Memo From France: Questions Raised About a Code of Silence

When, for example, Fran?ois Mitterrand was asked by a journalist during his presidency whether it was true that he had a daughter outside his marriage, he replied: “Yes, it’s true. And so what? It’s none of the public’s business.”

The French have been complicit in accepting this sort of secret-keeping: they do not enjoy ugly revelations that could tear apart the social fabric. What shocked them more than the existence of Mr. Mitterrand’s mistress and their daughter was the revelation after his death that the French state had financially supported them and even provided police protection.

Now, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is once again challenging the assumption that the private lives of the rich, famous and powerful are off limits to public scrutiny. That the most serious accusation against Mr. Strauss-Kahn is attempted rape, and not just an indiscretion involving a consensual sexual relationship, only adds to a sense on the part of some people in France that the curtain of privacy needs to be lifted.

“We felt that we were superior to the Americans and the British by upholding the principle of protecting private life,” Pierre Haski, one of France’s leading political commentators and co-founder of the political Web site Rue89, said in an interview. “But we journalists haven’t done our job properly. We were used and abused in keeping secrets. We need to define our role in a more aggressive way — and say that not everything private is private.”

Mr. Haski said he had been wrong to withhold information in the past about French political figures that could have compromised their ability to carry out their duties.

“I knew that when Roland Dumas was foreign minister, he was romantically involved with the daughter of Syria’s defense minister,” he said. “I didn’t write it because it was a matter of his ‘private life.’ I was wrong. It had an impact on France’s foreign policy.”

He also chided himself and the French media for keeping secret that the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal and Fran?ois Hollande, her longtime partner, father of her four children and head of the Socialist Party, were no longer a couple while she was running for president in 2007.

The Strauss-Kahn scandal coincides with shifts in French public life in which the codes had already begun to crack and secrets were being revealed. The personality-driven nature of the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy has created a hunger for personality-driven, tell-all tales. Technology has made it easy to record and film private meetings and embarrassing public encounters on cellphones, contributing to a transparency that had never before existed.

But historically, the French have traded in rumors and secrets, and there are several reasons why they can be passed around in private circles but not put into public discussion.

First, the French have long been accustomed to unconfirmed stories about powerful figures and politicians. This dates from the era of the royal court — when information was power, yet had to be handled carefully. Salacious stories, whether true or not, made for good entertainment.

That makes the French tolerant of other people’s private behavior, especially sexual behavior. Private lives must not be invaded by outsiders. “To live happy, live hidden,” goes the saying by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, the 18th-century poet.

There was no public outcry or journalistic investigation, for example, when Mr. Sarkozy named Frédéric Mitterrand, the nephew of Fran?ois Mitterrand, as minister of culture, even though he had written a memoir describing in graphic detail how he had paid for sex with “boys” in Thailand.

Marine Le Pen, now the leader of the ultra-right National Front, later pushed the matter into public view and called for his resignation, but Mr. Sarkozy supported him and he has kept his job.

Second, politicians in France are not hounded out of office for sexual indiscretions (although violence against women is another matter). Traditionally, a political man who reveals his sexual prowess is proving his vigor: he is showing his constituents that he is fully and physically capable of running the country.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year in which Cécilia Sarkozy became the first lady of France. She became the first lady in 2007, not 2005.

 

Questions of Motives in Bombing in Pakistan

Shortly after the attack early Friday, which was aimed at members of the Frontier Constabulary in the town of Charsadda, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility, saying it was retribution for the American raid on May 2 that killed Bin Laden in the small garrison city of Abbottabad, about 75 miles from the capital.

But the Pakistani Taliban have recently issued several statements claiming responsibility for attacks that they did not initiate, the police officials said, adding that they doubted that the suicide bombing was carried out by the group, or that it was in revenge for the American raid.

They said the attack was instead probably the work of a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban that has been fighting the Pakistani Army in the nearby tribal region of Mohmand, where the army has struggled for two years to subdue the insurgents, who are led by Umar Khalid.

Recently, the army opened what it called the third phase of an offensive, suffering heavy losses.

The insurgents in Mohmand have been able to force the Pakistani Army into a lengthy campaign by seeking refuge in sanctuaries across the border in Kunar Province in Afghanistan. NATO forces in Afghanistan have been helping Pakistan by going after the militants as they escape across the border.

Sikandar Hayat Khan Sherpao, a member of the provincial assembly of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, said the training facility that was attacked, at Shabqadar Fort, had been a frequent target of militants before. “Basically, the threat is from Mohmand Agency, where militants still have pockets and are active,” he said.

“I feel that this attack is not in retaliation to the Abbottabad incident,” he added. “Basically, in the last one and a half months, a new military operation has been started in Mohmand, as the army is going against militants. So this attack can be seen as a retaliation to the Mohmand operation.”

Bashir Bilour, a senior minister in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, told reporters that officials were withholding assessing blame for the deadly attack. “We don’t believe in directly blaming any country without any proof,” he said.

The bombing killed 82 cadets and wounded about 150 people, said Muhammad Akbar Hoti, the commandant of the Frontier Constabulary.

The death toll was expected to rise and could end up being the highest number of law enforcement officials killed in a terrorist attack in recent years, said Liaqat Khan, the police chief in nearby Peshawar. A second bomber may have taken part, he said.

The suicide bomber attacked as the paramilitary soldiers were about to return to their homes for a 10-day leave after six months of training, Mr. Khan said. The bomber was in a car outside the fort when he detonated the explosives about 6 a.m.

The death toll was so high because the men were told to wait for their transportation outside the gates, which provided the opportunity to attack them in a cluster, a provincial security official said.

“There are two occasions in one’s life to celebrate: wedding and going home on vacations at the end of six months of training,” said Mohammad Sardar, in his mid-20s, who was admitted to Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar with a head injury. “So we were all happy, celebrating the occasion, with bedrolls on our heads, thinking of home, when the first explosion occurred, followed by a second.”

The Frontier Constabulary forces who were the target of the suicide attack are not involved in the fighting in Mohmand. They are security guards at checkpoints in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, but their graduation, officials said, provided an accessible target for the militants to drive home their message.

The Frontier Constabulary, which dates from the 1800s, is run by the Pakistani police authorities and has about 70,000 paramilitary soldiers. In addition to patrolling checkpoints, the constabulary provides security at foreign embassies and consulates in major cities. For the sons of many poor families, landing a job in the constabulary is considered a prize.

 

Gift to M.I.T. from Bose Founder Raises Tax Questions

But Amar G. Bose, who received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from M.I.T. and was a professor there from 1956 to 2001, placed some unusual restrictions on the Bose shares he donated to the university.

While the shares give the university majority ownership, they are nonvoting and thus confer no control over the company and its operations. Nor can M.I.T. sell the shares. It will receive dividends from Bose, which Nathaniel W. Nickerson, a spokesman for the university, said in an e-mail would be “used broadly to sustain and advance M.I.T.’s education and research mission.”

While Mr. Nickerson said it was “a very significant gift,” he would not discuss the financial details, including the potential value, saying that Dr. Bose and the Bose Corporation want to “keep details of financial matters confidential.”

M.I.T. officials, in announcing the donation, praised Dr. Bose’s teaching and research. “Amar Bose gives us a great gift today, but he also serves as a superb example for M.I.T. graduates who yearn to cut their own path,” Susan Hockfield, the university’s president, said in an article on its Web site.

Dr. Bose could not be reached for comment.

But some tax experts said the gift and the lack of detail about it raised questions. “We don’t know much about the terms of this gift, but it seems like it clearly falls into a gray area that has been of concern to Congress,” said Dean Zerbe, national managing director of the tax consulting firm Alliantgroup. “The university needs to be more forthcoming about the arrangements behind this donation so we can get a clear picture of what’s going on.”

Roger Colinvaux, an associate law professor at Catholic University and previously a staff member of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, also said the gift raised questions for him. “If the shares truly can’t be sold so that there is some restriction on the university’s ability to transfer stock, then it would suggest it is a contribution of partial interest only, which would not be deductible as a charitable contribution,” said Mr. Colinvaux, who recently published an article in The Florida Tax Review that argues that the laws governing charity are outdated and inadequate. But Erik Dryburgh, a nonprofit lawyer, said he did not see a problem with the gift. “On its face, I don’t see the abuse or potential abuses that were present in some of the more abusive gift transactions we saw in the past,” Mr. Dryburgh said.

Mr. Zerbe and Mr. Colinvaux, though, said the gift brought to mind various tax shelters involving charities that came under scrutiny during the time they worked in Congress.

Mr. Nickerson, however, denied that Dr. Bose’s gift was similar to those tax strategies. “Further, it would not be appropriate for us to discuss the taxes of any of M.I.T.’s donors,” he said.

Most of the tax shelters cited by Mr. Zerbe and Mr. Colinvaux involved an elaborate strategy where privately held companies gave nonvoting shares to a charity and then, after a period of time, bought them back. The transactions attracted the attention of regulators puzzled by why donors would give nonprofit groups nonvoting shares, whose value — and thus potential for tax deduction — is limited by their nonvoting nature.

In 2003, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations looked into such transactions and found that in some cases, they were an elaborate way of using a charity’s tax-exempt status to erase tax liabilities for the other shareholders of the company involved.

A charity involved in such a tax strategy would receive income from the company in proportion to the size of its holdings of nonvoting stock. But while that income was taxable, it was not distributed to the charity and stayed at the company to be reinvested.

The charity did not owe taxes on the income, anyway, because it was tax-exempt.

Later, the charity would sell the nonvoting shares back to the company at fair market value, and the company would distribute the income, tax-free, that had been associated with those shares among its other shareholders.

In other, similar cases, charities that received nonvoting stakes in privately held companies through gifts of stock used large losses they had incurred on unrelated businesses to offset taxes for other shareholders. Mr. Dryburgh wrote a paper on that type of tax shelter.

In 2004, the I.R.S. listed as “restricted” such transactions and denied deductions associated with them.