News International, through its Management and Standards Committee, is now being ruthless and commercial in dealing with the alleged wrongdoings of all its British titles. In doing so, News International is showing no more sentimental attachment to its reporters than it did thirty years ago to its print workers. It is akin to when a despot withdraws his favour from certain underlings: they are not “thrown to the wolves” but they suddenly are treated like any other subjects, and they then have to account for their actions when they thought they could get away with it.

David Allen Green in the New Statesman.

What’s going on in the world?

- Financial services
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Professional services eg lawyers, accountants etc

?

We’re not in the boom times any more, however, and thus the issue of tax optimisation has come up again. The less tax government spends, the less it can spend on services; but the more tax it takes, the less money there is in the real economy for people to spend, hitting jobs, wages, and ultimately taxes. Tax is the Jörmungandr upon which public policy is built, and the question of how much you can tax before the negative impact on the economy outweighs the spending benefit has sharpened over the last half-decade.

As a result, lots of different groups are looking at the question in different ways (as I write this, Andrew Neil is debating Laurie Penny on the retrospective merits of the Community Charge – aka the Poll Tax. It’s not going well for Brillo). And it’s not just the usual leftie malcontents; in America, the very rich – led by the world’s second-richest man, Warren Buffet – are themselves questioning the levels of tax levelled upon them: Buffet famously claimed to pay a lower rate of tax than his assistant.

Increasingly there are numbers to back the various positions up. Shortly before Christmas, a group of economists – Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stefanie Stantcheva of MIT – put out a paper (pdf) detailing optimal rates of top-rate tax. The results are surprising.

Kevin Drum elaborates on the results, but in short, the paper asserts that top rates of tax can go as high as 76% without inflicting economic damage greater than the net benefit derived. The writers of the paper take a conservative view of behavioral elasticity, as well, so the risks of the rich “going Galt” and fleeing to tax havens is priced into that calculation. There is some historical evidence to support that, too. The UK’s top rate of tax, set at 50%, has made next to no difference to wealth creation since it was implemented a year and a half ago. Furthermore, Martin Feldstein of Harvard found that the 1986 cut in the US top rate of tax, from 50% to 28%, made no perceptible difference to the gross tax yield.

Feldstein does not conclude that taxes can be raised, however. His conclusion is that the tax based needs to be broadened by eliminating reductions. To be fair, the other paper makes a similar point. Have a high tax rate may not intrinsically undermine the economy, but it’s a wasted effort if you still allow people to find ways to avoid paying it. So the first task of tax reformers must be to minimise such opportunities by having a broader tax base, better enforcement and similar tax rates for different kinds of income.

And that’s the problem. Even in small countries – like Sweden – keeping the exchequer in order is a massive challenge. For countries like Britain and America, with a vastly diverse economy and an especially ornate system of financial services and products, any attempts to design a straightforward tax system run into a conflict between fairness and flexibility. Schemes such as that designed by the Deputy Prime Minister, to raise the income level at which tax is charged on the lower band, may be the most straightforward way to force the issue. Removing pressure at the bottom of the pile has to result in increasing it at the top, and if these reports are to be believed, then the top has plenty more to give.

Because that’s what the good men of SEAL Team Six did – they were given a kill order and they executed it, no pun intended.

It’s a complex question and gets tangled up in a lot of other problems, both emotional and intellectual. This post aims to unpick some of that.

Was it legal?

Many will hardly care whether it was legal or not, arguing that right and wrong are not always reflected in law. That’s a fair point, but legalities are still important, if only because they’re the difference between the subjective opinion of an individual and the agreed parameters established by a society.

On this issue the rules are actually very straightforward and relatively unambiguous: killing Osama bin Laden was inalienably legal under international law.

Under international humanitarian law, a member of an armed organised group can be killed as an enemy combatant, and as al Qaida was a recognised participant in the war in Afghanistan his death is an entirely justifiable act of war. The only strictures on such an action are the principles of distinction and proportionality, and the action in Abbotabad seems not to violate either of those restrictions.

Under international human rights law (a separate and oftentimes contradictory code), targeted killings are harder to justify but still not impossible. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 is the document that governs this code, and it states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life” – meaning that assassination is legal so long as it can be justified. If he had attempted to surrender then the case would be sticker, but the White House claims that bin Laden resisted arrest and that is certainly consistent with his own pronouncements of the issue. Given that the White House holds video of the killing – which can be subpeona’d – we can probably assume that they are being truthful in this regard.

Was it morally justifiable?

The question of moral right or wrong breaks in two – ‘can it be coherently justified to others’ and ‘is it, at a fundamental level, consistent with the moral norms established in our society’. One can be critically examined; the other is conceptually much more woolly.

The question of whether the killing could be justified is straightforward. Yes; it is clearly possible to build a coherent and convincing argument asserting that killing bin Laden was morally preferable to taking him alive. Here’s how you do it:

• He was an enemy combatant, not a civilian. While taking him alive was an option, killing him was an equally viable one, and the question needs to be viewed in that light.

• There was no gain to be had from taking him alive, for the following reasons:
• He would not have given up information except under extreme torture, and the compulsion to use that torture would have been acute.
• Taking him alive would not have changed the ultimate outcome. He confessed to the crime, he only would have been tried in America, and he would have been put to death.
• The only difference is that taking him alive would have subjected the world to the spectacle of a court case, which would have had no real value. It would have been impossible to try him fairly, it would have been perceived to be a humiliating sham amongst our enemies (and many of our allies) overseas, regardless of how rigorous the trial actually was, and it would have given him one last prime-time podium from which to agitate for further slaughter. I accept that we should not be afraid to face extremist rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean we have to give it our network airtime.
• The key point in the above section is that it wouldn’t actually win us any friends. People don’t like that we assassinated him and that’s sad, but the shitstorm we would have faced for trying him would have been much worse. The Nuremburg trials would have been invoked, and probably not entirely unfairly. America’s own divisions would have come to the fore as everyone’s favourite bigots – Beck, O’Reilly, Palin, Trump – would have vied to be toughest on the terrorist. Even our allies in the region would have been forced into the position of defending Islam, and bin Laden by proxy, from the acid tongues of America’s most divisive assholes.
• Every day that he spends on TV in an orange boiler suit and shackles, his friends get more pissed off. That means reprisals, and not just against us – against anybody.
• The videotapes of bin Laden’s final hours would be passed from hand to hand like relics. It’s a short-cut to martyrdom.
• All of these would be equivocations from a moral imperative, though, were it not for one thing: he was an enemy soldier in a time of war. If he was a political leader, a civilian, then it would be a different matter, but he was a man whose life was war. Ultimately, this was the end he chose, and we shouldn’t let an obsession with abstract principles interfere with that.

So it’s certainly morally defensible. If the Dalai Lama can bring himself to recognise the justification then it seems bizarre to suggest otherwise.

Was it right?

If it’s legal and justifiable, then surely that shouldn’t be in question?

And yet. Outside of ground zero, away from the gates of the white house, many people – not just the airy-fairy left – are uneasy. The policy of whacking terrorist leaders is from an Israeli playbook that has a tendency to inspire revulsion, as Alan Dershowitz notes:

Among others, these critics include officials in Britain, France, Italy, Russia, the EU, Jordan, and the United Nations. [Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary] once said, “The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive.” The French foreign ministry has declared “that extrajudicial executions contravene international law and are unacceptable.” The Italian Foreign Minister has said, “Italy, like the whole of the European Union, has always condemned the practice of targeted assassinations.” The Russians have asserted that “Russia has repeatedly stressed the unacceptability of extrajudicial settling of scores and ‘targeted killings.’” Javier Solana has noted that the “European Union has consistently condemned extrajudicial killings.” The Jordanians have said, “Jordan has always denounced this policy of assassination and its position on this has always been clear.” And Kofi Annan has declared “that extrajudicial killings are violations of international law.”

Yet none of these nations, groups or individuals have criticized the targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden by the US. The reason is obvious. All the condemnations against targeted killing was directed at one country. Guess which one? Israel, of course.

I disagree with Dershowitz’s conclusion – I think that bin Laden is a qualitatively different name from Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and politicians tend to be sensitive to the political sensitivities of condemning the killing of such a widely despised man. But nevertheless, a bad taste lingers. No-one is quite sure if they’ve passed through the looking glass.

Bin Laden wore no uniform. Is the argument that he was an armed combatant not a legal fudge? Yes, putting him on trial would be politically difficult. Isn’t that the kind of difficulty a strong society, with a sound ideological basis, should welcome? And aren’t the flag-waving crowds at ground zero… kinda crass?

And ultimately, those are justifiable concerns. I agree with the decision as it was made, but still, I am uneasy. It’s never comfortable to see an act of war feted on a widescreen TV.

Perhaps this moment will be a moment of closure, a final transgression that allows America to move past its dirty wars, to put Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay behind it, and to close the door on “enhanced interrogation” and extraordinary rendition. If that turns out to be the case then the moral qualms will have to be quashed, because it will have been worth it, this final destruction of the mirror that reflected America back upon itself. If not then America will continue to owe us a little more justification for this than it has yet been able to give, to quiet that tiny voice of conscience; but in that case, more and greater atrocities await.

[...] all government of the Gambia projects and programmes, which were implemented in co-operation with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been cancelled.

[...]

The Gambia government hereby requests all Iranian nationals representing the interest of the government of Iran in the Gambia to leave the country within 48 hours from the effective date stipulated through a notification issued to the government of Iran.

What’s interesting, though, is that ties between Nigeria and Iran were strained earlier this week when Nigeria intercepted a shipment of arms that the Iranian government was routing through their ports. Also long-term allies, the Nigerians stopped just short of freezing the relationship but demanded a full and frank accounting from the Iranian government. Under pressure, Iran claimed that the shipment was from a private company and was on its way to Gambia… No reason was given by Gambia for the suspension of ties but it doesn’t seem especially likely that the two incidents are unrelated.

Shipments of arms going to Africa without the knowledge of the African governments in question are rarely innocent. The question is: is Iran arguing factions in Gambia? Or is it throwing its relationship with Gambia under a bus to hide its real activities elsewhere – possibly in Nigeria itself?

I find media narratives strange at times.

Two years ago, Barack Obama was elected on a wave of enthusiasm at his message of hope and change. Was he? Or was he elected in a wave of rejection at the unusually unpopular George Bush?

At the same election, the Democrats entrenched their leads in both Houses of Congress. Did they get there on Obama’s coattails, or did they ride the same anti-Bush wave as he did?

Elections are made or lost on a hundred million micro-choices. Media narratives occasionally pick up on dominant trends but never tell the full story. All to often, however, their need to focus on narrative ignores the smaller stories of micro-choices and political realities. Today, the first obituaries for Barack Obama’s presidency are being written, despite the fact that his popularity is not abnormally low and that his involvement in campaigning was muted at best. Is it possible that this election was nothing to do with him at all?

The Republican party got handed an unholy beating in 2008, such that predictions were made that the party would be locked out of power “for a generation”. That can happen, from time to time; most notably, the Democrats held both houses of Congress for 13 consecutive terms, or 26 years (despite only holding the Presidency for twelve of those years in total) between 1955 and 1981 – astonishingly they continued to hold the House of Representatives until 1995, and unbroken run of 44 years. As the chart below shows, both Houses of Congress can be seen to be historically strongly Democrat.

The huge majorities that the Dems had after 2008, then, could safely be seen as presaging another long period of blue control on Capitol Hill, no? Well, not really. The 77-year average is interesting, but much more relevant is the last twenty or so. Since the Democrats lost control of both ends of the House in 1995 (from, it must be said, a 1993 peak that equalled their lead in 2008), the Republicans have controlled both houses non-stop until anti-Bush sentiment started to become acute in 2007. For many voters, the 110th Congress was the first in their adult lives that had enjoyed a Democratic majority in either Chamber, let alone both.

It was more fragile than it appeared, however, due that that aforementioned anti-Bush feeling. And this is the central thrust of my thesis: it’s actually pretty rare for a President’s popularity to affect the results of a Congressional election in a lasting or sustained manner. Carter was massively unpopular when he left office, but handed the Republicans only a weak, temporary control over the Senate and only an ephemeral boost to their minority standing in the House. The extent of Democratic control of Congress was virtually unaffected by either the unpopularity of Richard Nixon or the popularity (and untimely death) of JFK. Reagan made almost no headway on reducing the Democrat’s lock on either chamber, despite being widely popular across the spectrum.

Control of Congress changes at a macro level that, in many ways, cannot be understood through the results of a single election. Because they occur much more frequently, focus much more on local issues and are far more subject to manipulation through tactical spending, gerrymandering and the weird vagaries of political chance (would a Harry Ried figure really find himself against a Sharon Angle at the national level?) they are much more reliable indicators of the national political mood when taken as an aggregate over time. What recent history shows us is that, Congressionally speaking, we are living in a Republican era in this GOP control of both House and Senate may be considered the default mood of the country.

In other words: 2008 was a weird fluke, an ephemeral result brought about by the passage of an unpopular President. It was the equivalent to the GOP retaking the Senate in 1981. In all probability, Barack Obama could have done nothing to prevent it short of beating Osama bin Laden in a fist-fight underneath the Washington Monument. This result, in short, is an anti-indicator; it is simply political gravity reasserting itself. It could never last, and today’s result should not be taken in any other light.

This is a complex situation, clearly, and large sections of the internet have devoted considerable time to overreaching in search of hard conclusions. Mondoweiss, for example, which does this by raising false equivalences. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera calls it “the selective application of the law against Arabs” and “just plain racism.” Even Feministe concludes that “there are certain circumstances where rape by fraud is a legitimate claim” but “this… is not one of them, and opens the door to even greater abuses.”

One thing is clear: the crime of rape by deception is a legitimate complaint, and not in an abstract sense. Cases have been successfully prosecuted where the man has lied about his sexual health, passing HIV onto his partner; where a man posed as a senior official and promised increased social security payments in exchange for sex; and where a woman consented to sex with a man who she believed to be her boyfriend but was actually her boyfriend’s brother. The statute is not used for situations where a man, say, claimed to be 27 when he’s actually 25, or a woman who claims to be a supermodel in a bar.

For many, though, the overtly racist nature of the complaint seems to be the deciding factor. My own personal feeling is perhaps dangerously relativistic, but my gut tells me that racism needs to be viewed through a different prism when dealing with Israel and Palestine. From a western perspective, the explicitly racial justification for the suit can be nauseating; but then, racial issues – although by no means defused in Europe or America – are less of an immediate concern than they are in the Levant. It is impossible not to decry the institutional racism and xenophobic nationalist tribalism exhibited by both Israeli and Arab political and social elements.

But the heart of this case isn’t an abstract principle; it’s rooted in personal actions and responses. The woman felt genuinely and legitimately deceived and violated. That in itself isn’t enough to determine guilt of course. What is, however, is the fact that the man knew that the deception was of decisive magnitude and did it anyway. The problem here is that the man chose to tell a lie of sufficient magnitude to deny the woman the opportunity to give consent. That the woman’s objection to the deception was racist in nature is vile but to some extent beside the point.

In many ways, Israel and – to a lesser extent – the occupied territories (particularly the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip) are fundamentally racist. They are societies constructed on a nationalist ideal, defined by opposition to an alien “other”. Widespread societal changes are needed to prevent citizens of Israel from viewing non-Israeliness as a defining flaw. But the fact remains that, for now, it is a defining flaw, and that fact is a factor that must have been known to the defendant.

As much as it galls me, I have to accept that in this case the verdict was probably correct.

EDIT: For an interesting comparative, check out how rape is handled in the UAE.

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

That’s Shahram Amiri.

Mr. Amiri is an Iranian who vanished while on hajj in 2009. What happened to him is a mystery. A video released by the Iranian government in June suggested that he was an Iranian nuclear scientist, that he had been kidnapped by the CIA and tortured, and that he was being held within the US against his will. In a concurrent video, a person who appears to be the same man explains that he wasn’t kidnapped – he moved to the US of his own volition, to complete his PhD. Further muddying the waters was this ABC report, which cited unnamed CIA officials, and which claimed that Amiri is a nuclear scientist, but that he defected to the CIA of his own free will.

That’s the straightforward bit.

Yesterday morning, both the Pakistani and Iranian governments claimed that he had taken refuge in Pakistan’s Washington embassy – which serves Iran’s interests in America in the absence of its own diplomatic mission – and was trying to get home. America flatly denied the claim, however, and Wired’s Danger Room blog has a repudiation from a spokesperson at the Pakistani embassy.

But a Pakistani embassy official tells Danger Room that the reports of Amiri turning up in the embassy are ”incorrect information” and “we have no one here” matching his description. That’s from an individual at the press office who didn’t identify herself and said she could not speak for the record. She added she couldn’t explain why a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in Islamabad told reporters that the scientist is at the embassy’s Iranian interest section, about two miles away from the main facility in D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood. But she also didn’t split hairs: “He’s not in the embassy at all.”

That said, the Iranian interest section is staffed by Iranians, not Pakistanis. A spokesman for the Iranian interest section, Ali Shahrazi, tells Danger Room, “When we arrived this morning, [Amiri] was here.” He dodged a question about whether the Pakistanis assisted in Amiri’s alleged arrival, saying that it was the job of Iranian staff to help Iranian nationals. But there are lots of questions remaining about Amiri’s true identity, to say nothing of his whereabouts.

What to make of this? Firstly, if you think that the CIA isn’t trying to abduct Iranian scientists and hold them against their will then you’re out of your mind. The only question is, would they do so so badly? If true, this shows a frightening lack of finesse, not least in allowing the captured scientist the liberty to broadcast his unexpurgated thoughts onto YouTube, and then permitting him to wander into Pakistan’s embassy unimpeded. Also, the still above – of Amiri’s pro-Merican-version video – is so obviously staged it hurts. The chess set? The globe, artfully set to show America on its visible face? The warm, structured lighting rig (note how the light illuminates Amiri on the face, despite the low, mood-lighting behind)? C’mon, you can almost see the camera crew and military escort just offstage.

On the other hand, this could quite easily be an Iranian stitch-up, although it would be hard to see the benefit to Iran to escalate the story to the level that it has unless it had something worth revealing.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that you couldn’t pay me enough money to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. Wherever he is right now, I’m quite sure that Mr Amiri is wishing for nothing more than a quiet life.

EDIT: Looks like answers may be forthcoming, as he’s on his way home.