By Sasha Abramsky
As California goes, so goes the nation.
If that old adage still holds true, then the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades. For the most populous state in the union is on the verge of insolvency--partly because it didn't set aside a rainy-day fund during the boom years; partly because its voters recently rejected a series of initiatives that would have allowed a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to help stabilize the state's finances during the downturn; partly because it has spent the past quarter-century funneling tens of billions of dollars into an out-of-control correctional system. Now, as California's politicians contemplate emergency cuts to deal with a $24 billion hole in the state budget, old certainties are crumbling.
The state with the toughest three-strikes law in the land and a prison population of more than 150,000 is facing the real possibility of having to release tens of thousands of inmates early in order to pare its $10 billion annual correctional budget. At the same time, an increasing number of the state's political figures are challenging the basic tenets of the "war on drugs," the culprit most responsible for the spike in prison populations over the past thirty years; they argue that the country's harsh drug policies are not financially viable and no longer command majority support among the voting public.
Similar stories are unfolding around the country; in Washington, federal officials are talking about drug-policy reform and, more generally, sentencing reform in a way that has not been heard in the halls of power for more than a generation.
For old-time politicians, who have spent the past three-plus decades navigating the country's roiling tough-on-crime waters, the changes are almost unfathomable. Onetime California governor and current gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown, for example, has spent decades trying to erase the public's memory of his liberal tenure in the 1970s, when California's prison population shrank to well below 30,000. As a part of that remodeling, he has assiduously courted the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, the trade union representing the state's prison guards. Now, with his war chest flush with CCPOA funds, Brown won't do anything to challenge tough-on-crime orthodoxies.
Yet many newer political faces view the current moment as something of an opportunity. For Betty Yee, chair of California's Board of Equalization--the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State--the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can't come soon enough.
Sitting at her conference table high up in one of downtown Sacramento's few sky-rises, Yee has marijuana on her mind. Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21. Her friend Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature. Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. "Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?" she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?
Not so many years back, any public figure who dared to advocate such reforms would have been shunned by much of the establishment. It's a measure of how much things have changed that Yee and Ammiano's proposal is being taken seriously across the board. In fact, shortly after I met with Yee, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--whose office declined my request for an interview for this article--announced that the state should at least consider the merits of pot legalization. He wasn't advocating it, he was careful to stress, but he did think the time was ripe to debate the issue.
"The budget is so bad now, the populism of the issue is beginning to work here in the Legislature," Ammiano says as he paces back and forth in his office, toward the bookshelves with the four martini glasses and Golden Gate Bridge bookends and then away again. On the wall near the receptionist's desk hangs a huge poster from the movie Milk. "Everyone thinks it's Cheech and Chong," he says with a laugh, describing the marijuana legalization bill. "But there's a lot of policy wonks" supporting it. "There's very conservative support from the oddest sources and locations." The GOP chair in the state, as well as Tom Campbell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, have indicated their support for his bill, Ammiano declares. "When it starts to cost more money than it's worth even in the eyes of the pooh-bahs, then you can accomplish something."
Over the past three decades, California has tripled the number of prisons it operates, has more than quintupled its prison population and has gone from spending $5 on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections to a virtual dead-heat in spending. That puts it in the same boat as Michigan, Vermont, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware--all of which, according to estimates by the Pew Charitable Trust, spend as much or more on prisons than on colleges. California is also under federal court order to implement costly improvements in the delivery of medical and mental healthcare services in prisons and to release close to a third of the prison population--about 55,000 inmates--to improve conditions for those remaining behind bars.
Schwarzenegger adamantly opposed that ruling by a three-judge panel. Now, though, in the face of fiscal calamity, he is proposing cutting the prison population by tens of thousands. Of course, he is doing that not out of concern for inmates' well-being, or out of a sense that many sentences are disproportionate to the crime, but simply because the state can no longer pay its bills. Schwarzenegger believes he can save several hundred million dollars by releasing some categories of inmates, in particular nonviolent offenders who are in the country illegally and stand to be deported upon early release.
To save money, he's also talking about firing hard-working guards (a far better, but costlier, option would be to scale back the prison system and to retrain surplus guards to work in other venues), and he's asking for close to $1 billion in cuts to vital prison drug-treatment, education and job-training services. At the same time, since this is all about shaving dollars off budgets rather than intelligent criminal justice system reform, there's no talk of investing in crucial re-entry infrastructure.
In short, it looks like California will go about a necessary scaling back of the correctional system exactly the wrong way. But however grudgingly state officials are approaching the issue, at least they recognize that the magnitude of prison spending is a problem. Down the road, when Californians start thinking beyond the crisis moment, that new understanding will shape policy responses for years to come. It will both feed off and help create a new national sentiment that being "tough on crime" isn't necessarily being smart on crime.
Tough-on-crime rhetoric, and the policies and institutions that grow from it, emerged from Nixon's Silent Majority tactics, from his recasting of politics as a series of debates around "values" rather than bread-and-butter issues. And in the same way the 2008 presidential election ended that peculiar chapter in American history, so too did it end the monotone cry that we could incarcerate our way out of deep-rooted social and economic problems. Despite a few halfhearted GOP attempts to accuse Democrats of being weak on drugs and public safety--Obama had, after all, written about his drug use during his teenage and early adult years, which, according to the old calculus, should have made him an easy target for scaremongers--neither presidential candidate played the tough-on-crime card. It was a nonissue for most voters and thus for the candidates. In fact, recent Zogby polling commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency suggests that close to eight in ten Americans favor alternatives to incarceration for low-level nonviolent offenders. Another Zogby poll, from last fall, found that just more than three-quarters of Americans felt the "war on drugs" was a failure. The sea change in public opinion holds in California too. In late March the Los Angeles Times ran a column asking readers their opinion on marijuana legalization. So far 4,927 people have replied, and 94 percent of them favor legalization. A Field Poll in April found that 56 percent of Californians favor legalizing and taxing pot.
The new atmosphere is most apparent vis-à-vis the Obama administration's move away from "war on drugs" rhetoric and toward a harm-reduction strategy. Gil Kerlikowske, the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has made it clear that he prefers treatment over punishment for drug users, a preference he brings from his time as a reform-oriented police chief in Seattle. Putting money where its mouth is, the new team has increased funding for the Bush-era Second Chance Act, intended to connect released inmates with community services such as housing, family counseling and addiction treatment. Support is also growing for the creation of more drug and mental health courts across the country. Finally, there are the promises being made by drug policy leaders in Washington that state medical marijuana laws will be respected rather than trampled, as they have been for more than a decade.
A related issue involves the infamous discrepancy in sentences for crack- versus powder-cocaine crimes. Vice President Biden was one of the architects of these laws--which is why his repudiation of them in recent years has been so significant. The day after Obama's inauguration, the president's website mentioned the importance of eliminating these discrepancies--as well as of promoting needle-exchange programs and expanding the nation's embryonic network of drug courts. The House recently held hearings on the sentencing discrepancy issue.
For Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Southern California, sacrosanct legislative underpinnings of the "war on drugs" are starting to look like the Berlin Wall, "up one day and down the next"--seemingly impregnable; in reality, utterly fragile. Over the past few years, an increasing number of localities have dabbled in ways to simply walk away from the "war on drugs." Initiatives in several states and cities, including Denver; Missoula, Montana; Albany County, Oregon; and Seattle have mandated that law enforcement agencies deprioritize marijuana arrests. Several cities have begun needle-exchange programs. And states like California have passed citizens' initiatives mandating that first-time drug offenders be channeled into treatment programs in lieu of prisons.
Then there's Virginia Senator Jim Webb's legislation creating a blue-ribbon commission on criminal justice reform, with a mandate to put all questions on the table during its eighteen-month tenure--from drug law reform to the restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing, from parole reforms to different approaches to gangs, border patrol, prison architecture and the like. Webb has been pushing for systemic criminal justice reform for years; in 2009, he believes, it will acquire legs. During a telephone interview for this article, Webb said that President Obama "has personally called me on this, and he's very supportive of the idea of moving forward." Across the aisle many Republican senators, including senior figures like Lindsey Graham, have also expressed support for the idea.
The bipartisan backing for Webb's commission is partly a response to the escalating drug-and-gang crisis south of the border. There's a growing recognition in US policy and law enforcement circles that government dysfunction, phenomenal levels of street violence and the rising power of drug cartels are threatening to move from being a Latin American problem to one that destroys the integrity of the Mexican state and risks spilling over more heavily into the American Southwest. Nobody, no matter their political stripe, wants the Tijuana-ization or Juárez-ization of Phoenix or Los Angeles, of San Diego or El Paso.
"It really is a serious problem in this country," Webb argues. "The transnational gangs or syndicates are bringing a tremendous amount of drugs into this country."
To get a handle on that problem involves thinking of ways to neutralize these gangs, which inevitably leads to a discussion of partial drug decriminalization or legalization. Why? Because once the drug market is no longer confined to the shadows--once it is regulated and taxed, as alcohol was after Prohibition ended in 1933--the violence that accompanies struggles for control of that illicit market will disappear. After years of denying this truth and assuming that the country could incarcerate its way out of the drug-abuse epidemic, a number of American politicians, Webb included, are touting that seemingly paradoxical fact. Want to get really tough on crime? Well, do the smart thing: start working out ways to neutralize the drug cartels, start talking about at least limited forms of decriminalization or legalization.
It is, Webb argues, "a fair issue for this commission. Every piece of it should be fair game."
For an administration like Obama's that prides itself on thinking outside the box, systemic drug policy reform is an intriguing prospect. An increasing number of law enforcement people and judges have also decided that this is an idea worth running with.
"I've never seen so much interest," says retired Orange County superior court judge James Gray, who has been advocating marijuana legalization since the early 1990s. "My phone is ringing much more than it ever has before."
"We need to ask, Is there a more sensible approach?" argues Norm Stamper, who, like Kerlikowske, is a former chief of police of Seattle who believes the criminal justice system is broken. "And the answer is prevention and education and treatment."
After decades of being on the defensive, progressive criminal justice reformers suddenly have a receptive audience. New York, which has closed some of its prisons in the past decade, has spent the last few years unraveling the tangled web created by the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws. Michigan, Louisiana and several other states have also scaled back their harshest mandatory drug sentences. The State of Washington is looking at how to redefine low-end drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. And in Michigan, which allows a $100 theft to trigger a four-year prison sentence, legislators are pushing to make the threshold $1,000 instead, so as to reduce the number of low-end offenders pushed into long-term incarceration and hobbled for life by felony convictions.
Meanwhile, correctional system administrators in Georgia, Illinois and Arkansas have started the long, hard task of reforming their systems from within even without a new consensus emerging on the issue.
Howard Wooldridge, a retired police detective from Bath, Michigan, who advocates in DC for criminal justice system reform, says the moment is ripe for change. "I've been doing this for twelve years, and this is by far the most perfect storm."
America isn't about to abandon all of its "tough on crime" tenets. Nor should it in all instances. The three-strikes law will likely remain in place for violent offenders, as will the growing body of laws limiting where sex offenders may live. Violent crimes will probably continue to trigger longer sentences than they did before the get-tough movement. And while some inmates will qualify for early release, many sentenced to long terms at the height of the tough-on-crime years will stay in prison. But out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars.
This will be especially true for drug policy--the multi-tentacled beast that's sucking most people into jails and prisons. There, profound changes are likely to develop over the next few years. And when it comes to the mentally ill, momentum continues to build around mental health courts designed to get people medical and counseling help rather than simply to shunt them off to prison. States like Pennsylvania are starting to develop parallel institutions to deal with mentally ill people who run afoul of the law. Many other states will likely follow suit in the near future. Forty years after deinstitutionalization, a new consensus is emerging that prisons became an accidental, de facto alternative to mental hospitals, and that very little good has come from that development.
"I believe that we have a compelling national interest," explains Senator Webb, referring to systemic criminal justice reform. "That's a term that is carefully chosen. This is a national commission, but it should not be limited to looking at the federal prison system. You have to look at the whole picture and then boil it down into resolvable issues."
About Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at Demos, is the author, most recently, of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It (PoliPoint).
Jul 3, 2009
The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation
By Dean Starkman
On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.
Long before most in the business press rose to the challenge, Gretchen Morgenson was reporting that the financial sector had gone rogue.
"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.
Today this is common knowledge; until this story ran, though, it wasn't. The article was about as bold and valuable as business stories come and involved no small journalistic risks for the Times. Goldman, for instance, was able to wring a correction on the story and still feels wronged today. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called Morgenson and her editor to question the article's premise, The Nation has learned. The piece has been the subject of endless parsing on financial blogs and, privately, sniping by Morgenson's peers. Was Goldman really exposed to AIG? And if so, how? Was it fair to mention Blankfein's presence at the Fed?
It would be too much to say that the story was all in a day's work for Morgenson. It was extraordinary. But it does open a window onto what makes Morgenson the most important financial journalist of her generation.
At 53, Morgenson is at the height of her career, read and feared in the corridors of power running from Wall Street to Washington. As a reporter and columnist (a controversial dual role), she is enormously productive. During the period following Lehman's bankruptcy, her byline appeared on major stories on Henry Cisneros and good housing goals gone bad, Merrill Lynch's collapse, corrupted rating agencies and Washington Mutual's boiler-room culture, in addition to the September 28 blockbuster on AIG--not to mention weekly 1,200-word columns on everything from rating-agency hypocrisy ("They're Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess," October 26) to a convoluted tax deal that imperiled an Indiana electrical cooperative ("Just Call This Deal Hoosier Baroque," December 21).
She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. ("Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now," she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn't just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called "toxic."
At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.
"She rules," says Aaron Elstein, a senior writer who covers Wall Street for Crain's New York. "She grasped that the game was rigged way before it was fashionable to do so." (He was talking about bogus accounting practices, but the remark holds more generally.)
"Unreadable," snaps a business journalism peer. "She writes like an Escalade running into a concrete barrier. And her relentless and repetitious pounding of simplistic issues is maddening."
"The consensus view of her among actual business people I know is pure contempt," says Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies, a public relations firm that has represented high-profile business-press targets. "Her work has a sort of drive-by, potshot quality to it that leads to habitual mistakes and ideological laziness. She is reflexively opposed to free markets and assumes bad faith in almost every subject or person she examines."
What both sides miss, and what sets Morgenson apart, is that she combines the blunt writing style with a prodigious fact-gathering ability and an accountability mindset all too rare in the business-press culture. This allows her to go beyond merely reporting and commenting on the public agenda. She helps to set it.
For the public, the financial crisis has demonstrated the degree to which Morgenson matters. We've just experienced a long period of radical deregulation that touched off a sea change in the business culture and at the same time created an information vacuum. How was the public to know about Wall Street-backed predatory lending and the scale it had reached? Most of the business press ducked the challenge, sticking largely to tried-and-true formulas: personality profiles, scoops handed out by insiders and after-the-fact explanations of the latest corporate scandal. And while the press did publish some investor- and consumer-oriented stories about the housing bubble, defective mortgage products and the like, it was culturally incapable of grasping the big picture--that, for instance, the financial sector had gone rogue.
Morgenson got it then and gets it now. Ignoring the eye rolls of her peers, pushing back against the lawyers and the flacks, she aims her reporting straight at the heart of the matter--and in doing so points the way for a more credible business press. Many groaned, for instance, at her repeated pounding in recent years on excesses in executive compensation. But we now know that compensation lies at the center of today's crisis, since everyone from mortgage brokers to Wall Street executives was given incentives to sell financial products without regard for their quality. Similarly, what Morgenson saw as a fairness problem became a systemic one, since income distortions left a borrower class too strapped to repay consumer loans. More broadly, her tone of urgency and accountability gave the public the message it needed to hear: something in the system had gone deeply awry.
Morgenson made fairly strenuous efforts to talk me out of this profile, arguing variously that she wasn't the story, that others in the mortgage mess were far more significant, that attention might impair her effectiveness, etc. (As a thoughtful journalist, I of course blew all this off.) Waiting for her in a restaurant around the corner from her office at the Times, I'm more nervous than I expected to be. Not helping my sang-froid was the one-word description a friend at the Times offered of Morgenson's grimly focused demeanor in the newsroom: scary. She sweeps in--tall, blond hair well coiffed at shoulder length, blue eyes, carrying stuff, chattering apologies about being (two minutes) late--and I'm relieved and surprised to find how quickly it feels like I'm talking with an old friend. Over eggs and granola, she is chatty, even dishy and disarmingly open. At a certain point, though, I touch a nerve--something to do with her prerogatives at the Times, I think--and the chitchat ceases. Her eyes narrow and now seem icy as she stares across the table. I start to understand what it is like to face off against her.
But that's part of the formula. She has a lot of power for a business reporter, and she acts like it. When I ask, for instance, what she thinks of her former employer, Forbes--a question that would seem to call for some diplomacy--she says simply, "Awful. Terrible." Breaking a few more industry taboos, she then unfavorably compares current Forbes editor William Baldwin with his predecessor, the late Jim Michaels, one of her mentors.
"Jim Michaels had a knack for taking a small story and making it big," she says slyly. "Bill Baldwin has a knack for making a big story small."
(Baldwin, reached later, brushes off the slam. "Forbes has always been brusque in judgment and tough on people, and if you dish it out you have to learn to take it," he says.)
Still, plutocrats and liberals expecting or hoping to find a stern ideologue in Morgenson--or, really, sweeping views from her of any kind--will be disappointed. For one thing, many will be surprised to learn she's a moderate Republican. "I believe in capitalism," she says. "To me it's natural that I would go after the people who are wrecking it."
What becomes apparent over several conversations is that Morgenson is a business reporter--no more, no less. She's more likely to mention investors as her main concern than readers or "the public." Her views are pragmatic, sometimes small-bore to the point that her detail-laden writing can turn off casual readers. Her fixes are meliorative and not particularly original--better regulation, more competition. Her radical idea is, basically, that regulators should regulate, rating agencies should rate according to the merits of the credit, corporate compensation committees should set executive pay at arm's length, directors should look to the interests of shareholders first, large shareholders should act like the owners they are and mortgage lending should be something other than a game of three-card monte. That these views are seen as "antibusiness" in some circles tells us less about Morgenson than about the ethical breakdown among this generation's corporate elites.
"If you're going to believe this is an ownership society where you're going to take part in the upside, if you're going to participate in a sort of populist form of capitalism...you have to be confident that the agents have your best interests at heart," she says.
Morgenson was born in State College, Pennsylvania, the daughter of liberal parents. Her father was an academic psychologist who later taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (in Waterloo, Ontario), and her mother was a librarian. Her parents split when she was 10, and she moved with her mom to Oxford, Ohio.
Her ambition as a girl was to be a reporter for the New York Times. After graduating from her parents' alma mater (St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota), lacking contacts, training or much in the way of money, she nonetheless boarded a plane for New York City and eventually landed a job in journalism--as a secretary at Vogue reporting to, of course, a tyrannical editor. ("It was 'devil wears Prada,' totally," she says.) She later moved up to a low-level editorial job ("assistant slave," as she puts it), then began to write personal-finance columns. But at a salary of $10,000 a year, she found she couldn't afford her new profession and left for a better-paying job on Wall Street.
Her three years at Dean Witter (now part of Morgan Stanley) taught her a few things about the financial-services industry, none of them particularly edifying. For example, if the office squawk box in the morning announced an "overnight special" on some stock laden with incentives for the brokers, "you knew it would open lower," she says. Another lesson: "You can't trust your research department; that you learn pretty quickly." Her career, such as it was, lasted until mid-1983, when an early version of the tech bubble burst, costing some of her clients a lot of money. "I felt so terrible," she says. "I had this terrible guilt."
Retreating to the relative moral high ground of journalism, she cadged a six-month trial at Money magazine and eventually a job at Forbes, then known for its hard-hitting business investigations. She rose quickly, learning at the feet of Michaels, the magazine's defining personality and editor from 1961 to 1999. A taskmaster (he could be "nasty, frightening," she recalls), Michaels stressed the importance of assembling an armada of facts in reporting and cutting to the chase in writing. Don't leave it to the reader to sort it out, he preached.
It was under Michaels that Morgenson became Morgenson, rattling off a series of investigative coups. A 1993 bombshell that found the entire Nasdaq trading system was tilted to favor stockbrokers over investors led to a historic $1 billion antitrust settlement with Wall Street firms. Another Forbes story took aim at the mid-1990s euphoria surrounding "boiler rooms"--registered and licensed small brokerages that were in fact criminal enterprises. The firms cold-called and bamboozled thousands of people into investing in plausible-sounding tiny public companies the brokerages secretly controlled. And while all business publications covered the resulting criminal cases, only Morgenson traced the frauds of one particularly malignant firm, A.R. Baron & Company, to its financial backer and back-office services provider: Bear Stearns.
The story detailed an intimate relationship between a criminal enterprise and a Wall Street bank, including unheeded letters from frantic investors pleading with Bear to cancel trades they had never authorized. The piece, incredibly, also traced the relationship between Baron principal Andrew Bressman and Richard Harriton, a top Bear official. Bear later agreed to pay $38 million (and got off incredibly easy) to settle charges brought by the SEC and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Harriton agreed to pay $1 million and was barred from the business.
The business press generally goes to great lengths to avoid this kind of straightforward investigative reporting, which is why Morgenson's approach has been so badly needed in recent years. After all, the mortgage crisis was nothing if not the Bear/Baron model writ large. It is generally conceded today that Ameriquest, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Citigroup--all the brand names, in fact--were running boiler rooms underwritten and incentivized by Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and the Wall Street securitization machine. The business press did not cover it then and still hasn't gotten its arms around this phenomenon. If readers are wondering why they were surprised by the mortgage crisis, this is the reason.
Morgenson arrived at the Times in 1998, an ascension that brought an investigative, accountability-oriented sensibility to a highly visible outpost. Reading through years of her work in one sitting isn't an entirely pleasurable experience--it can feel like you're being pummeled by a sock filled with wet sand. But even so, a reader is struck by her mastery of technical details, the force of her prose and, mostly, the underlying insistence that capitalism be made to work for everyone, not just the big shots. Her work in the run-up to the tech bubble was characteristically skeptical and investor oriented. Common causes of columns and stories include, besides compensation reform: shareholder rights; effective corporate governance; nonrigged arbitrations; anti-gouging; full disclosure in consumer lending; and fairness in bankruptcy, foreclosure and other legal proceedings. Her 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting was officially awarded for stories that plumbed bogus Wall Street stock research and the dangers of off-balance-sheet financing. But in an era of spectacular business corruption (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), I suspect the Pulitzer judges, who were not business news specialists, also appreciated her confrontational approach.
Not everyone does, of course. A handful of bloggers, including the late Doris Dungey (known as Tanta) of Calculated Risk and University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, have created large bodies of work debunking and mocking her and picking her apart. Ribstein, who calls her Morgenscreed, particularly objects to the Times allowing her to write both an opinion column ("Fair Game") and straight news, sometimes on the same subjects. In a column last November, the Times's public editor, Clark Hoyt, tut-tutted the paper for the practice (Andrew Ross Sorkin, among others, is also allowed the dual platform) but not very convincingly. The critiques, most centering on Morgenson's alleged oversimplications, come across as arguments about wallpaper design in a burning house. Bloggers, for instance, hit the roof over a Morgenson column last September arguing that the newly nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be made to disclose details about the individual mortgages they'd bought or guaranteed in the past decade. Ribstein found the idea an example of her "extreme idiocy." Others would wonder what's wrong with it.
In the Times's famously baroque culture, some people are known to have power, and others aren't. Morgenson has it. She's not known as a shmoozer but as one of the most efficient staffers at the paper: in at 9:30; out, incredibly, around 6. And while she's a cheerful and cooperative colleague by all accounts--helping out younger staffers, waiting her turn at the salad bar, etc.--she doesn't hesitate to assert her undefined but very real prerogatives. Editors ask her questions and make suggestions. They don't give orders.
The downside, according to a midlevel editor, is that Morgenson is not particularly open to nuance or different points of view. This person says the system can lead to a kind of orthodoxy and groupthink that deadens reporting. Morgenson's views on executive compensation, for instance, are hardly out of step with the "way people think" around the Times, the person notes.
That said, her clout has its limits. In 2003 the Times business section was getting an overhaul. Its editor, Glenn Kramon, was moving up and out. Jockeying began for a successor, with internal candidates including Jim Schachter, now editor of digital initiatives at the paper, and Winnie O'Kelley, a business editor with whom Morgenson has been particularly close.
Instead, executive editor Bill Keller chose Lawrence Ingrassia, who had run the Wall Street Journal's "Money & Investing" section. While many believed Ingrassia had breathed life into a stale operation, some at the Times viewed him (unfairly, in my view) as a cheerleader for the tech bubble, mainly because of his frequent appearances on CNBC during the late '90s. Some also believed he didn't "get" the investigative, accountability-oriented journalism Morgenson practices, favoring instead the kind that depends on access to power.
When Keller asked Morgenson about hiring Ingrassia, according to people with knowledge of the conversation, she told him flatly that it was a bad idea. But she also promised to make it work. (Keller, through a Times spokeswoman, declined to comment.) For his part, Ingrassia, now 57, has nothing but praise for Morgenson. "She knows Wall Street and how it works better than any reporter I've seen," he says. "She has great sources, and she's passionate. She cares deeply about making sure that individual investors are treated fairly. Basically, she believes people in positions of responsibility should act responsibly." Ingrassia said he and Morgenson have "quite a good working relationship, now."
Says Morgenson, turning cautious and speaking slowly: "Larry Ingrassia has been extremely supportive of my work this year."
However one parses all that, few would argue that the business section has not dramatically improved in recent years. Despite a relatively small staff (the Times has about 110 business journalists; the Journal, about 700), it is reasonably competitive on major stories and has assembled a cadre of reporters capable of strong investigative work, including Diana Henriques, Charles Duhigg, Vikas Bajaj, Louis Uchitelle, Stephen Labaton, Louise Story and Peter Goodman, supplemented by Jo Becker of the investigative staff.
Morgenson, Ingrassia and the Times business staff have produced some of the best coverage of the crisis, particularly the "Reckoning" series at the end of last year, which included exposés on major themes: the predatory practices at Countrywide, Washington Mutual and other brand names; compromised regulation; skewed compensation incentives; even the role played by the person in charge of the regulatory system, George W. Bush. The paper's news coverage has been complemented by strong editorials, many written by Teresa Tritch, a former staffer at Money.
Morgenson's approach has obviously been vindicated by the crisis, and she continues to help steer the public agenda. A story in April (with Becker as the lead byline) deftly revealed Timothy Geithner's longstanding social and professional ties to some of the leading culprits in the financial mess, including Robert Rubin (a longtime mentor), Sanford Weill (who, the story revealed, pushed Geithner to head Citigroup) and executives at money manager BlackRock (which got a no-bid bailout contract from Geithner's New York Fed). A June 1 story peeled back Wall Street lobbying efforts to dilute the regulation of derivatives, and unearthed a key lobbyist's memo that has helped shape the Obama administration's policy-making.
Like newspaper crusaders of old, Morgenson has sided with the little guy over the big guy, revealing, for instance, that Countrywide's predations continued even after its borrowers had filed for bankruptcy. A series in 2007 and last year reported that the lender had destroyed or "lost" $500,000 in homeowners' mortgage payments, then imposed additional penalties and fees, and presented to the court "re-created" letters that had never been mailed to homeowners.
"It's really about fairness," Morgenson says. "It just seems that the playing field is so skewed in some cases that it's worthwhile to educate people to level the playing field a little bit."
A little-understood aspect of Morgenson's approach is that she avoids a business-press tendency toward over-sophistication and goes after the big, honking story, the kind that rings alarm bells in executive suites.
Take the AIG/Goldman story. It came a mere two weeks after the bailout was announced, with the public still baffled as to why an insurance company would suddenly require scores of billions from the government. It also involved clashing with Wall Street's most powerful firm on the crux of a vital matter of public policy. (Disclosure: Goldman is a funder of Columbia Journalism Review's business section, "The Audit," which I run.)
Today, Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, says the story was "really very unfair" and that the now-corrected error, which mistakenly placed Blankfein in the same meeting with his predecessor, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, set off damaging conspiracy theories. (Tim O'Brien, one of Morgenson's editors, who got the original tip for the story, takes the blame for the error.)
Goldman, which adamantly contested Morgenson's premise that it had been exposed to AIG's failure, received support from a surprising quarter: Geithner, who called Morgenson on her cellphone the day the story ran, a Sunday.
"I think they were fully hedged," he told her, according to people familiar with the call. Translation: Goldman had no exposure because it had bought insurance from third parties.
"Do you know who the counterparties were?" she snapped back. Translation: are you sure, and have you checked? He conceded he hadn't, the people said. Geithner made a similar call to Ingrassia, people familiar with that call said. (A spokesman for Geithner declined to comment.)
The dispute continues. Goldman officials have repeated that Goldman's exposure to AIG was "not material," in effect disputing Morgenson's premise. The meeting between Blankfein and Morgenson in April did not resolve the question.
But even conceding Goldman's main point--that $10 billion was covered at the time of the bailout--the bank still had another $10 billion exposed, the value of which easily could have, and probably would have, plummeted absent a bailout. One could argue that with Goldman's immediate exposure covered, the AIG bailout didn't benefit Goldman directly and that Goldman benefited no more than other banks. But the AIG bailout clearly mattered to Goldman--and would come to matter more as additional bailout funds flowed to the bank, totaling $12.9 billion. The Times stands by the story, and the story stands.
In one of our later interviews, Morgenson remarks that such chronicling has shaken her belief in capitalism "to the core." But one comes away unconvinced. She was a skeptic in the first place, after all, and doesn't put much faith in government either. "It's scarier than what Wall Street was doing," she says. "The secrecy, doing an end run around Congress, tripling the size of the Fed's balance sheet."
So capitalism is the world's worst system except for all the others? "You need it," she says firmly. "But it must have a counterbalance, and that counterbalance must be tough regulation--and a very forthright media."
About Dean Starkman
Dean Starkman is an assistant managing editor and the Kingsford Capital Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review; he runs "The Audit," CJR's online business-press section.
On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.
Long before most in the business press rose to the challenge, Gretchen Morgenson was reporting that the financial sector had gone rogue.
"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.
Today this is common knowledge; until this story ran, though, it wasn't. The article was about as bold and valuable as business stories come and involved no small journalistic risks for the Times. Goldman, for instance, was able to wring a correction on the story and still feels wronged today. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called Morgenson and her editor to question the article's premise, The Nation has learned. The piece has been the subject of endless parsing on financial blogs and, privately, sniping by Morgenson's peers. Was Goldman really exposed to AIG? And if so, how? Was it fair to mention Blankfein's presence at the Fed?
It would be too much to say that the story was all in a day's work for Morgenson. It was extraordinary. But it does open a window onto what makes Morgenson the most important financial journalist of her generation.
At 53, Morgenson is at the height of her career, read and feared in the corridors of power running from Wall Street to Washington. As a reporter and columnist (a controversial dual role), she is enormously productive. During the period following Lehman's bankruptcy, her byline appeared on major stories on Henry Cisneros and good housing goals gone bad, Merrill Lynch's collapse, corrupted rating agencies and Washington Mutual's boiler-room culture, in addition to the September 28 blockbuster on AIG--not to mention weekly 1,200-word columns on everything from rating-agency hypocrisy ("They're Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess," October 26) to a convoluted tax deal that imperiled an Indiana electrical cooperative ("Just Call This Deal Hoosier Baroque," December 21).
She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. ("Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now," she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn't just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called "toxic."
At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.
"She rules," says Aaron Elstein, a senior writer who covers Wall Street for Crain's New York. "She grasped that the game was rigged way before it was fashionable to do so." (He was talking about bogus accounting practices, but the remark holds more generally.)
"Unreadable," snaps a business journalism peer. "She writes like an Escalade running into a concrete barrier. And her relentless and repetitious pounding of simplistic issues is maddening."
"The consensus view of her among actual business people I know is pure contempt," says Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies, a public relations firm that has represented high-profile business-press targets. "Her work has a sort of drive-by, potshot quality to it that leads to habitual mistakes and ideological laziness. She is reflexively opposed to free markets and assumes bad faith in almost every subject or person she examines."
What both sides miss, and what sets Morgenson apart, is that she combines the blunt writing style with a prodigious fact-gathering ability and an accountability mindset all too rare in the business-press culture. This allows her to go beyond merely reporting and commenting on the public agenda. She helps to set it.
For the public, the financial crisis has demonstrated the degree to which Morgenson matters. We've just experienced a long period of radical deregulation that touched off a sea change in the business culture and at the same time created an information vacuum. How was the public to know about Wall Street-backed predatory lending and the scale it had reached? Most of the business press ducked the challenge, sticking largely to tried-and-true formulas: personality profiles, scoops handed out by insiders and after-the-fact explanations of the latest corporate scandal. And while the press did publish some investor- and consumer-oriented stories about the housing bubble, defective mortgage products and the like, it was culturally incapable of grasping the big picture--that, for instance, the financial sector had gone rogue.
Morgenson got it then and gets it now. Ignoring the eye rolls of her peers, pushing back against the lawyers and the flacks, she aims her reporting straight at the heart of the matter--and in doing so points the way for a more credible business press. Many groaned, for instance, at her repeated pounding in recent years on excesses in executive compensation. But we now know that compensation lies at the center of today's crisis, since everyone from mortgage brokers to Wall Street executives was given incentives to sell financial products without regard for their quality. Similarly, what Morgenson saw as a fairness problem became a systemic one, since income distortions left a borrower class too strapped to repay consumer loans. More broadly, her tone of urgency and accountability gave the public the message it needed to hear: something in the system had gone deeply awry.
Morgenson made fairly strenuous efforts to talk me out of this profile, arguing variously that she wasn't the story, that others in the mortgage mess were far more significant, that attention might impair her effectiveness, etc. (As a thoughtful journalist, I of course blew all this off.) Waiting for her in a restaurant around the corner from her office at the Times, I'm more nervous than I expected to be. Not helping my sang-froid was the one-word description a friend at the Times offered of Morgenson's grimly focused demeanor in the newsroom: scary. She sweeps in--tall, blond hair well coiffed at shoulder length, blue eyes, carrying stuff, chattering apologies about being (two minutes) late--and I'm relieved and surprised to find how quickly it feels like I'm talking with an old friend. Over eggs and granola, she is chatty, even dishy and disarmingly open. At a certain point, though, I touch a nerve--something to do with her prerogatives at the Times, I think--and the chitchat ceases. Her eyes narrow and now seem icy as she stares across the table. I start to understand what it is like to face off against her.
But that's part of the formula. She has a lot of power for a business reporter, and she acts like it. When I ask, for instance, what she thinks of her former employer, Forbes--a question that would seem to call for some diplomacy--she says simply, "Awful. Terrible." Breaking a few more industry taboos, she then unfavorably compares current Forbes editor William Baldwin with his predecessor, the late Jim Michaels, one of her mentors.
"Jim Michaels had a knack for taking a small story and making it big," she says slyly. "Bill Baldwin has a knack for making a big story small."
(Baldwin, reached later, brushes off the slam. "Forbes has always been brusque in judgment and tough on people, and if you dish it out you have to learn to take it," he says.)
Still, plutocrats and liberals expecting or hoping to find a stern ideologue in Morgenson--or, really, sweeping views from her of any kind--will be disappointed. For one thing, many will be surprised to learn she's a moderate Republican. "I believe in capitalism," she says. "To me it's natural that I would go after the people who are wrecking it."
What becomes apparent over several conversations is that Morgenson is a business reporter--no more, no less. She's more likely to mention investors as her main concern than readers or "the public." Her views are pragmatic, sometimes small-bore to the point that her detail-laden writing can turn off casual readers. Her fixes are meliorative and not particularly original--better regulation, more competition. Her radical idea is, basically, that regulators should regulate, rating agencies should rate according to the merits of the credit, corporate compensation committees should set executive pay at arm's length, directors should look to the interests of shareholders first, large shareholders should act like the owners they are and mortgage lending should be something other than a game of three-card monte. That these views are seen as "antibusiness" in some circles tells us less about Morgenson than about the ethical breakdown among this generation's corporate elites.
"If you're going to believe this is an ownership society where you're going to take part in the upside, if you're going to participate in a sort of populist form of capitalism...you have to be confident that the agents have your best interests at heart," she says.
Morgenson was born in State College, Pennsylvania, the daughter of liberal parents. Her father was an academic psychologist who later taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (in Waterloo, Ontario), and her mother was a librarian. Her parents split when she was 10, and she moved with her mom to Oxford, Ohio.
Her ambition as a girl was to be a reporter for the New York Times. After graduating from her parents' alma mater (St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota), lacking contacts, training or much in the way of money, she nonetheless boarded a plane for New York City and eventually landed a job in journalism--as a secretary at Vogue reporting to, of course, a tyrannical editor. ("It was 'devil wears Prada,' totally," she says.) She later moved up to a low-level editorial job ("assistant slave," as she puts it), then began to write personal-finance columns. But at a salary of $10,000 a year, she found she couldn't afford her new profession and left for a better-paying job on Wall Street.
Her three years at Dean Witter (now part of Morgan Stanley) taught her a few things about the financial-services industry, none of them particularly edifying. For example, if the office squawk box in the morning announced an "overnight special" on some stock laden with incentives for the brokers, "you knew it would open lower," she says. Another lesson: "You can't trust your research department; that you learn pretty quickly." Her career, such as it was, lasted until mid-1983, when an early version of the tech bubble burst, costing some of her clients a lot of money. "I felt so terrible," she says. "I had this terrible guilt."
Retreating to the relative moral high ground of journalism, she cadged a six-month trial at Money magazine and eventually a job at Forbes, then known for its hard-hitting business investigations. She rose quickly, learning at the feet of Michaels, the magazine's defining personality and editor from 1961 to 1999. A taskmaster (he could be "nasty, frightening," she recalls), Michaels stressed the importance of assembling an armada of facts in reporting and cutting to the chase in writing. Don't leave it to the reader to sort it out, he preached.
It was under Michaels that Morgenson became Morgenson, rattling off a series of investigative coups. A 1993 bombshell that found the entire Nasdaq trading system was tilted to favor stockbrokers over investors led to a historic $1 billion antitrust settlement with Wall Street firms. Another Forbes story took aim at the mid-1990s euphoria surrounding "boiler rooms"--registered and licensed small brokerages that were in fact criminal enterprises. The firms cold-called and bamboozled thousands of people into investing in plausible-sounding tiny public companies the brokerages secretly controlled. And while all business publications covered the resulting criminal cases, only Morgenson traced the frauds of one particularly malignant firm, A.R. Baron & Company, to its financial backer and back-office services provider: Bear Stearns.
The story detailed an intimate relationship between a criminal enterprise and a Wall Street bank, including unheeded letters from frantic investors pleading with Bear to cancel trades they had never authorized. The piece, incredibly, also traced the relationship between Baron principal Andrew Bressman and Richard Harriton, a top Bear official. Bear later agreed to pay $38 million (and got off incredibly easy) to settle charges brought by the SEC and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Harriton agreed to pay $1 million and was barred from the business.
The business press generally goes to great lengths to avoid this kind of straightforward investigative reporting, which is why Morgenson's approach has been so badly needed in recent years. After all, the mortgage crisis was nothing if not the Bear/Baron model writ large. It is generally conceded today that Ameriquest, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Citigroup--all the brand names, in fact--were running boiler rooms underwritten and incentivized by Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and the Wall Street securitization machine. The business press did not cover it then and still hasn't gotten its arms around this phenomenon. If readers are wondering why they were surprised by the mortgage crisis, this is the reason.
Morgenson arrived at the Times in 1998, an ascension that brought an investigative, accountability-oriented sensibility to a highly visible outpost. Reading through years of her work in one sitting isn't an entirely pleasurable experience--it can feel like you're being pummeled by a sock filled with wet sand. But even so, a reader is struck by her mastery of technical details, the force of her prose and, mostly, the underlying insistence that capitalism be made to work for everyone, not just the big shots. Her work in the run-up to the tech bubble was characteristically skeptical and investor oriented. Common causes of columns and stories include, besides compensation reform: shareholder rights; effective corporate governance; nonrigged arbitrations; anti-gouging; full disclosure in consumer lending; and fairness in bankruptcy, foreclosure and other legal proceedings. Her 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting was officially awarded for stories that plumbed bogus Wall Street stock research and the dangers of off-balance-sheet financing. But in an era of spectacular business corruption (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), I suspect the Pulitzer judges, who were not business news specialists, also appreciated her confrontational approach.
Not everyone does, of course. A handful of bloggers, including the late Doris Dungey (known as Tanta) of Calculated Risk and University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, have created large bodies of work debunking and mocking her and picking her apart. Ribstein, who calls her Morgenscreed, particularly objects to the Times allowing her to write both an opinion column ("Fair Game") and straight news, sometimes on the same subjects. In a column last November, the Times's public editor, Clark Hoyt, tut-tutted the paper for the practice (Andrew Ross Sorkin, among others, is also allowed the dual platform) but not very convincingly. The critiques, most centering on Morgenson's alleged oversimplications, come across as arguments about wallpaper design in a burning house. Bloggers, for instance, hit the roof over a Morgenson column last September arguing that the newly nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be made to disclose details about the individual mortgages they'd bought or guaranteed in the past decade. Ribstein found the idea an example of her "extreme idiocy." Others would wonder what's wrong with it.
In the Times's famously baroque culture, some people are known to have power, and others aren't. Morgenson has it. She's not known as a shmoozer but as one of the most efficient staffers at the paper: in at 9:30; out, incredibly, around 6. And while she's a cheerful and cooperative colleague by all accounts--helping out younger staffers, waiting her turn at the salad bar, etc.--she doesn't hesitate to assert her undefined but very real prerogatives. Editors ask her questions and make suggestions. They don't give orders.
The downside, according to a midlevel editor, is that Morgenson is not particularly open to nuance or different points of view. This person says the system can lead to a kind of orthodoxy and groupthink that deadens reporting. Morgenson's views on executive compensation, for instance, are hardly out of step with the "way people think" around the Times, the person notes.
That said, her clout has its limits. In 2003 the Times business section was getting an overhaul. Its editor, Glenn Kramon, was moving up and out. Jockeying began for a successor, with internal candidates including Jim Schachter, now editor of digital initiatives at the paper, and Winnie O'Kelley, a business editor with whom Morgenson has been particularly close.
Instead, executive editor Bill Keller chose Lawrence Ingrassia, who had run the Wall Street Journal's "Money & Investing" section. While many believed Ingrassia had breathed life into a stale operation, some at the Times viewed him (unfairly, in my view) as a cheerleader for the tech bubble, mainly because of his frequent appearances on CNBC during the late '90s. Some also believed he didn't "get" the investigative, accountability-oriented journalism Morgenson practices, favoring instead the kind that depends on access to power.
When Keller asked Morgenson about hiring Ingrassia, according to people with knowledge of the conversation, she told him flatly that it was a bad idea. But she also promised to make it work. (Keller, through a Times spokeswoman, declined to comment.) For his part, Ingrassia, now 57, has nothing but praise for Morgenson. "She knows Wall Street and how it works better than any reporter I've seen," he says. "She has great sources, and she's passionate. She cares deeply about making sure that individual investors are treated fairly. Basically, she believes people in positions of responsibility should act responsibly." Ingrassia said he and Morgenson have "quite a good working relationship, now."
Says Morgenson, turning cautious and speaking slowly: "Larry Ingrassia has been extremely supportive of my work this year."
However one parses all that, few would argue that the business section has not dramatically improved in recent years. Despite a relatively small staff (the Times has about 110 business journalists; the Journal, about 700), it is reasonably competitive on major stories and has assembled a cadre of reporters capable of strong investigative work, including Diana Henriques, Charles Duhigg, Vikas Bajaj, Louis Uchitelle, Stephen Labaton, Louise Story and Peter Goodman, supplemented by Jo Becker of the investigative staff.
Morgenson, Ingrassia and the Times business staff have produced some of the best coverage of the crisis, particularly the "Reckoning" series at the end of last year, which included exposés on major themes: the predatory practices at Countrywide, Washington Mutual and other brand names; compromised regulation; skewed compensation incentives; even the role played by the person in charge of the regulatory system, George W. Bush. The paper's news coverage has been complemented by strong editorials, many written by Teresa Tritch, a former staffer at Money.
Morgenson's approach has obviously been vindicated by the crisis, and she continues to help steer the public agenda. A story in April (with Becker as the lead byline) deftly revealed Timothy Geithner's longstanding social and professional ties to some of the leading culprits in the financial mess, including Robert Rubin (a longtime mentor), Sanford Weill (who, the story revealed, pushed Geithner to head Citigroup) and executives at money manager BlackRock (which got a no-bid bailout contract from Geithner's New York Fed). A June 1 story peeled back Wall Street lobbying efforts to dilute the regulation of derivatives, and unearthed a key lobbyist's memo that has helped shape the Obama administration's policy-making.
Like newspaper crusaders of old, Morgenson has sided with the little guy over the big guy, revealing, for instance, that Countrywide's predations continued even after its borrowers had filed for bankruptcy. A series in 2007 and last year reported that the lender had destroyed or "lost" $500,000 in homeowners' mortgage payments, then imposed additional penalties and fees, and presented to the court "re-created" letters that had never been mailed to homeowners.
"It's really about fairness," Morgenson says. "It just seems that the playing field is so skewed in some cases that it's worthwhile to educate people to level the playing field a little bit."
A little-understood aspect of Morgenson's approach is that she avoids a business-press tendency toward over-sophistication and goes after the big, honking story, the kind that rings alarm bells in executive suites.
Take the AIG/Goldman story. It came a mere two weeks after the bailout was announced, with the public still baffled as to why an insurance company would suddenly require scores of billions from the government. It also involved clashing with Wall Street's most powerful firm on the crux of a vital matter of public policy. (Disclosure: Goldman is a funder of Columbia Journalism Review's business section, "The Audit," which I run.)
Today, Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, says the story was "really very unfair" and that the now-corrected error, which mistakenly placed Blankfein in the same meeting with his predecessor, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, set off damaging conspiracy theories. (Tim O'Brien, one of Morgenson's editors, who got the original tip for the story, takes the blame for the error.)
Goldman, which adamantly contested Morgenson's premise that it had been exposed to AIG's failure, received support from a surprising quarter: Geithner, who called Morgenson on her cellphone the day the story ran, a Sunday.
"I think they were fully hedged," he told her, according to people familiar with the call. Translation: Goldman had no exposure because it had bought insurance from third parties.
"Do you know who the counterparties were?" she snapped back. Translation: are you sure, and have you checked? He conceded he hadn't, the people said. Geithner made a similar call to Ingrassia, people familiar with that call said. (A spokesman for Geithner declined to comment.)
The dispute continues. Goldman officials have repeated that Goldman's exposure to AIG was "not material," in effect disputing Morgenson's premise. The meeting between Blankfein and Morgenson in April did not resolve the question.
But even conceding Goldman's main point--that $10 billion was covered at the time of the bailout--the bank still had another $10 billion exposed, the value of which easily could have, and probably would have, plummeted absent a bailout. One could argue that with Goldman's immediate exposure covered, the AIG bailout didn't benefit Goldman directly and that Goldman benefited no more than other banks. But the AIG bailout clearly mattered to Goldman--and would come to matter more as additional bailout funds flowed to the bank, totaling $12.9 billion. The Times stands by the story, and the story stands.
In one of our later interviews, Morgenson remarks that such chronicling has shaken her belief in capitalism "to the core." But one comes away unconvinced. She was a skeptic in the first place, after all, and doesn't put much faith in government either. "It's scarier than what Wall Street was doing," she says. "The secrecy, doing an end run around Congress, tripling the size of the Fed's balance sheet."
So capitalism is the world's worst system except for all the others? "You need it," she says firmly. "But it must have a counterbalance, and that counterbalance must be tough regulation--and a very forthright media."
About Dean Starkman
Dean Starkman is an assistant managing editor and the Kingsford Capital Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review; he runs "The Audit," CJR's online business-press section.
U.S. Troops Move Deeper Into Afghanistan's Helmand Province; One Marine Killed
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan, July 2 -- Columns of U.S. Marines in eight-wheeled armored vehicles pushed deep into southern Afghanistan on Thursday in an attempt to cut off Taliban supply lines from Pakistan and restore order in areas long neglected by short-handed NATO forces.
The movement of the Marines to the town of Khan Neshin in the lower Helmand River valley is the most significant deployment of U.S. forces in areas near the Pakistani border with southern Afghanistan, and it reflects a growing concern among U.S. military and intelligence officials that much of the violence that has plagued the south is linked to a flow of fighters and munitions from Pakistan's Baluchistan region.
The troops encountered roadside bombs and small-arms attacks, which resulted in the death of one Marine, but commanders opted to mute their return fire. In the first 24 hours of the operation, the Marines did not lob artillery or call for fighter planes to drop bombs.
The drive to Khan Neshin is part of a Marine campaign to root out Taliban insurgents by restoring the authority of local officials and police departments in the Helmand River valley. The 4,000-strong operation -- one of the largest conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan -- is intended to demonstrate new strategies advocated by the Obama administration to turn around a struggling, seven-year-old war effort.
As units from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade fanned out on foot in other parts of the valley Thursday, their principal focus was to meet local leaders -- and to set about winning their confidence -- not to hunt down Taliban fighters. Marine officers distributed handbills explaining their presence and talked to residents with the help of interpreters. Some Marine companies, which had arrived by helicopter early Thursday, bedded down for the night in empty homes instead of constructing bases with razor wire and sand-filled barriers.
The brigade's operations officer, Col. Eric Mellenger, said the absence of opposition in Khan Neshin represented a "major political and security success" and would allow the Marines to meet with town elders over the next few days. In other areas, he said, "people have been coming up to us with information about the Taliban."
U.S. military and diplomatic officials say the vast majority of Afghans, even those in violence-racked places such as Helmand province, do not want to be ruled by the Taliban and its extremist ideology. The officials contend that if Afghans are provided security and basic services, they will switch allegiances and support the local government.
Reactions to the Marine operation varied across the valley. In Khan Neshin, residents largely stayed off the streets, wary of being caught in the crossfire of possible Taliban attacks on the troops. In the northern areas, around the Nawa district, several residents approached Marines with information about where roadside bombs had been planted. Farther south, in Garmser district, a Marine company was attacked by a group of insurgents, who eventually retreated to a housing compound.
A gun battle at the house was the day's most significant combat engagement, resulting in the Marine fatality and the deaths of at least three insurgents. As the sun set, it appeared that the standoff would continue through the night.
Another challenge for the Marines was the 110-degree weather. Loaded down with backpacks and ammunition, and insulated by flak vests and Kevlar helmets, several fell ill from heatstroke, and five had to be evacuated for further medical attention. Helicopters had to be summoned to replenish units with extra water.
"All in all, it's been a pretty good day, considering we have 4,000 Marines involved in this operation," said Maj. Tom Clinton, the senior watch officer in the brigade's combat operations center here.
Commanders expressed surprise that the Marine battalion that moved south to Khan Neshin -- an imposing collection of 70 armored vehicles, each weighing 17 tons -- did not encounter more resistance. The battalion reported an incident of gunfire directed at one of the vehicles, but little else.
The experience in Khan Neshin, a hardscrabble riverfront town that sits north of a vast desert stretching into Pakistan, suggests that Taliban fighters there, and elsewhere in the Helmand River valley, may be lying low to observe the Marines before trying to retaliate with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. But the Marine presence may also lead some of the fighters to move to other parts of the country or seek other infiltration paths from Pakistan.
Either way, U.S. military and civilian officials say they have an opportunity to impede the Taliban's ability to operate with impunity by building local government institutions and reconstituting police units. In Khan Neshin, there is no district governor, and although the Afghan government has 59 police officers on the payroll for the area, none show up for work.
Marine officers and representatives from a British-U.S. reconstruction team in Helmand have held meetings in the provincial capital with elders from Khan Neshin in recent weeks. The elders have urged the Marines to move into the area, which has become a key transit point for Taliban fighters coming from Pakistan, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Although most fighters have crossed into Afghanistan through the eastern provinces that abut Pakistan, increasing patrols in that area and the relative strength of the Taliban in the south have led increasing numbers of Pakistani fighters to infiltrate into Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, according to U.S. officials.
"There's no doubt that the community doesn't want the Taliban there," said Rory Donohoe, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who will serve on a reconstruction team for Khan Neshin. It will be the first U.S. district-level stabilization program in the south.
But getting residents to engage with the Americans could prove challenging at first. Marine commanders had hoped the officers with the Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion that moved into the town would convene a meeting with community leaders Thursday. But no such gathering occurred.
It was not immediately clear why. Although Marines walked through the town soon after they arrived, most residents stayed indoors. "We first have to figure out what they want," Donohoe said. "Our goal is to work in partnership with them."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan, July 2 -- Columns of U.S. Marines in eight-wheeled armored vehicles pushed deep into southern Afghanistan on Thursday in an attempt to cut off Taliban supply lines from Pakistan and restore order in areas long neglected by short-handed NATO forces.
The movement of the Marines to the town of Khan Neshin in the lower Helmand River valley is the most significant deployment of U.S. forces in areas near the Pakistani border with southern Afghanistan, and it reflects a growing concern among U.S. military and intelligence officials that much of the violence that has plagued the south is linked to a flow of fighters and munitions from Pakistan's Baluchistan region.
The troops encountered roadside bombs and small-arms attacks, which resulted in the death of one Marine, but commanders opted to mute their return fire. In the first 24 hours of the operation, the Marines did not lob artillery or call for fighter planes to drop bombs.
The drive to Khan Neshin is part of a Marine campaign to root out Taliban insurgents by restoring the authority of local officials and police departments in the Helmand River valley. The 4,000-strong operation -- one of the largest conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan -- is intended to demonstrate new strategies advocated by the Obama administration to turn around a struggling, seven-year-old war effort.
As units from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade fanned out on foot in other parts of the valley Thursday, their principal focus was to meet local leaders -- and to set about winning their confidence -- not to hunt down Taliban fighters. Marine officers distributed handbills explaining their presence and talked to residents with the help of interpreters. Some Marine companies, which had arrived by helicopter early Thursday, bedded down for the night in empty homes instead of constructing bases with razor wire and sand-filled barriers.
The brigade's operations officer, Col. Eric Mellenger, said the absence of opposition in Khan Neshin represented a "major political and security success" and would allow the Marines to meet with town elders over the next few days. In other areas, he said, "people have been coming up to us with information about the Taliban."
U.S. military and diplomatic officials say the vast majority of Afghans, even those in violence-racked places such as Helmand province, do not want to be ruled by the Taliban and its extremist ideology. The officials contend that if Afghans are provided security and basic services, they will switch allegiances and support the local government.
Reactions to the Marine operation varied across the valley. In Khan Neshin, residents largely stayed off the streets, wary of being caught in the crossfire of possible Taliban attacks on the troops. In the northern areas, around the Nawa district, several residents approached Marines with information about where roadside bombs had been planted. Farther south, in Garmser district, a Marine company was attacked by a group of insurgents, who eventually retreated to a housing compound.
A gun battle at the house was the day's most significant combat engagement, resulting in the Marine fatality and the deaths of at least three insurgents. As the sun set, it appeared that the standoff would continue through the night.
Another challenge for the Marines was the 110-degree weather. Loaded down with backpacks and ammunition, and insulated by flak vests and Kevlar helmets, several fell ill from heatstroke, and five had to be evacuated for further medical attention. Helicopters had to be summoned to replenish units with extra water.
"All in all, it's been a pretty good day, considering we have 4,000 Marines involved in this operation," said Maj. Tom Clinton, the senior watch officer in the brigade's combat operations center here.
Commanders expressed surprise that the Marine battalion that moved south to Khan Neshin -- an imposing collection of 70 armored vehicles, each weighing 17 tons -- did not encounter more resistance. The battalion reported an incident of gunfire directed at one of the vehicles, but little else.
The experience in Khan Neshin, a hardscrabble riverfront town that sits north of a vast desert stretching into Pakistan, suggests that Taliban fighters there, and elsewhere in the Helmand River valley, may be lying low to observe the Marines before trying to retaliate with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. But the Marine presence may also lead some of the fighters to move to other parts of the country or seek other infiltration paths from Pakistan.
Either way, U.S. military and civilian officials say they have an opportunity to impede the Taliban's ability to operate with impunity by building local government institutions and reconstituting police units. In Khan Neshin, there is no district governor, and although the Afghan government has 59 police officers on the payroll for the area, none show up for work.
Marine officers and representatives from a British-U.S. reconstruction team in Helmand have held meetings in the provincial capital with elders from Khan Neshin in recent weeks. The elders have urged the Marines to move into the area, which has become a key transit point for Taliban fighters coming from Pakistan, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Although most fighters have crossed into Afghanistan through the eastern provinces that abut Pakistan, increasing patrols in that area and the relative strength of the Taliban in the south have led increasing numbers of Pakistani fighters to infiltrate into Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, according to U.S. officials.
"There's no doubt that the community doesn't want the Taliban there," said Rory Donohoe, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who will serve on a reconstruction team for Khan Neshin. It will be the first U.S. district-level stabilization program in the south.
But getting residents to engage with the Americans could prove challenging at first. Marine commanders had hoped the officers with the Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion that moved into the town would convene a meeting with community leaders Thursday. But no such gathering occurred.
It was not immediately clear why. Although Marines walked through the town soon after they arrived, most residents stayed indoors. "We first have to figure out what they want," Donohoe said. "Our goal is to work in partnership with them."
In Pakistan, Generations of Brickmakers See Few Changes
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 3, 2009
TARLAHI, Pakistan -- At the end of a village road, behind a grassy bluff, lies a hidden valley carpeted with thick red dust and canyoned with craggy mounds of earth. At the bottom, clay-colored figures squat barefoot all day, shaping balls of mud into bricks. In the distance, a dozen scattered chimneys spew clouds of black smoke, which trail off prettily across the horizon.
This is the world of Pakistan's brick kilns, a self-contained and primitive production system that has changed little in generations. It relies on the labor of migrant families, from girls of 6 to grizzled grandfathers, who live in brick huts beside the kilns, rarely leave the quarries and never fully wash off the red mineral stains that seep into their feet, hands and clothing.
"My father did this work before me, and my children will do this work after me," said Abdul Wakil, 25, who makes bricks in a kiln about 20 miles from Islamabad, the capital. Sitting on his haunches last week, he slapped mud balls into metal molds and moved like a crab along the lengthening row of damp bricks. The workday had started at 4:30 a.m. By sundown, Wakil said, he would finish 1,200 bricks and earn $3.50.
His two younger sons toddled along beside him, playing in the mud. The 7-year-old was already at work, deftly molding balls. A gaunt old man watched from a cart, coughing frequently. His fingers were stained mauve. He was not certain of his age but said he had been working in the kilns "since the time of Ayub Khan," a military ruler of the 1950s.
"This work shortens your life. No one would do it by choice," said the man, Abdul Sadiq. "The problem is that you can never earn enough to leave. If your wife needs an operation or the rainy seasons lasts too long, you have to borrow from the kiln owners. You try to repay it, but the debt stays with you, sometimes for your whole life. It's like a pair of invisible handcuffs."
Brickmakers toil near the bottom of Pakistan's economic and social ladder, forever at the mercy of heat, dirt, human greed and official indifference. By law, they cannot be compelled to work or be kept in bondage; in practice, the great majority are bound to the kilns by debt. The work is seasonal and families move often, but if they leave one kiln for another, their debt is transferred to the new owner. If they try to escape, they said, they are hunted down.
At least 200,000 Pakistanis, many of them children, work in more than 2,500 kilns across the country, according to studies by labor advocacy organizations. Their plight is well known and often described as a national disgrace. Human rights groups have exposed cases of kiln owners chaining or imprisoning workers; reformists have initiated programs to forgive their debts and educate their children.
But resistance to change has been stubborn. Kiln owners tend to be economically powerful and politically well-connected, while many brick workers are illiterate, nomadic, cut off from modern society and unaware of their rights. For all its discomforts and indignities, moreover, this is the only life they know, and some say they cannot imagine where else they would go.
"Brick workers fall outside the formal labor force and fall between the cracks of the law," said Tahira Abdullah, an activist with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in Islamabad. "They have no unions, no organization, no voice and no one to speak for them." With permanent debts tying most of them to the kilns, she added, "they are almost like serfs."
Although federal laws against child labor and debt peonage are rarely enforced, the Pakistani court system has recently become more aggressive in pursuing cases of worker imprisonment. Protests by brick workers against inhumane conditions, some organized by a national group called the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, are becoming more common.
Such encouraging news rarely penetrates the insular world of the kilns, however, while cautionary tales circulate swiftly. In conversations at several kilns in this Punjab province district last week, a few older workers said that they had heard about efforts to promote debt forgiveness or wage increases over the years, but that no one had ever actually come to help them.
Salim Mohammed, 28, said that five years ago he asked for a raise of 20 rupees (about 30 cents) a day. The owner refused and had him arrested on false charges. The police beat him severely, he said, and after one month the owner finally had him released. The case is still languishing in a provincial court. Mohammed still works in the kilns, and his two sons work alongside him.
"I just wanted a little more for my kids, but what I got was a lesson that people like me can never raise their voice without something bad happening to them," Mohammed said, sipping tea at dawn last week beside a waiting mound of mud.
Most workers said they could not afford to send their children to school, or managed to buy them books and shoes for only a couple of years before giving up. A bright-eyed, 8-year-old quarry boy named Zarfran Khan proudly counted from one to 13 in English, then trailed off. "I liked school," he said in Pashto, the language of many migrant kiln families from the northwest, "but I don't go there anymore."
The brick workers know little about the industry they serve, except that when building construction is up, they must race to fill orders, and when it is down, they abruptly get laid off. They never see the kiln owners, but every two weeks, a manager arrives with a ledger that records their pay and any deductions they want to make toward their debt.
The work itself needs no supervision; it is an ancient assembly line in which everyone knows his part. Even the little quarry donkeys seem to know that when the last of 32 new bricks is placed on their backs, it is time to start along the dusty path to the kiln. On the return trip, the teenage herders leap on the donkeys' empty backs with whoops of glee, goading the beasts to a canter. It is the herders' only source of fun during the long, sweltering days.
The kiln chimneys belch black smoke round the clock, while stacks of bricks bake in huge underground ovens that are filled, emptied and refilled by hand, one brick at a time. Grimy men feed coal chips to the roaring fire through small holes in the oven's roof. Burns are a routine hazard, usually from hot bricks that topple. The smoke is toxic, but activists said periodic efforts to regulate kiln pollution had failed.
Sometimes, desperation drives kiln workers to risk a horrifying health hazard: selling their kidneys. The clandestine organ trade is criminally prosecuted and socially condemned in Pakistan, but kiln workers said it is one of the few available means of acquiring enough cash to pay off their debts. They said organ agents transport willing workers to urban clinics for the surgery, pay them the equivalent of a few thousand dollars afterward, then vanish.
"I thought if I did this, I could pay off the money I owed," said Imam Baksh, 45, a veteran kiln worker. After a moment's hesitation, he lifted his dirty tunic to display a long, diagonal scar across his left side. "They only paid me 80,000 rupees [about $1,600 at the time], and I owed 100,000," he added. "I lost my kidney, but I am still here, and I am still in debt."
In this timeless but precarious existence, families may work together at a kiln for years, occupying the same cluster of gloomy brick huts, and then be gone in an instant. Last week, a family of six was evicted and had piled up all their belongings outside: three string beds, a bicycle, clothes, cooking pots, and their prized possession -- an electric fan.
The father looked haggard and worried. He said that they were moving on to another kiln, and that their debt of 50,000 rupees would follow them. But as the family piled bundles into a horse cart, a little girl watching them began to weep. Even if their next perch were in another dusty red valley only a few miles away, she understood that she would never see them again.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 3, 2009
TARLAHI, Pakistan -- At the end of a village road, behind a grassy bluff, lies a hidden valley carpeted with thick red dust and canyoned with craggy mounds of earth. At the bottom, clay-colored figures squat barefoot all day, shaping balls of mud into bricks. In the distance, a dozen scattered chimneys spew clouds of black smoke, which trail off prettily across the horizon.
This is the world of Pakistan's brick kilns, a self-contained and primitive production system that has changed little in generations. It relies on the labor of migrant families, from girls of 6 to grizzled grandfathers, who live in brick huts beside the kilns, rarely leave the quarries and never fully wash off the red mineral stains that seep into their feet, hands and clothing.
"My father did this work before me, and my children will do this work after me," said Abdul Wakil, 25, who makes bricks in a kiln about 20 miles from Islamabad, the capital. Sitting on his haunches last week, he slapped mud balls into metal molds and moved like a crab along the lengthening row of damp bricks. The workday had started at 4:30 a.m. By sundown, Wakil said, he would finish 1,200 bricks and earn $3.50.
His two younger sons toddled along beside him, playing in the mud. The 7-year-old was already at work, deftly molding balls. A gaunt old man watched from a cart, coughing frequently. His fingers were stained mauve. He was not certain of his age but said he had been working in the kilns "since the time of Ayub Khan," a military ruler of the 1950s.
"This work shortens your life. No one would do it by choice," said the man, Abdul Sadiq. "The problem is that you can never earn enough to leave. If your wife needs an operation or the rainy seasons lasts too long, you have to borrow from the kiln owners. You try to repay it, but the debt stays with you, sometimes for your whole life. It's like a pair of invisible handcuffs."
Brickmakers toil near the bottom of Pakistan's economic and social ladder, forever at the mercy of heat, dirt, human greed and official indifference. By law, they cannot be compelled to work or be kept in bondage; in practice, the great majority are bound to the kilns by debt. The work is seasonal and families move often, but if they leave one kiln for another, their debt is transferred to the new owner. If they try to escape, they said, they are hunted down.
At least 200,000 Pakistanis, many of them children, work in more than 2,500 kilns across the country, according to studies by labor advocacy organizations. Their plight is well known and often described as a national disgrace. Human rights groups have exposed cases of kiln owners chaining or imprisoning workers; reformists have initiated programs to forgive their debts and educate their children.
But resistance to change has been stubborn. Kiln owners tend to be economically powerful and politically well-connected, while many brick workers are illiterate, nomadic, cut off from modern society and unaware of their rights. For all its discomforts and indignities, moreover, this is the only life they know, and some say they cannot imagine where else they would go.
"Brick workers fall outside the formal labor force and fall between the cracks of the law," said Tahira Abdullah, an activist with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in Islamabad. "They have no unions, no organization, no voice and no one to speak for them." With permanent debts tying most of them to the kilns, she added, "they are almost like serfs."
Although federal laws against child labor and debt peonage are rarely enforced, the Pakistani court system has recently become more aggressive in pursuing cases of worker imprisonment. Protests by brick workers against inhumane conditions, some organized by a national group called the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, are becoming more common.
Such encouraging news rarely penetrates the insular world of the kilns, however, while cautionary tales circulate swiftly. In conversations at several kilns in this Punjab province district last week, a few older workers said that they had heard about efforts to promote debt forgiveness or wage increases over the years, but that no one had ever actually come to help them.
Salim Mohammed, 28, said that five years ago he asked for a raise of 20 rupees (about 30 cents) a day. The owner refused and had him arrested on false charges. The police beat him severely, he said, and after one month the owner finally had him released. The case is still languishing in a provincial court. Mohammed still works in the kilns, and his two sons work alongside him.
"I just wanted a little more for my kids, but what I got was a lesson that people like me can never raise their voice without something bad happening to them," Mohammed said, sipping tea at dawn last week beside a waiting mound of mud.
Most workers said they could not afford to send their children to school, or managed to buy them books and shoes for only a couple of years before giving up. A bright-eyed, 8-year-old quarry boy named Zarfran Khan proudly counted from one to 13 in English, then trailed off. "I liked school," he said in Pashto, the language of many migrant kiln families from the northwest, "but I don't go there anymore."
The brick workers know little about the industry they serve, except that when building construction is up, they must race to fill orders, and when it is down, they abruptly get laid off. They never see the kiln owners, but every two weeks, a manager arrives with a ledger that records their pay and any deductions they want to make toward their debt.
The work itself needs no supervision; it is an ancient assembly line in which everyone knows his part. Even the little quarry donkeys seem to know that when the last of 32 new bricks is placed on their backs, it is time to start along the dusty path to the kiln. On the return trip, the teenage herders leap on the donkeys' empty backs with whoops of glee, goading the beasts to a canter. It is the herders' only source of fun during the long, sweltering days.
The kiln chimneys belch black smoke round the clock, while stacks of bricks bake in huge underground ovens that are filled, emptied and refilled by hand, one brick at a time. Grimy men feed coal chips to the roaring fire through small holes in the oven's roof. Burns are a routine hazard, usually from hot bricks that topple. The smoke is toxic, but activists said periodic efforts to regulate kiln pollution had failed.
Sometimes, desperation drives kiln workers to risk a horrifying health hazard: selling their kidneys. The clandestine organ trade is criminally prosecuted and socially condemned in Pakistan, but kiln workers said it is one of the few available means of acquiring enough cash to pay off their debts. They said organ agents transport willing workers to urban clinics for the surgery, pay them the equivalent of a few thousand dollars afterward, then vanish.
"I thought if I did this, I could pay off the money I owed," said Imam Baksh, 45, a veteran kiln worker. After a moment's hesitation, he lifted his dirty tunic to display a long, diagonal scar across his left side. "They only paid me 80,000 rupees [about $1,600 at the time], and I owed 100,000," he added. "I lost my kidney, but I am still here, and I am still in debt."
In this timeless but precarious existence, families may work together at a kiln for years, occupying the same cluster of gloomy brick huts, and then be gone in an instant. Last week, a family of six was evicted and had piled up all their belongings outside: three string beds, a bicycle, clothes, cooking pots, and their prized possession -- an electric fan.
The father looked haggard and worried. He said that they were moving on to another kiln, and that their debt of 50,000 rupees would follow them. But as the family piled bundles into a horse cart, a little girl watching them began to weep. Even if their next perch were in another dusty red valley only a few miles away, she understood that she would never see them again.
"War on terror" Used to Target Minorities
03 Jul 2009 08:34:00 GMT
Written by: Natasha Elkington
LONDON - Countries on the front line in the "war on terror" are using the battle against extremists as a smokescreen to crack down on minority groups, according to an international human rights group.
For the fourth straight year, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan topped an annual index compiled by Minority Rights Group International (MRG) of countries where minorities are most at risk of genocide, mass killings or violent repression.
"You see governments who have faced a genuine threat, but the point is the actions they have taken against the wider civilian population, including minority civilians, has been justified as part of the 'war on terror,'" MRG director Mark Lattimer told Reuters on Thursday.
"It has included disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions."
A two-year insurgency in Somalia led by al Shabaab militants, who have links to al Qaeda and include foreign Islamists among their ranks, has killed some 18,000 civilians.
The insurgency has put historically oppressed minority groups such as the Bantu, Gabooye and Yibir at particular risk, the chairman of Somali Minority Rights and Aid Forum, Mohamed Hassan Daryeel, said.
"If the Yibir go with the government, they will be attacked by the radical Islamists. At the same time, if they go with the Islamists, they will be considered terrorists, and if they are neutral they'll be targeted by all sides."
Daryeel said recent amputations carried out by al Shabaab fighters were performed on child soldiers forcibly recruited from minority groups. "They are at the bottom of society, the most disadvantaged," he said.
Despite a decline in violence in Iraq, the report said civilian deaths from violence were still estimated at 300-800 a month over the past year.
It said minorities continued to bear the brunt of the violence, especially in the Nineveh area, home to the Shabak people.
"The Shabak community has suffered a lot at the hands of the terrorist groups and at the hands of the Kurdish 'Assayish' (secret police)," head of Iraq's Minorities Council, Hunain Al-Qaddo, told Reuters.
He said around 10,000 Shabak families had fled parts of Mosul to their homeland in the Nineveh plains for fear of being killed because of their ethnicity.
The rest of the top 10 list was comprised of Myanmar in fifth place, followed by Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Israel/Palestinian territories.
Pakistan rose on the list due to an escalating conflict against different Islamist groups, combined with growing violence in national politics and suppression of dissidents.
Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen were assessed as under greater danger than a year ago with their governments' involvement in regional conflicts compounding the risk of repression at home.
African states make up half the report's top 20 list. (Editing by Robert Woodward)
Written by: Natasha Elkington
LONDON - Countries on the front line in the "war on terror" are using the battle against extremists as a smokescreen to crack down on minority groups, according to an international human rights group.
For the fourth straight year, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan topped an annual index compiled by Minority Rights Group International (MRG) of countries where minorities are most at risk of genocide, mass killings or violent repression.
"You see governments who have faced a genuine threat, but the point is the actions they have taken against the wider civilian population, including minority civilians, has been justified as part of the 'war on terror,'" MRG director Mark Lattimer told Reuters on Thursday.
"It has included disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions."
A two-year insurgency in Somalia led by al Shabaab militants, who have links to al Qaeda and include foreign Islamists among their ranks, has killed some 18,000 civilians.
The insurgency has put historically oppressed minority groups such as the Bantu, Gabooye and Yibir at particular risk, the chairman of Somali Minority Rights and Aid Forum, Mohamed Hassan Daryeel, said.
"If the Yibir go with the government, they will be attacked by the radical Islamists. At the same time, if they go with the Islamists, they will be considered terrorists, and if they are neutral they'll be targeted by all sides."
Daryeel said recent amputations carried out by al Shabaab fighters were performed on child soldiers forcibly recruited from minority groups. "They are at the bottom of society, the most disadvantaged," he said.
Despite a decline in violence in Iraq, the report said civilian deaths from violence were still estimated at 300-800 a month over the past year.
It said minorities continued to bear the brunt of the violence, especially in the Nineveh area, home to the Shabak people.
"The Shabak community has suffered a lot at the hands of the terrorist groups and at the hands of the Kurdish 'Assayish' (secret police)," head of Iraq's Minorities Council, Hunain Al-Qaddo, told Reuters.
He said around 10,000 Shabak families had fled parts of Mosul to their homeland in the Nineveh plains for fear of being killed because of their ethnicity.
The rest of the top 10 list was comprised of Myanmar in fifth place, followed by Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Israel/Palestinian territories.
Pakistan rose on the list due to an escalating conflict against different Islamist groups, combined with growing violence in national politics and suppression of dissidents.
Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen were assessed as under greater danger than a year ago with their governments' involvement in regional conflicts compounding the risk of repression at home.
African states make up half the report's top 20 list. (Editing by Robert Woodward)
Jul 2, 2009
Americans’ Worry About Terrorism Nears 5-Year Low
by Lymari Morales
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week said the issue of terrorism "is always with us" and that "we have to be ever vigilant." Americans, however, are less worried about terrorism than at any point since August 2004 -- with 36% saying they are very or somewhat worried that they or a family member will become a victim.
Americans' collective level of worry about terrorism measured in the USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted June 8-9, is the lowest recorded since August 2004 (34%) and down sharply from the all-time high of 59% recorded in October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks. The latest poll finds 30% who say they are not too worried about being a victim of terrorism and 34% who say they are not at all worried.
In a separate Gallup Poll, conducted June 14-17, only 1% mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the United States, consistent with Americans' perceptions of this issue over the past year, and tied for the lowest percentage giving this answer since 9/11. Mentions have been in the single-digit range since November 2006, and are down from a peak of 46% in October 2001.
Currently, 73% of Americans say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the U.S. government to protect its citizens from future acts of terrorism -- unchanged from 2006, but down from 81% in 2004.
While most Americans are not personally worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism, they do see a continued need for the post-Sept. 11 security measures aimed at preventing terrorist attacks. Most (83%) think those measures are still needed, while 14% think they could be dropped.
Bottom Line
Americans are for the most part not personally worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism, and they have a fairly high level of confidence in the U.S. government to protect them. While most agree that security measures implemented after 9/11 are still necessary, calls for continued vigilance like the one articulated by Napolitano this week are likely a good tactic to keep Americans ever aware of the ongoing threat.
Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 995 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 8-9, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week said the issue of terrorism "is always with us" and that "we have to be ever vigilant." Americans, however, are less worried about terrorism than at any point since August 2004 -- with 36% saying they are very or somewhat worried that they or a family member will become a victim.
Americans' collective level of worry about terrorism measured in the USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted June 8-9, is the lowest recorded since August 2004 (34%) and down sharply from the all-time high of 59% recorded in October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks. The latest poll finds 30% who say they are not too worried about being a victim of terrorism and 34% who say they are not at all worried.
In a separate Gallup Poll, conducted June 14-17, only 1% mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the United States, consistent with Americans' perceptions of this issue over the past year, and tied for the lowest percentage giving this answer since 9/11. Mentions have been in the single-digit range since November 2006, and are down from a peak of 46% in October 2001.
Currently, 73% of Americans say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the U.S. government to protect its citizens from future acts of terrorism -- unchanged from 2006, but down from 81% in 2004.
While most Americans are not personally worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism, they do see a continued need for the post-Sept. 11 security measures aimed at preventing terrorist attacks. Most (83%) think those measures are still needed, while 14% think they could be dropped.
Bottom Line
Americans are for the most part not personally worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism, and they have a fairly high level of confidence in the U.S. government to protect them. While most agree that security measures implemented after 9/11 are still necessary, calls for continued vigilance like the one articulated by Napolitano this week are likely a good tactic to keep Americans ever aware of the ongoing threat.
Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 995 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 8-9, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
We Still Torture: The New Evidence from Guantánamo
By Luke Mitchell
Luke Mitchell is a senior editor of Harper’s Magazine.
We face the temptation to believe that an election can “change everything”—that the stark contrast between Barack Obama and George W. Bush recapitulates an equally stark contrast between the present and the past. But political events move within a continuum, and they are driven by many forces other than democratic action, including the considerable power of their own momentum. Such is the case with the ongoing American experiment with torture.
The release in April of documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross, from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, and from the House Armed Services Committee gave further credence to what had long been known about CIA and military interrogation techniques. They are brutal and, despite the surreal claims of the Bush Justice Department, they are illegal. The assumption underlying coverage of “the torture story,” however, has been that U.S.-sponsored torture came to a halt on January 21. The culpability of the previous administration remains to be determined, we are told, and in terms of ongoing criminal liability, the worst Obama himself could do is obstruct an investigation. Regarding the launch of that investigation, we must be patient.
We cannot be patient, though, and not simply because justice must be swift. We cannot be patient because not only have we failed to punish the people who created and maintained our torture regime; we have failed to dismantle that regime and, in many cases, even to cease torturing.
This last charge is the least heard. Although it is true that waterboarding is once again proscribed, it is equally true that the government continues to permit a series of “torture lite” techniques—prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, force-feeding—that even Reagan appointee Judge Susan Crawford had to acknowledge amounted to torture when she threw out the government’s case against one accused terrorist. Like waterboarding, these techniques cause extreme mental anguish and permanent physical damage, and, like waterboarding, they are not permitted under international law. But unlike waterboarding, they remain on the books, in detailed prison regulations and field-manual directives, unremarked by anyone except a few activists.
The United States has always tortured. But our approach to torture has evolved over time. In the past, we preferred to keep the practice hidden. During the Cold War, we exported most of our torture projects to client regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, while at home we worked to perfect a new form of “no touch” interrogation that would achieve terror and compliance without leaving scars, even as we denounced similar practices employed by our enemies. This was the age of hypocrisy—our secrecy was the tribute war crimes paid to democracy.
The hypocritical period ended, of course, with the attacks of September 11, the national flinch, the chest-thumping of George W. Bush, and the grim pronouncements of Dick Cheney, who loudly advertised his willingness to take the United States to “the dark side.” This, as we have all come to understand, was the time of open torture. It was the “shameful era,” when we put the techniques we had developed during the Cold War to use in the new “war on terror.”
Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat them. We know that we still use a series of punishments and interrogation techniques—touch and “no touch”—that any normal person would acknowledge to be torture. And we know that when those men protest such treatment by refusing to eat, we strap them to chairs and force food down their throats. We know all of this because it is well documented, not just by reporters and activists but by the torturers themselves.
It is this very openness that suggests why this new age—let’s call it the era of legitimized torture—is so perilous, not just to the men who are tortured but to liberal democracy. The moment is rapidly approaching when President Obama will cease to be the inheritor of a criminal regime and instead become its primary controlling authority, when the ongoing war crimes will attach themselves to his administration. And when they do attach themselves, Obama’s administration will be forced to defend itself, as all administrations do. And it will defend itself by claiming that what we call crimes are not in fact crimes.
This process has already begun. Rather than end illegal torture, we are now solidifying the steps that we have taken to make these activities legal. By failing to change the underlying problem even as we celebrate its supposed “solution,” we actually further entrench the past, the “bad” Bush era, into the present, the “good” Obama era. We will return to the rule of law, but within that rule will remain a rule of torture, given all the greater authority by our love of the new regime.
We have a tendency in the United States to judge actions not by their intrinsic merit but by the stylishness with which they are executed. Although the ostentatious lawlessness of the previous administration was pleasing to some, it ultimately frightened the majority of Americans. It was far too flamboyant. Obama and the Democrats seem to have rejected ostentation and lawlessness, and are all the more popular for that rejection. But they have not rejected torture itself.
As we learned from the Office of Legal Counsel memos, it is possible to parse “torture” to a considerable degree. What is the allowable incline for a waterboard? How many calories will suffice to avoid starvation? Which insects are permitted to be used in driving a man insane? The correct answer, according to those who parse, is the difference between a war crime and a heroic act of patriotism.
The OLC memos have been discredited but not the thinking behind them. We are still parsing, still weighing, still considering the possibilities. Whereas once we understood torture to be forbidden—something to be hidden and denied—now we understand it to be “complex.” We are instrumental in our analysis, and that instrumentality is held to be a virtue. We don’t torture not because it is illegal or immoral or repugnant to democracy but because “it doesn’t work,” leaving the way clear to torture that does “work.”
The combination of complexity and instrumentality creates the potential for a new inversion. We enter the “complex” realm of torture and draw a new line, and the logical consequence—the unavoidably intended consequence—is that whatever is on the “good” side of that line, the “useful” side, can no longer be called torture. And since it is no longer torture, it must be something else. In this way we arrive at the strangest and most absurd conclusion. What was once a crime becomes a sensible approach to law enforcement. And in becoming sensible it also becomes invisible.
It is our evolving understanding of force-feeding that most clearly demonstrates this process of inversion and invisibility—not because it is the most horrifying form of torture, though it is horrifying, but because it has been so completely mainstreamed. Indeed, as it is practiced at Guantánamo, force-feeding is understood not only to not be torture but in fact to be a form of mercy. It is understood, above all, as a way to “preserve life.”
As of this writing, at least thirty men are being force-fed at Guantánamo. They are being force-fed despite the departure of the administration that instituted force-feeding, despite the current administration’s order to shut down Guantánamo, and despite its even more specific order requiring prisoners there to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which—by every interpretation but that of the U.S. government—clearly forbids force-feeding.11. The conventions forbid “humiliating and degrading treatment,” and doctors who advise the Red Cross, which in turn has considerable oversight in interpreting the conventions, have repeatedly made clear that force-feeding is humiliating and degrading. See, for instance, the judgment of Red Cross adviser Hernán Reyes, in a 1998 policy review: “Doctors should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or oesophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’”
Most of these prisoners are not facing imminent death. In fact, force-feeding is itself a risky “treatment” that can cause infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and other complications. The feedings begin very soon after prisoners begin a hunger strike, and continue daily—with military guards strapping them to restraint chairs, usually for several hours at a time—until the prisoners agree to end the strike. This hunger striker is not an emaciated Bobby Sands lying near death after many weeks of starvation. He is a strong man bound to a chair and covered in his own vomit.22. Dr. William Winkenwerder, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and was therefore responsible for the force-feeding policy at Guantánamo, explained this peremptory approach to me three years ago with an almost poignant question: “If we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?”
If force-feeding does not save lives, then what does it do? What makes it useful? From the perspective of the prisoner, there can be only one answer: Pain makes force-feeding useful. The pain makes the strike unbearable, and therefore it prevents further protest.
This is not just a logical inference. The first experience many Guantánamo prisoners had with being forced to eat was not when they went on hunger strikes but rather when they underwent interrogations at the secret CIA bases where they were held prior to their arrival at Guantánamo. At these “black sites,” we now know from the ICRC and OLC reports, CIA interrogation teams used “dietary manipulation” as a “conditioning technique” to help gather “intelligence.” These techniques, in other words, were a form of torture, no different from other, more infamous techniques outlined in the same reports, including “walling,” “cramped confinement,” and “water dousing” (now better known as waterboarding).
A 2005 memo signed by Steven Bradbury, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, explains the method. Dietary manipulation “involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet.” The CIA interrogation team would strap the prisoners to chairs and feed them bottles of Ensure Plus—cited by name—for weeks on end. As Bradbury noted, it was hoped that this would cause the prisoners to become compliant.
The interrogation team believed [redacted] “maintains a tough, Mujahidin fighter mentality and has conditioned himself for a physical interrogation.” The team therefore concluded that “more subtle interrogation measures designed more to weaken [redacted] physical ability and mental desire to resist interrogation over the long run are likely to be more effective.” For these reasons, the team sought authorization to use dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing, and abdominal slap. In the team’s view, adding these techniques would be especially helpful [redacted] because he appeared to have a particular weakness for food and also seemed especially modest.
In imposing dietary control, safety was always a concern. “While we do not equate commercial weight-loss programs and this interrogation technique,” Bradbury wrote, “the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” Bradbury even anticipated the almost sentimental patina of caregiving that informs the present-day discussion of force-feeding at Guantánamo, noting that “a detainee subjected to the waterboard must be under dietary manipulation, because a fluid diet reduces the risks of the technique”—by reducing the risk of choking on undigested vomit. The force-feeding, in other words, was for the good of the prisoner.
Forcing a man to drink a diet shake may seem like a minor affront, far removed from the rack or even from waterboarding. But actual prisoner testimony from another set of documents, the Red Cross interviews acquired by Mark Danner and published in The New York Review of Books in April, suggests that the dietary manipulation was traumatizing:
During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank. . . .
During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force. . . .
I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet [and] given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time. . . .
That is how we treated prisoners at CIA black sites, back in the shameful era. It is by no means the worst instance of man’s inhumanity to man. But dietary manipulation clearly was not a technique meant primarily to preserve life.
Compare now the shameful and repudiated practice of dietary manipulation under Bush to the sensible, life-preserving practice of “involuntary feeding” at Guantánamo today, in the post-torture era.
In February, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, a U.S. military lawyer representing Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was recently released from Guantánamo, described a now-familiar situation to the Guardian. “Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell,” she said. “Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten.”
Bradley continued,
It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two-or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, “I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.”
That same month, Ahmed Ghap pour, an attorney with the human-rights group Reprieve, which represents thirty-one detainees at Guantánamo, told Reuters that prison officials were “over-force-feeding” hunger strikers, who were suffering from diarrhea as they sat tied to their chairs. He said in some cases officials were lacing the nutrient shakes with laxatives. And the situation was getting worse. “According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” Ghappour said, speculating that guards there wanted to “get their kicks in” before the camp closed.
David Remes, an attorney who represents fifteen detainees at Guantánamo, wrote in an April petition to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that one of his clients, Farhan Abdul Latif, had been suffering in particular. When the nasogastric tube “is threaded though his nostril into his stomach,” it “feels like a nail going into his nostril, and like a knife going down his throat.” Latif had in recent months resorted to covering himself with his own excrement in order “to avoid force-feeding and that, when he was finally force-fed, the tube was inserted through the excrement covering his nostrils.”33. Latif, who is now being held in Guantánamo’s “Behavioral Health Unit,” has quite clearly been broken by his many years of confinement. Remes reports that his client has made several suicide attempts, the most recent of which was in his presence. “Without my noticing, he chipped off a piece of stiff veneer from the underside of the table and used it to saw into a vein in his left wrist,” he said. “As he sawed, he drained his blood into a plastic container I had brought and, shortly before our time was up, he hurled the blood at me from the container. It must have been a good deal of blood because I was drenched from the top of my head to my knees.” Latif survived this attempt as well.
Another prisoner, Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, told his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights that he and fifteen other men had also refused to eat:
Mr. Mouhammad described that men were vomiting while being overfed. Some of the striking detainees had kept their feeding tubes in their noses even when not being force-fed just to avoid having the tubes painfully reinserted each time. Mr. Mouhammad reported that interrogators were pressuring and coercing the men on hunger strike to eat, making promises that they would be moved to the communal living camp if they began eating. Mr. Mouhammad described these experiences as “torture, torture, torture.”
What was torture at the black sites remains torture today at Guantánamo. It is perhaps ironic that what began as a method for making men talk—in fact, as we are now learning, in order to make them lie, about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq—is now a method of preventing men from “talking,” of preventing them from registering protest at the injustice of their condition. But that irony should not prevent us from recognizing the simple fact of the torture itself.
Every U.S. institution that could prevent force-feeding has failed to do so. Congress has failed to act, as have the courts, as has the president. Today the American Medical Association refuses even to sanction the doctors employed at Guantánamo, and one of those doctors, William Dudney, actually touts his previous job as the “Chief of Psychiatry, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” in an advertisement for his “Medical Weight Management” services.
District Judge Gladys Kessler had the opportunity to address force-feeding in February, when lawyers for Mohammed Al-Adahi and four other prisoners at Guantánamo sought an immediate injunction against the practice. Kessler denied the injunction on the unconvincing grounds that her court lacked not just the jurisdiction but the competency to dispense justice. “Resolution of this issue requires the exercise of penal and medical discretion by staff with the appropriate expertise,” she wrote, “and is precisely the type of question that federal courts, lacking that expertise, leave to the discretion of those who do possess such expertise.” Once again, complexity prevents intervention. (Kessler, it should be noted, began her career working for Democrats in Congress.)
The Pentagon, so richly empowered by the circuit court, has failed as well. Dr. Ward Casscells was appointed assistant secretary of defense for health affairs in 2007 and thus far has survived in his role as the Pentagon’s top health official. I asked his spokesperson, Cynthia Smith, why he was continuing the previous administration’s policy of force-feeding even after the new president had ordered prisoners to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. “The policy does save lives,” Smith wrote back (a week later, stipulating that I attribute quotes to her instead of to Casscells). “Idly watching detainees for whose care we are responsible engage in self-starvation to the point of permanent damage to health or death is not required by U.S. law, Common Article 3, or medical ethics.”44. Smith is one-third right. Force-feeding is indeed permitted under U.S. Bureau of Prison guidelines. But as previously noted, the Geneva Conventions are well understood to forbid the practice, and the guidelines of the World Medical Association are even more unambiguous: “Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable.”
Smith went on to note that some strikers may be protesting because they feel pressured to do so by other prisoners. In such cases, force-feeding was a way to help them resist that pressure. This was a strange argument. Given that the prisoners are separated from one another and are under constant surveillance, such pressure could come only in the form of appeals to conscience. Smith’s logic was reminiscent of the claim by Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, in the Washington Post in April: “The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely”—which itself brings to mind the case of Alvaro Jaume, who was tortured under medical supervision in Uruguay in the 1980s, and who recalled, “These doctors are saving lives, but in a perverse way. The aim of torture is thwarted if the victim cannot support the interminable ordeal. The doctor is needed to prevent you from dying for your convictions.”55. The historian A. J. Langguth recalled some similar thinking many years ago in the New York Times, drawing from the memoirs of a CIA asset in the Uruguayan police force who was trained in the 1960s by Dan Mitrione, of the U.S. Office of Public Safety (which was founded to facilitate the training of officials in states believed to be threatened by Communist subversion).
“Before all else,” Mitrione explained to his Latin American protégé, “you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.”
Mitrione was a bureaucrat at heart. “It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die,” he said, adding that a “premature death means a failure by the technician.”
Compare Mitrione’s claims with the words of the top lawyer at the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, at a 2002 strategy meeting (the minutes for which were released in 2008 by Carl Levin as part of an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs). Fredman was similarly professional, emphasizing that “techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents.” He also discussed the strong requirement of a bureaucracy for documentation: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental. Everything must be approved and documented.” And he brought the same dark, almost humorous, perception of his task to bear, declaring that torture “is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”
Fredman, it should be noted, claims that he was “paraphrased sloppily and poorly.”The prudent degree of specificity may vary from regime to regime, but the mind of the torturer remains the same at all times and in all places. All of which, in any case, suggests that the Pentagon has no intention of changing its policy.
President Obama, to date, has done nothing either. In February, Ramzi Kassem, a Yale law professor who represents one of the hunger strikers, sent a formal letter to Gregory Craig, the new White House counsel, outlining the legal concerns about force-feeding and recommending in detail how to bring the treatment of hunger strikers in line with the Geneva Conventions (for instance, by prohibiting the use of restraint chairs). Obama could simply order these changes, but he has not.
Obama did ask Navy Admiral Patrick Walsh to visit Guantánamo and report back on conditions there. Walsh found the practices in question, including the use of restraint chairs, to be perfectly acceptable. When Reuters asked Walsh about specific incidents of abuse, he was evasive. “We heard allegations of abuse,” he said. “What we found is that there were in some cases substantiated evidence where guards had misconduct, I think that would be the best way to put it.”
Force-feeding is an especially egregious example of legitimized torture, but it is far from the only example. Just one percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are held at Guantánamo, and many other techniques remain legally available to their jailers. The Army Field Manual still permits solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, as well as so-called emotional techniques such as “fear up,” which involves terrifying prisoners into a state of “learned helplessness.”
It is difficult to know the degree to which these practices are employed, though, because President Obama has adopted not only much of the Bush Administration’s torture policy but also its radical doctrine of secrecy. The Obama White House has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment, sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees.
The result is that what would at first seem to be something positive—a “national conversation about torture”—has instead become a form of complicity. We know that torture occurred, and we know that it continues to occur. Yet we allow ourselves to pretend otherwise because we don’t know enough. The secrecy allows us to transform a taboo into an “issue,” and most voters seem to desire, as Judge Kessler did, to leave the resolution of that issue to the “penal and medical discretion” of “a staff with the appropriate expertise.” In one recent poll only 35 percent of Americans called for the closing of Guantánamo, whereas 45 percent wanted to keep it open and 20 percent weren’t sure what we should do.
As ever, Democrats are attempting to split the difference. A major claim by Obama is that he does not want people in the CIA “to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders”—presumably because he does not want to prejudge their “appropriate expertise.” A more persuasive means of preventing torture would be to say precisely the opposite, that people in the CIA should spend all their time looking over their shoulders. But that is not what Obama has said. Now those who would speak against torture in a crisis situation face a strong deterrent. They will be understood as taking a side on an issue—a complex issue—rather than simply upholding well-established legal (and at one time political) precedent.
We have seen too much in the past eight years to pretend any longer that the United States is incapable of criminal abuse or to trust the “experts” to act secretly in what they believe, sincerely or not, to be our best interests. We have seen too much to permit ourselves the luxury of ambivalence. Indeed, now that we have seen what our nation has done in the depths of a panic, we should also be able to recognize the larger, longer-term crimes of our leaders. We have for many years imprisoned a greater proportion of our own people than any other nation on earth, kept many of those prisoners in the kind of prolonged solitary confinement that is shown in study after study to drive people insane, and countenanced the rape of those who aren’t in solitary confinement as part of a system of “rough justice.” We have known this about ourselves for a very long time and done nothing.
Now we have a choice. We can continue our experiment with torture or we can harness the obvious horror of the last eight years to rectify the more discreet horrors of the distant past and the darkening present, and in so doing at last become a nation whose actions embody its pretensions.
Luke Mitchell is a senior editor of Harper’s Magazine.
We face the temptation to believe that an election can “change everything”—that the stark contrast between Barack Obama and George W. Bush recapitulates an equally stark contrast between the present and the past. But political events move within a continuum, and they are driven by many forces other than democratic action, including the considerable power of their own momentum. Such is the case with the ongoing American experiment with torture.
The release in April of documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross, from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, and from the House Armed Services Committee gave further credence to what had long been known about CIA and military interrogation techniques. They are brutal and, despite the surreal claims of the Bush Justice Department, they are illegal. The assumption underlying coverage of “the torture story,” however, has been that U.S.-sponsored torture came to a halt on January 21. The culpability of the previous administration remains to be determined, we are told, and in terms of ongoing criminal liability, the worst Obama himself could do is obstruct an investigation. Regarding the launch of that investigation, we must be patient.
We cannot be patient, though, and not simply because justice must be swift. We cannot be patient because not only have we failed to punish the people who created and maintained our torture regime; we have failed to dismantle that regime and, in many cases, even to cease torturing.
This last charge is the least heard. Although it is true that waterboarding is once again proscribed, it is equally true that the government continues to permit a series of “torture lite” techniques—prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, force-feeding—that even Reagan appointee Judge Susan Crawford had to acknowledge amounted to torture when she threw out the government’s case against one accused terrorist. Like waterboarding, these techniques cause extreme mental anguish and permanent physical damage, and, like waterboarding, they are not permitted under international law. But unlike waterboarding, they remain on the books, in detailed prison regulations and field-manual directives, unremarked by anyone except a few activists.
The United States has always tortured. But our approach to torture has evolved over time. In the past, we preferred to keep the practice hidden. During the Cold War, we exported most of our torture projects to client regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, while at home we worked to perfect a new form of “no touch” interrogation that would achieve terror and compliance without leaving scars, even as we denounced similar practices employed by our enemies. This was the age of hypocrisy—our secrecy was the tribute war crimes paid to democracy.
The hypocritical period ended, of course, with the attacks of September 11, the national flinch, the chest-thumping of George W. Bush, and the grim pronouncements of Dick Cheney, who loudly advertised his willingness to take the United States to “the dark side.” This, as we have all come to understand, was the time of open torture. It was the “shameful era,” when we put the techniques we had developed during the Cold War to use in the new “war on terror.”
Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat them. We know that we still use a series of punishments and interrogation techniques—touch and “no touch”—that any normal person would acknowledge to be torture. And we know that when those men protest such treatment by refusing to eat, we strap them to chairs and force food down their throats. We know all of this because it is well documented, not just by reporters and activists but by the torturers themselves.
It is this very openness that suggests why this new age—let’s call it the era of legitimized torture—is so perilous, not just to the men who are tortured but to liberal democracy. The moment is rapidly approaching when President Obama will cease to be the inheritor of a criminal regime and instead become its primary controlling authority, when the ongoing war crimes will attach themselves to his administration. And when they do attach themselves, Obama’s administration will be forced to defend itself, as all administrations do. And it will defend itself by claiming that what we call crimes are not in fact crimes.
This process has already begun. Rather than end illegal torture, we are now solidifying the steps that we have taken to make these activities legal. By failing to change the underlying problem even as we celebrate its supposed “solution,” we actually further entrench the past, the “bad” Bush era, into the present, the “good” Obama era. We will return to the rule of law, but within that rule will remain a rule of torture, given all the greater authority by our love of the new regime.
We have a tendency in the United States to judge actions not by their intrinsic merit but by the stylishness with which they are executed. Although the ostentatious lawlessness of the previous administration was pleasing to some, it ultimately frightened the majority of Americans. It was far too flamboyant. Obama and the Democrats seem to have rejected ostentation and lawlessness, and are all the more popular for that rejection. But they have not rejected torture itself.
As we learned from the Office of Legal Counsel memos, it is possible to parse “torture” to a considerable degree. What is the allowable incline for a waterboard? How many calories will suffice to avoid starvation? Which insects are permitted to be used in driving a man insane? The correct answer, according to those who parse, is the difference between a war crime and a heroic act of patriotism.
The OLC memos have been discredited but not the thinking behind them. We are still parsing, still weighing, still considering the possibilities. Whereas once we understood torture to be forbidden—something to be hidden and denied—now we understand it to be “complex.” We are instrumental in our analysis, and that instrumentality is held to be a virtue. We don’t torture not because it is illegal or immoral or repugnant to democracy but because “it doesn’t work,” leaving the way clear to torture that does “work.”
The combination of complexity and instrumentality creates the potential for a new inversion. We enter the “complex” realm of torture and draw a new line, and the logical consequence—the unavoidably intended consequence—is that whatever is on the “good” side of that line, the “useful” side, can no longer be called torture. And since it is no longer torture, it must be something else. In this way we arrive at the strangest and most absurd conclusion. What was once a crime becomes a sensible approach to law enforcement. And in becoming sensible it also becomes invisible.
It is our evolving understanding of force-feeding that most clearly demonstrates this process of inversion and invisibility—not because it is the most horrifying form of torture, though it is horrifying, but because it has been so completely mainstreamed. Indeed, as it is practiced at Guantánamo, force-feeding is understood not only to not be torture but in fact to be a form of mercy. It is understood, above all, as a way to “preserve life.”
As of this writing, at least thirty men are being force-fed at Guantánamo. They are being force-fed despite the departure of the administration that instituted force-feeding, despite the current administration’s order to shut down Guantánamo, and despite its even more specific order requiring prisoners there to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which—by every interpretation but that of the U.S. government—clearly forbids force-feeding.11. The conventions forbid “humiliating and degrading treatment,” and doctors who advise the Red Cross, which in turn has considerable oversight in interpreting the conventions, have repeatedly made clear that force-feeding is humiliating and degrading. See, for instance, the judgment of Red Cross adviser Hernán Reyes, in a 1998 policy review: “Doctors should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or oesophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’”
Most of these prisoners are not facing imminent death. In fact, force-feeding is itself a risky “treatment” that can cause infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and other complications. The feedings begin very soon after prisoners begin a hunger strike, and continue daily—with military guards strapping them to restraint chairs, usually for several hours at a time—until the prisoners agree to end the strike. This hunger striker is not an emaciated Bobby Sands lying near death after many weeks of starvation. He is a strong man bound to a chair and covered in his own vomit.22. Dr. William Winkenwerder, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and was therefore responsible for the force-feeding policy at Guantánamo, explained this peremptory approach to me three years ago with an almost poignant question: “If we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?”
If force-feeding does not save lives, then what does it do? What makes it useful? From the perspective of the prisoner, there can be only one answer: Pain makes force-feeding useful. The pain makes the strike unbearable, and therefore it prevents further protest.
This is not just a logical inference. The first experience many Guantánamo prisoners had with being forced to eat was not when they went on hunger strikes but rather when they underwent interrogations at the secret CIA bases where they were held prior to their arrival at Guantánamo. At these “black sites,” we now know from the ICRC and OLC reports, CIA interrogation teams used “dietary manipulation” as a “conditioning technique” to help gather “intelligence.” These techniques, in other words, were a form of torture, no different from other, more infamous techniques outlined in the same reports, including “walling,” “cramped confinement,” and “water dousing” (now better known as waterboarding).
A 2005 memo signed by Steven Bradbury, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, explains the method. Dietary manipulation “involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet.” The CIA interrogation team would strap the prisoners to chairs and feed them bottles of Ensure Plus—cited by name—for weeks on end. As Bradbury noted, it was hoped that this would cause the prisoners to become compliant.
The interrogation team believed [redacted] “maintains a tough, Mujahidin fighter mentality and has conditioned himself for a physical interrogation.” The team therefore concluded that “more subtle interrogation measures designed more to weaken [redacted] physical ability and mental desire to resist interrogation over the long run are likely to be more effective.” For these reasons, the team sought authorization to use dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing, and abdominal slap. In the team’s view, adding these techniques would be especially helpful [redacted] because he appeared to have a particular weakness for food and also seemed especially modest.
In imposing dietary control, safety was always a concern. “While we do not equate commercial weight-loss programs and this interrogation technique,” Bradbury wrote, “the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” Bradbury even anticipated the almost sentimental patina of caregiving that informs the present-day discussion of force-feeding at Guantánamo, noting that “a detainee subjected to the waterboard must be under dietary manipulation, because a fluid diet reduces the risks of the technique”—by reducing the risk of choking on undigested vomit. The force-feeding, in other words, was for the good of the prisoner.
Forcing a man to drink a diet shake may seem like a minor affront, far removed from the rack or even from waterboarding. But actual prisoner testimony from another set of documents, the Red Cross interviews acquired by Mark Danner and published in The New York Review of Books in April, suggests that the dietary manipulation was traumatizing:
During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank. . . .
During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force. . . .
I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet [and] given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time. . . .
That is how we treated prisoners at CIA black sites, back in the shameful era. It is by no means the worst instance of man’s inhumanity to man. But dietary manipulation clearly was not a technique meant primarily to preserve life.
Compare now the shameful and repudiated practice of dietary manipulation under Bush to the sensible, life-preserving practice of “involuntary feeding” at Guantánamo today, in the post-torture era.
In February, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, a U.S. military lawyer representing Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was recently released from Guantánamo, described a now-familiar situation to the Guardian. “Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell,” she said. “Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten.”
Bradley continued,
It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two-or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, “I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.”
That same month, Ahmed Ghap pour, an attorney with the human-rights group Reprieve, which represents thirty-one detainees at Guantánamo, told Reuters that prison officials were “over-force-feeding” hunger strikers, who were suffering from diarrhea as they sat tied to their chairs. He said in some cases officials were lacing the nutrient shakes with laxatives. And the situation was getting worse. “According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” Ghappour said, speculating that guards there wanted to “get their kicks in” before the camp closed.
David Remes, an attorney who represents fifteen detainees at Guantánamo, wrote in an April petition to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that one of his clients, Farhan Abdul Latif, had been suffering in particular. When the nasogastric tube “is threaded though his nostril into his stomach,” it “feels like a nail going into his nostril, and like a knife going down his throat.” Latif had in recent months resorted to covering himself with his own excrement in order “to avoid force-feeding and that, when he was finally force-fed, the tube was inserted through the excrement covering his nostrils.”33. Latif, who is now being held in Guantánamo’s “Behavioral Health Unit,” has quite clearly been broken by his many years of confinement. Remes reports that his client has made several suicide attempts, the most recent of which was in his presence. “Without my noticing, he chipped off a piece of stiff veneer from the underside of the table and used it to saw into a vein in his left wrist,” he said. “As he sawed, he drained his blood into a plastic container I had brought and, shortly before our time was up, he hurled the blood at me from the container. It must have been a good deal of blood because I was drenched from the top of my head to my knees.” Latif survived this attempt as well.
Another prisoner, Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, told his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights that he and fifteen other men had also refused to eat:
Mr. Mouhammad described that men were vomiting while being overfed. Some of the striking detainees had kept their feeding tubes in their noses even when not being force-fed just to avoid having the tubes painfully reinserted each time. Mr. Mouhammad reported that interrogators were pressuring and coercing the men on hunger strike to eat, making promises that they would be moved to the communal living camp if they began eating. Mr. Mouhammad described these experiences as “torture, torture, torture.”
What was torture at the black sites remains torture today at Guantánamo. It is perhaps ironic that what began as a method for making men talk—in fact, as we are now learning, in order to make them lie, about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq—is now a method of preventing men from “talking,” of preventing them from registering protest at the injustice of their condition. But that irony should not prevent us from recognizing the simple fact of the torture itself.
Every U.S. institution that could prevent force-feeding has failed to do so. Congress has failed to act, as have the courts, as has the president. Today the American Medical Association refuses even to sanction the doctors employed at Guantánamo, and one of those doctors, William Dudney, actually touts his previous job as the “Chief of Psychiatry, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” in an advertisement for his “Medical Weight Management” services.
District Judge Gladys Kessler had the opportunity to address force-feeding in February, when lawyers for Mohammed Al-Adahi and four other prisoners at Guantánamo sought an immediate injunction against the practice. Kessler denied the injunction on the unconvincing grounds that her court lacked not just the jurisdiction but the competency to dispense justice. “Resolution of this issue requires the exercise of penal and medical discretion by staff with the appropriate expertise,” she wrote, “and is precisely the type of question that federal courts, lacking that expertise, leave to the discretion of those who do possess such expertise.” Once again, complexity prevents intervention. (Kessler, it should be noted, began her career working for Democrats in Congress.)
The Pentagon, so richly empowered by the circuit court, has failed as well. Dr. Ward Casscells was appointed assistant secretary of defense for health affairs in 2007 and thus far has survived in his role as the Pentagon’s top health official. I asked his spokesperson, Cynthia Smith, why he was continuing the previous administration’s policy of force-feeding even after the new president had ordered prisoners to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. “The policy does save lives,” Smith wrote back (a week later, stipulating that I attribute quotes to her instead of to Casscells). “Idly watching detainees for whose care we are responsible engage in self-starvation to the point of permanent damage to health or death is not required by U.S. law, Common Article 3, or medical ethics.”44. Smith is one-third right. Force-feeding is indeed permitted under U.S. Bureau of Prison guidelines. But as previously noted, the Geneva Conventions are well understood to forbid the practice, and the guidelines of the World Medical Association are even more unambiguous: “Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable.”
Smith went on to note that some strikers may be protesting because they feel pressured to do so by other prisoners. In such cases, force-feeding was a way to help them resist that pressure. This was a strange argument. Given that the prisoners are separated from one another and are under constant surveillance, such pressure could come only in the form of appeals to conscience. Smith’s logic was reminiscent of the claim by Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, in the Washington Post in April: “The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely”—which itself brings to mind the case of Alvaro Jaume, who was tortured under medical supervision in Uruguay in the 1980s, and who recalled, “These doctors are saving lives, but in a perverse way. The aim of torture is thwarted if the victim cannot support the interminable ordeal. The doctor is needed to prevent you from dying for your convictions.”55. The historian A. J. Langguth recalled some similar thinking many years ago in the New York Times, drawing from the memoirs of a CIA asset in the Uruguayan police force who was trained in the 1960s by Dan Mitrione, of the U.S. Office of Public Safety (which was founded to facilitate the training of officials in states believed to be threatened by Communist subversion).
“Before all else,” Mitrione explained to his Latin American protégé, “you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.”
Mitrione was a bureaucrat at heart. “It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die,” he said, adding that a “premature death means a failure by the technician.”
Compare Mitrione’s claims with the words of the top lawyer at the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, at a 2002 strategy meeting (the minutes for which were released in 2008 by Carl Levin as part of an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs). Fredman was similarly professional, emphasizing that “techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents.” He also discussed the strong requirement of a bureaucracy for documentation: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental. Everything must be approved and documented.” And he brought the same dark, almost humorous, perception of his task to bear, declaring that torture “is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”
Fredman, it should be noted, claims that he was “paraphrased sloppily and poorly.”The prudent degree of specificity may vary from regime to regime, but the mind of the torturer remains the same at all times and in all places. All of which, in any case, suggests that the Pentagon has no intention of changing its policy.
President Obama, to date, has done nothing either. In February, Ramzi Kassem, a Yale law professor who represents one of the hunger strikers, sent a formal letter to Gregory Craig, the new White House counsel, outlining the legal concerns about force-feeding and recommending in detail how to bring the treatment of hunger strikers in line with the Geneva Conventions (for instance, by prohibiting the use of restraint chairs). Obama could simply order these changes, but he has not.
Obama did ask Navy Admiral Patrick Walsh to visit Guantánamo and report back on conditions there. Walsh found the practices in question, including the use of restraint chairs, to be perfectly acceptable. When Reuters asked Walsh about specific incidents of abuse, he was evasive. “We heard allegations of abuse,” he said. “What we found is that there were in some cases substantiated evidence where guards had misconduct, I think that would be the best way to put it.”
Force-feeding is an especially egregious example of legitimized torture, but it is far from the only example. Just one percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are held at Guantánamo, and many other techniques remain legally available to their jailers. The Army Field Manual still permits solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, as well as so-called emotional techniques such as “fear up,” which involves terrifying prisoners into a state of “learned helplessness.”
It is difficult to know the degree to which these practices are employed, though, because President Obama has adopted not only much of the Bush Administration’s torture policy but also its radical doctrine of secrecy. The Obama White House has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment, sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees.
The result is that what would at first seem to be something positive—a “national conversation about torture”—has instead become a form of complicity. We know that torture occurred, and we know that it continues to occur. Yet we allow ourselves to pretend otherwise because we don’t know enough. The secrecy allows us to transform a taboo into an “issue,” and most voters seem to desire, as Judge Kessler did, to leave the resolution of that issue to the “penal and medical discretion” of “a staff with the appropriate expertise.” In one recent poll only 35 percent of Americans called for the closing of Guantánamo, whereas 45 percent wanted to keep it open and 20 percent weren’t sure what we should do.
As ever, Democrats are attempting to split the difference. A major claim by Obama is that he does not want people in the CIA “to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders”—presumably because he does not want to prejudge their “appropriate expertise.” A more persuasive means of preventing torture would be to say precisely the opposite, that people in the CIA should spend all their time looking over their shoulders. But that is not what Obama has said. Now those who would speak against torture in a crisis situation face a strong deterrent. They will be understood as taking a side on an issue—a complex issue—rather than simply upholding well-established legal (and at one time political) precedent.
We have seen too much in the past eight years to pretend any longer that the United States is incapable of criminal abuse or to trust the “experts” to act secretly in what they believe, sincerely or not, to be our best interests. We have seen too much to permit ourselves the luxury of ambivalence. Indeed, now that we have seen what our nation has done in the depths of a panic, we should also be able to recognize the larger, longer-term crimes of our leaders. We have for many years imprisoned a greater proportion of our own people than any other nation on earth, kept many of those prisoners in the kind of prolonged solitary confinement that is shown in study after study to drive people insane, and countenanced the rape of those who aren’t in solitary confinement as part of a system of “rough justice.” We have known this about ourselves for a very long time and done nothing.
Now we have a choice. We can continue our experiment with torture or we can harness the obvious horror of the last eight years to rectify the more discreet horrors of the distant past and the darkening present, and in so doing at last become a nation whose actions embody its pretensions.
U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.
Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.
While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.
In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.
Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.
“They think of us as an ecclesiastical work force,” said Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, in California. “Whereas we are religious, we’re living the life of total dedication to Christ, and out of that flows a profound concern for the good of all humanity. So our vision of our lives, and their vision of us as a work force, are just not on the same planet.”
The more extensive of the two investigations is called an Apostolic Visitation, and the Vatican has provided only a vague rationale for it: to “look into the quality of the life” of women’s religious institutes. The visitation is being conducted by Mother Mary Clare Millea, an apple-cheeked American with a black habit and smiling eyes, who is the superior general of her order, the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and lives in Rome.
In an interview in a formal sitting room at her order’s United States headquarters in Hamden, Conn., Mother Clare said she had already met one-on-one with 127 superiors general of women’s orders, many in that room but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, Rome and St. Louis. She is preparing questionnaires to send to each congregation of women and recruiting teams of investigators, mostly nuns and some priests, who will make visits to congregations that she selects. The visitation focuses only on nuns actively engaged in working in society and the church, not cloistered, contemplative nuns.
Mother Clare’s task is to prepare a confidential report to the Vatican on the state of each of about 340 qualified congregations of nuns in the United States, as well as a summary with her recommendations, all of which she hopes to complete by mid-2011.
The investigation was ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican office that deals with religious orders. In a speech in Massachusetts last year, Cardinal Rodé offered barbed criticism of some American nuns “who have opted for ways that take them outside” the church.
Given this backdrop, Sister Schneiders, the professor in Berkeley, urged her fellow sisters not to cooperate with the visitation, saying the investigators should be treated as “uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house.” She wrote this in a private e-mail message to a few friends, but it became public and was widely circulated.
Mother Clare said she was aware that some women’s institutes “weren’t happy” to hear of the visitation, but that so far about 55 percent had responded in person or in writing.
“It’s an opportunity for us to re-evaluate ourselves, to make our reality known and also to be challenged to live authentically who we say we are,” she said.
Each congregation of nuns will be evaluated based on how well they are “living in fidelity” both to their congregation’s own internal norms and constitution, and to the church’s guidelines for religious life, Mother Clare said. For instance, if a congregation’s stated mission is to serve youth, are the nuns doing that? If they do not live in a convent, are they attending Mass and keeping the sacraments? Are their superiors exercising adequate supervision?
“There’s no intention to make us all identical,” she said.
Church historians said that the Vatican usually ordered an apostolic visitation when a particular institution had gone seriously astray. In the wake of the priest sexual-abuse scandal, the Vatican ordered a visitation of American seminaries. It is now conducting a visitation of the Legionaries of Christ, a men’s order whose founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, sexually abused young seminarians, fathered a child and was accused of financial improprieties. He died in 2008.
But the investigation of American nuns surprised many because there was no obvious precipitating cause.
Sister Janice Farnham, a part-time professor of church history at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, said, “Why are the U.S. sisters being singled out, when women religious in other countries are struggling with many issues about the quality of their lives, in the Church and in their societies?”
The visitation could result in some communities of nuns’ being ordered to make changes, but judging from how the Vatican handled previous visitations, those consequences may never become public.
The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.
Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.
The letter goes on to say that, “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses” at assemblies the Leadership Conference has held in recent years, the problem has not been fixed.
The Leadership Conference drew the Vatican’s wrath decades ago when its president welcomed Pope John Paul II to the United States with a plea for the ordination of women. But several nuns who have attended the group’s meetings in recent years said they had not heard anything that would provoke the Vatican’s ire.
Officers of the Leadership Conference refused interview requests, but said in an e-mail message that they had one meeting in late May with the investigators, Bishop Leonard P. Blair, of the Diocese of Toledo, and Msgr. Charles Brown from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, who voiced the Vatican’s concerns. (Bishop Blair declined to comment). In the fall, they said, they will meet again to respond to the concerns.
“We are looking forward to clarifying some misperceptions,” Sister J. Lora Dambroski, president of the Leadership Conference, said in the e-mail message.
Besides these two investigations, another decree that affected some nuns was issued in March by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops said that Catholics should stop practicing Reiki, a healing therapy that is used in some Catholic hospitals and retreat centers, and which was enthusiastically adopted by many nuns. The bishops said Reiki is both unscientific and non-Christian.
Nuns practicing reiki and running church reform groups may have finally proved too much for the church’s male hierarchy, said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns,” (Doubleday Religion, 2006).
Mr. Briggs said of the various investigations: “For some in the leadership circles in Rome and elsewhere, it’s a piece of unfinished business. It’s an effort to bring about a re-establishment of a very traditional, very conservative set of standards for what convent life is supposed to be.”
The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.
Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.
While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.
In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.
Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.
“They think of us as an ecclesiastical work force,” said Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, in California. “Whereas we are religious, we’re living the life of total dedication to Christ, and out of that flows a profound concern for the good of all humanity. So our vision of our lives, and their vision of us as a work force, are just not on the same planet.”
The more extensive of the two investigations is called an Apostolic Visitation, and the Vatican has provided only a vague rationale for it: to “look into the quality of the life” of women’s religious institutes. The visitation is being conducted by Mother Mary Clare Millea, an apple-cheeked American with a black habit and smiling eyes, who is the superior general of her order, the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and lives in Rome.
In an interview in a formal sitting room at her order’s United States headquarters in Hamden, Conn., Mother Clare said she had already met one-on-one with 127 superiors general of women’s orders, many in that room but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, Rome and St. Louis. She is preparing questionnaires to send to each congregation of women and recruiting teams of investigators, mostly nuns and some priests, who will make visits to congregations that she selects. The visitation focuses only on nuns actively engaged in working in society and the church, not cloistered, contemplative nuns.
Mother Clare’s task is to prepare a confidential report to the Vatican on the state of each of about 340 qualified congregations of nuns in the United States, as well as a summary with her recommendations, all of which she hopes to complete by mid-2011.
The investigation was ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican office that deals with religious orders. In a speech in Massachusetts last year, Cardinal Rodé offered barbed criticism of some American nuns “who have opted for ways that take them outside” the church.
Given this backdrop, Sister Schneiders, the professor in Berkeley, urged her fellow sisters not to cooperate with the visitation, saying the investigators should be treated as “uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house.” She wrote this in a private e-mail message to a few friends, but it became public and was widely circulated.
Mother Clare said she was aware that some women’s institutes “weren’t happy” to hear of the visitation, but that so far about 55 percent had responded in person or in writing.
“It’s an opportunity for us to re-evaluate ourselves, to make our reality known and also to be challenged to live authentically who we say we are,” she said.
Each congregation of nuns will be evaluated based on how well they are “living in fidelity” both to their congregation’s own internal norms and constitution, and to the church’s guidelines for religious life, Mother Clare said. For instance, if a congregation’s stated mission is to serve youth, are the nuns doing that? If they do not live in a convent, are they attending Mass and keeping the sacraments? Are their superiors exercising adequate supervision?
“There’s no intention to make us all identical,” she said.
Church historians said that the Vatican usually ordered an apostolic visitation when a particular institution had gone seriously astray. In the wake of the priest sexual-abuse scandal, the Vatican ordered a visitation of American seminaries. It is now conducting a visitation of the Legionaries of Christ, a men’s order whose founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, sexually abused young seminarians, fathered a child and was accused of financial improprieties. He died in 2008.
But the investigation of American nuns surprised many because there was no obvious precipitating cause.
Sister Janice Farnham, a part-time professor of church history at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, said, “Why are the U.S. sisters being singled out, when women religious in other countries are struggling with many issues about the quality of their lives, in the Church and in their societies?”
The visitation could result in some communities of nuns’ being ordered to make changes, but judging from how the Vatican handled previous visitations, those consequences may never become public.
The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.
Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.
The letter goes on to say that, “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses” at assemblies the Leadership Conference has held in recent years, the problem has not been fixed.
The Leadership Conference drew the Vatican’s wrath decades ago when its president welcomed Pope John Paul II to the United States with a plea for the ordination of women. But several nuns who have attended the group’s meetings in recent years said they had not heard anything that would provoke the Vatican’s ire.
Officers of the Leadership Conference refused interview requests, but said in an e-mail message that they had one meeting in late May with the investigators, Bishop Leonard P. Blair, of the Diocese of Toledo, and Msgr. Charles Brown from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, who voiced the Vatican’s concerns. (Bishop Blair declined to comment). In the fall, they said, they will meet again to respond to the concerns.
“We are looking forward to clarifying some misperceptions,” Sister J. Lora Dambroski, president of the Leadership Conference, said in the e-mail message.
Besides these two investigations, another decree that affected some nuns was issued in March by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops said that Catholics should stop practicing Reiki, a healing therapy that is used in some Catholic hospitals and retreat centers, and which was enthusiastically adopted by many nuns. The bishops said Reiki is both unscientific and non-Christian.
Nuns practicing reiki and running church reform groups may have finally proved too much for the church’s male hierarchy, said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns,” (Doubleday Religion, 2006).
Mr. Briggs said of the various investigations: “For some in the leadership circles in Rome and elsewhere, it’s a piece of unfinished business. It’s an effort to bring about a re-establishment of a very traditional, very conservative set of standards for what convent life is supposed to be.”
37 U.S. Senators Urge Vietnam to Free Imprisoned Priest
37 U.S. Senators Urge Vietnam to Free Imprisoned Priest
By REUTERS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A group of United States senators urged Vietnam’s president on Wednesday to free a Roman Catholic priest as human rights groups said that his imprisonment justified putting Vietnam on a religious freedom blacklist.
The priest, the Rev. Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, was sentenced to eight years in prison in March 2007 after being charged with spreading propaganda against Vietnam’s Communist government. He had previously served 16 years in prison for activities in which he advocated for human rights.
The group of 37 senators, who were led by Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, urged President Nguyen Minh Triet of Vietnam to free Father Ly, calling his trial “seriously flawed.”
“We request that you facilitate Father Ly’s immediate and unconditional release from prison, and allow him to return to his home and work without restrictions on his right to freedom of expression, association and movement,” the senators said in a letter.
“Father Ly’s longstanding nonviolent activities to promote religious freedom and democracy in Vietnam are well known in the United States,” wrote the senators, who included Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
The Vietnamese Embassy in Washington did not confirm receipt of the letter or issue a comment.
During Father Ly’s four-hour trial in 2007, he was denied access to a lawyer and was silenced by security guards when he tried to speak, said the human rights group Freedom Now.
Maran Turner, the executive director of Freedom Now, said Father Ly’s case and similar ones involving other religious figures should mean that Vietnam was placed on a United States government list of “countries of particular concern” for violations of religious freedom.
The United States, which put Vietnam on that list in 2004, lifted the designation before President George W. Bush visited Hanoi in November 2006.
Michael Cromartie, vice chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, was permitted to visit Father Ly in prison in May. Father Ly was “in solitary confinement for reasons that are not clear,” Mr. Cromartie said.
By REUTERS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A group of United States senators urged Vietnam’s president on Wednesday to free a Roman Catholic priest as human rights groups said that his imprisonment justified putting Vietnam on a religious freedom blacklist.
The priest, the Rev. Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, was sentenced to eight years in prison in March 2007 after being charged with spreading propaganda against Vietnam’s Communist government. He had previously served 16 years in prison for activities in which he advocated for human rights.
The group of 37 senators, who were led by Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, urged President Nguyen Minh Triet of Vietnam to free Father Ly, calling his trial “seriously flawed.”
“We request that you facilitate Father Ly’s immediate and unconditional release from prison, and allow him to return to his home and work without restrictions on his right to freedom of expression, association and movement,” the senators said in a letter.
“Father Ly’s longstanding nonviolent activities to promote religious freedom and democracy in Vietnam are well known in the United States,” wrote the senators, who included Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
The Vietnamese Embassy in Washington did not confirm receipt of the letter or issue a comment.
During Father Ly’s four-hour trial in 2007, he was denied access to a lawyer and was silenced by security guards when he tried to speak, said the human rights group Freedom Now.
Maran Turner, the executive director of Freedom Now, said Father Ly’s case and similar ones involving other religious figures should mean that Vietnam was placed on a United States government list of “countries of particular concern” for violations of religious freedom.
The United States, which put Vietnam on that list in 2004, lifted the designation before President George W. Bush visited Hanoi in November 2006.
Michael Cromartie, vice chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, was permitted to visit Father Ly in prison in May. Father Ly was “in solitary confinement for reasons that are not clear,” Mr. Cromartie said.
Hong Kong’s Pro-Democracy March Draws Thousands
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG — Thousands of people joined a pro-democracy march here on Wednesday, although the turnout fell short of a candlelight vigil held nearly four weeks ago to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
An enormous crowd for the annual June 4 candlelight vigil, the largest since 1990, had raised the hopes of Hong Kong democracy advocates that the same enthusiasm might carry over to their movement. The movement has been struggling after several small successes from 2003 to 2005, including winning support for blocking the government’s planned introduction of stringent internal security legislation.
The immediacy of democracy demands here has faded somewhat as Beijing officials have ruled out direct elections for the chief executive until 2017 and the legislature until 2020.
The march on Wednesday, on the 12th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule after 156 years of British control, nonetheless drew a large crowd.
Many marchers said they were dissatisfied with government policies to deal with the economy. Unemployment in Hong Kong rose sharply over the winter and leveled off this spring at 5.3 percent — a little over half the rate in the United States, but a shock for a territory where the rate was 3.2 percent last summer.
But the largest single issue seemed to be the limits on democracy in Hong Kong. “The majority comes here for democracy, but there are other grievances against government policy,” said Sin Chung Kai, vice chairman of the Democratic Party.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government initially held out the possibility of full democracy after 2007, including the concept in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s miniconstitution, but stopped short of an unequivocal promise of how and when to achieve universal suffrage.
A committee of 800 people, most with connections to Beijing, chooses the chief executive here, who must then be appointed by leaders in Beijing before taking office. Half the legislature is chosen by the public and half by a variety of interest groups, including banks, chambers of commerce, trade unions and lawyers.
The police estimated that 26,000 people had assembled in Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island as the march began. The organizers had said that they expected more to join the march along the way, and they estimated that 76,000 people took part.
The police had estimated the crowd at the June 4 Tiananmen vigil, at the same location in Victoria Park, at 62,800, while organizers put it at 150,000.
The vigil did have some carryover effect on Wednesday’s march. Jupiter Chan, a 24-year-old graduate student, said that the vigil prompted him to come to the annual democracy march this year for the first time since 2003.
“I was touched by the Fourth of June ceremony, and I felt that if I didn’t come this year, I would regret it later,” he said.
HONG KONG — Thousands of people joined a pro-democracy march here on Wednesday, although the turnout fell short of a candlelight vigil held nearly four weeks ago to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
An enormous crowd for the annual June 4 candlelight vigil, the largest since 1990, had raised the hopes of Hong Kong democracy advocates that the same enthusiasm might carry over to their movement. The movement has been struggling after several small successes from 2003 to 2005, including winning support for blocking the government’s planned introduction of stringent internal security legislation.
The immediacy of democracy demands here has faded somewhat as Beijing officials have ruled out direct elections for the chief executive until 2017 and the legislature until 2020.
The march on Wednesday, on the 12th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule after 156 years of British control, nonetheless drew a large crowd.
Many marchers said they were dissatisfied with government policies to deal with the economy. Unemployment in Hong Kong rose sharply over the winter and leveled off this spring at 5.3 percent — a little over half the rate in the United States, but a shock for a territory where the rate was 3.2 percent last summer.
But the largest single issue seemed to be the limits on democracy in Hong Kong. “The majority comes here for democracy, but there are other grievances against government policy,” said Sin Chung Kai, vice chairman of the Democratic Party.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government initially held out the possibility of full democracy after 2007, including the concept in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s miniconstitution, but stopped short of an unequivocal promise of how and when to achieve universal suffrage.
A committee of 800 people, most with connections to Beijing, chooses the chief executive here, who must then be appointed by leaders in Beijing before taking office. Half the legislature is chosen by the public and half by a variety of interest groups, including banks, chambers of commerce, trade unions and lawyers.
The police estimated that 26,000 people had assembled in Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island as the march began. The organizers had said that they expected more to join the march along the way, and they estimated that 76,000 people took part.
The police had estimated the crowd at the June 4 Tiananmen vigil, at the same location in Victoria Park, at 62,800, while organizers put it at 150,000.
The vigil did have some carryover effect on Wednesday’s march. Jupiter Chan, a 24-year-old graduate student, said that the vigil prompted him to come to the annual democracy march this year for the first time since 2003.
“I was touched by the Fourth of June ceremony, and I felt that if I didn’t come this year, I would regret it later,” he said.
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