Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran's nuclear program:

They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

Classy.

The fact that this appears in a column chastising Barack Obama for not being serious enough only makes it worse ("Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States."). But it's worth remembering that Cohen also wrote that "only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman" would have argued with Colin Powell's 2003 UN presentation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action:

The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things have changed. For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this. Maybe the Supreme Court will recognize this.

First of all, affirmative action was never solely about racism--though the media have long made race their primary consideration in how they talk about the issue.

But to Cohen's actual, umm, "point": Every poll shows that race is irrelevant? Too bad for Cohen that the Washington Post recently asked people about this in a poll (1/13-16/09):

"How big a problem is racism in our society today? Is it a big problem, somewhat of a problem, a small problem or not a problem at all?"

A Big Problem: 26%
Somewhat of a Problem: 48%
A Small Problem: 22%
Not a Problem:  4%

Richard Cohen appears to be in the 4 percent who don't think that racism is at all a problem anymore.  The other 96 percent of us wish him luck in his journey back to the real world.

A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding.  What's striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive--it met their post-September 11 psychological needs.

Kiriakou told ABC (12/10/07): "At the time I was so angry and  I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States that I felt it was the only thing we could do."

He sounds a lot like Cohen writing in the Post (4/28/09):

The horror of September 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station--the memorials still fresh--without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day--yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance--and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.

It doesn't sound like it's about making America safer, though, does it?  It sounds like it's about taking care of Richard Cohen's deep psychic wounds.  Does torture work--to make newspaper pundits feel better?  That seems to be the real question on the table.

In his column today, Washington Post's Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable.  His real point is this:

Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works--sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works. I refer you to the 1995 interrogation by Philippine authorities of Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda terrorist who served up extremely useful information about a plot to blow up airliners when he was told that he was about to be turned over to Israel's Mossad. As George Orwell suggested in 1984, everyone has his own idea of torture.

If the threat of torture works--if it has worked at least once--then it follows that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves. This is also the position of Dick Cheney, who can sometimes be both, but in this, at least, he has some support.

If something "sometimes or rarely" works, that's hardly a testament to its effectiveness. As others with more first-hand knowledge of the use of torture than Richard Cohen have argued, torture doesn't produce reliable information.

What Cohen seems to be saying the mere threat of torture cracked this one case. First of all, it would seem that Murad was, in fact, tortured. But whether it was torture or threat of torture was really what "worked" is not really the question; as Washington Post writer Lorraine Adams wrote in a review of an Alan Dershowitz book:

What solved the case, court records show, was that Murad was stupid enough to have started a fire from the explosives, which brought police. In the apartment, they found a computer that detailed the plot, which entailed using liquid explosives to simultaneously destroy 12 commercial planes carrying Americans. Police easily confiscated the explosives in the apartment; the computer supplied names and numbers for the plotters. All were arrested and convicted.

Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture, reached a similar conclusion:

As the Washington Post has reported, Manila police got all their important information from Murad in the first few minutes when they seized his laptop with the entire bomb plot. All the supposed details gained from the 67 days of incessant beatings, spiced by techniques like cigarettes to the genitals, were, as one Filipino officer testified in a New York court, fabrications fed to Murad by Philippine police.

In other words, it would seem that Richard Cohen is using an example of torture not working to argue that torture might, in theory, work.

The more puzzling leap of faith, though, comes when Cohen writes that the "torture works" theory has defenders in high places: "Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves." Well, of course they can. There are "some" scientists who don't believe in climate change. Does the fact that they have that opinion mean that they're right?

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/17/09) weighs in on Richard Cohen's defense of Jim Cramer, accusing the Washington Post columnist of "continuing the stream of excuses for the financial media's failure to warn of the economic crisis." Baker sees "an effort to imply that the issues involved were very complex" lying "at the center of the cover-up for the media's incompetence."

Baker's reply to the Cohen claim that "there was not much they [financial reporters] could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at":

This is pathetic. Financial reporters did not need subpoena power, they did not need access to AIG's books, they did not even need to know what a credit default swap was. They just needed to know arithmetic.

The basic story is as simple as you can possible have. Nationwide house prices tracked inflation for 100 years from 1895 to 1995. In the decade from 1996 to 2006, they rose by more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation, creating more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.

There was no remotely plausible explanation for this increase in house prices on either the supply-side or the demand side. If there is a huge divergence from a 100-year long trend, with no explanation based on fundamentals, how could it be anything over than a bubble?

And who could have thought that the country could lose $8 trillion in housing wealth ($110,000 for every homeowner) without enormous consequences for the economy?

While assuring us that "exposing the corruption in the financial industry that supported the growth in the bubble...would have been a great public service," Baker insists that reporters "just needed to know arithmetic and have some common sense." His suggestion going forward: "How about a good news story explaining that even though nearly all economists completely failed to see the coming of the biggest economic disaster in their lifetime, none of them will suffer any consequences in their career? None will get fired and almost none of them will even miss a promotion. Reporting on the non-accountability of economists would be a very good story for financial reporters."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

Many observers praised the Daily Show's Jon Stewart for his hard-hitting interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. Columnist Richard Cohen (Washington Post, 3/17/09) begs to differ.

Actually, Stewart was "wrong" to go after Cramer, Cohen wrote--it was a "cheap shot at business media." His main argument is that Stewart charged that Cramer "knew all the time what was happening" at game-playing financial companies, but Cohen has a list of CEOs at such firms who lost money on their own company's stock, so even they must not have known what was really going on: "When someone puts his money where his mouth is, you have to pay attention. The big shots believed." It's a variation on the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" argument: If they're now poor, they must be innocent.

There are several things wrong with this line of reasoning. For one, it's really not so easy to take the money and run--or else Bernie Madoff would have made off with more of the $65 billion he stole. For companies slightly more legitimate than Madoff's, there are disclosure requirements that make a CEOs cashing in their stock the surest way to send the value of that stock hurtling toward zero.

And it's unlikely that any of Cohen's hard-luck moguls are actually now in the poor house. One of them, Citicorp's Sanford Weill, is still on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in the world, though his net worth has fallen from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion. That's still more than the GDP of 34 countries.

Cohen provides a helpful link to a story about his exhibit A, AIG's Maurice Greenberg, who lost a billion in stock. That piece ends with this:

Greenberg was forced out of AIG during a controversy in 2005 when the company restated its financial statements for the previous five years, acknowledging accounting improprieties including "improper or inappropriate transactions."

New York regulators later accused AIG, Greenberg and the company's former chief financial officer of orchestrating an accounting scheme that made AIG's financial picture appear brighter than it was, misleading both investors and regulators.

Yeah, in 2005.  Not actually very good evidence for Cohen's "how could anyone have known?" case.

Passing over Cohen's subsidiary argument that even Cohen himself was fooled by AIG, so what chance did Cramer have, what comes through most strongly in Cohen's column is his contempt for journalism:

The role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at.

As Cohen later spells out, this is a variation of the don't-blame-the-media argument about the Iraq War.  The fact is, there were exceptional journalists who pointed out the many holes in the WMD case before the invasion, and there were some economists who recognized that a financial system based on a housing bubble was a house of cards. The fact that Cohen didn't pay attention to these people doesn't mean they don't exist.

Cohen should note that Stewart's point about Cramer knowing that the market was manipulated was based on footage he had gathered of Cramer boasting about how easy it was for him, Cramer, to manipulate the market.  And Stewart didn't need subpoena power to get it.

Looking back on the good old days when we all supported torture, Richard Cohen writes today in the Washington Post (1/27/09):

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called September 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Back then, a Post poll gave George W. Bush an approval rating of 92 percent, which meant that almost no one thought he was on the wrong course. At the same time, questions about the viability of torture were very much in the air.  Alan Dershowitz was suggesting the creation of torture warrants--permission from a court to, in effect, break some bones....

The thoughtful Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter mulled the legality, the morality and the efficacy of torture.... Alter's essay created quite a stir--and to his considerable surprise, a lot of whispered support from liberals....  The conventional wisdom that torture never works--so counterintuitive as to be an absurdity--was not yet doctrine.

And so, Cohen concludes:

We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done -- back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

Fortunately, we don't have to take Cohen's word for what the past was like; thanks to the Web, we can visit it ourselves.  And when we do so we find that while it's true that a lot of Cohen's friends in the "liberal media" were keen on torturing people, the general public was much less so.  In a poll conducted by Investors Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor on November 7-11, 2001, 32 percent of the public said that they could "envision a scenario" in which they would support "government-sanctioned torture of suspects held in the U.S. or abroad"; 66 percent said they could not envision such a scenario.

Cohen's column is headlined "Torture? Prosecute Us, Too," which is evidently meant to suggest the absurdity of prosecuting anyone for torture.  Actually, though, the Nuremberg Trials established that advocacy of crimes against humanity is itself a crime against humanity.  And systematic torture is counted as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court.  Pundits ought to think long and hard about this before they dash off another 700 words about ticking time bombs.