Man Arrested for Declining to Show His Driver's License

One more example of the small ways our liberties have been eroded and which continue the trend toward a de-facto police state.

"Michael Righi was arrested in Ohio over the weekend after refusing to show his receipt when leaving Circuit City. When the manger and 'loss prevention' employee physically prevented the vehicle he was a passenger in from leaving the parking lot, he called the police, who arrived, searched his bag and found he hadn't stolen anything. The officer then asked for Michael's driver's license, which he declined to provide since he wasn't operating a motor vehicle. The officer then arrested him, and upon finding out Michael was legally right about not having to provide a license, went ahead and charged him with 'obstructing official business' anyways."

A state of ignorance of the law, the constitution, bill of rights (and the civil liberties granted by these documents) combined with overwhelming consumerist capitalism and apathy about our rights as citizens leads to loss of those liberties as much as the illegal domestic spying activities of the US government. Bless those Slashdot geeks, nerds and code-heads who really get it.

The Slashdot post on the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/09/03/1449200.shtml

Technorati Tags:
civil liberties, Ohio, 4th amendment, illegal search and seizure, Bill of Rights, Constitution, liberty, freedom, loss of freedom

How to create an Angry American

Past time to Ditch the Denial & Sense of Powerlessness

Time to Translate Anger into Action.

Footnote: As of this date, Imperial Republican President Bush has yet to attend one funeral of any soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan (where Osama Bin Laden still hides).

Technorati Tags:
press, press failures, Failure of the Media, Jon Stewart, Particpatory Democracy, voter responsibility, Citizen Action

The HUGE disconnect between participatory democracy and military/militarism.

For me the Washington Post article today about the Rand 'advertising/marketing/branding' study for the Pentagon (links below) once more brings into focus and reinforces the major, likely insurmountable philosophical deficit of this admin (and its lackies both in the military and outside of it) — i.e., the Bush-Cheney administration's failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy both abroad and at home.

I see it in my ex-marine father and too many of his 'greatest generation' cohorts — especially the southern ones — who were entrained by the military, taught 'obedience to authority' through their WWII military service at tender teen ages and never grew beyond it. These men made great followers, committed to rule enforcement, upholding the rule of law (theoretically), but not so great independent thinkers and not very deep thinkers.

They naively believe that if only everyone followed the rules, all would be okay. They fail to analyze the context of the rules, much less the context of history. They are so easily confused and overwhelmed by analyzing rhetoric vs actions, hypocrisy and all the contradictions of power holders (not to mention downright mendacity and outright lying) that it was simply easier to have stopped thinking or learning to think way back when. Following orders, upholding social order has been their greatest strength — and strongest commitment — since those days.

It's also their most glaring deficit. They are still being willingly entrained by the Bushes, Cheneys, Limbaughs, O'Reilly's, etc etc — those who reap great personal wealth and power from the greatest followers' superficial grasp of democracy — one in which majority rules and following the rules defines their primary understanding of democracy — while failing to remember we are a republic, which theoretically upholds and protects the EQUAL rights of any and all citizens who are considered minorities.

The challenge for the advertising study ... was to find "something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we're trying to deliver a message about what democracy is." ... the problem is "how we influence them to be on our side, or at least not be an enemy" when "what they see is armor." The goal of such studies ... is to distill what works and incorporate it into future training.

The fact that this recent Rand study is organized around the concepts of advertising, branding, and marketing the concept of democracy instead of actually modeling, teaching and practicing participatory democracy demonstrates the glib shallowness of this administration (its handlers, thinkers, strategizers and its military leaders). It shows both a severe contempt for and a foundational failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy.

Yet, once more, it does indicate their complete commitment and servitude to the fundamental mandates of capitalism: Selling for Profit (and power) ahead of everything and everyone else.

What is that saying — something along the lines of: great soldiers don't necessarily make great citizens?

We already know of one worse-than-poor, layabout national guardsman who has made possibly (likely) The Worst President Ever.

Sadly, disturbingly, this war, this administration, the severe lack of critical thinkers in the military industrial complex prove it with a vengeance.

If there was ever a time to Question Authority, this is it. We stand at the edge of an epochal precipice — full of world-life-society-country-citizen-altering challenges — and our responses to them will determine whether Americans will step forward to actively participate in our rapidly fading democratic heritage (and think critically about who benefits from the decisions which are made by those in power) or stand still to passively consume, produce profits for the powerful and rich, and remain obedient to authority except in the most superficial, self-destructive, meaningless ways.

Do we have any hope for meeting the challenge? What do you think?

The Washington Post article, entitled "The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue: U.S. Needs to Devise a Different 'Brand' to Win Over the Iraqi People, Study Advises" is here:

Technorati Tags:
U.S. Military, participatory democracy, entrainment, branding, marketing

Yay Michael Moore! Kicks Wolfie's Lame-Ass Butt!

Okay, for the less slangy types let's call it:

"Michael Moore Chastises Wolf Blitzer Live on CNN in Heated Rebuttal"

And in kicking Wolfie's mealy-mouthed cowering spineless 'never speaks truth to power, only kicks down' butt, he kicked CNN's mealy-mouthed cowering butt and the symbolic butt of all cowering so-called mainstream media who as he stated not only didn't ask the hard questions about the Iraq War from pre-war to now, they aren't asking the hard questions about our dismal, shameful health care system now.

As Moore stated, Wolf Blitzer and CNN acted as spokespersons FOR Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neocon warhawks when Farenheit 911 came out -- yet it was Moore who got it right, not the lying, shuffling, mendacious, non-transparent administration.

And in this case and his new movie "Sicko" -- it is Moore who gets it right not Dr. Sanjay Gupta or CNN or most of the media who are still cowards bowing before the greedy gods of corporate news hucksters.


CNN and most practitioners of contempoary mainstream corporate journalism (I use that term lightly) are in fact slaves to the prevalent, ever-ambient and stupidly banal kind of obedience to authority.

I ♥ Michael Moore.

You can read and see it all at Michael Moore's website here.

Crooks & Liars has some viewable and downloadable video and links as well.

Frank Rich: When Cheney the Vice Does It, It’s Not Illegal

When the Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal

By FRANK RICH
July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes.com


WHO knew that mocking the Constitution could be nearly as funny as shooting a hunting buddy in the face? Among other comic dividends, Dick Cheney’s legal theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch yielded a priceless weeklong series on “The Daily Show” and an online “Doonesbury Poll,” conducted at Slate, to name Mr. Cheney’s indeterminate branch of government.

The ridicule was so widespread that finally even this White House had to blink. By midweek, it had abandoned that particularly ludicrous argument, if not its spurious larger claim that Mr. Cheney gets a free pass to ignore rules regulating federal officials’ handling of government secrets.

That retreat might allow us to mark the end of this installment of the Bush-Cheney Follies but for one nagging problem: Not for the first time in the history of this administration — or the hundredth — has the real story been lost amid the Washington kerfuffle. Once the laughter subsides and you look deeper into the narrative leading up to the punch line, you can unearth a buried White House plot that is more damning than the official scandal. This plot once again snakes back to the sinister origins of the Iraq war, to the Valerie Wilson leak case and to the press failures that enabled the administration to abuse truth and the law for too long.

One journalist who hasn’t failed is Mark Silva of The Chicago Tribune. He first reported more than a year ago, in May 2006, the essentials of the “news” at the heart of the recent Cheney ruckus. Mr. Silva found that the vice president was not filing required reports on his office’s use of classified documents because he asserted that his role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, gave him an exemption.

This scoop went unnoticed by nearly everybody. It would still be forgotten today had not Henry Waxman, the dogged House inquisitor, called out Mr. Cheney 10 days ago, detailing still more egregious examples of the vice president’s flouting of the law, including his effort to shut down an oversight agency in charge of policing him. The congressman’s brief set off the firestorm that launched a thousand late-night gags.

That’s all to the public good, but hiding in plain sight was the little-noted content of the Bush executive order that Mr. Cheney is accused of violating. On close examination, this obscure 2003 document, thrust into the light only because the vice president so blatantly defied it, turns out to be yet another piece of self-incriminating evidence illuminating the White House’s guilt in ginning up its false case for war.

The tale of the document begins in August 2001, when the Bush administration initiated a review of the previous executive order on classified materials signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The Clinton order had been acclaimed in its day as a victory for transparency because it mandated the automatic declassification of most government files after 25 years.

It was predictable that the obsessively secretive Bush team would undermine the Clinton order. What was once a measure to make government more open would be redrawn to do the opposite. And sure enough, when the White House finally released its revised version, the scant news coverage focused on how the new rules postponed the Clinton deadline for automatic declassification and tightened secrecy so much that previously declassified documents could be reclassified.

But few noticed another change inserted five times in the revised text: every provision that gave powers to the president over classified documents was amended to give the identical powers to the vice president. This unprecedented increase in vice-presidential clout, though spelled out in black and white, went virtually unremarked in contemporary news accounts.

Given all the other unprecedented prerogatives that President Bush has handed his vice president, this one might seem to be just more of the same. But both the timing of the executive order and the subsequent use Mr. Cheney would make of it reveal its special importance in the games that the White House played with prewar intelligence.

The obvious juncture for Mr. Bush to bestow these new powers on his vice president, you might expect, would have been soon after 9/11, especially since the review process on the Clinton order started a month earlier and could be expedited, as so much other governmental machinery was, to meet the urgent national-security crisis. Yet the new executive order languished for another 18 months, only to be published and signed with no fanfare on March 25, 2003, a week after the invasion of Iraq began.

Why then? It was throughout March, both on the eve of the war and right after “Shock and Awe,” that the White House’s most urgent case for Iraq’s imminent threat began to unravel. That case had been built around the scariest of Saddam’s supposed W.M.D., the nuclear weapons that could engulf America in mushroom clouds, and the White House had pushed it relentlessly, despite a lack of evidence. On “Meet the Press” on March 16, Mr. Cheney pressed that doomsday button one more time: “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But even as the vice president spoke, such claims were at last being strenuously challenged in public.

Nine days earlier Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency had announced that documents supposedly attesting to Saddam’s attempt to secure uranium in Niger were “not authentic.” A then-obscure retired diplomat, Joseph Wilson, piped in on CNN, calling the case “outrageous.”

Soon both Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Waxman wrote letters (to the F.B.I. and the president, respectively) questioning whether we were going to war because of what Mr. Waxman labeled “a hoax.” And this wasn’t the only administration use of intelligence that was under increasing scrutiny. The newly formed 9/11 commission set its first open hearings for March 31 and requested some half-million documents, including those pertaining to what the White House knew about Al Qaeda’s threat during the summer of 2001.

The new executive order that Mr. Bush signed on March 25 was ingenious. By giving Mr. Cheney the same classification powers he had, Mr. Bush gave his vice president a free hand to wield a clandestine weapon: he could use leaks to punish administration critics.

That weapon would be employed less than four months later. Under Mr. Bush’s direction, Mr. Cheney deputized Scooter Libby to leak highly selective and misleading portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to pet reporters as he tried to discredit Mr. Wilson. By then, Mr. Wilson had emerged as the most vocal former government official accusing the White House of not telling the truth before the war.

Because of the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation, we would learn three years later about the offensive conducted by Mr. Libby on behalf of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush. That revelation prompted the vice president to acknowledge his enhanced powers in an unguarded moment in a February 2006 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News. Asked by Mr. Hume with some incredulity if “a vice president has the authority to declassify information,” Mr. Cheney replied, “There is an executive order to that effect.” He was referring to the order of March 2003.

Even now, few have made the connection between this month’s Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.” Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president’s own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Last week The Washington Post ran a first-rate investigative series on the entire Cheney vice presidency. Readers posting comments were largely enthusiastic, but a few griped. “Six and a half years too late,” said one. “Four years late and billions of dollars short,” said another. Such complaints reflect the bitter legacy of much of the Washington press’s failure to penetrate the hyping of prewar intelligence and, later, the import of the Fitzgerald investigation.

We’re still playing catch-up. In a week in which the C.I.A. belatedly released severely censored secrets about agency scandals dating back a half-century, you have to wonder what else was done behind the shield of an executive order signed just after the Ides of March four years ago. Another half-century could pass before Americans learn the full story of the secrets buried by Mr. Cheney and his boss to cover up their deceitful path to war.

www.buzzzed.com

Technorati Tags:
Chicago Tribune, Mark Silva, press, MSM, media, mainstream media, press failures

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!

---

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