Steve Coll's Blog, page 11

The Case of Faisal Shahzad

Providing an accurate e-mail address to the seller of a vehicle you intend to use as a murder weapon is the sort of mistake that might get a person's membership card pulled down at the terrorist union hall. No doubt Faisal Shahzad, the man arrested in the Times Square car bomb case, is having a bad day. It will probably get worse if he spends time in his holding cell reflecting on the trail of breadcrumbs he apparently left behind while planning what the evidence available so far suggests...

Terrorism

A few years ago, I was at an event with New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. The conversation turned to why terrorist groups, particularly those associated with Al Qaeda, had not carried out any attacks inside the United States since September 11th. Kelly noted that terrorist groups have a limited amount of talent and resources. They know that it can be very difficult for the United States to locate them in advance of an attack. But they also know that the strength of American...

Goldman’s Culpability

In the days since the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit charging Goldman Sachs with disclosure violations involving securities used to make various bets against the housing market circa 2007, there has been an extraordinary amount of armchair lawyering in press about the case, much of it casting doubt on the S.E.C.’s decision to file charges. Internal Goldman e-mails released separately by congressional investigators have been parsed and analyzed similarly. The press seems to be in a hurried search for some clearly marked borderline between that which is unethical/reprehensible/unattractive and that which is truly felonious. To be fair, if such a painted line existed in securities law, it might be relevant to the debate about financial-reform legislation now before Congress. It doesn’t, however. In many borderline cases involving financial fraud, the crime ultimately lies in the eye of a beholding jury or judge.

Fanning the press commentary are many executives in the financial-services industry whose livelihoods and freedom depend on the existence of a relatively high bar for felony indictments in securities-law cases. Andrew Ross Sorkin has a column in the Times today containing perhaps the most distended form of such commentary yet, offered by the hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin. He called the S.E.C.’s case against Goldman “childish.” He continued, “I think that the disclosure around one transaction being the justification to vilify Goldman Sachs or to pass regulatory reform is just incredible.”

Childish? I suppose it is not a felony for a billionaire to be deeply tone deaf. Sorkin noted that Griffin spoke from an annual Beverly Hills investment conference, once known as the “Predator’s Ball,” organized by the former Drexel Burnham Lambert junk-bond banker Michael Milken, who pleaded guilty to securities charges more than two decades back and was sentenced initially to ten years in prison. (He was released after serving less than two years.)

Anyone who has followed securities-fraud litigation or the S.E.C. in any detail will be cautious about remarks like Griffin’s. I have no idea whether the S.E.C.’s case will prove strong enough to prevail. I do know that its enforcement staff will have already taken many depositions, gathered many undisclosed documents, heard many contrary arguments from Goldman lawyers, and endured intensive scrutiny within the Commission before recommending that its charges be brought. The idea that they did so cavalierly is not credible. The idea that non-lawyers, or even lawyers, who have no access to the actual evidence in the case, can make a confident judgment about its likelihood of success is almost as dubious.

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Goldman's Culpability

In the days since the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit charging Goldman Sachs with disclosure violations involving securities used to make various bets against the housing market circa 2007, there has been an extraordinary amount of armchair lawyering in press about the case, much of it casting doubt on the S.E.C.'s decision to file charges. Internal Goldman e-mails released separately by congressional investigators have been parsed and analyzed similarly. The press...

Improvised Explosive Devices: Bonus Webby Edition

We had an event yesterday at New America to launch a research paper by Alec Barker entitled "Improvised Explosive Devices in Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, 2002-2009" (pdf). Also participating was Montgomery Meigs, the retired general who ran the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization during the worst days of the Iraq war, and whose work in reducing the effectiveness of the statistically average I.E.D. by a factor of six was chronicled in a terrific...

Kandahar

As even casual followers of the Afghan war will know, its next big campaign will take place in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, describes Kandahar as being "in this time frame … as critical in Afghanistan as Baghdad was in Iraq in the surge, writ large." Something like half or more of the thirty thousand additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama will take part in the campaign. The basic idea is that if...

Tourist Snaps

Three photos from yesterday's battlefield tourism in southern Afghanistan, now that I've found a laptop connection and five minutes to rub together.

Journalists deploying, while suppressing their Vietnam (or Vietnam movie-watching) flashbacks. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, sharing a carpet with Marja's elders. A battalion of the Fourth Infantry Division, known as the 1-12, which took casualties in the Fort Hood shootings as its soldiers prepared to deploy to Afghanistan, here at its...

Battlefield Tourist

Greetings from en route to Marjah. I'm out in Afghanistan for a spell to do some reporting for the magazine. I thought I would file some posts as I go along, while trying to avoid subjects that might overlap with my prospective print piece—hard to sort out how to do that with precision, but I'll try.

To reach Kabul and beyond I hitched a ride with the press pool accompanying Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, who is in Afghanistan for about forty-eight hours. The pool includes me...