Pervez Musharraf cashes the check that President Bush wrote him on September 24, 2001:

Security forces were reported to have detained about 500 opposition party figures, lawyers and human rights advocates on Sunday, and about a dozen privately owned television news stations remained off the air. International broadcasters, including the BBC and CNN, were also cut off.

The biggest surprise? It’s the lawyers who are fighting back.

(Quote by Jane Perlez and David Rohde. Photo by Khalid Tanveer.)

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis, who now are both teaching at Manchester University. In a new introduction to his primer Ideology, Eagleton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of calling Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-part essay Amis published last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now published Eagleton’s response to the latest article, as well as Amis’s letter responding to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay responding to it. A much-shortened version was published by a U. of Chicago email broadsheet called Sightings. Since the subject has come up again, I thought I’d post the original version in its entirety below. (Warning: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduction of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic prerequisite of serious moral thought, and for good reason. (more…)

Alden Pyle lives: “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

So said a State Department official in response to the murder of an innocent Iraqi bystander by a Blackwater USA “operator.” The official suggested that Blackwater pay the victim’s family $5,000 to hasten the putting.

(Quoted in a new report on Blackwater by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which also includes this indictment:

The Blackwater and State Department records reveal that Blackwater’s use of force in Iraq is frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage. Blackwater is legally and contractually bound to only engage in defensive uses of force to prevent “imminent and grave danger” to themselves or others. In practice, however, the vast majority of Blackwater weapons discharges are preemptive, with Blackwater forces firing first at a vehicle or suspicious individual prior to receiving any fire.

Thanks to the data included with the report, “vast majority” can be specified exactly: Blackwater shot first 163 out of 195 times, or 84%.)

Most important of all, what will be said and done by those of us who take no side in filthy religious wars? The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant, or neutral, without inviting their own suicide.

Which will it be, Mr. Hitchens? Will you “take no side in filthy religious wars” or will you refuse to be “tolerant, or neutral” (such an easy slip down the slope) and therefore stave off your own suicide?

the [insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut.

From “JTF GTMO ‘SERE’ Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” a five-page document that tells interrogators how to apply the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training tactics to enemy combatants. The reverse engineering of the methods described by the document was accomplished by CIA consultants James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Katherine Eban writes,

Mitchell and Jessen’s methods were so controversial that, among colleagues, the reaction to their names alone became a litmus test of one’s attitude toward coercion and human rights. Their critics called them the “Mormon mafia” (a reference to their shared religion) and the “poster boys” (referring to the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” posters, which are where some thought their activities would land them). The reversed SERE tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity…

Read the whole story at Vanity Fair.

The New York Times reports that thanks to a complicated tax structure, partners of the Blackstone Group will, over the course of 15 years, receive $1.1 billion in tax deductions for their IPO. That’s $198 million over what the partners will pay in taxes on the stock sale, meaning that they will not only avoid paying taxes on the IPO but will actually earn a negative tax of some $200 million.

Once you get past the shock of this fact, the most vexing part of the whole thing is that Blackstone’s negative tax turns on an accounting fiction known as good will, “the value of the intangible assets, like a well-known brand name, that are built up by a company over time.” The NYT’s David Cay Johnston explains how they’ll do it:

Individuals who create good will cannot deduct it. But when good will is sold the new owners can [deduct it] because its value is assumed to erode. The Blackstone partners sold the good will from their left pocket to their right.

It’s a nice trick I don’t recommend trying on your next 1040: sell yourself some quantity of fading charm or falling beauty and take a deduction for your future losses. But what won’t work for you will work for Blackstone, and with that bit of financial legerdemain the Blackstone partners will actually turn a profit off the U.S. Treasury.

It’s their business if the super-rich want to get richer, but you’d think they could have the courtesy to leave the rest of us out of it. As it stands, for the next 15 years we the people will be subsidizing the depreciation of Blackstone’s good will, an entity whose existence—especially of late—one has very good reasons to doubt.