From The Sunday London Times
Barack Obama means change – except on torture
A bid to carry on prosecuting a man who had been tortured under Bush even though his tormentors knew him to be innocent chills the marrow
Andrew Sullivan
There is no longer any doubt that torture was used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay under George W Bush. The president’s own appointee who headed the military commissions, Susan Crawford, said so in January this year.
The torture was not of the sadistic comic-book type; it was rather the torture that destroys the soul and the body without leaving any physical marks: countless days and nights of sleep deprivation, freezing or heating naked prisoners, shackling and tying them in stress positions, taking people to the edge of dying by drowning, sexual abuse. The Bush administration argued that these were the only ways to get vital intelligence and that they were carried out only on the “worst of the worst”. And so the debate is about whether torture is moral and whether it works.
There is, however, another danger of using torture, especially against people captured in distant places with scarcely any evidence against them: torture risks becoming the means to determine guilt or innocence. And if you have captured an innocent man and tortured him only to find he is innocent after all, what do you do then? Does Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, admit that many of these victims were not “the worst of the worst” but simply innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and tortured nonetheless?
Until now, this scenario has only been a fear. Now we know it was a reality. An astonishing, and largely ignored, judicial ruling issued on September 17 in the case of one Fouad al-Rabiah told us that the US government knowingly tortured an innocent man to procure a false confession.
We know that an American interrogator, operating under the authority of the US government, said the following words to a detainee: “There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”
That’s from page 41 of the court memorandum and order, releasing al-Rabiah. Al-Rabiah was captured in Pakistan in December 2001. He had an unlikely history for a top Al-Qaeda commander and strategist. He had spent 20 years at a desk job for Kuwait Airways. As the journalist Andy Worthington has painstakingly reported — and the court reiterated — he was also a humanitarian volunteer for Muslim refugees. Yet informants had described him as an Al-Qaeda supporter and confidant of Osama Bin Laden, and before he knew what was happening to him, he was whisked away to Guantanamo.
The informants’ accounts were riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted that “the only consistency with respect to [these] allegations is that they repeatedly change over time”. The one incriminating statement was given by another inmate after he had been subjected to sleep deprivation and coercion. So the only option left to prove that al-Rabiah had not been captured by mistake was his own confession.
The interrogators’ notes, forced into the open by the court, gave the game away. In the judge’s words, although “al-Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him”, they “never believed his confessions, based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports”. In fact, “the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that alRabiah should not have been detained”.
That CIA analyst, moreover, had told the justice department this was his judgment. Rather than withdraw the prosecution, however, the decision was made to get al-Rabiah to confess. He didn’t and wouldn’t. So he was subject to sleep deprivation and other unspecified “interrogation techniques” that led him to suffer “from serious depression, losing weight in a substantial way, and very stressed because of the constant moves, deprived of sleep and worried about the consequences for his children”.
Whatever the techniques applied to him, the outcome was a breakthrough for the US government. It resulted, in the judge’s words, in al-Rabiah’s “confession that he met with Osama Bin Laden, continued with his confession that he undertook a leadership role in Tora Bora, and repeated itself ... with respect to ‘evidence’ that the government has not even attempted to rely on as reliable or credible”.
The ruling also reveals that during the coercion, al-Rabiah began to make contradictory confessions; and when he tried to retract them, he was punished: “As a result, al-Rabiah’s interrogators began using abusive techniques that violated the Army Field Manual and the 1949 Geneva Conventions ... The first of these techniques included threats of rendition to places where al-Rabiah would either be tortured and/or would never be found.”
This scenario did not take place in communist China or Ahmadinejad’s Iran. It took place under the authority of the United States of America. One individual, we now know for sure, was tortured by interrogators who knew he was innocent but were determined to save face. Mercifully, the US is not China or Iran and an independent judiciary, after years of this man’s illegal imprisonment and torture, finally provided him with the writ of habeas corpus. Shockingly, although Barack Obama’s justice department knew the details of this case, it persisted with the Bush administration’s attempt to prosecute him. Last week, the Obama administration also backed a legal provision to withhold permanently all unreleased photographic evidence of torture in sites and prisons far away from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And some of us believed we were voting for change.
After writing about this case on my blog, a justice department trial lawyer wrote me an e-mail. In part it read: “The conclusion drawn by each of my colleagues — some of whom are liberal Democrats, some of whom are conservative, law-and-order Republicans — is, to a person, that the detention and interrogation programmes the United States implemented in the months and years following 9/11 is not only a complete abrogation and violation of international law and, in many cases, federal law — it is also fundamentally immoral.
“ We also agree that the al-Rabiah case is by far the most egregious yet to come to light. To repeat: yet to come to light. I can only guess that there are other, far worse cases.”
Well, we will at some point find out.

www.andrewsullivan.com

From The London Sunday Times
The clouds part but underlying problems remain
Irwin Stelzer: American Account
The letter W is back on some agendas, and sending tremors through the business community — especially as it seems to be displacing V in the discourse of economy-watchers.
Recall, the alphabet has been put to the service of economists. A V recovery is one in which a sharp drop is followed by an equally sharp rebound. A U is a drop followed by a period in which the economy bumps along the bottom, and then recovers. An L is worse: a precipitous drop, followed by a long period of stagnation. And the dreaded W is worst of all. The economy plunges, then recovers, luring investors into the market and businessmen into new investments, only to drop again before a final recovery, with substantial losses for the prematurely optimistic.
The optimism engendered by soaring share prices in the quarter just ended came to a screeching halt when the Department of Labor issued a jobs report so grim that the Lindsey Group consultancy warned its clients not to read it “without a bottle of Prozac handy”. Shortly thereafter Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, told a congressional committee that even if the economy grows at a 3% annual rate, the unemployment rate would remain above 9% by the end of 2010. In the view of some observers, he is being optimistic.
A spate of bad news followed. Factory orders down year-on-year by some 20%;
a mortgage market functioning only because the government is guaranteeing about 80% of loans written; consumer credit so tight that it is falling at the fastest rate since the crisis began two years ago, and credit increasingly unavailable to small businesses; Treasury secretary Tim Geithner forced to be economical with the truth, lest the dollar collapse, and proclaim that a strong dollar is “very important to this country”; Goldman Sachs predicting that high unemployment will drive down wages and purchasing power.
And that’s only in the short term. Longer term, the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is under threat; America is leading the way towards growth-stifling protectionism; and economic and political power is passing from America to China, India and other emerging nations. Americans are being told to become accustomed to a sharply reduced role in the world.
It all adds up to a W. Or does it? Not certainly. For one thing, the service sector, which accounts for about 80% of American economic activity, has moved into growth territory. The Institute for Supply Management’s index of non-manufacturing activity has passed the 50 mark, meaning that the sector is growing for the first time this year — not by a lot, but growing nevertheless. So is the manufacturing sector, with an index above 50 for the second consecutive month. Equally important, the growth is occurring in 13 of the 18 manufacturing industries covered by the ISM survey.
For another, orders for business equipment are picking up, perhaps because businesses see signs that demand is picking up, and have cash to spend. Business Week reports that non-financial companies have surplus cash flow of $156 billion, “a surfeit that allows companies to finance all of their current outlays for equipment and construction without borrowing”. With the exception of one year, “that is the largest surplus on record”.
Then there is housing. Prices are up, as is the index of pending sales (not yet completed), the latter for the seventh consecutive month. Consumer spending is showing a bit of life, even excluding the temporary jump in car sales arising from the cash-for-clunkers programme that doled out $4,500 of taxpayer money to anyone trading in a gas guzzler for a more fuel-efficient car.
Add to this an easing of credit markets. The default rate of speculative-grade companies has dropped for the first time this year and the premium that riskier corporate borrowers have to pay over safer US Treasuries has fallen by half. “Even cash-strapped companies have been able to refinance,” reports the Financial Times.
Perhaps most important of all is the inventory picture because it is a forerunner of economic activity and the indicator most watched by White House economists. Many companies have so reduced their stocks of materials and goods that they have no choice but to restock. Whether this trend will prove durable, setting off a restocking boom, is difficult to say. Some businessmen tell me it is. Others — these are in the W camp — say it isn’t. In Britain, for example, the Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy says: “We are past the low point. Things are getting better.” Marks & Spencer’s Sir Stuart Rose doesn’t think so. Nor does America’s Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE and a W man to his core.
Unfortunately, even if things are improving — and I prefer V for victory to W for worry — the fundamental cause of recent financial problems remains unaddressed. Low interest rates fuelled unsustainable debt. Those low rates were the result of China’s need to make money from the pile of dollars it earns from its exports. It did this by buying Treasury IOUs, keeping their price up and their rates down. China’s exports, in turn, were fuelled by its undervalued currency. That policy remains unchanged. So do trade imbalances. Which means the dollar probably has further to fall if imports to America are to become more expensive, and exports of American products more competitive.
There is no indication that the administration finds a dollar decline undesirable, if it is gradual, despite Geithner’s strong-dollar statement. It is the possibility of a dollar collapse that worries some at the White House. The same fear among investors has triggered a flight to gold. Such a development would force up interest rates, aborting the recovery. Obama has no desire to face the electorate in 2012 with high inflation and interest rates soaring, a real possibility if he adds to the downward pressure on the dollar by increasing the red ink already pouring over the nation’s ledgers, as frightened congressional Democrats are demanding.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute
stelzer@aol.com

Streetscapes Cosmopolitan Hotel
The Granddaddy of Them All
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
IT’S a classic railroad hotel, although the railroad left more than a century ago. These days, the 1845 Cosmopolitan Hotel, at Chambers Street and West Broadway, caters to a subway crowd, its Web site listing rooms for $149 for budget-minded tourists.
Possibly New York’s oldest hotel structure, it has been loved to death, with successive alterations using the original neo-Gothic style, each one meant to match the original building. Now another change is in the offing, with a different tack.
Chambers and nearby streets attracted houses for the gentry around the time City Hall was completed two blocks away in 1812. Six years later, Isaac Jones Jr. and his wife, Mary, built a house at 122 Chambers Street, said to have been the first in New York to have a bathtub.
These families began departing within a few decades as commerce took over the area, and in 1844-45 James Boorman, a merchant of tobacco, Madeira, ironwork and other goods, built a boarding house at the northeast corner of Chambers and West Broadway. Boorman was also a founder of the new Hudson River Railroad, then about to build its southerly depot across the street, with tracks running up Hudson Street and along the Hudson River.
A print from 1851 at the Museum of the City of New York shows the boarding house to be a four-story red brick structure, its second floor ringed by a lacy, New Orleans-style iron balcony, the windows and cornice with neo-Gothic trim. The neo-Gothic flourished in this period, but survivors are now unusual.
The print bears the legend “Frederick Hotel,” although it appears that nobody but the printmaker knew it by that name. By 1854 it was definitely operating as a hotel, the Girard House.
In the late 1860s, the Girard was raised to six stories with a small attic in the same neo-Gothic style, even though it was long out of fashion, and renamed the Cosmopolitan. Almost simultaneously the railroad moved its depot farther uptown, and the Cosmopolitan lost its railroad trade.
But in 1894, the hotel was still important enough for the Massachusetts merchant Benjamin Low, described by The New York Times as “one of the richest men in Gloucester,” to take a room there. He was in New York to inspect a cargo of Newfoundland herring, but was found dying on the ground on West Street, perhaps of natural causes, his pockets empty.
No later than the turn of the century the red brick had been painted light yellow or beige.
The Cosmopolitan continued as a business hotel, and in 1897 a group of ticket brokers gathered there to protest a new anti-scalping law. It had been their practice to buy up railroad tickets and sell them to desperate travelers.
In July 1923, a Times reporter found a group of elderly traveling salesmen sitting outside complaining that the Fourth of July had been sanitized. One said that “it’s safe and sane all right, but it’s mighty tame” — not at all as celebrated in his youth, by firing muskets and shotguns in the air.
The 1930 census found a marine engineer, a boiler maker, a tea mixer and a radio operator living there; all occupations were typical of the lower West Side. Six years later an advertisement in The Times offered rooms at $4 per week, while the typical hotel charged $9 or $10.
Although a 1940 photograph shows a large sign, “Families Accommodated,” by the 1960s the Cosmopolitan, now known as the Bond, had evolved into an S.R.O., or single room occupancy residence. In 1967, The Times reported that a drifter who lived there had been arrested for murder after stabbing a customer in a store downstairs in a dispute over 2 cents.
The Bond name was dropped, apparently to distance the place from its unsavory reputation, and the hotel became the Cosmopolitan again. In 1989 a seventh floor was added, also in the Gothic style, and painted to match the rest of the building, the intent being to make it look as if it had always been there.
Now the Do-Bar Hotel Corporation, including the veteran investor Jay Wartski, has retained Franke, Gottsegen, Cox to design yet another addition, this one an annex along West Broadway at the Reade Street end of the lot. The site is within the TriBeCa South Historic District, and the architects have avoided replicating the Gothic format yet again — imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery in formal preservation practice.
Instead, the firm has prepared drawings for a handsome, retiring six-story brick building, quite different from the old structure, and promising to add a little bounce to its old neighbor by sheer contrast. The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the addition last month.
Matthew Gottsegen, a partner, says that almost nothing original is left inside the old hotel, which alterations have turned into a labyrinth.
As for the exterior, architecture repeatedly altered in various modes often becomes richly layered in nuance, like an old brownstone with an Edwardian rooftop and an Art Deco storefront. But the Cosmopolitan was long ago swamped by good intentions.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

From The London Times
Israeli Foreign Minister rules out Palestinian peace deal
James Hider in Jerusalem
Israel’s Foreign Minister has ruled out any permanent peace deal for years to come, even as the US envoy to the region called for a swift resumption of peace talks.
Instead of pushing for a final status agreement that would create a Palestinian state, Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, said that the two sides should aim for a series of interim accords.
“What is possible to reach is a long-term intermediate agreement ... that leaves the tough issues for a much later stage,” Mr Lieberman said before the latest visit by George Mitchell, the US envoy appointed this year by President Obama.
Those issues include the future status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and final borders — all thorny topics that have derailed peace talks over the past 16 years.
“I will tell [Mr Mitchell] clearly, there are many conflicts in the world that haven’t reached a comprehensive solution and people learnt to live with it,” Mr Lieberman said. The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has said that it is willing to agree to a long-term ceasefire but that it will not recognise Israel as a state.
Mr Lieberman’s comments were at odds with the message that Mr Mitchell — a veteran negotiator who helped to steer Northern Ireland to peace — brought from the Washington administration, which is already stinging from a recent Israeli snub to its call for a total freeze on Jewish settlement-building in the West Bank. Mr Lieberman himself lives in one of those settlements.
Mr Mitchell tried to strike a determined, upbeat note on his arrival in Israel, despite rising tensions in Jerusalem and reports by the Israeli anti-settlement group, Peace Now, that more settlements are being laid out in the Palestinian territories. “We’re going to continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” he said before meeting Shimon Peres, the Israeli President, who emphasised the growing urgency of the situation.
“I think that expectations are becoming higher and the time is becoming shorter,” Mr Peres said. “There are quite a few elements that would like to kill prospects for peace.”
The most dire warning came from King Abdullah of Jordan, whose country is one of only two Arab states to have signed peace deals with Israel. A staunch ally of the United States, the king told the Israeli daily Haaretz that rising tensions between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem and the continued construction of settlements were a threat to regional stability.
“We are sliding back into the darkness,” he said. “Is Israel going to be fortress Israel or is it going to be part of the neighbourhood? Because if there is no two-state solution, what future do we all have together?”
Tensions in Jerusalem’s historic Old City have steadily increased for the past week; Israeli police restricted access to Muslim worshippers while thousands of Jewish and Christians poured into the area for religious ceremonies. Palestinian youths have fought running skirmishes with Israeli police, who also arrested an Israeli Arab Islamic Party leader on charges of inciting violence.
King Abdullah warned that Jerusalem was “a tinderbox that will have a major flashpoint throughout the Islamic world.” Even as Mr Mitchell tried to persuade Israelis and Palestinians to return to the bargaining table, efforts to sign a reconciliation agreement between the two main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, were again strained to breaking point.
After more than a year of Egyptian-brokered talks, the two rivals had agreed to meet next week to sign a pact. Hamas said yesterday, though, that it had asked Egypt to postpone the meeting in protest at the failure by Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to endorse a UN report into the Gaza war this year which found both Israel and Hamas guilty of war crimes.
Aides to Mr Abbas have admitted that the delay was a diplomatic mistake that had cost him support. Palestinian officials said that they came under US pressure not to back the report after Israel said that such action would jeopardise the future of peace talks.

From The London Times
The shadow of female sex abusers
The tragic Little Ted’s nursery case has forced us to face an unfortunate truth: that women use children for sex too
Penny Marshall
Susannah Faithfull has been haunted by her mother’s image for all of her adult life. She sees her every time she looks in the mirror, for she has inherited her mother’s startling blue eyes. But every time Susannah is reminded of her mother, she is reminded of a childhood full of trauma. She was systematically sexually abused by her mother; repeatedly hurt by the woman she looked to first for her security, care and support.
“I used to hide in the cupboard under the stairs,” she tells me, explaining that was the only place that she felt safe at home. “My nana had a chenille-type table cloth there and I used to hide underneath it. When my mum came back from work she’d be shouting for me.”
Susannah now runs the Aurora Health Foundation, a treatment centre for victims — or survivors, as some like to be known — of child sex abuse. Her testimony is part of my Radio 4 documentary, Female Sexual Abuse: Breaking the Silence, which airs tonight.
Her abuse began when Susannah was very small and her father had left the household. It continued until she herself left home at 16, and throughout all that time her mother forced her to share a bedroom with her, and a double bed. When she told her father about the abuse during a visit, he didn’t believe her.
“The more I cried, the worse it would be. We used to have this rose wallpaper and I used to just look at the roses and wish that I was dead. How can the mother that gave birth to you do those things to you?”
Last week when two women, both of them mothers, pleaded guilty to charges of serious sexual abuse in a Bristol court room, it forced us to confront the reality that Susannah has known for most of her 54 years: that women can and sometimes do sexually abuse the children in their care.
It’s a reality that has always been thought to be very rare. There are a very small number of convictions (2 per cent of all sexual crimes, according to the Ministry of Justice). But when the cases occur they upset us greatly because they challenge every comforting and accepted image we have of women and of mothers in particular.
So just how rare an occurrence is it? The statistics are hard to pin down and some think they may not tell the whole story. We do know that there are now about 50 women held in custody for sexual offences against children, a tiny fraction of the total. We also know that there are some women on the sex offenders register, although we don’t know how many because the Home Office doesn’t keep details of gender.
We also know that those working in the field believe it is an underreported crime because the stigma associated with it prevents victims coming forward.
Detective Superintendent Graham Hill works at CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency. He heads the Behavioural Therapy Unit and interviews female sex offenders. He believes that as many as one in five of all cases of sexual abuse may involve female perpetrators. “I don’t think there’s a police force in the country that isn’t currently dealing with a female child sex offender,” he tells me, adding that this was just the “tip of the iceberg”.
According to Hill, ten or fifteen years ago most crimes involving accusations of child sexual abuse that the police dealt with were always examined on the premise that the man was the guilty party.
“It was always the case that the female in the family was treated as a potential witness,” he says. “One of our messages to law enforcement officers now is that, when you investigate a serious sexual offence against a child, you should always look at how complicit the female is in that kind of offending.”
And not always just complicity. Hill believes that the public’s perception that female sex offenders usually operate alongside a controlling and manipulative man is often false. He dismisses that stereotypical image as a societal cliché born out of a reluctance to believe that a woman could act so heinously alone and for her own sexual gratification.
“The public’s perception is coloured by the high-profile crimes, the sort of duos in the press. And the thought is that a bad man and a bad woman equal a perfect storm. But what I’m looking at at this centre are women who do have a sexual interest in children in their own right. We even have some examples where women have brought men into their lives just to facilitate sex with their children.”
Bill Jenkins doesn’t know whether his foster mother deliberately took him into care so that she could abuse him. But that was the tragic result and he, like other victims of female child abusers, says that, while he spoke about the abuse at the time, no one investigated it or believed him.
He now runs a company devising and selling software to protect children who are online from harm. He is clearly driven by the memory that no one was there to help and protect him as a child. His abuse consisted of inappropriate touching when his foster mother forced him to bath her. He told me he remembered that the door handles in the bathroom seemed to be quite high. “I suppose that was because I was so small. She was a harsh-looking woman — great big eyes, right in my face. I was always frightened of her.”
That his abuser was a woman makes it more difficult to deal with: “I don’t think any man would feel particularly comfortable admitting that they had been sexually abused by a woman. It is almost like a dark world that has yet to be revealed.”
Dr Michele Elliott knows all about challenging accepted beliefs and trying to expose what Bill calls that “dark world”: she runs Kidscape, a charity set up to support the victims of childhood abuse. In the 1980s, when the issue of sexual abuse by men had only just begun to receive mainstream acknowledgement, Elliott was one of the first in this country to raise the possibility that women could sexually harm children. She was pilloried for it.
“I vividly remember talking at an RAF base about the sexual abuse of children,” she tells me. “I never said anything about women abusing; I didn’t even think that was possible. Afterwards a man came up in his uniform standing very straight and he said, ‘You know, it isn’t only men who do it. My mother did it to me.’ Then he walked out and I was left so shaken that I started to think maybe I should ask questions." Elliott began to talk about the issue on radio and TV and the response was immediate: “It was like a floodgate had opened.”
Among those who contacted her was a woman who had spent 40 years locked in an asylum after reporting that she had been sexually abused at school by a nun. More than 800 victims have now been in touch with her because of female sexual abuse. But Elliott says that she often feels like a lone voice.
“No one really wants to talk about it. But the professionals are the ones who really annoy me. I’d say that 75 per cent of them are in denial — a mental block. I think there are professionals working in the field who have staked a career on a certainty that it is men who do the abusing. They are very threatened by the idea that that might not be true.”
There is also, among professionals, a very real concern that focusing on the abusive behaviour of a very small minority of women causes unnecessary panic in a society that is already stressed about child safety.
But most of those working in this field welcome a chance to break the silence. They believe that the issue has been underresearched and ignored for too long.
Diana Cant is a psychologist who counsels those who have suffered female sexual abuse. While there are still some who do not believe that female sexual abuse is even possible, given that “women don’t have the necessary physical equipment”, Cant has found that there are many forms of abusive behaviour. These can range from watching inappropriate videos and TV programmes to inappropriate exposure, masturbation, stimulation and penetration.
The harm it does is terrible: “If you think about the experience that we have as children, we expect a degree of safety and security and primary care from our mothers. If that expectation is confounded, something at a very primitive level is broken and gets destroyed. The child grows up immediately with a sense of fear and threat. That can lead to an underlying degree of anger, resentment and fury that colours adult life.”
Tragically the children that women most often abuse are the ones closest to them. Women are less likely to be predatory in their criminal behaviour, according to Hill, although the CEOP does come across occasional exceptions.
“Predominantly the female sex offenders we know about offend against children they know,” says Hill. “They offend in a controlled environment. They tend to stay close to home.”
And they often also tend to stay close to the internet. It appears that, while sexual offending most certainly predates the development of the internet and digital photography, the emergence of both have made offending easier. “These people have always had a sexual interest in children,” says Hill. “But the internet validates and fuels those existing beliefs. And it puts them in touch with like-minded people.”
That the internet is affecting the pattern of offending is clear to everyone involved in this area of criminal behaviour.
Sherry Ashfield, from the child protection charity, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, is one of the few people in this country who has spent time talking to convicted female offenders. She has seen an increase in the number of women who use chatrooms to meet like-minded adults and then go on to use the web to share obscene and illegal material.
So what do we know about the women who offend and what motivates them? Through her work at Lucy Faithfull, Ashfield has been able to build up a profile of sorts. Although she stresses that these women do come from a wide range of backgrounds, vary in age and personal histories, “they all have very complex personal histories, often with complex issues and experience of abuse,” she says. “They tend to be women with low selfesteem; women who are socially isolated, and who find dealing with emotion extremely difficult. They tend to have a history of depression.”
Their motivation varies too. Ashfield’s research suggests that while some women will abuse to please or keep a partner, others will abuse to meet their own sexual needs. Some may also abuse for money: “We have had women who have had debts who have met someone on the internet who has suggested that if they would take part in making abusive films or pictures of children they would pay them significant sums,” she says.
There is no simple answer as to why women do it. No clear trigger either — although most difficult of all for me to hear was that for some women caring for a tiny, helpless newborn can trigger abusive behaviour. It’s an awful thought; one of many I’ve had to contend with while investigating this difficult subject.
While making this programme my aunt asked me why, when there is so much beauty in the world, must I explore something so ugly? And here is my answer: everyone I interviewed while making the documentary told me how important it was that we examine this crime and force it into the open.
“It’s an issue that has been locked away for too long and we need to get everyone talking about this problem openly and honestly,” says Hill. “That in itself will be a major step forward in our battle against child sex abuse.”
Hill, like the victims and all those I spoke to during this investigation, agreed to talk because they felt that breaking the silence surrounding the issue of female sexual abuse will better help the victims and better protect our children.
Female Sexual Abuse: Breaking the Silence, tonight on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm. Gwen Adshead, a consultant psychotherapist at Broadmoor, will be confronting attitudes towards violent women in a talk as part of Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival 2009 on Saturday, October 24, at The Sage, Gateshead, 1.30pm. Free tickets on 0191 443 4661 or www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/freethinking

From The Sunday London Times
Muddle on, Mr President, that’s the best option
Andrew Sullivan
This is the second draft of this column. I had to scrap the first one and start over. In this respect — since the column was intended to be about Afghanistan — there is a strange similarity between my predicament and that of Barack Obama.
He too is wondering whether to scrap everything and start over. And he too has a case of decider’s block. This is not the same as paralysis. It is a recognition of the enormous difficulty of figuring out what to do this autumn. And so, last week, in almost a textbook reversal of George W Bush’s decision-making process, the administration wrestled as transparently and as honestly as it could with the enormously vexing bad options he has to choose from.
I have to say I find this process reassuring, as I find General Stanley McChrystal’s candour and good humour the latest indication that he is the right man for the job. If only Bush had allowed his generals this much leeway and this much transparency.
The near-impossible least-worst option remains maddeningly elusive. If I were to approach this from an ideological perspective or simply as a political assessment of Obama’s short-term domestic interests, I could probably come to a swift conclusion. My Tory pessimism tells me that, after a war now as long as Vietnam, this is a hopeless endeavour.
This is not just Afghanistan; it’s Afghanistan after 30 years of violence, mayhem, brutality and anarchy. To believe that America can create a functioning, stable state in that context seems insane to me, and given America’s fiscal crisis and profound public unease at deepening the commitment, a reckless bet on the future with a large increase in troops seems a definition of unwise. It would be, in some ways, the inverse of the Colin Powell doctrine: an open-ended commitment with no clear political goals in a wilderness that has destroyed every army that tried to subdue it. Yes, American forces have learnt a huge amount about counterinsurgency and even a hard-nosed, fat-free force of nature like McChrystal has finally understood that you cannot kill and torture and terrify to victory.
I’ve had some deep worries about McChrystal — most particularly the war crimes in Iraq that took place on his watch — and was appalled that he was allegedly threatening to resign if he didn’t get his way. It seems clear now that he never actually threatened to resign, and those who leaked that non-fact were trying to bounce him as much as the president. His speeches and comments last week in London seem to me to speak very highly of him, just as his bluntness in public and private suggest a man serious about winning this war. On a human level, anyone who can recite whole sections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by heart is all right with me.
I worry, however, that his analysis — “all in or all out” — is not quite right. I’ve relied on this formula myself in the past, but every time I follow through in my head the consequences of either path, I end up feeling deeply uncomfortable. Letting Afghanistan unravel still further, with the ramifications for Pakistan’s knife-edge struggle with Islamism, is a risk few American presidents would willingly take. More important, it is a risk we cannot adequately assess in the context of a bewilderingly fluid set of conflicts in the Middle East.
Here are some of the factors we do not fully understand right now. Pakistan’s military is on the verge of a large offensive against the Taliban. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be. The election in Afghanistan is unresolved, with serious and credible allegations of fraud and the possibility of a run-off or any number of unforeseen developments. Again, we do not know the outcome of that.
Iraq, still home to almost 130,000 US troops, is far from stable and could descend into sectarian anarchy when the US leaves. There are some encouraging signs there — especially Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s inclusion of Sunni groups in his new coalition and an apparent resurgence of national unity as a theme in the current campaign. If Iraqis are finally ready to leave the past behind, if the bloody chaos of the worst years has shifted that national psyche, that would indeed be miraculous. Bloody civil wars can do that (it was true of the English civil war and the 30 years’ war): they can finally persuade a population that compromise really is better than the alternative. Once the general population believes that, and there is a halfway credible national government willing to support them, a pivot can occur. We may not be there in Iraq, but it would be insane, after the immense sacrifice and carnage of the past few years, to dismiss the possibility that disaster could be avoided.
Of course, anyone boldly predicting triumph in Iraq needs his head examined. The truth is: we do not know the outcome of that either, and since the US has limited resources, and has already pummelled the troops beyond what most mortals could tolerate, Obama should be cautious about overextension in very volatile regions. Shifting a large number of troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan is a risk to Iraq and potentially a disastrous strategic call.
So what to do? In a moment of immense unpredictability and fluidity, it seems that muddling through for a while may be an unsatisfying but sensible option. Marc Lynch, as shrewd a foreign policy analyst as exists in Washington, put the case very well last week: “Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn’t quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can and try to figure out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part, which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved counterinsurgency tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an Al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.”
In other words, meticulously prepare for either the McChrystal counterinsurgency surge or a more low-key counterterrorism campaign. But right now, hold on to see what emerges after the results of the imminent Pakistani military campaign in Waziristan and after we know more about the post-election position in Afghanistan.
The time for a deep strategic call may not, in fact, be now. It will, for sure, be soon. But in wars and politics, timing is everything.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
The crash could not kill our faith in capitalism
Irwin Stelzer: American Account
A funny thing happened on the way to the collapse of market capitalism in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn’t. Indeed, in Germany voters relieved Chancellor Angela Merkel of the necessity of cohabiting with a left-wing party, allowing her to form a coalition with a party favouring lower taxes and free markets. And in Pittsburgh leaders representing more than 90% of the world’s GDP convened to figure out how to make markets work better, rather than to hoist the red flag. The workers are to be relieved, not of their chains, but of credit-card terms that are excessively onerous, and helped to retain their private property — their homes.
All of this is contrary to expectations. The communist spectre that Karl Marx confidently predicted would be haunting Europe is instead haunting Europe’s left-wing parties, with even Vladimir Putin seeking to attract investment by re-privatising the firms he snatched. Which raises an interesting question: why haven’t the economic turmoil and rising unemployment led workers to the barricades, instead of to their bankers to renegotiate their mortgages?
It might be because Spain’s leftish government has proved less able to cope with economic collapse than countries with more centrist governments. Or because Britain, with a leftish government, is now the sick man of Europe, its financial sector in intensive care, its recovery likely to be the slowest in Europe, its prime credit rating threatened. Or it might be because left-wing trade unions, greedily demanding their public-sector members be exempted from the pain they want others to share, have lost their credibility and ability to lead a leftward lurch.
All of those factors contribute to the unexpected strength of the right in a world in which a record number of families are being tossed out of their homes, and jobs have been disappearing by the million. But even more important in promoting reform over revolution are three factors: the existence of democratic institutions; the condition of the unemployed; and the set of policies developed to cope with the recession.
Democratic institutions give the aggrieved an outlet for their discontent, and hope that they can change conditions they deem unsatisfactory. Don’t like the way George W Bush has skewed income distribution, toss the Republicans out and elect a man who promises to tax the rich more heavily. Don’t like Gordon Brown’s tax increases, toss him out and hope the Tories mean it when they promise at least to try to lower taxes. Result: angry voters but no rioters, unless one counts the nutters who break windows at McDonald’s or storm banks in the City. Contrast that with China, where the disaffected have no choice but to take to the streets. Result: an estimated 10,000 riots this year protesting against job losses, arbitrary taxes, and corruption.
A second factor explaining the left’s inability to profit from economic suffering is capitalism’s ability to adapt, demonstrated in the Great Depression of the 1930s. While a gaggle of bankers and fiscal conservatives held out for the status quo, Franklin D Roosevelt and his experimenters began to weave a social safety net. In Britain, William Beveridge produced a report setting the stage for a similar, indeed stronger, net. Continental countries recovering from the second world war did the same. So unemployment no longer dooms a worker to close-to-starvation. Yes, civic institutions were able to soften the blow for the unemployed before the safety net was put in place, but they could not cope with pervasive protracted lay-offs.
Also, during this and other recessions, when prices for many items are coming down, the real living standard of those in work actually improves. In America, somewhere between 85% and 90% of workers have kept their jobs, and now see their living costs declining as rents and other prices come down. So the impetus to take to the streets is limited.
Then there are the steps taken by capitalist governments to limit the depth and duration of the downturn. As the economies of most of the big industrial countries imploded, policy went through two phases. The first was triage — do what is necessary to prevent the financial system from collapse. Spend. Guarantee deposits to prevent runs on banks and money funds, bail out big banks, force relatively healthier institutions to take over sicker ones, mix all of this with rhetorical attacks on greedy bankers — the populist spoonful of sugar that made the bailouts go down with the voters — and stop the rot.
Meanwhile, have the central banks dust off their dog-eared copies of Bagehot and inject lots of liquidity by whatever means comes to mind. John Maynard Keynes, meet Milton Friedman for a cordial handshake.
Then came more permanent reform, another round of adapting capitalism to new realities, in this case the malfunctioning of the financial markets. Even Barack Obama’s left-wing administration decided not to scupper the markets but instead to develop rules to relate bankers’ pay more closely to long-term performance; to reduce the chance of implosions by increasing the capital banks must hold, cutting their profits and dividends, but leaving them in private hands; and to channel most stimulus spending through private-sector companies.
This leaves the anti-market crowd little room for manoeuvre as voters seem satisfied with the changes to make capitalism and markets work better and more equitably. At least, so far.
There are exceptions. Australia moved a bit to the left in the last election, but more out of unhappiness with a tired incumbent’s environmental and foreign policy. Americans chose Obama, but he had promised to govern from the centre before swinging left. And for all his rhetorical attacks on greedy bankers and other malefactors of great wealth, sticks to reform of markets rather than their replacement, with healthcare a possible exception. Even in these countries, so far, so good for reformed capitalism. No substitutes accepted.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute
stelzer@aol.com