In Our Names

PHOTO DELETED.

The Evil of Abu Ghraib.

The GNB Stylebook calls for most longer stories to open with:

• SLUG
• PHOTO
• HEADLINE

Not this one.

There are ten photos. I want to throw up.

There is a video as well. I want to cry. I am suppressing tears as I write.

They did this in our name. Children. Boys and girls with guns tortured prisoners, beating them with fists, burning them with cigarettes and electricity, forcing them to do sex acts which were not only perverse but were deep moral abominations before God. These soldier-children threatened men with death and with dogs while fathers and men perhaps enemies, perhaps simply swept up in sweeps, turned in for revenge or religious reasons, or there by bad luck, for no real reason at all -- the men cowered naked or died. These men were forced to roll in human shit and pose covered in shit for the amusement of their captors who took photos. Even death was not an escape as our soldier girls and boys posed with tortured mutilated corpses, grinning at the lens.

And while it is not in this set of photos, we know from the Senate there are many thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of film, classified top-secret to prevent you and I from seeing them, of our soldiers raping boys in front of their fathers, and sexually assaulting daughters. These children were sent home, dishonored in a culture where sexual dishonor equals death.

Our soldiers did this. In our names.

I CAUTION YOU IN THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS... the photos are horrific to view. They will remain with you as long as your memory works properly. There is also a film, in its own way, better perhaps, but even more real as it puts the photos in a larger context and ads dubbed in sound.

It has been months at least, since I've had a medic flashback. I'm partially in one right now as I type. If there is any reason you should not see these photos, do not. They show human beings torturing other human beings, posing with the dead, committing war crimes.

There is a full article associated with the photos and film. I recommend reading it.

Article and film. (Film NSFW under any circumstances. Violently disturbing.)
Photos. (Absolutely NSFW under any circumstances. Violently disturbing.)

You may read the article without seeing either film or photos.

From the article:

Wired Magazine

Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.

His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, explores how a "perfect storm" of conditions can make ordinary people commit horrendous acts.

He spoke with Wired.com about what Abu Ghraib and his prison study can teach us about evil and why heroes are, by nature, social deviants.

Philip Zimbardo: Those sets of things are found any time you really see an evil situation occurring, whether it's Rwanda or Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge.

Wired: But not everyone at Abu Ghraib responded to the situation in the same way. So what makes one person in a situation commit evil acts while another in the same situation becomes a whistle-blower?

Zimbardo: There's no answer, based on what we know about a person, that we can predict whether they're going to be a hero whistle-blower or the brutal guard. We want to believe that if I was in some situation [like that], I would bring with it my usual compassion and empathy. But you know what? When I was the superintendent of the Stanford prison study, I was totally indifferent to the suffering of the prisoners, because my job as prison superintendent was to focus on the guards.

As principal [scientific] investigator [of the experiment], my job was to care about what happened to everybody because they were all under my experimental control. But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It's hard to believe that, but I was transformed.

Wired: Do you think it made any difference that the Abu Ghraib guards were reservists rather than active duty soldiers?

Zimbardo: It made an enormous difference, in two ways. They had no mission-specific training, and they had no training to be in a combat zone. Secondly, the Army reservists in a combat zone are the lowest form of animal life within the military hierarchy. They're not real soldiers, and they know this. In Abu Ghraib the only thing lower than the army reservist MPs were the prisoners.

Wired: So it's a case of people who feel powerless in their lives seizing power over someone else.

Zimbardo: Yes, victims become victimizers. In Nazi concentration camps, the Jewish capos were worse than the Nazis, because they had to prove that they deserved being in this position.

Wired: You've said that the way to prevent evil actions is to teach the "banality of kindness" -- that is, to get society to exemplify ordinary people who engage in extraordinary moral actions. How do you do this?

Zimbardo: If you can agree on a certain number of things that are morally wrong, then one way to counteract them is by training kids. There are some programs, starting in the fifth grade, which get kids to think about the heroic mentality, the heroic imagination.

To be a hero you have to take action on behalf of someone else or some principle and you have to be deviant in your society, because the group is always saying don't do it; don't step out of line. If you're an accountant at Arthur Andersen, everyone who is doing the defrauding is telling you, "Hey, be one of the team."

Heroes have to always, at the heroic decisive moment, break from the crowd and do something different. But a heroic act involves a risk. If you're a whistle-blower you're going to get fired, you're not going to get promoted, you're going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn't matter.

Most heroes are more effective when they're social heroes rather than isolated heroes. A single person or even two can get dismissed by the system. But once you have three people, then it's the start of an opposition.

So what I'm trying to promote is not only the importance of each individual thinking "I'm a hero" and waiting for the right situation to come along in which I will act on behalf of some people or some principle, but also, "I'm going to learn the skills to influence other people to join me in that heroic action."

There's more...

Yes, you may read the article, without viewing the film or seeing the photos.

I have to go be ill now.

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The Clown Presidency

19%

Among all Americans, 19% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 14% approve and 79% disapprove.

-- arg poll

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3,963

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Legions of Imperial America

The CostThe United States of America spends 56% of total government military spending on Planet Earth, with a published FY2008 military budget of $623 billion* (in 2008 dollars). China is a distant second at 6% with an estimated 2004 military budget of $65 billion. The entire "Axis of Evil" (with Pakistan thrown in for good measure) spends barely 1% at less than $15 billion.

* This is the official defense budget, and does not include "supplementary" funding for the war(s). In 2006, supplementary funding for the Iraq and Afghan conflicts was just over $100 billion. Total supplementary funding over the Iraq and Afghan conflicts has been roughly $450 billion.

What does the US get for that $623 billion?

• 1,285,400* Army
  
• 642,766 Navy
• 217,600 Marines
• 705,200 Air Force

* Numbers include active service, mobilized guard and reserve, national guard, selected reserve, and civilian contractors

That's a total of just under 3 million men and women under arms, 5% (about 140,000) of whom are immigrants. We spend about $210,000 annually per soldier or about $2000 annually per US resident.

The Mission
In the "early days of the Cold War", the US military was required to be capable of responding to 2 1/2 wars (e.g.: direct theatre-level conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe plus a similar war with China in Asia and a "half-war" with a regional state such as Vietnam). During the first Bush administration (GHW Bush, 1988 - 1992), General Colin Powell developed the idea of the Base Force, emphasizing regional conflict over global conflict, and reducing the size of the standing forces. Between 1993 and 2001, the US military had an overall strategic objective of being able to fight two major strategic conflicts (theatre level wars) simultaneously. Since 2001, when Don Rumsfeld approved new "terms of reference", the US military has been tasked with four missions:

• Defend US territory
• Prevent aggressors from taking hostile action for fear of US retaliation using forces staged outside the US in Europe, the Middle East, SW Asia, NE Asia, and the East Asian rim
• "Win decisively" one major conflict
• Conduct "small-scale contingencies of limited duration" in other areas of the world

If you compare the current scope of required military action with that of the Cold War, the US military has much less "on it's plate" now. The "one major conflict" (say, with Iraq) really matches up with the "half war" of the Cold War era, so we've taken two global sized wars off the table.

Historical Manpower
Obviously the US military has been growing smaller since Vietnam, with a significant blip upward in 2008 (unfortunately, I can't find good data right this moment for the last couple of years). Post 2000, it's logical to assume that some of the draw down is being taken up by private contractors (Blackwater, etc.).

Historical Budget

(normalized to 2006 dollars)

Since the end of WWII, we see a variable trend upward in US military budget. It appears that there is a "normal" military budget of a bit over $300 billion with bumps for Korea, Vietnam, and GWII. GWI is a more diffuse bump -- possibly because we're seeing a substantial change in the military's mission and posture during the changeover to the Base Force.

No doubt, though, there's a huge jump in the last few years (once again, I don't have continuous data for the last couple of years). We are now at a post-WWII high and at nearly double the "normal" baseline.

Historical Cost per Soldier

(normalized to 2006 dollars)

Equally obviously, the historical trend in the US is to increase spending on a per-soldier basis. This doesn't argue that each soldier gets paid this much or uses this much equipment, but demonstrates that spending is increasing faster than the size of the US military (which we see above isn't actually increasing over time except very recently).

Analysis
In a business we'd look at these three graphs and immediately see something obvious: this company has a slight downturn in headcount, a large increase in budget and an overall increase in spending per employee. The hope is that we're seeing capital spending increases designed to improve productivity. An alternative might be that we're seeing a company retooling for a completely new function -- building planes instead of cars, for instance.

GWI was a fast war of maneuver, with tanks and helos and fixed-wing aircraft slicing decisively into enemy formations and destroying them. Rather like we imagined what we would do if we went rolling through the Fulda Gap instead of the Warsaw Pact trying to. GWII started out the same way, and that phase of it ended the same way too -- with our mobile forces crushing everything they could find. This was what the US military was designed to do against the Soviets or the Chinese in one of those "theatre-level" conflicts of the Cold War. In a sense, GWI was the last hurrah of the Cold War US military machine.

GWII is the first hurrah of a new US military designed by Don Rumsfeld, which uses technology to increase "productivity" -- effectively providing the same effect using fewer soldiers:

To maintain this position of strength, the Bush administration seeks to exploit US prowess in science and technology to ensure that American weapons, offensive and defensive, are always a generation or two ahead of those of any potential adversaries. This follows the thinking of US strategists who favour a "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) which aims to redefine war through the procurement of advanced weapons - self-guiding munitions, advanced satellites, airborne sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robot-controlled gun systems, "low-yield" nuclear munitions and the famous NMD anti-ballistic system.

Unfortunately, the "revolution in military affairs" people forgot something: technological improvement cuts both ways.


That's the background and some basic analysis -- sort of a primer of information you need at your fingertips if you want to talk about the US military.

There's more...