>> religion allow politics to come in and oppression to come in, so i want to separate totally between religion and state so that the laws are clear. religion is very, very private, even i want to protect children from being indoctrinated when they are young by a certain religion. i am against that. plus. [applause] because i met professors who are

very scientific, and they are with evolution, and they say, yes, evolution, etc., etc. but deep inside them they are religious in a fanatic way because of childhood, so we cannot get rid of childhood, of the psyche because religion is embedded in our psyche since we are children, and that's why i am very much against religious education to children, but the problem is, in fact, what i am saying may be a bit radical, but we need to be radical. we need. we need to be radical. because are we going to have this world going on like that? or should we speak up? it's time. it's time to speak up.

even you can discuss with me, but through this discussion we can reach something because this cannot go on. what's happening in afghanistan, what's happening in egypt, you know, if i come to circumcision, female circumcision, it's increasing since the islamic groups have power under sadat, female circumcision increased, and now we have the percentage of female circumcision in egypt now is 97 percent. and male circumcision also is very harmful, but people are silent. they don't speak about that even here. because it is mentioned in the old testament, there's a verse in the old testament about the

promised land. you know that god said to abe him abraham, i give you the promised land of palestine on condition that you circumcise your boys to cut the foreskin of the boy. so that even in one of my books i said what's the relationship between the invasion of palestine and cutting the foreskin of the penis, you know? this didn't make logic to me. [laughter] you know? so that's part of my studies to the holy books. what i would like to say writers, if we writers do not speak up our mind and pay the price, who will do that? who will do it? >> that might be a good question with which to end. [laughter]

[applause] thank you very much indeed. [applause] >> this lecture was part of the 2009 pen world voices festival of international literature. for more information visit pen.org.

>> the booktv bus traveling the country visiting bookstores, libraries, festivals and authors. here are some of the people and places we've visited.

>> we're here with aidan delgado, what does your title, the sutras of abu ghraib mean? >> for me it represents the lessons or teachings of abu ghraib. for me it's something not only the lessons we learned as a nation, but what i personally learned about myself serving at abu ghraib prison. >> what promised you to -- prompted you to write this book? >> i was reacting to what i perceived as other war novels out there, and i wanted to write a different war story that was about the moral or internal struggle that goes on in being a soldier, especially in the controversial war like the iraq war. >> why did you join the army? >> for a lot of reasons that were nebulous even to me. i think i wasn't fitting in very well at college, it was a bit of a culture shock to me coming from egypt, and i wanted to feel more american, more part of this american project. >> you mentioned that you grew up in egypt. how did that affect your choices

to join the american army? >> well, i joined the american army almost on a whim, but having grown up in egypt strongly familiar with the muslim society, so i think it was a lot easier for me to empathize with and interact with iraqis and, therefore, more difficult for me to fight them or view them as enemies. >> how did your faith affect you in this situation? >> my background is buddhism was probably the driving force what i did in welcome, but it was my buddhist beliefs that reinforced on me that war was wrong. >> how was it perceived in the army when you became a conscientious objector? >> it was extremely difficult. a large proportion of my unit turned their back on me and really refused to interact with me and disliked what i was doing. those who knew me well or

personally stayed loyal and continue to be my friends, but i think a lot of people felt i was standing in judgment of them and saying i was too moral or righteous to do what they were doing, but i think they felt personally judged by me saying the war was wrong. >> how has this affected you in your work today? >> most of my work today is talking about the iraq war, and i deal with it. i continue to deal with scorn sometimes from my unit, sometimes other soldiers or civilians, but it's something i bear because it's so important for americans to see the ugly side of war and the underside of war that i'm willing to take any sort of scorn or scrutiny towards me. >> what are you working on next? >> i'm actually trying to do something totally different, i'm trying to jump tracks and do something in fiction still dealing with some of these issues that i really care about like individual conscious and morality in war, but i want to approach it from a fiction perspective, try and reach a different audience. >> for more information about

the booktv bus, visit our web site at booktv.org/booktv bus. >> financial times reporter gillian tett's new book fool's gold, gives an insider's look at how a team at jpmorgan produced a record in banking. financial times hosted this event at their headquarters in new york city. it's about 50 minutes. >> i realize it's quite an ungodly hour, and you've all got busy lives, so thanks very much. what i want to do is talk about how and why i wrote this book and give you a rough sketch of how the book's constructed as a story and then open it to questions. feel free to chuck at me whatever you want.

the origins of this book really started five years ago when i was working on the lex column with some of you in the room who were there as well, and at one stage i was asked to try and do a quick sketch of what i thought were going to be the key themes going forward for lex to cover. so i started off listing things like telecoms, banks, etc., etc., and then i finally thought, hold on a sec, let's take a step back and look how lex is covering the financial world and corporate world in general and how that matches up to how the financial and corporate world looks. so i try to draw a map of the city of london and compare it to what the stories we were covering and was struck almost immediately by the fact that there was a dig discrepancy, that pretty much all the media was focusing on accessively on the equity markets and writing about foreign exchange, but

there was this big wave of debt and derivatives which was pretty important for the city of london and wall street but which by and large was not being covered. so i started making some noise about that, and one thing led to another, and i moved across to the capital markets team in early 2005. at the stage that wasn't viewed as a particular glory professional move. the ft's been covering the debt markets for many years in a very solid manner. but, you know, the glory positions at the ft were the banking editor, the economics editor, things like lex. it wasn't the capital markets that sat in a little annex quite a long way from the main newsroom, and most of the capital markets coverage was on page 423 of the ft. in fact, one person when i said i was moving across there pointed out to me because i'd just got pregnant, that going to

capital markets would be great for a new mom because it would be quiet, nothing ever happened. [laughter] i kid not. one of the first things i started to do, and this is where the story of the jp morgan group comes into being was to go down to nice to attend the european securitization forum that they held once a year. so i went down and walked into the center in nice, a great big bit of french architecture, and into plush velvet-seated conference room to find out what was going on in the credit world. and that scene that i walked into, i remember it very clearly even today, felt almost immediately like walking into a strange new sort of alien jungle, if you like. there were a bunch of people walking around in smart casual, lots and lots of loafers and

chinos and things, there were lots of people talking about large sums of money but doing so in a language that i, even though i'd been working for a financial paper, did not have the foggiest idea what they were talking about. it was like suddenly hearing a strange new dialect going on that, frankly, was alien ating. and it almost felt familiar, too, because before i became a journalist, i worked as a social anthropologist, and i did a ph.d. out in the himalayas, and when i was doing my field work up in the mountains, i studied in particular wedding rituals. and i used to go into these large very alienating weddings and not have the foggiest idea what was going on, and everybody would be speaking a strange language, and these people would be running around as a discreet tribe, and it was very clear that these rituals perpetuated

the ideology that bound them together, but trying to unpick that language and work out what was going on was a huge challenge. but there's something about me that as an ex-anthropologist that made me intrigued by the tribe down in nice at the forum and on the basis that, well, i could very well learn the language of ceos. i set about trying to unpick what was going on. i did what often journalists will do, and i flipped through all the materials and started reading the biographies of the people from the tribe up on the podium, and i noticed something very strange which was almost all of them appeared to have worked at jpmorgan which back in 2005 was kind of weird because in those days everyone assumed actually it was goldman sachs alumni who ran the world and kept popping up everywhere. but suddenly there were the

jpmorgan alumni all over the place. so i asked my neighbor, why did they all used to work at jpmorgan, and he said a sentence which later ended up changing my life or at least shaping that last year, oh, you've got to understand. there's one thing about the credit world that's absolutely key, they're everywhere, and they created it. now, like many quick cliches, that was not entirely true, and i would stress the morgan guys were not o the only ones who created the modern world of structure, but it turned out to have a lot lot of veracity as i later discovered. i flew back to the fp determined, on the one hand, to unpick this jungle, and on the other hand keep an eye on why and how the morgan alumni had come to play such a key role in

building this world. and for the next two years we labored away, and i would stress we because it was a group of us, not just myself, trying to make sense of this vast, shadowy debt and derivatives world that was growing apace. and, i mean, it's become very fashionable to try and unpick or work out who predicted this crisis and who didn't. i, for one, would not claim to have predicted on the scale of the terrible financial cataclysm that's overwhelmed us, but what was clear to us back in 2005 and 2006 was that not only was there an extraordinary revolution going on in the credit world, but the only thing that was more extraordinary about the scale of revolution going on in the financial system was the fact that it was going almost entirely unnoticed. i mean, there were a few papers like the ft who were writing about this stuff, pretty few. but for the most part, politicians were extremely

uninterested in asking questions about how the financial system worked or asking questions about why credit was so cheap. in fact, the only politician who ever volunteered the word securitization to me before the summer of 2007 was barney frank. over in the u.k. there was absolutely no interest, and for the most part there wasn't much interest in washington east. and i became increasingly concerned because it was clear to me that this scale of activity was not merely occurring or expanding very, very rapidly, but doing so with very little oversight and doing so in a condition where there was almost nobody who was able to understand how the minutiae of the credit world worked, let alone how it all fitted together who was not in some way entirely beholden to the system or who did not have a vested interest in preserving it either because they were being paid by the system, or because they were a regulator and they worried that in rocking the boat too

violently it might all come crumbling down. so then, of course, the summer of 2007 happened and our worst concerns about the excesses that had been building in the financial system became only too true. and in subsequent months in between the sheer maelstrom of trying to cover what was happening as this world fell apart, and many of you were also trying to work out what the hell had happened and what was going to happen and why it had happened, i was very keen to try to find some kind of vehicle to tell the story about how the financial system had spun so badly out of control and perhaps make some pointers about what could be done to try and avoid that in the future. and so i returned back to the original morgan mafia idea that had been bubbling with me ever since i'd gone to the original conference in nice, and the reason why i decided to focus on them was partly because they did, indeed, play a critical

role in developing the credit world, but also because i felt very strongly i wanted to tell the story through the prism of real-life human beings, through an actual story. because as the financial system has imploded over the last couple of years, it's been far too easy for politicians and consumers and even journalists at times to simply resort to cliches, stereotypes, to put everything in black and white terms, to try and make very snap judgments, and sometimes, quite frankly, you have the impression that the financial implosion has happened because a team of evil martians have invaded the world and taken over the system with some kind of dastardly plot to bring down the financial system. and this idea that there were actually human beings inside the financial system who were taking decisions, both the good and bad, and who like any human beings had complicated motives wasn't really about. so i picked up on the jpmorgan

group, and essentially the book divides into three parts. the first part is calls innovation because i try to tell the story about how this group developed a set of ideas starting in the early 1990s which proved absolutely crucial later this decade in terms of taking credit risks which had traditionally been treated as something which stuck to the balance sheets of banks and slicing and dicing it in a way that it could be sold across the system and parceled out to investors all over the world. they initially did that with corporate credit risk, and in fact, for the most part stuck with corporate credit risk, and they did that partly through derivatives. and as they developed these ideas, it came out of a much longer stream of international development that had been occurring in finance really starting in the late 1970s which was all about trying to find ways to transfer risk between banks and between banks

and investors that made the financial system more efficient and effectively they hoped less risky. that was the theory. so there were this body of experimentation and development that took place in the 1990s which was pioneered in the corporate credit derivatives world by the jpmorgan team, but then this part of the decade collided with another stream of intellectual development that was occurring in finance in the mortgage arena, and that was the deal with the slicing and dicing of mortgage debt and the bundling up of mortgages to create structures called cdos, cmos, other alphabet soup. and the whole idea collided with the mortgage ideas i then called perversion because, in essence, what happened was you had these concepts being fed into an era

when credit was very, very cheap, and in a sense there was a tremendous bout of deregulation in the financial system. and these two great intellectual streams collided to terrible effect spawning, essentially, a crazy credit bubble. and the last third of the book is called disaster where i basically tell the story of how that then began to fall apart and in a sense the consequences of the overreaching excesses. but within this structure i followed the story of the jpmorgan group, and there are some terrible, bitter irony in there because although the jpmorgan group who i originally talked about pioneered some of the ideas, they spotted at a very early stage the risk attached to some of those. and when they developed their ideas about credit derivatives and about synthetic ceos, they weren't doing that because they were in any way hoping to blow this system up. on the contrary, they had a technology that they generally

thought was going to make the system much safer, and many regulators genuinely thought it was going to make the system much safer. when he first found out about one of the characters in the book had put together back in 1995, '96, he was so excited he called her up and said, wow, this is going to transform the face of banking, brilliant. there was the sense of having discovered this amazing technology that could only be good, probably a bit like the guys who first split the atom or the guys who, you know, had first done the first genetic dna, whatever. and, of course, these were bankers. they knew about bonuses, they weren't angels, they weren't, you know, charity workers, but the jpmorgan group by and large were not in any way driven by the sense of, you know, let's try and get a big p and l this

year. they were very crowng, and they were excited and swept away by it, it was a very heady period, and they were in a sense caught up by the sense of being pioneers. so the initial impetus behind these ideas was not bad. the problem, though, came really in this part of the decade in the perversion period when in a sense there were a series of hard choices to be made, not just by bankers, but by regulators. and one of the ironies of the story is the jpmorgan group actually spotted some of the dangers inherent of putting mortgages into these structures. they experimented a couple of times with doing mortgage cdos and actually backed away from it because they felt the data wasn't there. five, six years later as the credit bubble became crazier, all the banks began to make similar expeermts and took a different decision. similarly, the jpmorgan group

took a decision to try and get rid of it. fast forward to ubs, citigroup, merrill lynch, and a very different decision was taken. jpmorgan basically cut its credit lines to sivs in 2002, 2003 because they thought those structures didn't make much sense. again, a very different decision was made by other banks, and i say that not because i think jpmorgan were somehow superior beings and geniuses who have ducked every bullet, nothing could be further from the truth. but it's become far too easy to assume that all bankers were stupid, all bankers were risky. and that was not the case. one of the things that had had become clear to me by doing the research is just how different the different banks were in terms of their treatment of some of the risk analysis which brings me to my crucial point, and this is really where we start to come towards the

disaster, if you like, section of the book which is we're now faced with a tremendous choice. clearly, the financial system has imploded to a terrifying degree, and many of the ideologies and principles on which finance has been based in the last three decades stand very discredited. right now we're in a kind of patching and mending phase where the government, geithner and co., are desperately trying to keep the banks alive, keep some kind of, you know, functioning credit system going and to insure that we don't descend into another collapse. but further ahead we have some hard choices to make. we meaning, you know, all of us in the u.k. and america, about how we're going to actually shape the financial system. and it's very tempting now to say let's try and chuck all innovation out a bit like people sometimes say, you know, let's try and ban all prescription drugs or stop an entire product. but if we are going to do that,

then we're going to face a world where the banking system operates on a much slower, to a much lower capacity where credit's much more rationed, where it's going to be a much slower world. so the question i would say i'd leave you with is as we look back over the story of the jpmorgan group, the story of credit innovation, which parts of the innovations can we actually preserve, and which parts can we chuck out? is there a way that we can actually take some of the original ideas about financial innovation that were developed back in the 1990s and actually keep them for the good, or is it the case that all complex finance is bad? i think looking back at the story of some real-life human beings and how they've actually tried to develop those ideas offers one way of showing that it didn't have to be like this. and so i hope that for the future it will also provide a pointer of not just a terrible mistakes -- the terrible mistake

that is the banking industries made, but also some ways we can try and control the risk better going forward. so thank you, and i will take any questions you'd like to chuck at me. >> gillian, there has been a new complacency, it seems to me, in the credit derivatives market, you know, it's going to be exchange traded, it will become more transparent. do you think that all the problems have gone away? are there rules that you think should be adopted? >> in terms of making credit derivatives more transparent or -- >> are there elements of the market that still trouble you? >> i don't think the clearinghouse is an easy, perfect solution. point one. i think there are good cases for extending a clearing platform beyond the credit derivatives world. i mean, this has been discussed

by academics in the u.s., but simply having cdf and clearinghouse and leaving other derivatives off a clearinghouse creates problems. i think that there needs to be more scrutiny and transparency, still, of how cdfs are being used. i mean, the arrival of credit derivatives is changing the way that creditors behave when a company goes into bankruptcy in quite a, quite a radical and potentially untested manner, and i think there needs to be a lot more discussion about how that's changing the way that different, you know, creditors are behaving towards troubled companies. but to think that somehow we've had the clearinghouse and then tick, that's the end of the story i don't think is true at all. >> gillian, you know, you have a character in your book named mark -- >> who's actually sitting behind you. [laughter]