearl, but contradictory evidence and opinion continue to surface. Yosri Fouda, the Al Jazeera reporter who interviewed Mohammed in Karachi, said that although Mohammed handed him a package of propaganda items, including an unedited video of the Pearl murder, he never identified himself as playing a role in the killing, which occurred in the same city just two months earlier. And a federal official involved in Mohammed’s case said, “He has no history of killing with his own hands, although he’s proved happy to commit mass murder from afar.” Al Qaeda’s leadership had increasingly focussed on symbolic political targets. “For him, it’s not personal,” the official said. “It’s business.”

Ordinarily, the U.S. legal system is known for resolving such mysteries with painstaking care. But the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program, Senator Levin said, has undermined the public’s trust in American justice, both here and abroad. “A guy as dangerous as K.S.M. is, and half the world wonders if they can believe him—is that what we want?” he asked. “Statements that can’t be believed, because people think they rely on torture?”

Asra Nomani, the Pearls’ friend, said of the Mohammed confession, “I’m not interested in unfair justice, even for bad people.” She went on, “Danny was such a person of conscience. I don’t think he would have wanted all of this dirty business. I don’t think he would have wanted someone being tortured. He would have been repulsed. This is the kind of story that Danny would have investigated. He really believed in American principles.”



Conrad Black's Drama

Canada's most flagrant media tycoon once suggested that this writer be "horsewhipped".

By Linda Mcquaig
From Linda Mcquaig.com
2007

Listening to Conrad Black being interviewed by Peter Gzowski on the radio a number of years ago, I was surprised to hear Black suggest that I be "horsewhipped."

I knew he was angry about two lengthy articles I'd written about some of his business dealings, and I wouldn't have been surprised to hear him attack me, even urge that I be fired. But horsewhipped?

Of course, it was all part of Black's larger-than-life persona that included a high sense of self-drama that was always colourful in its excessiveness.

Black also once described me in an article as a "not very bright, leftist reporter" – for which a number of people urged me to sue him for libel. This was an intriguing idea, especially given Black's own penchant for slapping intimidating lawsuits on journalists who took an interest in investigating some of his questionable business practices.

But there was the problem of proving his attack had damaged me. In truth, it's hard to imagine where my career as an anti-establishment author would be today without such colourful swats from Canada's most flagrant and widely-detested business tycoon.

But if Conrad Black has been good for my career, his impact elsewhere has been less benign. He used his ample resources to create the National Post, a vehicle that helped him push the mainstream debate in Canada considerably to the right. Black relentlessly used the Post as a platform for himself and a host of like-minded commentators to ridicule the Canadian taste for equality and strong public programs, to denigrate what amounted to the Canadian way of doing things.

Black liked to present the Post as an irreverent, scrappy upstart of a newspaper that shook up the staid Canadian media scene and challenged the establishment with its "take-no-prisoners" approach. The only problem with that image was that, far from challenging the establishment, the Post was - and is - the establishment.

It may well have been a scrappy upstart, but from the beginning it was an attack-dog fighting on behalf of Canada's financial elite - who have never been shy about defending their own interests. Could anyone seriously argue that, before the Post came along, we had heard insufficiently from business on the subject of the need for tax cuts, free trade or deficit reduction?

Of course, before Black started the Post, the message of the financial elite had been championed relentlessly for decades by The Globe and Mail. What the Post added was a sassy new look to the staid corporate message. It offered up the same old thunderous voice of Big Business, but now cranked up to deafening levels, with even less attempt at "balance," and with considerably more zing, including shots of celebrities in low-cut dresses. Its pages sparkled with a new brand of ultra-right journalism: neoconservatism with cleavage.

If the Post had a target, it was never the establishment, but rather the powerless. I recall how the Post, under Black, came out guns blazing against a court decision favouring a group of secretaries, file clerks and librarians who had waged a lengthy battle against the federal government for failing to follow its own pay equity laws. The Post fearlessly called for a total repeal of pay equity laws, to prevent this sort of fairness from ever intruding into the Canadian workplace again. That'll show those uppity girls.

So much was Black part of the Canadian establishment that he managed to escape legal problems here for years, and would have likely escaped them entirely, had the U.S. authorities not eventually caught up with him.

It's perhaps relevant to mention here that the articles I wrote (along with fellow journalist Ian Austen) that so angered Black were about attempts by one of his companies, Norcen Energy, to take over Cleveland-based Hanna Mining in 1982, and about the failure of Canadian authorities to prosecute Black over the case.

Hanna had fought back against Black's takeover bid, and won a U.S. court injunction and a tough court ruling that Norcen had violated U.S. securities laws by failing to disclose its takeover intention.

In Canada, Black got a much softer ride at the hands of authorities. Black was investigated here in connection with the same takeover bid for possible violations of our securities laws. Two staff investigators of the Ontario Securities Commission recommended the commission lay a total of 26 securities charges against Black, Norcen and president Edward Battle.

But the decision whether to lay the charges was in the hands of the commission's eight-member board, who were all well-connected members of the Canadian financial elite. In the end, they decided not to prosecute one of their own.

Having been cleared by the establishment, Black went on bankroll a newspaper that loudly trumpeted the rights of the affluent, while posing as a scrappy upstart taking on the establishment.



Media on Medicare

Don’t mess with success—or corporate profits

By Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas
From Extra!
2007

With the new Democratic Congress promising to let the Medicare prescription drug program negotiate lower prices from drug companies, those companies have gotten their friends in the media to find some reason—any reason—why this would be a bad idea.

The Washington Post, happy to defend corporate profits, declared in the lead paragraph of a front-page November 26 article that Democrats were in danger of “wrecking a program that has proven cheaper and more popular than anyone imagined.”

“Anyone” clearly doesn’t include Congress, which barely passed the program in 2003 based on the White House’s 10-year cost projection of less than $400 billion (though, as the chief Medicare actuary revealed shortly after passage, a higher projection was suppressed by the Bush administration—New York Times, 3/25/04). The latest 10-year estimate: $797 billion (www.hhs.gov, 9/29/06), a doubling of the cost in less than three years. But that original estimate was nowhere to be found in the latest round of Medicare stories singing the program’s praises.

It’s true that the projected cost for 2006 was reduced significantly, from $38.1 billion to $30.5 billion (www.hhs.gov, 9/26/06). The biggest reason for this cost reduction, though, was that far fewer people than expected signed up for the plan (AP, 11/28/06). But isn’t it “more popular than anyone imagined”? The Post article cited polls saying that “more than 80 percent of enrollees are satisfied”—but that figure has to do with whether people feel they’ve chosen the right plan out of the many offered by the program, not whether they’re happy with the program itself.

A Wall Street Journal/Harris poll released November 20, for example, found 75 percent of enrollees were satisfied with their plan—but only 59 percent gave a positive rating to the program. And those who enroll, of course, are more positive than those who are eligible but don’t enroll; among all people over age 65, only 47 percent give the Medicare drug program positive marks. Did no one “imagine” that a program costing hundreds of billions of dollars would get the approval of more than half the people it was supposed to benefit?

No doubt the program would be more popular with its beneficiaries if it cost them less, which price negotiation would almost certainly achieve. But the drug companies—and their media steno-graphers—are making dire predictions about all the different ways the Democrats’ plans could “wreck” the program.

A Chicago Tribune editorial (12/3/06) warned that “drug companies would lose the incentive to invest in research” if “the feds were able to wring huge discounts from drugmakers.” Unmentioned in the Tribune and virtually every other mainstream article on the plan is that the drug industry’s profit margins, at about 18 percent of sales, are the highest in the business world (New York Review of Books, 7/15/04). As economist Dean Baker noted (Beat the Press, 11/26/06), "...lower prices may also mean less marketing (the industry spending approximately as much on marketing as it does on research). It might also mean less copycat research. (According to the industry’s own analysis, approximately two-thirds of its research spending goes to developing copycat drugs.)"

Baker went on to point out that the drug industry still makes a profit with the much lower prices it charges the Veterans Administration, Medicaid, Canada and all the other countries who negotiate prices with them; otherwise, it wouldn’t engage in those transactions.

Another media-accepted argument is that even if the Dems manage to give Medicare the power to negotiate with drug companies, “the official congressional scorekeepers aren’t persuaded that the government would actually save money” (Wall Street Journal, 12/7/06).

Though the much smaller VA program has successfully negotiated prices 40 percent–50 percent lower than the prices private insurers have negotiated under Medicare (Beat the Press, 12/7/06), the Chicago Tribune editorial warned that “it’s unclear whether Medicare would be able to copy that success,” since, as the paper argued, “the VA offers a much smaller variety of drugs than most private Medicare plans, and tightly controls its costs in other ways.” And, as the media emphasized, “limiting choice would be unacceptable to many Medicare beneficiaries” (Washington Post, 11/26/06) because “American consumers have repeatedly resisted efforts to save money on medical care by restricting choice” (L.A. Times, 11/26/06).

Actually, the main reason the VA offers fewer drugs is that it has tough standards for effectiveness and safety (standards that the belatedly withdrawn Vioxx, for example, never met—Tapped, 11/27/06). That’s part of the reason why the New England Journal of Medicine (5/29/03) concluded that VA care was significantly better than Medicare’s fee-for-service program.

Of course, it’s odd to read journalists who are obviously working from drug-company talking points arguing that allowing Medicare to negotiate prices wouldn’t save any money. It’s because it would save money, lots of it, that Big Pharma is fighting the idea so hard. The New York Times reported (11/24/06) on the drug industry’s quick and massive mobilization to respond to the new threat to their Medicare windfall. “It’s all hands on deck,” said Ken Johnson, a senior vice president at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In the recent media blitz, mainstream journalists have been acting as loyal members of that crew.