The musician and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died today.

After a concert of his sometime around 1995, we talked about unsuspected music in the daily environment. Living next to a railway station at that time, I mentioned the distinct, suprisingly clean six note ton sequence of accelerating ICE highspeed trains.

But I never got to send him the tape I promissed and the "Concert for Five ICE Trains" will stay unwritten. Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet is a fine alternative.

As the the NYT and others reported yesterday, the CIA in 2005 destroyed hours of video tapes which documented the torture interogations of two alleged ‘Al-Qaida operatives’.

This is obviously obstruction of justice as well as obstruction of the inquiries by the 9/11 commission. This by the CIA as well as the Justice Department which earlier denied the existence of such tapes in front of a federal court.

The White House, the Justice Department and Congress committee members now say they adviced the CIA not to destroy the tapes. The CIA assures us that this was a lone decision taken against such advice by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine service, in 2005. Rodriguez is now retired.

As usual, the coverup is the crime that breaks the case. The torture itself was a crime against humanity, wellknown and so far legally untouched. To destroy the tapes is obvious obstruction of justice that will likely have consequences.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., claimed this week that the relevant Congress committees were informed, after the fact, about the destruction of the tapes. Committee leaders form both parties deny this. Hayden’s statement is not yet criminal, but as soon as he is asked under oath …

Congress wants to look into this. But with Senator Rockefeller as the relevant Senate committee chairman, nothing will come out. The House may have a better chance to get more information.

Two points:

1. There are always copies of such tapes.

2. The White House somewhat denies any presidential knowledge on the issue by a very carefully worded statement:

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush “has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction” before this week.

Nice try and obviously not a clean denial. What did the president know and when did he know it? Did he really forget how he laughed at those screams?

I recommend a thorough search through Bush’s private video collection. Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s private archives also deserve some scrutinity. A rerun of the relevant scenes might refresh their memories.

The world according to Mitt Romney:

War requires peace just as peace requires war. War and peace endure together, or perish alone.

or

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

or

Ignorance requires strength just as strength requires ignorance. Ignorance and strength endure together, or perish alone.

or

Freedom requires slavery just as slavery requires freedom. Freedom and slavery endure together, or perish alone.

Your guess …

The public attention is still on the default of subprime mortgage loans. There the defaults are further increasing:

One in every five adjustable-rate subprime loans had late payments in the quarter, a number that excludes the one of every 10 already in foreclosure, the trade group said. Foreclosures started on all types of mortgages rose to an all-time high of 0.78 percent from 0.65 percent.

When you can get Two Houses for the Price of One something is indeed very wrong.

The parameters of the mortgage rescue operation by the "broad coalition", i.e. Wall Street, have been released.
The idea is to forestall interest increases on some Adjustable Rate
Mortgages for some time. The announced plan is quite restrictive, legally flawed
and will likely be ineffective:

Barclays Capital — extrapolating from a similar program
recently unveiled in California — estimates that only about 12 percent
of all subprime borrowers, or 240,000 homeowners, would get relief.

The Citigroup bailout via a ‘Super Fund’ for Structured Investment Vehicles is, like I expected, going nowhere.
The size of the plan has been halfed to $50 billion and, as predicted, the three involved banks have found no one else who will take
part in this looser scheme.

The credit problems are widening. The banks securitized all kind of loans and sold them off as Collateral Debt Obligations. Mortgages defaults are up. Now auto loan defaults are increasing. In the next step securitized credit card loans will follow. People who can not pay their mortgage also can not pay for their car or balance their credit cards. Student loans are another problem. When the economy slows down, defaulting commercial loans will add to the shitpile of bad debt.

Cont. reading: The Debt Bubbles and Interest Rates

The Iran NIE starts with this (pdf):

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons
program

The above sentence has two chunks of information. One, Iran has no current nuclear weapon program, was greated with great relief, including by me, as it makes an attack on Iran during Bush’s remaining reign unlikely. That chunk, which we are happy about, induces us to trust the second chunk and the whole NIE. We want to believe in this.

But by swallowing that chunk we are pressed to also automatically swallow the other part: the assertion that Iran really had a nuclear weapons program up to 2003.

As Chris Floyd notes:

Cont. reading: The NIE is a Ruse

Traditional beer taverns on the North-German coasts have candles burning at each table. Visiting smokers should beware of lighting their cigarettes with these. It will inevitably provoke some harsh reaction by the locals or the publician.

"Stop that! Each time you light a smoke with a candle you kill a fisherman!"

Most folks, even those protesting the atrocious deed, have long forgotten why this is believed to be so. But every child here knows by heart that you just don’t do that. It kills fishermen.

Here’s the background story as it was told to me a long time ago.

During the dark wintertimes the seas are roaring, the winds gusty and the big rivers frozen. There’s no chance to sail out for fish. The fishermen are out of pay and go hungry.

To survive, the fisher families gather in their huts around the table. They chip dry wood into tiny splints. They dunk the tips of these into a strong smelling can in front of them. The result is carefully lined up aside to eventually dry. The can holds a well stirred mixture of yellow phosphor, sulfer, potassium chlorate and gum arabicum. The fishermen produce matches. At daytime, they and their children will roam the market and knock on doors to sell them.

Lighting a smoke with a candle robs the fishermen of their only winter income. It kills.

The wisdom from that old tale is still kept alive as a social norm here, long after its reason went away. It is so ingrained in me that I don’t dare to use a candle to light up, even when alone.

But then, many of our small rites, morals and believes are kept alive for generations, while their original background and usefullness long disappeared.

We need your comments, news & views …

Open thread …

As one who has feared a U.S. attack on Iran, I am personally relieved that the relase of the new National Intelligence Estimate makes such prospects unlikely:

Political sources in Israel said Monday night that it appears that the Bush administration has lost the sense of urgency and determination to carry out a military strike against Iran in 2008. The same sources said that the United States is unlikely to strike Iran in 2008, and will make do with more severe sanctions against Tehran.

I’ll sleep better now. Even Bush’s latest red line has been crossed without consequences. Six weeks ago he said:

I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.

Now the NIE asserts (pdf):

We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial
capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

Let’s review the press reactions today which answer some questions about the NIE release I asked yesterday:

Cont. reading: The Iran NIE – Reactions

Two levels of change:

The director of national intelligence said Tuesday he does not plan to make public any of the key findings of a soon-to-be-completed assessment on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mike McConnell said to do so could expose U.S. intelligence capabilities and enable Iran to change its practices.
Iran threat assessment won’t be released, intelligence chief says,
CNN, Nov. 14, 2007

Iran halted work toward a nuclear weapon under international scrutiny in 2003 and is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb until 2010 to 2015, a U.S. intelligence report says.

A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic stopped an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003.
U.S. report: Iran stopped nuclear weapons work in 2003,
CNN, Dec. 3, 2007

First level: What changed between the above news releases?

Cont. reading: Iran NIE – What Changed?

What will the global outcome of the current economic downturn be?

First we have to imagine how severe this one may be. Paul Krugman today:

How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

The blow-up of the credit bubble will severly effect financial markets. But that is certain bleed into the real economy. It is unlikely that the effects can be contained locally. The crisis will be global. The consequences in the political dimensions can be enourmous too.

The Economist muses about the political outcome in Great Britain.

As its graph shows, British GDP growth in the last ten years was solely based on the financial industry:

Cont. reading: Global Downturn Musings

One currently discussed initiative to help homeowners in mortgage trouble is legislation sponsered by Democrats which would allow
judges to modify faulty mortgage loans in bankruptcy proceedings.

The White House-Wall Street plan is opposed to this. It’s idea is to freeze some selected Adjustable Rate Mortgages at their current interest rate.

That is unlikely to benefit homeowners and investors. But Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini somewhat lauded the effort.   

The Washington Post made it sound like all interests were included in the WH-WS discussion:

Homeowners could apply to freeze their rates or refinance their loans quickly under the deal being worked out by Treasury officials; the Hope Now Alliance, a broad coalition of consumer counseling groups, investors, nonprofits such as Homeownership Preservation Foundation; and lenders such as Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Countrywide Financial.
…
A key point of negotiation that remains unresolved is working out a solution for investors, who are being represented by the American Securitization Forum, that would convince them to give up their right to sue.

Note the semicolons in the first WaPo paragraphs that make it look like three distinct different groups, -Treasury; Hope Now Alliance; lender banks- , plus the investor representation, are involved. But these actors are not distinct.

From the government we have:

Cont. reading: A “Broad Coalition” For Mortgage Scams

There is a deal in the making between Wall Street and the White House regarding the mortgage crisis. It is marketed as helping homeowners who have problems with the rising rates of their Adjustable Rate Mortgages.

WaPo:

Mortgage rates for homeowners with spotty credit histories would be temporarily frozen under a nearly completed agreement between top Bush administration officials and a broad alliance of Wall Street’s biggest banks, mortgage investors, nonprofits and consumer groups.
[…]
Homeowners could apply to freeze their rates or refinance their loans quickly under the deal being worked out by Treasury officials; the Hope Now Alliance, a broad coalition of consumer counseling groups, investors, nonprofits such as Homeownership Preservation Foundation; and lenders such as Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Countrywide Financial.

[…]
A potential sticking point is determining which homeowners would qualify for the help and how much they would have to pay to refinance or freeze their loans, several sources close to the discussion said.

There are still no details available about this deal. But something dealed out between this White House and Wall Street is naturally suspicious. Wall Street smells more fees and profits. In a sucker rally Countrywide, one of the biggest endangered lender, yesterday soared 16% on the news of the deal.

Nouriel Roubini muses about the proposal and is carefully optimistic:

Cont. reading: The Mortgage Deal