Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Generational Transfer

by digby

Saint John McCain (R-Get Off My Lawn), the man who claimed the economic fundamentals were strong on the day Lehman failed, is at it again with his “generational tranfer” trope. And CNN is trumpeting it as some sort of serious critique.

I emailed them this, from the last time McCain babbled about this:

The basic story is that the borrowing is making future generations richer, not poorer. The stimulus will increase GDP and therefore increase investment, since companies will invest more in plant and equipment, if they see an increase in demand. This private investment will increase the economy’s productivity, thereby making our children and grandchildren richer. In addition, much of the spending in the stimulus will directly increase productivity, such as money for retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, putting medical records on-line, or increased funding for college education.

The debt that will be used to pay for this will be an asset for at least some of our children, since at some point we will all be dead and our heirs will have possession of the bonds we hold today. (The fact that China and other foreign countries own some of the debt doesn’t change the story. China’s buy U.S. assets to keep up the value of the dollar to preserve their export market. If they didn’t buy government debt, they would buy other assets, like stocks and bonds of private companies, which would result in a comparable flow of future income going to China. The problem here is the over-valued dollar, it has nothing to do with the budget deficit.)

It is especially remarkable that Senator McCain would make such a bizarre comment about “theft” from future generations given that they just have been handed an immense gift from the collapse of housing and stock prices. The decline in house prices means that they will be able to buy the nation’s housing stock for about $6 trillion less than they would have paid two and a half years ago. The decline in the stock market means that they can buy the country’s stock of productivity capital for about $10 trillion less than they would have paid two years ago.

The fact that Senator McCain could make such an incoherent complaint about younger generations being mistreated, after they have just seen a transfer of close to $16 trillion in wealth from older generations, warrants attention from the media. It is far more newsworthy than President Obama’s comment’s about “bitter” working class voters that received so much attention during the primaries.

It warrants attention from the media only if they can get it straight, which is unlikely. Otherwise, they should just ignore anything that McCain says on the economy. It’s not much different than paying attention to what the contestants on Make Me A Supermodel say about the economy.

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From The Driving Me Nuts Files

by digby

You know, I understand that the economic issues are complicated. I’m wading through them in muddled fashion myself. But that’s no excuse for the press to just regurgitate idiotic GOP talking points about legislation that is perfectly clear even to an idiot. Media Matters documents the journalistic malpractice:

Discussing the March 19 House vote to levy a 90-percent tax on executive bonuses paid to companies owing more than $5 billion in loans to the government, NBC, ABC, and Fox News all advanced the false Republican accusation that by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Democrats created the right for AIG to pay bonuses. In fact, as Media Matters for America documented, the recovery bill did not create the right for AIG — or any company — to pay bonuses. Rather, AIG reportedly disclosed that it had entered into agreements to pay these bonuses more than a year ago, the Bush Treasury department approved of the AIG bailout with this agreement in place, and the relevant provision in the recovery act, which was based on an amendment by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), actually restricted the ability of companies receiving money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to award bonuses in the future. In the absence of the recovery bill, AIG’s ability to pay the bonuses would not have been limited. Indeed, if Republicans had succeeded in defeating the bill, the clause restricting the ability of troubled companies to award bonuses in the future would not have been enacted at the time.

I know it’s a mouthful to explain all this and that the gasbags are media stars who have to entertain their audience. But it’s important that the press be precise in their reporting on these matters. The ability of the government to maneuver us through these times is getting narrower and narrower. Granted, that’s partially due to their own error and misjudgment, but that’s no reason for the media to make things worse by misreporting the story and placing blame where it doesn’t belong.

If the press ever looked back at their previous mistakes instead of pretending that they wre innocent bystanders, they’d realize just how dangerous these lies and misinterpretations are. It’s not like they have to look back very far — just five years ago this kind of sloppy, braindead reporting led us into the national security and financial disaster we find ourselves in today.

This isn’t a matter of figuring out the workings of arcane financial instruments. This is simple legislative reporting that anyone can do. But the ramifications of their failure to accurately report it will be steep if it erroneously empowers the know-nothing Republicans and limits the president’s options for the wrong reasons.

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FYI

by digby

The AIG Saga: A Brief Primer
By Dean Baker

The awarding of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives has dominated the news in the last week. There has been widespread outrage over the idea that taxpayers’ dollars are being used to reward the people who effectively bankrupted AIG and cost the government more than $160 billion in bailout funds to meet the company’s obligations. This primer addresses some of the issues raised by both the bonuses and the much larger sum going toward the AIG bailout.
The Bonuses: What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

One of the silliest distractions in the AIG saga has been the various accounts of when AIG told Treasury Secretary Geithner of the bonuses and when Geithner passed the information along to President Obama. This discussion is silly because Geithner almost certainly knew of the bonuses ever since the initial takeover on September 15th. He just didn’t think they were important.

Geithner was the chair of the New York Fed at the time of the original takeover. In that capacity, he was the person directly overseeing the takeover. As the chairman of the New York Fed, Mr. Geithner was undoubtedly familiar with the Wall Street culture and knew that financial firms paid out large bonuses each year to their most-valued employees. Since he did not issue any directives to AIG telling them not to pay bonuses, it was reasonable to expect that AIG would do so, just like it always did.

In other words, Geithner had every reason to believe that AIG would continue to pay out bonuses even after it was bailed out by the government, because he did not tell it stop paying bonuses. He may not have considered this issue important until the last week. And, he may not have known the exact size and the structure of the bonuses, but for all practical purposes he has known for six months that AIG would be issuing million dollar bonuses to certain employees, in spite of the fact that it was dependent on massive infusions of government money to stay alive.
Does the Government Have to Pay the Money?

It is not easy to find legal ways to avoid paying for work that was already done. It is possible that the government could make it difficult for the bonuses to be collected by breaking off AIG’s Financial Products division (the one responsible for bankrupting the company) and then letting this company go bankrupt.1

However, this route has two major problems. First, a main purpose of the bailout was precisely that the government wanted to honor the obligations of the Financial Products division, ostensibly to maintain the stability of the financial system. If this division went bankrupt, then it could pose risks to the stability of the financial system. The second problem is that the bonuses have already been paid. Any action would now require taking back money that was already paid out. This is considerably more difficult than preventing money from being paid in the first place.

A second path that is currently being pursued by Congress is to tax back the bonuses with a tax that is designed explicitly to apply to bonuses given to workers for companies that are being bailed out by the government. This sort of measure is a rather blunt instrument to address the problem. The resulting compensation system is certainly less than perfect (the bill passed by the House would tax back 90 percent of the bonuses received by highly paid executives), but it could hardly be worse than the compensation structure currently in place.

A third possibility is to insist that the private shareholders pay for the bonuses. Private shareholders still own 20 percent of the company. The market capitalization is approximately $2.6 billion. This means that the 20 percent stake ($520 million) owned by private shareholders can easily cover the $165 million in bonuses.

Under this arrangement, the government would tell AIG to sell enough new shares to cover the $165 million cost of the bonus. Since the money is supposed to come from the private shareholders 20 percent stake, for every share that AIG sells to the public, 4 shares will be awarded to the government. This keeps the government stake at 80 percent.

The current share price is about 95 cents. If it fell to 60 cents as a result of the newly issued shares, the company would have to sell 275 million shares to the public and issue another 1.1 billion shares to the government. This would leave the government’s stake unaffected, while cutting the value of the current private shareholders’ stake by roughly one-third. This route would leave the executives with their bonuses, but they would come at the expense of the private shareholders, not the taxpayers.
AIG Bailout Issues

Thus far $170 billion has been spent on the AIG bailout, more than 1000 times as much as is at stake with the bonuses. For the first time last weekend, the Treasury Department released information about how this bailout money was used. It reported that much of the AIG money went to large U.S. banks, most notably Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch, in addition to several large foreign banks, including the French bank Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. Most of these payments were in connection with their holdings of credit default swaps (CDS) issued by AIG.

There are at least three obvious issues that arise with these payouts:

1. Did the banks hold the underlying assets, or just the CDS?
2. Did the government have to buy back the underlying assets from the banks, or could it have waited to see what happened?
3. Could the support for the banks have been done directly, including some quid pro quo, without having AIG as an intermediary?

These three issues are outlined below.
CDS: Insurance or Gambling?

In 2007 the outstanding nominal value of all credit default swaps was close to $75 trillion. This was approximately five times as large as the outstanding value of insurable bonds. This meant that there was an average of five CDSs issued for every insurable bond, which implies that at least 80 percent of CDSs were not owned by institutions that actually owned the bond being insured.

The Treasury and Fed have not released the rules they applied in dealing with AIG’s CDS. They may have only honored CDS where the institution held the bond being insured or they may have honored all of AIG’s CDSs, regardless of whether or not the bank held the bond being insured.

This makes a big difference in terms of the purpose of the bailout. If a bank had bought a CDS to protect itself against losses on a mortgage backed security, and the CDS was not honored, then it would be an unexpected blow to its balance sheet. On the other hand, if the bank was just gambling that a bond that it did not hold would go bad by buying a CDS issued against it, it is difficult to see how a failure to honor the CDS would impose a serious hardship.

There may be legal issues that would prevent a non-bankrupt AIG from choosing which CDSs it chooses to honor, but that fact may have implications for the wisdom of rescuing AIG, as opposed to just directly supporting the counterparties, where it is considered appropriate.
Did the Government Pay Off the Bets Before the Race Was Over?

The government, through AIG, paid an additional $30 billion to counterparties because it paid off CDSs at their notional value rather than their market value. In principle, AIG would have owed the notional value of the CDSs if the underlying bond had defaulted. In these cases, the bond had not defaulted. In effect, the government acted as though AIG had already lost its bet, at a time when it was still possible that the underlying bonds would not go bad.

It is important to keep in mind that CDSs are typically relatively short-lived assets. Many provide insurance for only three years and most insure bonds for five years or less. Most of AIG’s CDSs were issued before 2007. This means that by late 2008, they would have already been two years old or older. In this context, it might have been reasonable to take a chance to see whether the CDS would actually have to be paid. In any case, there was no obvious reason to pay above the market value for the CDS. This seems like a straight gift to the banks.
Should the Government Have Gotten Something in Return for Giving Tens of Billions to the Banks?

When the government lent hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks through TARP, it got preferred shares of stock in return, in addition to placing conditions on the banks’ conduct. By contrast, the government received absolutely nothing for the tens of billions of dollars that it passed on to the banks through AIG. It may have been desirable to ensure that AIG’s defaults did not lead to the collapse of the major banks that were its counterparties, but this could have been accomplished by directly giving these banks capital through TARP or some equivalent mechanism. There is no obvious reason why it was necessary to give the money through AIG without getting anything in return.

It is worth noting that if the government had instead lent the AIG money to the banks through TARP, and under similar conditions, it would own an even larger share of these banks. Obviously the banks prefer that the money instead pass through AIG without conditions, but there is no reason that the taxpayers should prefer this route.

It is also worth noting that several of the recipients of AIG money were foreign banks. While the public has an interest in the stability of the world economy, which means preventing major foreign banks from going bankrupt, there is no obvious reason that American taxpayers should be forced to bail out foreign banks of wealthy countries. It is possible that there is some quid pro quo under which foreign governments are bailing out U.S. banks on losses suffered in their countries, but there has been no public acknowledgement of such an arrangement.

There is a possible alternative explanation. The government may have made these payments in order to preserve the international reputation of the U.S. financial industry. If that is the case, then this is a rather expensive subsidy to the financial industry. To date there has been no explanation as to the reason for making these payments.

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Engagement

by dday

In the off-chance that there is a country after the economic wreckage is cleared, Barack Obama’s message to the Iranian people on Nowruz, their new year’s holiday, is the first historic thing he has done. Obviously the domestic agenda will swamp everything else in the short term, but in retrospect, I gather historians will remember this message, fulfilling a promise to offer a new level of engagement to the whole world, without the silly constraints neocon bullies put on themselves by endlessly trying to prove what tough cowboys they are.

I’ve put the whole text below in case you can’t watch the video. The Farsi script was also placed on the White House website, along with a subtitled video.

Obviously a celebratory message will not unfreeze relations overnight. Indeed, the near-term headline in the region will probably be the two Navy warships colliding in the Straits of Hormuz, which will set conspiratorial tongues wagging. But the video remains a powerful symbol, the extended hand to the clenched fist. Obama, as per usual, speaks to the common humanity that transcends cultural differences, and the need to resolve conflict through mutual respect and international cooperation. Most important, Obama signaled a mutual strategic interest in constructive relations with Iran so the nations can partner on other challenges (it’s no secret that the Administration seeks Iranian help in Afghanistan). This is just his negotiating style, summed up by the line from a Persian poem he quotes: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.” Obviously the policy differences get in the way of this approach – this would be a better method – but at the end of the day the decision makers are human beings, and tone matters. It will be harder for Iranian hardliners to call the man in that video the great Satan (provided that the message actually reaches the people, of course). The pressure for a resolution will increase.

Of course the words must match the action – but I am very happy to see this outreach.

THE PRESIDENT: Today I want to extend my very best wishes to all who are celebrating Nowruz around the world.

This holiday is both an ancient ritual and a moment of renewal, and I hope that you enjoy this special time of year with friends and family.

In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nowruz is just one part of your great and celebrated culture. Over many centuries your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place.

Here in the United States our own communities have been enhanced by the contributions of Iranian Americans. We know that you are a great civilization, and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world.

For nearly three decades relations between our nations have been strained. But at this holiday we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together. Indeed, you will be celebrating your New Year in much the same way that we Americans mark our holidays — by gathering with friends and family, exchanging gifts and stories, and looking to the future with a renewed sense of hope.

Within these celebrations lies the promise of a new day, the promise of opportunity for our children, security for our families, progress for our communities, and peace between nations. Those are shared hopes, those are common dreams.

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran’s leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

So on the occasion of your New Year, I want you, the people and leaders of Iran, to understand the future that we seek. It’s a future with renewed exchanges among our people, and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It’s a future where the old divisions are overcome, where you and all of your neighbors and the wider world can live in greater security and greater peace.

I know that this won’t be reached easily. There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”

With the coming of a new season, we’re reminded of this precious humanity that we all share. And we can once again call upon this spirit as we seek the promise of a new beginning.

Thank you, and Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak.

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Modern Conservatism Is A Disease, Matthew

by tristero

Throughout his blogging career – which has been highly successful and on many occasions, insightful – Matt Yglesias has often made the fundamental mistake of confusing modern conservatism with an actual philosophical stance that one must consider seriously and with which one should argue. He’s still at it:

I don’t think it makes sense to reason “all conservatives are wrong about important things, therefore all conservatives are equally pernicious.” Tyler Cowen on economics has a lot more to offer than Larry Kudlow on economics, even though I agree with neither of them. I think that’s common sense, and I don’t think it makes one a traitor to progressive politics to point this kind of thing out or to think it’s a good thing when conservatives-who-offer-more replace conservatives-who-offer-less.

Sigh.

Modern conservatives like Kristol bring nothing of substance to the table, Matt. Whether Ross Douthat brings twice the nothing that Kristol does, or ten times the nothing Kristol does, still means that Douthat brings nothing to the table. That’s not only common sense: that’s basic arithmetic.

I would be remiss if I did not also point out that the Katha Pollitt piece which inspired Matt’s post gets off to an extremely asinine start:

Liberal blogger men are thrilled with the New York Times’s appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page.

Not true. Last I checked, I am a liberal, I’m a blogger, and I’m still male. I’m not thrilled Ross Douthat’s replacing Kristol and for all of the same reasons Pollitt points to, and more. I’m not the only liberal blogger man who thinks this, not by a long shot.

Nor, as Pollitt thinks, do I believe it would have been great to retain Kristol. The Times needs good ideas, not bad ones, on its op-ed pages. There are none to be had in the modern conservative movement, which is not the same as saying that all good ideas are liberal and progressive ones (although most are). Therefore, neither Kristol nor Douthat nor any other rightwing nut deserves regular access to the Times op-ed pages.

Science Education

by tristero

The Obama administration is saying exactly the right thing about science education:

“Whether it’s global warming, evolution or stem cell research, science will be honored. It will be respected and supported by this administration,” [Education Secretary Arne Duncan] said.

Excellent. But what inquiring minds want to know is whether that damn creationist book is still on sale at the Grand Canyon. Anyone happen to know?

UPDATE: They’re still selling that piece of shit.

Thought For The Day

by tristero

Unless it leads to immediate, serious, careful, and comprehensive regulation and oversight of our criminally corrupt financial institutions, the furor over the outrageous AIG bonuses – and the current legislation to tax those bonuses- will be just a tempest in a very tiny teapot, full of sound and fury, signifying exactly nada.

You say symbolism matters, even if the bonuses merely represent less than 1/10th of 1% of all the taxpayer simoleons dumped into AIG’s mattresses? I say, symbols, schmimbols. It’s time for action, real serious action. If I want a good show, I’ll go see some Shakespeare or Buffy. Spare me the cheap cartoon of a Congress (and administration) pretending to confront serious problems when all they’re really addressing is their image problem .

Clerks

by digby

Atrios nails the fundamental issue:

The issue is that Timmeh and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn’t do it.

I don’t know whether it’s insecurity,solidarity, ideology or some combination thereof, but they do seem to have believed that the only way they could fix the problem was to acquiesce to the demands of the perpetrators.

Just to remind you of how those people think, I’ll run this again:

Asked about Geithner’s comments and his decision regarding opening the discount window to Wall Street after Bear had been sold for $2 a share and not earlier, [Bear CEO]Jimmy Cayne became spitting angry.

“The audacity of that p—k in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan,” he said. “Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a h–d-on, saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’ This guy thinks he’s got a big d–k. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I’m not a good enemy. I’m a very bad enemy. But certain things really—that bothered me plenty. It’s just that for some clerk to make a decision based on what, your own personal feeling about whether or not they’re a good credit? Who the f–k asked you? You’re not an elected officer. You’re a clerk. Believe me, you’re a clerk. I want to open up on this f—-r, that’s all I can tell you.”

This is how these Wall Street MOUs see the government. Clerks. And in a way they’re right. That’s the problem.

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Food: Michelle Obama Plants A White House Garden

by tristero

This is excellent:

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.

In an interview in her office, Mrs. Obama said, “My hope is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”…

“The power of Michelle Obama and the garden can create a very powerful message about eating healthy and more delicious food,” said Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., an organic restaurant that grows many of its own ingredients. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it could translate into real change.”

This is an unalloyed Very Good Thing. But you folks know the drill by now, right? The entire Village will be shouting elitists! Elitists!

Yeah, well, let’s hear what a real fucking Park Avenue- level elitist thinks about food near her home:

Kyu-Sung Choi, a Korean immigrant, thought it would be a good idea to open a 24-hour delicatessen at Park Avenue and 75th Street. Many residents disagreed.

”Do the residents of Park Avenue want to look out the window at vegetables?” asked Shirley Bernstein, a leader of the opposition. ”They most certainly do not.”

Word of Mr. Choi’s plans and the sight of remodeling crews were met with stop-work orders, a complaint filed by the local Community Board, inspectors looking for code violations, and elected officials speaking out against the deli.

Mr. Choi won his case, by the way.

Hearts ‘N Minds

by digby

I have to say that I’m confused by all the Republicans fulminating on television today about “shredding the constitution” because the House voted to tax the TARP bonuses at 90%. Why, you’d think they were endorsing the imprisonment of innocent people for years without evidence or something.

Oh wait:

Thousands of Iraqis held without charge by the United States on suspicion of links to insurgents or militants are being freed by this summer because there is little or no evidence against them.

Their release comes as the U.S. prepares to turn over its detention system to the fledgling Iraqi government by early 2010. In the six years since the war began, the military ultimately detained some 100,000 suspects, many of whom were picked up in U.S.-led raids during a raging, bloody insurgency that has since died down.

The effort to do justice for those wrongly held to begin with, some for years, also runs the risk of releasing extremists who could be a threat to fragile Iraqi security.

As part of an agreement between the two countries that took effect Jan. 1, Iraqi authorities have begun reviewing the cases of the detainees to decide whether to free them or press charges. About 13,300 remain behind barbed wire in U.S. custody in Iraq.

But Iraqi judges have issued detention orders to prosecute only 129 of the 2,120 cases they have finished reviewing so far this year — or about 6 percent, according to U.S. military data. As of Thursday, 1,991 detainees had been freed since Jan. 1.

An Associated Press reporter embedded for two days at Camp Bucca, the largest U.S. detention facility in Iraq, and talked with military officials about preparations to shut it down.

“God willing, God willing,” said Layla Rasheed after learning that her son, a former government worker from Baghdad, was likely to be released. “He doesn’t have anything to do with terrorists. I don’t know why he was picked up.”

The military also expects to release another 600 detainees by the end of March, a spokesman said.

The U.S. detention policy has been unpopular in a country where many feel that thousands have been detained without cause, and where the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal will be remembered for a long time.

Iraq’s biggest Sunni parliamentary bloc has called for the release of virtually all detainees, arguing that even those who were militants no longer pose a threat because so many Sunni groups have abandoned the insurgency.

“It’s very easy to go back and say, ‘Well, you rounded up all these innocent people.’ Well, innocence has different shades,” Brig. Gen. David Quantock, commander of the U.S. detention system in Iraq, said in an interview this week.

One wonders what would happen if American politicians who started a war for no good reason were subject to the same standards (or should I say “shades of innocence.”)

“It’s not like we have a choice — it is prosecute or release. So it’s a huge undertaking right now to try to find as much evidence as we can. We’re not going after all of them, we’re going after a certain amount.”

These people have been mouldering away in prison for years with no due process. I suppose it’s a good thing that the authorities are finally “scrambling” to compile evidence against them but it’s hard to see how that is an example of Jeffersonian democracy.

And there are consequences:

One Camp Bucca imam said the majority of detainees are ready to forgive once they are released — even if they are angry and confused after being held so long.

“Some of them have decided to go outside Iraq to change,” said the imam, who identified himself only as Sheik Abdul-Sattar. “Some can say, we can forgive everyone. The majority are like that. The extremists speak of revenge.”

It only takes a handful. And I would bet that there are more extremists because of this policy than there would have been without it. Injustice tends to make people very testy.

Meanwhile, back in the states:

Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.

“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”

Of course, we knew that. But it’s still helpful to have it confirmed.

Now I know that the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to a person is to have their million dollar bonus taxed at a confiscatory rate for a year. It sends chills down my spine just thinking about it. But I do think it might be just a teensy bit more convincing if those who are having an aneurysm about this assault on the constitution could spare just a little bit of their self-righteousness for the people who ordered the torture and imprisonment of innocent human beings as well.

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