Costs of War: What $1.2 Trillion Could Have Been Used to Buy

While Bush Cheney & Rumsfeld were wasting 'blood and treasure' -- here's another reason the Republicans are the party of obscenity and immorality:


From the New York Times accompanying article

Not MY Commander in Chief

At Ease, Mr. President

January 27, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor NY Times

By GARRY WILLS
Evanston, Ill.

WE hear constantly now about "our commander in chief." The word has become a synonym for "president." It is said that we "elect a commander in chief." It is asked whether this or that candidate is "worthy to be our commander in chief."

But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.

I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the "Saturday Night Massacre" (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox?s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.

What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, "You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it." This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig?s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that "Constitutionally ... I?m in control."

President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus?s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: "The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States."

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely ? more like never ? heard today. It is just "commander in chief," or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken "for the duration." But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and "the duration" has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever ? more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

There has never been an executive branch more fetishistic about secrecy than the Bush-Cheney one. The secrecy has been used to throw a veil over detentions, "renditions," suspension of the Geneva Conventions and of habeas corpus, torture and warrantless wiretaps. We hear again the refrain so common in the other wars ? If you knew what we know, you would see how justified all our actions are.

But we can never know what they know. We do not have sufficient clearance.

When Adm. William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the gulf war under the first President Bush, Secretary of State James Baker said that the admiral was not qualified to speak on the matter since he no longer had the clearance to read classified reports. If he is not qualified, then no ordinary citizen is. We must simply trust our lords and obey the commander in chief.

The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines.

That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket).

We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led ? or were not in the past ? by caudillos.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan?s prescient last book, "Secrecy," traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that it strikes at the very essence of democracy ? accountability of representatives to the people. How can the people hold their representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the secrecy. The representative is accountable to citizens. Soldiers are accountable to their officer. The dynamics are different, and to blend them is to undermine the basic principles of our Constitution.

Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of "What Paul Meant."

MAUREEN DOWD: Daffy Does Doom

Daffy Does Doom

By MAUREEN DOWD

Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as ?delusional.?

It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.

Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn?t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.

Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he?s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America?s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran?s power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.

Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.

You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq?s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.

In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he?s ?out of line? when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.

Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, ?It won?t stop us.?

Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be ?detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.?

Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.

It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.

?Bottom line,? Vice told Wolf, ?is that we?ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.? The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not ?have the stomach for the fight.?

He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We?ve had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk. If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.

They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don?t have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.

After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, ?In that I?m the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.? (Or preordained it.)

The reality of Iraq, as The Times?s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to ?a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we?re seeing now,? and a ?wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world?s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there?s complete chaos in the region??

Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.

He assumes that the more people think he?s crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No?s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn?t.

He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.

To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it?s hogwash.

Retro Snap: Obedience to Authority Re-visited

If you ever have the chance to see the black and white films of the original OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY experiments that Stanley Milgram conducted in the 50s (in an attempt to analyze and truly understand the actions of 'good germans' and 'good soldiers' who were 'just following orders' during the holocaust in World War II -- you really must endeavor to do so.

Also, Court TV recently aired a mini-documentary about Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Role-playing Experiment (randomly assigned Prison Guards and Prisoners) as undertaken by students. The experiment had to be ended early because the 'Prison Guards' became torturers of the 'prisoners' in their charge. And they weren't even real prisoners or real prison guards!

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The Perils of Obedience [about Obedience to Authority]

by Stanley Milgram

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch. Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience.

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

In the basic experimental designs two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated a "teacher" and the other a "learner." The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric chair, his arms are strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.

The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, he is seated before an impressive shock generator. The instrument panel consists of thirty lever switches set in a horizontal line. Each switch is clearly labeled with a voltage designation ranging from 14 to 450 volts.

The following designations are clearly indicated for groups of four switches. going from left to right: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock. (Two switches after this last designation are simply marked XXX.)

When a switch is depressed, a pilot light corresponding to each switch is illuminated in bright red; an electric buzzing is heard; a blue light, labeled "voltage energizer," flashes; the dial on the voltage meter swings to the right; and various relay clicks sound off.

The upper left hand corner of the generator is labeled SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPE ZLB. DYSON INSTRUMENT COMPANY, WALTHAM, MASS., OUTPUT 15 VOLTS -- 450 VOLTS.

Each subject is given a sample 45 volt shock from the generator before his run as teacher, and the jolt strengthens his belief in the authenticity of the machine.

The teacher is a genuinely naive subject who has come to the laboratory for the experiment. The learner, or victim, is actually an actor who receives no shock at all. The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim.

Conflict arises when the man receiving the shock begins to show that he is experiencing discomfort. At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become more vehement and emotional. At 285 volts, his response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all.

For the teacher, the situation quickly becomes one of gripping tension. It is not a game for him: conflict is intense obvious. The manifest suffering of the learner presses him to quit: but each time he hesitates to administer a shock, the experimenter orders him to continue. To extricate himself from this plight, the subject must make a clear break with authority.

The subject, Gretchen Brantt, is an attractive thirty-one year old medical technician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before.

On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter coolly and inquires, "Shall I continue? She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, "Well, I'm sorry, I don't think we should continue."

Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.

Brandt: He has a heart condition, I'm sorry. He told you that before.

Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they're not dangerous.

Brandt: Well, I'm sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It's his free will.

Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue....

Brandt: I'd like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I'll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I'm sorry. I don't want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn't like it for me either.

Experimenter: You have no other choice.

Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don't want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.

She refuses to go further And the experiment is terminated.

The woman is firm and resolute throughout. She indicates in the interview that she was in no way tense or nervous, and this corresponds to her controlled appearance during the experiment. She feels that the last shock she administered to the learner was extremely painful and reiterates that she "did not want to be responsible for any harm to him."

The woman's straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.

An Unexpected Outcome

Before the experiments, I sought predictions about the outcome from various kinds of people -- psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, graduate students and faculty in the behavioral sciences. With remarkable similarity, they predicted that virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrist, specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board.

These predictions were unequivocally wrong. Of the forty subjects in the first experiment, twenty-five obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, punishing the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the.generator. After 450 volts were administered three times, the experimenter called a halt to the session. Many obedient subjects then heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows, rubbed their fingers over their eyes, or nervously fumbled cigarettes. Others displayed only minimal signs of tension from beginning to end.

When the very first experiments were carried out, Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, and about 60 percent of them were fully obedient. A colleague of mine immediately dismissed these findings as having no relevance to "ordinary" people, asserting that Yale undergraduates are a highly aggressive, competitive bunch who step on each other's necks on the slightest provocation. He assured me that when "ordinary" people were tested, the results would be quite different. As we moved from the pilot studies to the regular experimental series, people drawn from every stratum of New Haven life came to be employed in the experiment professionals, white collar workers, unemployed persons, and industrial workers. The experimental outcome was the same as we had observed among the students.

Moreover, when the experiments were repeated in Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia, the level of obedience was invariably somewhat higher than found in the investigation reported in this article. Thus one scientist in Munich found 85 percent of his subjects obedient.

Fred Prozi's reactions, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he has a good-natured. if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in the chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:

Prozi: I can't stand it I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?

Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but . . .

Prozi: But he's hollering. He can t stand it. What's going to happen to him?

Experimenter (his voice is patient, matter-of fact): The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher.

Prozi: Aah, but, unh, I'm not going to get that man sick in there -- know what I mean?

Experimenter: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs.

Prozi: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering

Experimenter: It's absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.

Prozi (indicating the unused questions): There's too many left here, I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there's too many of them left. I mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?

Experimenter: I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please.

Prozi: All right. (Consults list of words.) The next one's "Slow -- walk, truck, dance, music" Answer please. (A buzzing sound indicates the learner has signaled his answer.) Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. "Dance." (Zzumph!)

Learner (yelling): Let me out of here My hearts bothering me (Teacher looks at experimenter.)

Experimenter: Continue, please.

Learner (screaming): Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out of here, my hearts bothering me, let me out!

Prozi (shakes head, pats the table nervously): You see he's hollering. Hear that? Gee, I don't know.

Experimenter: The experiment requires . . .

Prozi (interrupting): I know it does sir, but I mean -- hunh! He don't know what he's getting in for. He's up to 195 volts! (Experiment continues, through 210 volts, 225 volts, 240 volts, 255 volts, 270 volts, at which point Prozi, with evident relief, runs out of word-pair questions.)

Experimenter: You'll have to go back to the beginning of that page and go through them again until be's learned them all correctly.

Prozi: Aw, no. I'm not going to kill that man. You mean I've got to keep going up with the scale? No sir. He's hollering in there. I'm not going to give him 450 volts.

Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on.

Learner: Ohhh. I absolutely refuse to answer anymore. (Shouting urgently now.) Let me out of here! You cant bold me here Get me out. Get-me-out-of-here!

Experimenter: Continue. The next word is "green," please.

Prozi: "Greengrass, hat, ink, apple." (Nothing happens. No answering buzz. Just gloomy silence.)

Prozi: I don't think he is going to answer.

Experimenter: If the learner doesn't answer in a reasonable time, about four or five seconds, consider the answer wrong. And follow the same procedures you have been doing for wrong answers. Say, "Wrong," tell him the number of volts, give him the punishment, read him the correct answer. Continue, please.

Prozi: "Green -- grass, hat, ink, apple." Answer, please. (More silence. Subject just sits there.)

Experimenter: Go on with the procedure, please.

Prozi: Three hundred and fifteen volts The answer is "ink." (Zzumph!)

Learner: Ohh. Ooohh

Prozi: (relieved to her response"). Next one . . .

Learner: I absolutely refuse to answer.

Prozi: You got to. You get a shock if you don't answer. (Experiment continues with learner refusing to answer, and, finally failing even to grunt or groan. At 375 volts, the subject stands up.)

Prozi: I think something's happened to that fellow in there. I don't get no answer. He was hollering at less voltage. Can't you check in and see if he's all right, please?

Experimenter (with same detached calm): Not once we've started. Please continue, Teacher.

Prozi (sits down, sighs deeply): "Cool day, shade, water, paint." Answer please. Are you all right in there? Are you all right?

Experimenter: Please continue, Teacher. Continue, please. (Subject pushes lever. Zzumph!)

Prozi (swiveling around in his chair): Something's happened to that man in there. (Swiveling back.) Next one. "Low -- dollar, necklace, moon, paint." (Turning around again.) Something's happened to that man in there. You better check in on him, sir. He won't answer or nothing.

Experimenter: Continue. Go on, please.

Prozi: You accept all responsibility?

Experimenter: The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on. (Subject returns to his list, starts running through words as rapidly as he can read them, works through to 450 volts.)

Prozi: That's that.

Experimenter: Continue using the 450 switch for each wrong answer. Continue, please.

Prozi: But I don't get anything!

Experimenter: Please continue. The next word is "white."

Prozi: Don't you think you should look in on him, please?

Experimenter: Not once we've started the experiment.

Prozi: What if he's dead in there? (Gestures toward the room with the electric chair.) l mean, he told me he. can't stand the shock, sir. I don't mean to be rude, but I think you should look In on him. All you have to do is look in on him. All you have to do is look in the door. I don't get no answer, no noise. Something might have happened to the gentleman in there, sir.

Experimenter: We must continue. Go on, please.

Prozi: You mean keep giving that? Four-hundred-fifty volts, what he's got now?

Experimenter: That's correct. Continue. The next word is "white."

Prozi (now at a furious pace): "White -- cloud, horse, rock, house." Answer, please. The answer is "horse." Four hundred and fifty volts. (Zzumph!) Next words, "Bag -- paint, music. clown, girl." The next answer is 'paint." Four hundred and fifty volts. (Zzumph!) Next word is "Short -- sentence, movie . . ."

Experimenter: Excuse me, Teacher. We'll have to discontinue the experiment.

Peculiar Reactions

Morris Braverman, another subject, is a thirty-nine-year-old social worker. He looks older than his years because of his bald head and serious demeanor. His brow is furrowed, as if all the world's burdens were carried on his face. Ho appears intelligent and concerned.

When the learner refuses to answer and the experimenter instructs Braverman to treat the absence of an answer as equivalent to a wrong answer, he takes his instruction to heart. Before administering 300 volts he asserts officiously to the victim, "Mr. Wallace, your silence has to be considered as a wrong answer." Then he administers the shock He offers halfheartedly to change places with the learner, then asks the experimenter. "Do I have to follow these instructions literally?" He is satisfied with the experimenter's answer that he does. His very refined and authoritative manner of speaking is increasingly broken up by wheezing laughter.

The experimenter's notes on Mr. Braverman at the last few shocks are:

Almost breaking up now each time gives shock. Rubbing face to hide laughter.

Squinting, trying to hide face with hand, still laughing

Cannot control his laughter at this point no matter what he does.

Clenching fist, pushing it onto table.

In an interview after the session, Mr. Braverman summarizes the experiment with impressive fluency and intelligence. He feels the experiment may have been designed also to "test the effects on the teacher of being in an essentially sadistic role, as well as the reactions of a student to a learning situation that was authoritative and punitive."

When asked how painful the last few shocks administered to the learner were, he indicates that the most extreme category on the scale is not adequate (it read EXTREMELY PAINFUL) and places his mark at the edge of the scale with an arrow carrying it beyond the scale.

It is almost impossible to convey the greatly relaxed, sedate quality of his conversation in the interview. In the most relaxed terms, he speaks about his severe inner tension.

Experimenter: At what point were you most tense or nervous?

Mr. Braverman: Well, when he first began to cry out in pain, and I realized this was hurting him. This got worse when he just blocked and refused to answer. There was I. I'm a nice person, I think, hurting somebody, and caught up in what seemed a mad situation . . . and in the interest of science, one goes through with it.

When the interviewer pursues the general question of tension, Mr. Braverman spontaneously mentions his laughter.

"My reactions were awfully peculiar. I don't know if you were watching me, but my reactions were giggly, and trying to stifle laughter. This isn't the way I usually am. This was a sheer reaction to a totally impossible situation. And my reaction was to the situation of having to hurt somebody. And being totally helpless and caught up in a set of circumstances where l just couldn't deviate and I couldn't try to help. This is what got me."

Mr. Braverman, like all subjects, was told the actual nature and purpose of the experiment, and a year later he affirmed in a questionnaire that he had learned something of personal importance: "What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e., the adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e., don't hurt someone who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, 'You can call yourself Eichmann,' I hope I deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter."

The Etiquette of Submission

One theoretical interpretation of this behavior holds that all people harbor deeply aggressive instincts continually pressing for expression, and that the experiment provides institutional justification for the release of these impulses. According to this view, if a person is placed in a situation in which he has complete power over another individual, whom he may punish as much as he likes, all that is sadistic and bestial in man comes to the fore. The impulse to shock the victim is seen to flow from the potent aggressive tendencies, which are part of the motivational life of the individual, and the experiment, because it provides social legitimacy, simply opens the door to their expression.

It becomes vital, therefore, to compare the subject's performance when he is under orders and when he is allowed to choose the shock level.

The procedure was identical to our standard experiment, except that the teacher was told that he was free to select any shock level of any on the trials. (The experimenter took pains to point out that the teacher could use the highest levels on the generator, the lowest, any in between, or any combination of levels.) Each subject proceeded for thirty critical trials. The learner's protests were coordinated to standard shock levels, his first grunt coming at 75 volts, his first vehement protest at 150 volts.

The average shock used during the thirty critical trials was less than 60 volts -- lower than the point at which the victim showed the first signs of discomfort. Three of the forty subjects did not go beyond the very lowest level on the board, twenty-eight went no higher than 75 volts, and thirty-eight did not go beyond the first loud protest at 150 volts. Two subjects provided the exception, administering up to 325 and 450 volts, but the overall result was that the great majority of people delivered very low, usually painless, shocks when the choice was explicitly up to them.

The condition of the experiment undermines another commonly offered explanation of the subjects' behavior -- that those who shocked the victim at the most severe levels came only from the sadistic fringe of society. If one considers that almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of "obedient" subjects, and that they represented ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and professional classes, the argument becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contended that the prosecution's effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job. For asserting her views, Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny. Somehow, it was felt that the monstrous deeds carried out by Eichmann required a brutal, twisted personality, evil incarnate. After witnessing hundreds of ordinary persons submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation -- an impression of his duties as a subject -- and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Many of the people were in some sense against what they did to the learner, and many protested even while they obeyed. Some were totally convinced of the wrongness of their actions but could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. They often derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that -- within themselves, at least -- they had been on the side of the angels. They tried to reduce strain by obeying the experimenter but "only slightly," encouraging the learner, touching the generator switches gingerly. When interviewed, such a subject would stress that he "asserted my humanity" by administering the briefest shock possible. Handling the conflict in this manner was easier than defiance.

The situation is constructed so that there is no way the subject can stop shocking the learner without violating the experimenter's definitions of his own competence. The subject fears that he will appear arrogant, untoward, and rude if he breaks off. Although these inhibiting emotions appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, they suffuse the mind and feelings of the subject, who is miserable at the prospect of having to repudiate the authority to his face. (When the experiment was altered so that the experimenter gave his instructions by telephone instead of in person, only a third as many people were fully obedient through 450 volts). It is a curious thing that a measure of compassion on the part of the subject -- an unwillingness to "hurt" the experimenter's feelings -- is part of those binding forces inhibiting his disobedience. The withdrawal of such deference may be as painful to the subject as to the authority he defies.

Duty Without Conflict

The subjects do not derive satisfaction from inflicting pain, but they often like the feeling they get from pleasing the experimenter. They are proud of doing a good job, obeying the experimenter under difficult circumstances. While the subjects administered only mild shocks on their own initiative, one experimental variation showed that, under orders, 30 percent of them were willing to deliver 450 volts even when they had to forcibly push the learner's hand down on the electrode.

Bruno Batta is a thirty-seven-year-old welder who took part in the variation requiring the use of force. He was born in New Haven, his parents in Italy. He has a rough-hewn face that conveys a conspicuous lack of altertness. He has some difficulty in mastering the experimental procedure and needs to be corrected by the experimenter several times. He shows appreciation for the help and willingness to do what is required. After the 150 volt level, Batta has to force the learner's hand down on the shock plate, since the learner himself refuses to touch it.

When the learner first complains, Mr. Batta pays no attention to him. His face remains impassive, as if to dissociate himself from the learner's disruptive behavior. When the experimenter instructs him to force the learner's hand down, he adopts a rigid, mechanical procedure. He tests the generator switch. When it fails to function, he immediately forces the learner's hand onto the shock plate. All the while he maintains the same rigid mask. The learner, seated alongside him, begs him to stop, but with robotic impassivity he continues the procedure.

What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being. Meanwhile, he relates to the experimenter in a submissive and courteous fashion.

At the 330 volt level, the learner refuses not only to touch the shock plate but also to provide any answers. Annoyed, Batta turns to him, and chastises him: "You better answer and get it over with. We can't stay here all night." These are the only words he directs to the learner in the course of an hour. Never again does he speak to him. The scene is brutal and depressing, his hard, impassive face showing total indifference as he subdues the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly.

When he administers 450 volts, he turns to the experimenter and asks, "Where do we go from here, Professor?" His tone is deferential and expresses his willingness to be a cooperative subject, in contrast to the learner's obstinacy.

At the end of the session he tells the experimenter how honored he has been to help him, and in a moment of contrition, remarks, "Sir, sorry it couldn't have been a full experiment."

He has done his honest best. It is only the deficient behavior of the learner that has denied the experimenter full satisfaction.

The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The most far-reaching consequence is that the person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear -- it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.

Language provides numerous terms to pinpoint this type of morality: loyalty, duty, discipline are all terms heavily saturated with moral meaning and refer to the degree to which a person fulfills his obligations to authority. They refer not to the "goodness" of the person per se but to the adequacy with which a subordinate fulfills his socially defined role. The most frequent defense of the individual who has performed a heinous act under command of authority is that he has simply done his duty. In asserting this defense, the individual is not introducing an alibi concocted for the moment but is reporting honestly on the psychological attitude induced by submission to authority.

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from "the self." In the situation we have studied, subjects have precisely the opposite view of their actions -- namely, they see them as originating in the motives of some other person. Subjects in the experiment frequently said, "if it were up to me, I would not have administered shocks to the learner."

Once authority has been isolated as the cause of the subject's behavior, it is legitimate to inquire into the necessary elements of authority and how it must be perceived in order to gain his compliance. We conducted some investigations into the kinds of changes that would cause the experimenter to lose his power and to be disobeyed by the subject. Some of the variations revealed that:

The experimenter's physical presence has a marked impact on his authority -- As cited earlier, obedience dropped off sharply when orders were given by telephone. The experimenter could often induce a disobedient subject to go on by returning to the laboratory.

Conflicting authority severely paralyzes actions -- When two experimenters of equal status, both seated at the command desk, gave incompatible orders, no shocks were delivered past the point of their disagreement.

The rebellious action of others severely undermines authority -- In one variation, three teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and shocks. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, thirty-six of forty subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well.

Although the experimenter's authority was fragile in some respects, it is also true that he had almost none of the tools used in ordinary command structures. For example, the experimenter did not threaten the subjects with punishment -- such as loss of income, community ostracism, or jail -- for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives. Indeed, we should expect the experimenter's authority to be much less than that of someone like a general, since the experimenter has no power to enforce his imperatives, and since participation in a psychological experiment scarcely evokes the sense of urgency and dedication found in warfare. Despite these limitations, he still managed to command a dismaying degree of obedience.

I will cite one final variation of the experiment that depicts a dilemma that is more common in everyday life. The subject was not ordered to pull the lever that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subsidiary task (administering the word-pair test) while another person administered the shock. In this situation, thirty-seven of forty adults continued to the highest level of the shock generator. Predictably, they excused their behavior by saying that the responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the switch. This may illustrate a dangerously typical arrangement in a complex society: it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of actions.

The problem of obedience is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

Notes

1. The ethical problems of carrying out an experiment of this sort are too complex to be dealt with here, but they receive extended treatment in the book from which this article is taken.

2. Names of subjects described in this piece have been changed.

"The Perils of Obedience" as it appeared in Harper's Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. Copyright 1974 by Stanley Milgram.

Power turns good soldiers into 'bad apples' - Boston Globe

By Philip G. Zimbardo | May 9, 2004

The horrifying photos of young Iraqis abused by American soldiers have shocked the world with their depictions of human degradation, forcing us to acknowledge that some of our beloved soldiers have committed barbarous acts of cruelty and sadism. Now there is a rush to analyze human behavior, blaming flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless we learn the dynamics of "why," we will never be able to counteract the powerful forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.

Those responsible should suffer severe sanctions if found guilty. However, we must separate guilt from blame. Should these few Army reservists be blamed as the "bad apples" in a good barrel of American soldiers, as our leaders have characterized them? Or are they the once-good apples soured and corrupted by an evil barrel? I argue for the latter perspective after having studied the psychology of evil for many decades. In fact, I have been responsible for constructing evil barrels that produced many bad apples.

Like Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib, I was once a prison superintendent with no experience or training in corrections. In 1971 I was in charge of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which randomly assigned student volunteers in a simulated prison role-played prisoners and guards. Although everyone knew it was just an experiment, the line between simulation and reality was breached as it became a psychological prison of incredible intensity.

The planned two-week study was terminated after only six days because it was out of control. Good boys chosen for their normalcy were having emotional breakdowns as powerless prisoners. Other young men chosen for their mental health and positive values eased into the character of sadistic guards inflicting suffering on their fellow students without moral compunction. And those "good guards" who did not personally debase the prisoners failed to confront the worst of their comrades, allowing evil to ripen without challenge.

The terrible things my guards did to their prisoners were comparable to the horrors inflicted on the Iraqi detainees. My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands.

As the boredom of their job increased, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison.

Human behavior is much more under the control of situational forces than most of us recognize or want to acknowledge. In a situation that implicitly gives permission for suspending moral values, many of us can be morphed into creatures alien to our usual natures. My research and that of my colleagues has catalogued the conditions for stirring the crucible of human nature in negative directions. Some of the necessary ingredients are: diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do not intervene, and a setting of power differentials.

Those factors were apparently also operating in Iraq. But in addition there was secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain of command, conflicting demands on the guards from the CIA and civilian interrogators, no rules enforced for prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking the will of the detainees, and no challenges by many bystanders who observed the evil but did not blow the whistle.

We must learn from this tragic event so it is never repeated. And we must not permit the authorities to deflect the blame and responsibility from themselves by pointing fingers at those soldiers who went into the administration's preemptive war as proud Americans and return now as disgraced prison guards.

The arrogance of power that spawned the "shock and awe" of military might one short year ago has been humbled by the dismay and disgust over these revelations of abuse. It is time for all Americans to reflect on the justification for continuing the war in Iraq that is killing, maiming, and demeaning our young men and women who have been put in harm's way for spurious reasons. Before more of our youth are corrupted, perhaps the time has come to empty out the vinegar of needless war that has filled that evil barrel.

Free Will, Part 2: Support Our Troops

by David Byrne

Well, should we? Are individual soldiers responsible for their actions? Or are they merely machine parts? “I was only following orders” is the often heard claim when a soldier who committed a human rights abuse or worse is challenged. It is a way of absolving themselves from responsibility. “I just drove the train, pushed the button, flew the plane because my commanding officer told me to.” If we follow this argument, it would be the higher-ups who are then always responsible, yes? But the higher-ups will always absolve themselves of responsibility for My Lai, Chechnya and Abu Graib. They’ll always say that those incidents were the work of “rogue” soldiers, bad apples — or that there were higher-ups yet higher above them who made the order. Or, in the case of Rumsfeld, restructured things to make abuses easier and more likely to happen — and the attendant destruction of civilians and a country. Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to get passed on up the chain of command. Of course, those 3 or 4 will blame “faulty intelligence” or try to absolve themselves one way or another, and they usually succeed.

But what about the hundreds of thousands who simply do as they are ordered and whose actions in some cases destroy a nation, a population, and hundreds of thousands or millions of lives as a result? People whose actions have devastating and long-lasting repercussions? Sometimes they do these things unwittingly, but what I am dealing with here is the question of what happens when they do realize what is happening. Have participants no will of their own? Do they deny that they have free will in this case? Those who make sure the bombers are running smoothly but didn’t actually shoot anyone — are they not as guilty as those who pull the triggers? (Anyone see the footage of U.S. soldiers zapping Iraqis for a lark? It’s typical war stuff, it always happens. They act like they’re playing a video game, vaporizing civilians.) Are the guys in the green zone in their air conditioned offices and boozy evenings not as guilty as the grunts who massacre civilians? Don’t they, the officers and bureaucrats, facilitate the dehumanization of the locals, and as a result, the rapid dehumanization of their own soldiers? Those who do as they have been commanded, but abandoned all reason, free will, responsibility and common sense? Do soldiers have no apparent impulse or incentive to think about or question a policy or their own actions? Do none of these folks bear any responsibility for their actions? Will Paul Brenner eventually step forward and say, “Oh, sorry, it was my fault, hang me too — I caused as many deaths as Sadam” —? Would Rummy take the heat? Will the gang who beat the war drums armed with lies and deception — Wolfowitz, Perle, Armstrong, Rice, Powell etc. — admit they hold responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths? Would Jeff Sacks admit he helped deliver the Russian people to the gangsters, KGB and oligarchs? Not likely.

I am reminded of the employees of most businesses whose owners are so distant that the employees never think or ask why they are doing something, how the product works, or just as often doesn’t work, why a policy does or doesn’t makes sense, or if a policy might even be counter-productive. Go into almost any store or office cubicle. Alienation, I believe Marx called it, based on his experience in Manchester during the industrial revolution. Most employees as a result of this disconnect simply cover their asses and have no personal investment in making things work better, knowing about the product they sell or how to fix it. It sometimes seems as if war, specifically the soldier, is the model for the alienated worker from his job. The workplace is modeled after the military. This can be a scary efficient machine, when all goes well.

Or, a little voice asks, does each individual soldier have a moral responsibility, and as a human being should he ask of him or herself, “Is my cause just, are the means just, or was I tricked, and if so, should I refuse, or should I lay down my guns and leave?” Do any of the additional 20K troops Bush just ordered (by what right?) into the trenches have any say in the matter? “Am I fighting for what they said I was fighting for?” The reasons for the invasion of Iraq have changed so many times, surely no one believes any of them at this point. Does the foot soldier have a duty to ask, “Is this old man, mother or kid I am about to kill really a terrorist?” Does the ordinary soldier have ANY responsibility to behave morally? If the troops are tired, and if they feel the war is a quagmire in which they are among the unfairly unprotected victims, should they lay down their weapons and walk away? Do they have a moral duty as human beings to do so? Should they be held responsible if they do not act? Is it more patriotic to refuse than to obey? At this point “support our troops” for most Americans means bring them home, quickly and safely.

Cindy Sheehan: "If every peace person just stops one kid from joining the military, that’s one potential American life saved.”

The implication I infer here is that the “kids” she refers to are either being duped or are too stupid to decide or see what’s going on for themselves. Her quote implies, to me, that we have to stop them; alert them, educate them, and deprogram them, because they won’t figure it out for themselves, not until it’s too late. So much for believing in informed citizenry — and, I would argue, so much for democracy as well, because you can’t have the latter without the former.

CONTINUE READING BYRNE

New Year Update: Costs of Iraq War ? Abstract & Otherwise

Excerpted from LA City Beat:

The Count
Some details on what the United States has lost in Iraq

As of Tuesday January 3, 2007:

• day 1,386 of the Iraq War ?
• 3,000 American soldiers have been reported killed, according to The New York Times.
• 26 of them died at age 18, according to the Associated Press.
• 308 of them were from California, which according to A.P. is the most of any state.
• 22,565 American soldiers have been reported wounded in action.*
• 52,473 is the minimum number of civilians killed in Iraq.
• $355.1 billion in taxpayer funds have been spent on the war, enough to pay 6.2 million public school teachers one year?s salary.
• $11.2 billion is L.A. County taxpayers? share.
• $172.3 million is Pasadena taxpayers? share.
• 6,273 civilian, police and military deaths were recorded in Iraq in 2006, A.P. reported on Monday. 14,298 of these casualties were civilian, and at least 2,186 of them occurred in December.
• 3,500 more U.S. troops will be sent to Kuwait, the military announced last week, according to Reuters.
• 109 is the minimum number of U.S. troops killed last month, making December the deadliest month of 2006 for U.S. service members, according to Reuters.
• 80 people were killed in violence on Saturday, A.P. reported. In the deadliest attack, 37 Iraqis were killed and 76 were injured by two consecutive bombings.
• 64 is the estimated number of journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq in 2006, Reporters Without Borders announced Sunday.
• QUOTE: ?Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,? former President Gerald Ford said in a 2004 interview published in The Washington Post after his death last week. ?And now, I?ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.?
• COUNTDOWN: 748 days remain in President Bush?s final term in office, according to BackwardsBush.com.
• ?Information compiled by Jon Lewis-Katz and Joe Piasecki from reports by the U.S. Department of Defense, Iraq Body Count, and the National Priorities Project, unless otherwise noted.

*The Pentagon has not updated these statistics since Dec. 29.

Full article here.

For Jay Leno: the Weird Ad Tonight Show Segment

They must have some strange things in their inventory:

Meanwhile Caring Loving Gay & Lesbian Americans Are Prohibited from Adoption, Foster Parenting...not to mention marrying

Three-year-old boy found running on I-465: Motorists stop to help child who escaped his apartment; mother charged with neglect.

A toddler wearing only a diaper and T-shirt was found running in the middle of the slow lane of northbound I-465 Saturday morning -- while an unaware driver, speeding by in his 1-ton flatbed, easily could have run into him. The boy survived unscathed, but for a few tense moments, at least a half-dozen cars and a big rig swerved into other lanes to avoid the barefoot child.

Hoping to find where the boy lived, [an officer], joined by Child Protective Services workers, went to the nearby Scarborough Lake Apartments. An assistant apartment manager directed them to the Dyer family's unit.

Their arrival woke Nancy Dyer up.

"Oh, he got out again," ...she [said] after hearing about her son's escape.

Dyer, who moved [to Indianapolis] from Florida about six months ago, told police she doesn't hear the children after she falls asleep on their one bed and had last seen Damon and her daughter, Gabriel, 2, just after midnight. Dyer told police she often used boxes to secure the apartment's door because Damon is able to unlock it, Merritt said. Whether she did so Friday night was unclear.

Merritt said Indianapolis police earlier last week were summoned to the area after the boy was seen running around a parking lot near his home unattended.
...

The incident led to the arrest of the boy's mother on two charges of child neglect after Merritt found she wasn't aware that her son had slipped out of her apartment.
The second charge related to the discovery of a second child eating spaghetti off the floor, police said. Officers said they also found trash in the apartment and feces on the walls.

And while we're at it: unlike many other European and industrialized nations, we in the USA (word's most powerful nation, the only superpower in the world ... Reagan & Bush both said so!) -- have one of the most shameful, neglectful, abusive, punitive, ineffectual, incompetent child care / family care and safety-net systems in the world -- rivaled only by the most impoverished, uneducated, undeveloped, mostly totalitarian nations in the world. THANKS UNFETTERED CAPITALISM (and especially BIG thanks to American HYPOCRISY)!

complete story here and here

Rose Parade -- better-looking on HGTV

Best Rose Parade Coverage visually: HGTV (see hgtv.com). Neither CBS nor NBC -- or was it ABC? -- whoever was showing it on the major networks -- have good color saturation. Everything looks drained, washed out. So watching on HGTV is better -- plus no interruptions.

But they still don't have the right commentator combination -- the guys are pretty good -- especially the guy who lives in L.A -- but the other two -- especially the woman -- are duds. The hosts were Paul James, Robb Weller, Karen McAloon. Last year's Joan Steffand was much better than McAloon. The year that Rebecca Coles shared duties was a complete disaster. She was pathetic. Probably about the same as the bimbette from KTLA (keep reading).

HGTV should have leapt at the chance to snag Stephanie Edwards who until this year was the commentator par excellence of the uninterrupted, commercial free coverage provided by KTLA in Los Angeles. Maybe next year? Apparently KTLA was shameful in its treatment of the wonderful, warm, authentic and EXTREMELY KNOWLEDGEABLE Edwards -- a former actress, news personality and talk show host in Los Angeles. No one has the wealth of knowledge -- nor the delightful and winning personality -- which Stephanie brought to parade coverage for -- who can remember how many years -- it was 25!

Boo KTLA. Yay Stephanie who decided to forgo the parade entirely this year. L.A.'s BIG loss. Maybe next year someone else's gain. HGTV are you listening? Get Stephanie on board for 2008 and you will finally have a winning parade program!!!

Another positive note: The HGTV pre-parade special, The Making of the Rose Parade 2007, with Chi-Lan Lieu was actually pretty good.

Here here here here here here are a few links to the disgusting 'dump' of Stephanie Edwards by KTLA, which started last year in 2006 when they banished her from the commentator booth to the sidewalks (in the downpour) while leaving the smarmy superficial snide Bob Eubanks in the booth, now paired with a stupid bimbette news reader. Stephanie Edwards = Class Act.

The Rocket Man was cool!