Book excerpts from a variety of educational nonfiction sources focusing mainly on current events and history of the activities of the US Government and the Multi-national Corporations that influence it
“The people who own the country ought to govern it.” John Jay
Moreover, in a move that would have significant implications for U.S. security later, the Department of defense began supplying arms and assistance to the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), a paramilitary force under the control of the royal family, whose principle task was and is to defend the regime against internal revolt. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.41)
Because Iranian and Saudi military personnel were generally inexperienced in operating and maintaining such high-tech weapons, most of these arms transfers also entailed the deployment of thousands of American military advisers and technicians. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.43-4)
Though the containment strategy allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power, for American officials it possessed one overarching virtue: (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.44-54)
In reality, no one much doubted which path the administration would choose. After all, the president had tapped Vice president Dick Cheney to direct the work of the NEPDG and assess the competing options. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.58)
By the end of 2003, therefore, the Bush administration’s energy policy had become thoroughly integrated into the nation’s security strategy. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.73) Spencer Abraham comments before House International Relations Committee June 20 2002
The first and possibly most formidable challenge facing the United States in 2001 was to preserve the status quo in Saudi Arabia. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.84)
Bush would not have made such haste to advertise America’s enthusiastic support for the Saudi government if he and his advisers had not been so worried about its durability, a factor bearing directly on the safety of U.S. oil interests. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.86)
To do so required vigorous action on several fronts. The United States would have to vacate its combat bases in Saudi Arabia, bring the Arab- Israeli imbroglio to some sort of resolution, and persuade the Saudi leadership to rid the ruling class of corruption and crack down on terrorists and terror-linked charities. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.90)
The widespread suffering provided Saddam with a powerful propaganda tool: by portraying the country’s misery as the product of a campaign against the entire nation, rather than the regime, he was able to generate substantial popular support. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.95-9)
“When we took over,” Powell told Congress on March 8, 2001, “I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray. And the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray, it was falling apart…. We discovered that we were in an airplane that was heading to a crash. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.96-7) Powell’s congressional testimony 3/8/01
Top administration officials took great pains to keep from mentioning oil as a casus belli -- an admission that would undoubtedly have undermined public support for the war. Nevertheless, a few moments of candor from Vice President Cheney provide hints as to the administration's deep anxiety about oil production in the Gulf. Cheney's August 2002 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars was widely viewed as an unvarnished expression of administration thinking, both because he was Bush's most influential adviser and a key architect of the war and because it was the only speech on Iraq he gave. "Should all [of Hussein's WMD] ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East and the United States," Cheney declared. "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a set atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." Viewed from this angle, the continued survival of his regime was unthinkable. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.) cited in Tom Hull’s notebook
A new relationship between the United states and the Caspian republics began to take shape in the mid-1990’s, just a few years after the region had become unyoked from the Soviet Union. As American energy firms concluded major oil deals with the governments of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the Department of Defense established military ties with these post-Soviet states and U.S. aid began to flow to their armed forces. From there it was only a short step to the deployment of American military advisers, the sale of American arms, and the initiation of joint training operations -- an exact repetition of the Persian Gulf scenario. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.132-3) cited by United for peace
In the worst possible case, this dynamic could lead to a direct confrontation between the forces of the United States and Russia or China. Unlikely as such a clash may seem, it could result from the escalation of a local struggle in which two powers support opposing sides-if, for example, American troops assisting government forces in Georgia were to come under fire from Russian-backed insurgents from the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia or Adzharia. This scenario is improbable but not inconceivable, given the rising level of American and Russian involvement in the Georgian civil war. And the possibilities multiply through every country suffering ethnic and religious unrest, every territorial dispute between local powers. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.178-9)
The Caspian Sea is another potential Quagmire. Hailed by the White House officials and American oil companies as a bountiful alternative to the Persian Gulf, this region is just as volatile. Most of the post-soviet states are governed by despots and Oligarchs whose misrule invites the rebellion of all those excluded from the power and wealth that oil can bring. Ethnic and religious antagonisms sustain the ever present perils of terrorism, sabotage, and insurgency. The United States has sought to get around these dangers by allying itself with local strongmen, like Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan- alliances that can only deepen the risk of our getting pulled into future insurrections and civil wars.
The Gulf and the Caspian regions have yet another time bomb in common: the potential for conflicts among the great powers, arising from their competitive pursuit of strategic advantage. Such a conflagration is not likely to be deliberately ignited, but could erupt on its own when one power or another escalates a local conflict a little to carelessly. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.181-3 )
The first step is to detach our pursuit of energy from any commitments to foreign governments for military protection and security assistance. (Michael Klare “Blood and Oil” 2005 p.189 )
Media Ed review of Michael Klare’s “Blood and Oil” 2005
http://www.truth-out.org/article/iraq-and-911-the-truth-is-out p.96-7
IPEG papers in Global Political Economy
Working under direct and indirect CIA contracts, distinguished American behavioral scientists-Albert Biderman, Irving L. Janis, Harold Wolff, and Lawrence Hinkle-advised the agency about the role of self-inflicted pain in Communist interrogation. (Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” 2006 p.32 )
At last, the CIA had a scientist eager to conduct “terminal experiments in sensory deprivation,” and one with his own ready supply of human subjects. As soon as Cameroon’s grant application arrived at human Ecology’s New York office on January 23, 1957, the CIA’s local mole forwarded it to agency headquarters where Dulles, who knew the doctor well from their wartime work on Nazi psychology, personally approved the project on February 25….
After the press exposed Cameron’s CIA funding in 1980, nine of his former patients filed a civil suit against the agency in Washington…. (Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” 2006 p.43-5 )
In searching for other university research that contributed to the CIA’s evolving torture paradigm, the famed Yale obedience experiments by a young psychologist, Stanley Milgram, seem a likely candidate. Since the agency regularly laundered MKUltra funds through other federal agencies to some 185 nongovernment researchers and has refused to release their names, we have no way of knowing the full scope of academic investigation that might have advanced the CIA’s study of torture. But the timing at the peak of the agency’s academic involvement and the topic torture raise the possibility that Milgram’s work may well have been part of its larger mind-control project. And, of equal import, his close ties to the ONR lend substance to this speculation. Moreover, Yale’s senior psychologist, Irving L. Janis, had written the seminal Air Force study of the Soviet mind-control threat, recommending the sort of experiment Milgram now proposed. (Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” 2006 p.47 )
One Yale colleague complained about this aspect to the American Psychological Association, which denied Milgram membership for a year. After finishing his contract at Yale, he moved on to Harvard, where he was later denied tenure, largely for the same reason. However, Milgram’s intelligence connections apparently saved his career. He was soon hired, with a promotion to full professor, by the new graduate dean at the City University of new York, Mina Rees, who had recently retired as deputy director of the Office of Naval research.
Nobody asked even decades later, why the ONR would have been so solicitous of Milgram’s career and why the NSF would have funded an experiment of so little value. Although Milgram himself said he was testing theories about Nazi torturers, world war II was long over and his ONR patrons, like their intelligence confreres at the CIA, were now obsessed with winning the Cold War. (Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” 2006 p.49 )
Parallel inquiries into the compromised role of medical personnel added to the sinking sense of an ethical miasma at Guantánamo Bay. One military interrogator, describing the role of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCTs] in detainee interrogation, told the New York Times that "their purpose was to help us break them." After similar interviews, two Georgetown University lawyers, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, found that psychiatrists and psychologists "have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives."*nbsp; Since August 2002, moreover, the Southern Command had ordered medical personnel to "convey any information . . . obtained from detainees in the course of treatment to non-medical military or other Untied States personnel," meaning CIA operatives. Indeed, former military interrogators to the Times that doctors, either psychologists or psychiatrists, had given them information from prisoner medical files and advised them how to play upon "a detainee's fears and longings to increase distress," including one prisoner's "fear of the dark" and another's "longing for his mother." Following General Miller's original guidelines, the first BSCT psychologist, Major John Leso, had "prepared psychological profiles for use by interrogators . . . sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators." Instead of treating patients, these mental health professionals had joined the guards to become, in the words of the New England Journal of Medicine, "part of Guantánamo's surveillance network." As the controversy continued, the assistant secretary of defense for health matters, Dr. Willima Winkenwerder Jr., claimed that Defense Department rules allowed doctors to assist lawful interrogations and called press criticism of their role "an outrageous distortion." A senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, insisted that doctors advising interrogators were "behavioral scientists" exempt from "ethics strictures." [Note 65: New York Times, June 24, June 27, July 6, 2005; M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, "Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay", New England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 1 (July 7, 2005), 6-8.]
But many psychiatrists unreservedly rejected the Pentagon's logic. In condemning the practices at Guantánamo as a clear ethical violation, these doctors cited the American Medical Association's advice to "diligently guard against exploiting information furnished by the patient," to "release confidential information only with the authorization of the patient," and, finally, to avoid evaluating "any person charged with criminal acts prior to access to . . . legal counsel." [Note 66: New York Times, June 24, June 27, July 6, 2005; The Principles of Medical Ethics: With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2001), 7-9.] The AMA's guidelines, are, of course, applications of broader ethical principles — from the ancient Hippocratic oath to do no harm, all the way to the World Medical Association's 1975 ban on participation in "torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures," and the UN's 1982 Principles of Medical Ethics prohibiting any physician contact with prisoners "which is not solely to evaluate, protect or improve their physical and mental health." [Note 67: Ole Vedel Rasmussen, "Medical Aspects of Torture," Danish Medical Bulletin 37, no. 1 (1990), 43, 84, 86.]
By contrast the American Psychological Association (APA), reflecting its long involvement in military research and CIA behavioral experiments, claimed that its members were not barred from "national security endeavors." In fact, the APA's code of ethics has stricter, more specific standards for the treatment of laboratory animals than for human subjects such as the Guantánamo detainees. In response to this crisis of ethics, the APA formed a special task force, including military psychologists, which ultimately rejected the Pentagon's proposition that Guantánamo practitioners were ethically exempt, and insisted that "psychologists do not engage in, direct, support, facilitate, or offer training in torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." But this APA conclusion, released June 2005, failed to bar members from military interrogations outright, saying, simply and vaguely, that they should be "mindful of factors unique to these roles . . . that require special ethical consideration." The task force also refused to recommend that members be bound by "international standards of human rights," neglected to specify their obligations to detainees, and even recommended research to "enhance the efficacy . . . of psychological science . . . to national security," including the "effectiveness of information-gathering techniques." [Note 68: New York Times, June 24, June 27, July 6, 2005; American Psychological Association, "Report of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security" (June 2005), 1, 5, 8-9, http://www.apa.org/releases/PENSTaskForceReportFinal.pdf; accessed July 7, 2005. In its "ethical principles," updated in June 2005, the APA suggests that researchers "make reasonable efforts to minimize the discomfort, infection, illness, and pain of animal subjects" but only requires that its members "take reasonable steps to avoid harming their clients/patients" who happen to be human beings. (American Psychological Association, "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct," ; accessed June 29, 2005). In a letter to the New York Times, the APA president Ronald F. Levant, faulted the critical tone of the paper's July 6 coverage of his association's ambiguous stance in this controversy, insisting that "using a phobia to inflict severe psychological distress is clearly prohibited by the task force report." But the task force report, cited in the text above, indicates that the Times's account did indeed capture the unresolved ambiguity of the APA's relationship with national security. (New York Times, July 7, 2005.)] (Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” 2006 p.183 )
Alfred McCoy “A Question of Torture” cited United for Peace in Pierce County
In another incident, Stanley and Joel were having a friendly tussle on the living room floor….French provisional coffee table… (Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p.3 )
Milgram was soundly scolded by his mother, making him cry. He felt miserable about his misdeed, even though it was an accident and he hadn’t meant to hurt his cousin. “Still, to be blamed for such things was a burden. But whether I learned my lesson remains unclear. For many years later, was I not again to become the object of criticism for my efforts to measure something without due regard to the risks it entailed others?” (Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p.5 )
He took two courses at each school. At Brooklyn College he signed up for Psychology of Personality and a course titled An Eclectic Approach to Social Psychology; at Hunter he enrolled in General Psychology and Gestalt Approach to social Psychology; at New York University he audited two courses-child Psychology and Language and Society, a sociology course. He completed each of the four graded courses with As. (Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p.15)
Williams (hereafter referred to as the experimenter) then continued: ”I’d like to explain to both of you about our Memory Project. Psychologists have developed several theories to explain how people learn various types of material.” ….One kind of application of the theory would be when a parent spanked a child for doing something wrong. The expectation being that the form of punishment will teach the child to remember better, teach him to learn more effectively. But actually we know very little about the effect of punishment on learning because almost no truly scientific studies have been made on human beings. (Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p.77 )
Most cases involved a similar modus operandi. A call is received by a restaurant’s manager from a person claiming to be a police officer who says that a particular employee-usually a female teenager or a young woman-is suspected of stealing money, and that she needs to be strip searched to see if money is found on her possession. (Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p.297 )
(Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p. )
(Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 p. )
“Like when a parent spanks a child when he does something wrong. But actually, we in the scientific community know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no documented studies have been made on human beings. For instance, we don’t know how much punishment is best for learning, and we don’t know how much difference it makes as to who’s giving the punishment — whether an adult learns best from an older or younger person and many things of this sort. So what we’re doing with this project is bringing together a number of adults, of different occupations and ages, and are asking some of them to be teachers, and some to be learners. We want to find out just what effect people will have on each other as teachers and learners, and also what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation.” The learners: the book after "The cheese monkeys" By Chip Kidd
Thomas Blass, "The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram" 2004 review
Indeed, the Soviets now officially maintain that they would not be the first to make use of nuclear weapons. This declaration was first officially articulated in a message from Brezhnev to the United Nations Assembly on June 12, 1982: “The union of Soviet Socialist Republics assumes an obligation not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.” In the same year, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov stated, “Only extraordinary circumstances-a direct nuclear aggression against the Soviet state or its allies-can compel us to resort to a retaliatory nuclear strike as a last means of self-defense.” These statements represented a change in position for the USSR. Previously, Soviet spokesmen had only been willing to say they would not use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear powers. (Robert McNamara “Blundering into Disaster” 1986 p.27)
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/1995/1995%20boldrick.pdf
When I served in the Kennedy Administration, I learned that the capability to launch a first strike that would virtually eliminate the capability Soviet nuclear forces was indeed the goal of some in the U.S. Air Force. In a 1962 memorandum to the President, I quoted from an Air Force document:
The Air Force has rather supported the development of forces which provide the United States a first-strike capability credible to the Soviet Union, as well as to our Allies, by virtue of our ability to limit damage to the United States and our Allies to levels acceptable to the light of the circumstances and the alternatives available. (Robert McNamara “Blundering into Disaster” 1986 p.51)
Memorandum to the President 11/21/1962 non-searchable declassified dod.gov
History of Strategic Arms competition 1945-1972 Part 2 non-searchable declassified dod.gov
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor said of Gorbachev’s proposal, “It is a plan for making the world safe for conventional warfare. I am therefore not enthusiastic about it.” (Robert McNamara “Blundering into Disaster” 1986 p.87)
For example, a declassified 1954 document reveals that General Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command, stated, “I want to make it clear that I am not advocating a preventive war; however, I believe that if the U.S. is pushed in the corner far enough we would not hesitate to strike first. I don’t care [if this is not official national policy.] It’s my policy.” (Robert McNamara “Blundering into Disaster” 1986 p.99)
The Nuclear Button and The Nuclear Football www.bibliotecapleyades.net
The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III gordonmccabe.wordpress.com
And in 1980 Vice President Bush, when discussing how to win a nuclear exchange, said that one side could win such a war if “you have survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have the capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That’s the way you can have a winner.” *
* Statements such as these drew adverse comments from critics. We therefore hear fewer of them today. But the Pentagon’s strategic planning, weapons development, and arms procurement continue to be driven by a determination to maintain dominance at each stage of a nuclear conflict, which it is assumed could last for days or weeks until one side or the other prevailed. (Robert McNamara “Blundering into Disaster” 1986 p.)
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil on Scribd
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil Scribd
A Situationist Perspective on the psychology of Good and Evil Scribd
The Socialization of Evil: How the “Nazi Hate Primers” Prepared and Conditioned the Minds of German Youth to Hate Jews
The second broad class of operational principles by which otherwise good people can be recruited into evil is through education/socialization pro- cesses that are sanctioned by the government in power, enacted within school programs, and supported by parents and teachers. A prime example is the way in which German children in the 1930s and 1940s were system- atically indoctrinated to hate Jews, to view them as the all-purpose enemy of the new (post–World War I) German nation. Space limitations do not allow full documentation of this process, but I touch on several examples of one way in which governments are responsible for sanctioning evil.
In Germany, as the Nazi party rose to power in 1933, no target of Nazification took higher priority than the reeducation of Germany’s youth. Hitler wrote: “I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. A violently active, dominating, brutal youth—that is what I am after” (The New Order, 1989, pp. 101–102). To teach the youth about geography and race, special primers were created and ordered to be read starting in the first grade of elementary school (seeThe New Order,1989). These “hate primers” were brightly colored comic books that contrasted the beautiful blond Aryans with the despicably ugly carica- tured Jew. They sold in the hundreds of thousands. One was titledTrust No Fox in the Green Meadows and No Jew on His Oath.What is most in- sidious about this kind of hate conditioning is that the misinformation was presented as facts to be learned and tested upon, or from which to practice penmanship. In the copy of theTrust No Fox text that I reviewed, a series of cartoons illustrates all the ways in which Jews supposedly deceive Ary- ans, get rich and fat from dominating them, and are lascivious, mean, and without compassion for the plight of the poor and the elderly Aryans.
The final scenarios depict the retribution of Aryan children when they expel Jewish teachers and children from their school, so that “proper disci- pline and order” could then be taught. Initially, Jews were prohibited from community areas, like public parks, then expelled altogether from Ger- many. The sign in the cartoon reads, ominously, “One-way street.” In- deed, it was a unidirectional street that led eventually to the death camps and crematoria that were the centerpiece of Hitler’s Final Solution: the genocide of the Jews. Thus, this institutionalized evil was spread perva- sively and insidiously through a perverted educational system that turned away from the types of critical thinking exercises that open students’ minds to new ideas and toward thinking uncritically and close-mindedly about those targeted as the enemy of the people. By controlling education and the propaganda media, any national leader could produce the fantas- tic scenarios depicted in George Orwell’s (1981) frightening novel1984.
The institutionalized evil that Orwell vividly portrays in his fictional account of state dominance over individuals goes beyond the novelist’s imagination when its prophetic vision is carried into operational validity by powerful cult leaders or by agencies and departments within the current national administration of the United States. Previously I have outlined the direct parallels between the mind control strategies and tactics Orwell at- tributes to “The Party” and those that Reverend Jim Jones used in dominating the members of his religious/political cult, Peoples Temple (Zimbardo, 2003a). Jones orchestrated the suicide/murders of more than 900 U.S. citizens in the jungles of Guyana 25 years ago, perhaps as the grand finale of his experiment in institutionalized mind control. I learned from former members of this group that not only did Jones read1984, he talked about it often and even had a song commissioned by the church’s singer, entitled “1984 Is Coming,” that everyone had to sing at some ser- vices. I will leave it to the reader to explore the similarities between the mind control practices in1984 and those being practiced on U.S. citizens in the past few years (see Zimbardo, 2003b).
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT: A CRUCIBLE OF HUMAN NATURE WHERE GOOD BOYS ENCOUNTERED AN EVIL PLACE
Framing the issues we have been considering as, in essence, who wins when good boys are put in an evil place casts it as a neo-Greek tragedy sce- nario, wherein “the situation” stands in for the externally imposed forces of “the gods and destiny.” As such, we can anticipate an outcome unfavor- able to humanity. In more mundane psychological terms, this research on the Stanford prison experiment synthesized many of the processes and variables outlined earlier: those of place and person anonymity that con- tribute to the deindividuation of the people involved, the dehumanization of victims, giving some actors (guards) permission to control others (pris- oners), and placing it all within a unique setting (the prison) that most so- cieties throughout the world acknowledge provides some form of institu- tionally approved sanctions for evil through the extreme differentials in control and power fostered in prison environments.
In 1971, I designed a dramatic experiment that would extend over a 2-week period to provide our research participants with sufficient time for them to become fully engaged in their experimentally assigned roles of either guards or prisoners. Having participants live in a simulated prison set- ting day and night, if prisoners, or work there for long 8-hour shifts, if guards, would also allow sufficient time for situational norms to develop and patterns of social interaction to emerge, change, and crystallize. The second feature of this study was to ensure that all research participants would be as normal as possible initially, healthy both physically and men- tally, and without any history of involvement in drugs or crime or vio- lence. This baseline was essential to establish if we were to untangle the situational versus dispositional knot: What the situation elicited from this collection of similar, interchangeable young men versus what was emitted by the research participants based on the unique dispositions they brought into the experiment. The third feature of the study was the novelty of the prisoner and guard roles: Participants had no prior training in how to play the randomly assigned roles. Each subject’s prior societal learning of the meaning of prisons and the behavioral scripts associated with the op- positional roles of prisoner and guard was the sole source of guidance. The fourth feature was to create an experimental setting that came as close to a functional simulationof the psychology of imprisonment as possible. The details of how we went about creating a mindset comparable to that of real prisoners and guards are given in several of the articles I wrote about the study (see Zimbardo, 1975; Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973).
Central to this mind set were the oppositional issues of power and powerlessness, dominance and submission, freedom and servitude, control and rebellion, identity and anonymity, coercive rules and restrictive roles. In general, these social-psychological constructs were operationalized by putting all subjects in appropriate uniforms, using assorted props (e.g., handcuffs, police clubs, whistles, signs on doors and halls), replacing corri- dor hall doors with prison bars to create prison cells, using windowless and clock-less cells that afforded no clues as to time of day, applying insti- tutional rules that removed/substituted individual names with numbers (prisoners) or titles for staff (Mr. Correctional Officer, Warden, Super- intendent), and that gave guards control power over prisoners.
Subjects were recruited from among nearly 100 men between the ages of 18 and 30 who answered our advertisements in the local city newspa- per. They were given a background evaluation that consisted of a battery of five psychological tests, personal history, and in-depth interviews. The 24 who were evaluated as most normal and healthiest in every respect were randomly assigned, half to the role of prisoner and half to that of guard. The student-prisoners underwent a realistic surprise arrest by offi- cers from the Palo Alto Police Department, who cooperated with our plan. The arresting officer proceeded with a formal arrest, taking the “felons” to the police station for booking, after which each prisoner was brought to our prison in the reconstructed basement of our psychology department.
The prisoner’s uniform was a smock/dress with a prison ID number. The guards wore military-style uniforms and silver-reflecting sunglasses to enhance anonymity. At any one time there were nine prisoners on “the yard,” three to a cell, and three guards working 8-hour shifts. Data were collected via systematic video recordings, secret audio recordings of con- versations of prisoners in their cells, interviews and tests at various times during the study, postexperiment reports, and direct, concealed obser- vations.
For a detailed chronology and fuller account of the behavioral re- actions that followed, readers are referred to the above references, to Zimbardo, Maslach, and Haney (1999), and to our new website: www.prisonexp.org.For current purposes, let me simply summarize that the negative situational forces overwhelmed the positive dispositional ten- dencies. The Evil Situation triumphed over the Good People. Our pro- jected 2-week experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days because of the pathology we were witnessing. Pacifistic young men were behaving sadistically in their role as guards, inflicting humiliation and pain and suf- fering on other young men who had the inferior status of prisoner. Some “guards” even reported enjoying doing so. Many of the intelligent, healthy college students who were occupying the role of prisoner showed signs of “emotional breakdown” (i.e., stress disorders) so extreme that five of them had to be removed from the experiment within that first week. The prison- ers who adapted better to the situation were those who mindlessly fol- lowed orders and who allowed the guards to dehumanize and degrade them ever more with each passing day and night. The only personality variable that had any significant predictive value was that ofF-scale au- thoritarianism: The higher the score, the more days the prisoner survived in this totally authoritarian environment.
I terminated the experiment not only because of the escalating level of violence and degradation by the guards against the prisoners that was ap- parent when viewing the videotapes of their interactions, but also because I was made aware of the transformation that I was undergoing personally (see the analysis by Christina Maslach of how she intervened to help bring light to that dark place and end the study; in Zimbardo et al., 1999). I had become a Prison Superintendent in addition to my role as Principal Investi- gator. I began to talk, walk, and act like a rigid institutional authority fig- ure more concerned about the security of “my prison” than the needs of the young men entrusted to my care as a psychological researcher. In a sense, I consider the extent to which I was transformed to be the most pro- found measure of the power of this situation. We held extended debriefing sessions of guards and prisoners at the end of the study and conducted pe- riodic checkups over many years. Fortunately, there were no lasting nega- tive consequences of this powerful experience.
Before moving on, I would like to share parts of a letter sent to me re- cently (e-mail communication, October 18, 2002) by a young psychology student, recently discharged from military service. It outlines some of the direct parallels between the aversive aspects of our simulated prison many years ago and current despicable practices still taking place in some mili- tary boot-camp training. It also points up the positive effects that research and education can have:
I am a 19-year-old student of psychology [who watched] the slide show of your prison experiment. Not too far into it, I was almost in tears. . . . I joined the United States Marine Corps, pursuing a childhood dream. To make a long story short, I had become the victim of repeated illegal physical and mental abuse. An investigation showed I suffered more than 40 unprovoked beatings. Eventually, as much as I fought it, I became suicidal, thus received a discharge from boot camp. . . .
The point I am trying to make is that the manner in which your guards carried about their duties and the way that military drill instructors do is un- believable. I was amazed at all the parallels of your guards and one particular D. I. who comes to mind. I was treated much the same way, and even worse, in some cases.
One incident that stands out was the time, in an effort to break platoon solidarity, I was forced to sit in the middle of my squad bay (living quarters) and shout to the other recruits “If you guys would have moved faster, we wouldn’t be doing this for hours,” referencing every single recruit who was holding over his head a very heavy foot locker. The event was very similar to the prisoners saying #819 was a bad prisoner. After my incident, and after I was home safe some months later, all I could think about was how much I wanted to go back to show the other recruits that as much as the D. I.s told the platoon that I was a bad recruit, I wasn’t.
Other behaviors come to mind, like the push-ups we did for punish- ment, the shaved heads, not having any identity other than being addressed as, and referring to other people as, “Recruit So-and-So”—which replicates your study. The point of it all is that even though your experiment was con- ducted 31 years ago, my reading the study has helped me gain an understand- ing I was previously unable to gain before, even after therapy and counseling. What you have demonstrated really gave me insight into something I’ve been dealing with for almost a year now. Although, it is certainly not an excuse for their behavior, I now can understand the rationale behind the D. I.’s actions as far as being sadistic and power hungry. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.37-41)
Affection and Nurturance versus Neglect and Harsh Treatment
Temperamental characteristics of children enter into the development of altruism and aggression (Coie & Dodge, 1998; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998). For example, impulsiveness and related early temperamental characteris- tics have been linked to boys’ aggression (Staub, in preparation-b). How- ever, these characteristics are most likely to exert their influence in interac- tion with social experience. The expression of these characteristics is shaped by harsh treatment or lack of support and appropriate guidance by parents and other people. Similarly, temperamental dispositions appear to play a role in the emergence of empathy, but so do early socializing experi- ences (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990). Social conditions such as poverty also play an important role, but they appear to exert influence primarily by affecting how parents relate to and guide their children (McLoyd, 1990).
Here, I focus on child-rearing practices. Becoming a caring, helpful, altruistic person or a hostile and aggressive one is the result of combina- tions or patterns of child-rearing practices (Staub, 1979, 1996a, 2003, in preparation-b). Early responsiveness by parents to their infants’ needs and the provision of continuing nurturance, warmth, and affection are the core socializing practices and experiences for the development of helpful ten- dencies in children (Eisenberg, 1992; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998; Hoffman, 1970a, 1970b, 1975a; Shaffer, 1995; Staub, 1971, 1979, 1996a, 1996b, 2003, in preparation-b; Yarrow & Scott, 1972). Neglect and harsh treat- ment—that is, rejection, hostility, the extensive use of physical punish- ment, and physical or verbal abuse—are the core socializing practices and experiences that contribute to the development of aggression (Coie & Dodge, 1998; Eron, Gentry, & Schlegel, 1994; Eron, Walder, Lefkowitz, 1971; Heussman, Eron, Lefkowitz, & Walder, 1984; Huesman, Lager- spetz, & Eron, 1984; Lykken, 2001; Staub, 1979, 1996a, 1996b, 2003, in preparation-b; Weiss et al., 1992; Widom, 1989a, 1989b).
Providing warmth, affection, and nurturance indicates that caretakers are responsive to the needs of the young child. Responsiveness to the in- fant’s physical and social needs provides (fulfills the basic needs for) secu- rity and connection. Sensitive responding to the infant’s signals also satisfies the need for efficacy and control. Responding to signals and satisfying needs also affirms the child and begins to develop the rudiments of a posi- tive identity. Such sensitive parental responding is associated with the de- velopment of secure attachment (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974; Bretherton, 1992; Shaffer, 1995; Waters, Wippman, & Sroufe, 1979). In turn, secure attachment is associated with the development of sympathy (i.e., the feeling of sorrow or concern for the distressed or needy other; Eisenberg, 2002, p. 135), with helping peers by the time children are 3½ years old (Waters et al., 1979), and with the emergence of prosocial behav- ior in preschool (Kestenbaum, Farber, & Sroufe, 1989).
As children get older, love, affection, and caring about a child’s wel- fare can take varied forms. For example, an in-depth, important study found that an essential characteristic of the parents of boys who have high self-esteem was caring about the child’s welfare, expressed in many ways, and not necessarily by physical affection (Coopersmith, 1967). Sensitivity in caring about and responding to the child’s feelings and needs—to who the child is—fulfills all basic needs. The child in such care develops con- nection to important adults and forms a positive orientation toward peo- ple in general. That this is the case is suggested by research findings that show that securely attached children are also capable ofcreating positive connections. Such children have positive relationships with peers in the early school years (Waters et al., 1979). Further in the developmental con- tinuum, college students who rate their parents as affectionate and caring also have a positive view of their fellow humans and express con- cern about, and feelings of responsibility for, others’ welfare (Staub & Operario, unpublished data). As noted earlier, such a prosocial value ori- entation is related to varied forms of helping.
In contrast, experiencing neglect and the ineffectiveness of one’s sig- nals, such as crying, to bring about the satisfaction of essential biological (and social) needs has severe negative effects. Research on institutionalized infants has shown that in institutions with poor caretaking, infants be- come depressed and die in significant numbers. Children who had lived in such institutions later show deficiencies in their capacity for human con- nection and in other domains (Shaffer, 1995; Thompson & Grusec, 1970). The conditions in such institutions frustrate infants’ basic needs for secu- rity, connection, and effectiveness/control. Given inadequate staffing, in- fants are fed and cared for on schedule, and in sequence, when it is their turn, not when they are hungry or distressed. Their crying brings no re- sponse. They have no significant connection to anyone. Neglect beyond in- fancy also has extreme negative consequences. Emotional neglect—that is, inattention to the child as a person and to his or her efforts to feel connec- tion and affirmation—has even more severe consequences than harsh treatment (Erikson & Egeland, 1996).
Harsh treatment also frustrates basic needs, increasingly so as it be- come more severe and abusive. Especially when it is unpredictable, it creates insecurity. When it is unavoidable, in that the child cannot prevent it, it creates a feeling of ineffectiveness. The child feels diminished; his or her connection with the caretaker is broken, and the child forms a view of peo- ple and the world as hostile and dangerous. This view, formed so early in life, interferes with the child’s ability to develop connections to people in general.
Aggressive boys, as well as adults, may come to use aggression as a destructive mode of fulfilling needs for security, efficacy, positive identity, and even connection. They learn to interpret others’ behavior toward themselves as hostile (Dodge, 1980, 1993) and consider aggression to be normal, appropriate, and even inevitable (Huesmann & Eron, 1984). When children are victimized by caretakers and also have models who coach them in aggressive responses (referred to as “violentization”), they may become intensely aggressive (Rhodes, 1999). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.68-70)
There can be little doubt that, from the victim’s perspective, their killers or would-be killers would be considered evil. Before we consider the possible evolution of a universal cognitive category of evil, however, it is critical to consider the evolutionary events that would be set into motion once killing entered the human strategic repertoire. Because of the dramatic fitness costs of being killed, selection would act strongly to create defenses against killing—what we have called anti-homicide mechanisms (Duntley & Buss, 1998). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.108)
That good and evil exist in the world is clear. Of that, there is little debate. We know that some people are capable of great selflessness, and that most people maintain high moral standards for themselves and others, give the welfare of others high priority, and place equality among their most cen- tral values (Kluegel & Smith, 1986). We also know that some people are capable of doing great harm, intentionally and unintentionally, to others. Racism reflects an essential kind of selfishness and evil that has pervaded human existence across cultures and across time (Jones, 1997). Racism provides both psychological benefits (e.g., enhanced self-esteem; Fein & Spencer, 1997) and material advantages (e.g., access to economic re- sources; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1998; see also Blank, 2001) to the perpetra- tor. The problem is that the same people—average people, “good” people—can be responsible for both good and bad deeds. Good people are often racist, and they are often racist without being aware of it….
In this initial study of contemporary racism (Gaertner, 1973), white participants residing in Brooklyn, New York, were selected for a field ex- periment on helping on the basis of their liberal or conservative orienta- tions, as indicated by their political party affiliations, which were a matter of public record. Both the liberal and the conservative households received wrong-number telephone calls that quickly developed into requests for as- sistance. The callers, who were clearly identifiable from their dialects as being black or white, explained that their car was disabled and that they were attempting to reach a service garage from a public phone along the parkway. The callers further claimed that they had no more change to make another call and asked the participant to help by calling the garage. If the participant agreed to help and called the number, ostensibly of the garage, a “helping” response was scored. If the participant refused to help or hung up after the caller explained that he or she had no more change, a “not helping” response was recorded. If the participant hung up before learning that the motorist had no more change, the response was con- sidered to be a “premature hang-up.”
The first finding from this study was direct and predicted. Conserva- tives showed a higher “helping” response to whites than to blacks (92% vs. 65%), whereas liberals helped whites somewhat, but not significantly, more than blacks (85% vs. 75%). By this measure, conservatives were more biased against blacks than were liberals. However, what is good and bad behavior is not always obvious or straightforward. Additional inspec- tion of the data revealed an unanticipated finding. Liberals “hung up pre- maturely” much more often on blacks than they did on whites (19% vs. 3%), and especially often on a black male motorist (28%). Conservatives did not discriminate in this way (8% vs. 5%). From the perspective of black callers, the consequence of a direct “not helping” response and of a “premature hang-up” was the same: They would be left without assistance. From the perspective of the participants, however, the consequences were different. Whereas a “not helping” response was a direct form of dis- crimination because it should have been clear to participants that their help was needed, a “premature hang-up” was a more indirect form be- cause participants disengaged from the situation before they learned of the other person’s dependence on them, and thus participants never overtly refused assistance. Consequently, both conservative and liberal whites dis- criminated against blacks but in different ways.
These findings and the conceptual work of Kovel (1970) challenged our views of good and bad and prompted us to reevaluate our assumptions about the nature of liberals’ racial attitudes and good intentions. They also stimulated a line of research on contemporary racism that we have con- ducted over the past 30 years. Specifically, this work has focused on a par- ticular type of contemporary racism, “aversive racism.” Aversive racism is hypothesized to be qualitatively different from the old-fashioned, blatant kind, and it is presumed to characterize the racial attitudes of most well- educated and liberal whites in the United States. It is more indirect and subtle than the traditional form of prejudice, but its consequences are no less evil. In this chapter, we first consider the nature of aversive racism. Second, we offer experimental evidence of its existence and operation in the behavior of whites toward blacks. Third, we examine how aver- sive racism can contribute to interracial miscommunication and distrust. Fourth, we explore approaches for combating aversive racism. And finally, we discuss the social implications of aversive racism. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.141-3)
Research from several perspectives reveals that a wide variety of risk and protective factors influence the incidence of individual and collective vio- lent evil between and within various societies. Examples of these factors include accessibility of guns (O’Donnell, 1995), global warming (Ander- son, Bushman, & Groom, 1997), different cultural norms about violence (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), and the widespread exposure to violent enter- tainment media (Anderson et al., in press; Anderson & Bushman, 2001, 2002b). However, no one causal factor, by itself, explains more than a small portion of differences in violence. For example, it is now well estab- lished that exposure to media violence is a risk factor for development of aggressive and violent individuals. Four broad types of converging evi- dence provide consistent results on this point: Cross-sectional correlation studies, longitudinal studies, laboratory experiments, and field experi- ments all point to the same simple conclusion (Anderson & Bushman, 2002c). Compared to the effect sizes of other more well-known medical ef- fects, such as secondhand smoking effects on lung cancer (Bushman & An- derson, 2002a), the media violence effects are sizeable but still account for only 3–4% of the variance in aggression. The effect size on the most ex- treme forms of violent evil is likely smaller. But the same is true for other violence risk factors. Violent evil is most likely to emerge in environments with multiple risk factors, environments that provide aggressive models, frustrate and victimize people, reinforce aggression, and teach people that aggression is acceptable and successful. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.182)
TABLE 8.1.Proximate and Distal Causal Factors in Violent Evil
Proximate causal factors
Person
Unstable high self-esteem Narcissism Self-image Long-term goals Self-efficacy beliefs for violent and nonviolent behavior Normative beliefs about aggression, retaliation, etc. Attitudes toward violence Hostile attribution, expectation, and perception biases Aggression scripts Dehumanization of others Cultural stereotypes Moral justification for violence Displacement of responsibility
Situation
Social stress Provocation Frustration Pain/discomfort Bad moods Weapons Violent scenes Violent media Noise Temperature Threatening or fearful stimuli Exercise Alcohol and other drugs
Distal Causal Factors in Violent Evil
Environmental modifiers
Maladaptive families and parenting Violent neighborhood Cultural norms that support violence Victimization experiences Deprivation Difficult life conditions Group conflict Fear-inducing events Lack of bystander intervention in violent encounters Diffusion of responsibility Exposure to violent media Association antisocial peers
Biological modifiers Low arousal Low serotonin ADHD Hormone imbalances Executive functioning deficits (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.184)
Although the most common interpretation of Milgram’s findings is that participants did not personally wish to harm the learner, the motives gen- erated in this paradigm may well have been more mixed or ambivalent in many participants. Unfortunately, the manner in which people actually re- gard the act ofpunishing others when they make mistakes—that is, the key behavior in the Milgram paradigm—has been virtually ignored in discus- sions of the obedience research. However, an examination of recent research oncorporal punishment suggests that this form of harming is a widely accepted form of child discipline (Gershoff, 2002; Strauss, 1994). Most people are hardly unequivocally opposed to the use of physical punishment under absolutely any circumstances. That a majority approve the use of capital punishment in this country might serve as another illustra- tion. It is also likely that in the late 1950s, the rationale of administering physical pain (i.e., shocks) to induce better learning may have seemed at least somewhat less surprising than it would today.
Key aspects of the arguments linking the obedience studies to the Ho- locaust rest not simply upon what actions people perform in these studies but why they perform them, and what they are experiencing while doing so.Many participants may have had a complex mixture of feelings about what they were being ordered to do; that is, they may not have beentotally opposed personally to shocking the learner, even though they did have res- ervations and were not willing to inflict significant punishment when left to their own accord. Precisely how people regard punishment, both physi- cal and nonphysical, is thus one of the many unanswered questions with important relevance to the M–H argument.
The Issue of Generalizing Research Findings
Research findings rarely “speak for themselves.” Generalizing the results of research to specific nonresearch contexts frequently produces disagree- ment because the applicability of a study is often a matter ofinterpretation rather than empirical or statistical fact, and people obviously may differ in their interpretations (e.g., Banaji & Crowder, 1989; Miller, 1995). Often, it is not the superficial similarities between a research project and an anal- ogous “real world” setting that are crucial to the generalization process (Henshel, 1980). Rather, as Mook (1983) has noted: “Ultimately, what makes research findings of interest is that they help us understand every- day life. That understanding, however, comes from theory or the analysis of mechanism; it is not a matter of ‘generalizing’ the findings themselves” (p. 386). At times, the linkage between research and nonresearch settings is relatively straightforward. For example, a number of generalizations from Milgram’s studies have been made to the kinds of obedience pres- sures that exist in hierarchical social organizations, corporations, and other bureaucracies (e.g., Brief, Buttram, Elliott, Reizenstein, & McCline, 1995; Darley, Messick, & Tyler, 2001; Hamilton & Sanders, 1999; Kelman & Hamilton, 1989). These analyses have provoked no noticeable controversy. Hamilton and Sanders (1995), for example, see great value in the Milgram experiments in terms of explaining how contemporary bu- reaucratic organizations may create conditions for subordinate deference to authorities:
Most of the organized ways in which people do wrong happen when they go to work. It is part of Milgram’s (1974) legacy that psychologists realize no question is more important for the next millennium than that of how human social organization can be made more humane. We need to learn, literally, who in the world really expects organizational actors to be autonomous moral beings. Perhaps then we may better understand when and why they are not. (p. 85)
As will be noted, however, generalizing the obedience research to the Ho- locaust has been anything but noncontroversial.
The First Challenge to the Obedience Interpretation of the Holocaust
In her influential ethical criticism of Milgram’s studies, Baumrind (1964) was extremely skeptical of linking the obedience research to the Holo- caust. She noted that the SS officers were not under the impression that the ultimate authority, Hitler, was kindly disposed toward the victims. The victims also were not social peers of the SS but rather were dehumanized to an extreme degree. Baumrind contended that the conflict expressed by many subjects was evidence of their concern for the learner—another ma- jor weakness in the Nazi analogy.
In Milgram’s (1964) rebuttal, he agreed partially with Baumrind— that is, he noted that he was not attempting to study the Holocaust per se. Arguing that his paradigm was only an analogy to the Holocaust, he clari- fied that his primary intent was not to explain the Holocaust:
Baumrind mistakes the background metaphor for the precise subject matter of investigation. The German event was cited to point up a serious problem in the human situation: the potentially destructive effect of obedience. But the best way to tackle the problem of obedience, from a scientific standpoint, is in no way restricted by “what happened exactly” in Germany. What hap- pened exactly cannever be duplicated in the laboratory or anywhere else. The real task is to learn more about the general problem of destructive obedience using a workable approach. (p. 851)
If Milgram and others had subsequently continued studying the processes of destructive obedience without a continuous preoccupation with its link- age to the Holocaust, the course of scholarship relating to the obedience research would likely have been very different. However, connections to the Holocaustwere to become the most salient reaction to the obedience studies. Indeed, the obedience studies were soon to become world re- nowned, and Milgram often extrapolated his laboratory findings to a vari- ety of global instances of destructive obedience—in addition to the Holo caust, he opined on the mass suicides under Jim Jones at Jonestown, the My Lai massacre, and other horrific events (e.g., Milgram, 1974, pp. 179– 189).
Why Is the Generalizability Issue Controversial?
Preexisting points of view or theoretical orientations held by the observer of a study (i.e., critics, students, readers) are a major source of contro- versy. One’s initial position or perspective may induce powerful biases in terms of how a research finding is interpreted or appraised (e.g., Green- wald, Pratkanis, Leippe, & Baumgardner, 1986; Kunda, 1990; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). Information that contradicts one’s prevailing attitude or theory is likely to be devalued and subjected to intense scrutiny. Informa- tion that is consistent with one’s theoretical view or leads to a preferred conclusion is more likely to be readily endorsed. Contributing to the im- portance and often insidious effects of these biases is the fact that people are likely to be unaware of these effects, claiming, instead, that their reac- tions to a particular study are objective and factually based.
The sources of these confirmatory biases are diverse—it could be a formal theoretical orientation, a political position, a religious or ethical conviction, a highly personal, emotional feeling, etc. Social psychologists who adopt a strongly situationist view of behavior invariably endorse the obedience experiments, whereas social psychologists taking a more dispositional or personality-oriented view of behavior are more criti- cal (e.g., Berkowitz, 1999), particularly in terms of their generaliza- tion to the Holocaust. In dramatizing the power of situations, social psychologists frequently note that the lay observer is not similarly at- tuned to situational pressures but rather biased toward dispositional explanations—what is often termed the fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995)—that is, if you do not agree with the situational view, you are simply committing a serious attributional error.
Generalizations from a social-psychological explanatory perspective are convincing only to the degree that the conceptualization of the do- main to which the research is generalized (e.g., Holocaust) is also plausi- bly construed in compatible terms. Thus, for a social-psychological anal- ysis of the Holocaust to be convincing—that is, to be persuasive to those who might not initially think about the Holocaust in social-psychologi cal terms—it must describe the Holocaust as caused, in key respects, by processes of social influence and external pressure in addition to (or per- haps rather than) personality factors or traits of moral character in indi- vidual actors. In essence, there must be a conceptual fit or match be- tween both elements of the generalization: the research and the target domain of the generalization. If this match is not present, disagreement will automatically ensue.
THE HOLOCAUST: A DEFINITION
In this chapter, the termHolocaust refers to the systematic and planned killing of millions of Jews, largely during the latter parts of the war. The Holocaust is generally considered to have been the result of a highly efficient bureaucracy or social organization (Darley, 1992; Hilberg, 1985). It is virtually uncontested that the policy of genocide was instigated by Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials (Mandel, 2002). It is further assumed here that the murder of Jews on the scale of genocide would not have occurred without this key factor of authorization from the upper ech- elons of the Nazi hierarchy. In describing the motives of the instigators, there is a general consensus that an ideological world view of Jews was of central importance. Bauer (2001) has noted that the Nazi regime extended anti-Semitism to a radically new form, essentially coupling it with a more elaborate ideology of racial purification: “Nazi ideology saw in the Jews a universal devilish element, so the pursuit of Jews was to have been a global, quasi-religious affair, the translation into practice of a murderous ideology” (p. 27). Sabini and Silver (1980) describe the diverse actions, performed by those who were given orders, that comprised the Holocaust:
It is not the angry rioter we must understand but Eichmann, the colorless bu- reaucrat, replicated two million times in those who assembled the trains, dis- patched the supplies, manufactured the poison gas, filed the paper work, sent out the death notices, guarded the prisoners, pointed left and right, super- vised the loading–unloading of the vans, disposed of the ashes, and per- formed the countless other tasks that also constituted the Holocaust. (p. 330)
A central question in this chapter concerns the perpetrators’ primary mo- tives in the killing operations. In terms of the M–H thesis, the issue of mo- tives is of critical importance and a source of great controversy.
GENERALIZING FROM THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENTS TO THE HOLOCAUST (M–H): ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF THE M–H THESIS
What can the obedience experiments tell us about the Holocaust? Posi- tions on this issue can generally be divided into those that endorse the gen- eralizations and those opposing them. I begin with an examination of the pro-generalization arguments.
Milgram’s Position
In the opening paragraph of his first publication on the obedience re- search, Milgram (1963) made an explicit association between the experi- ments and the Holocaust:
Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933–45 millions of innocent persons were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane poli- cies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed or- ders. (p. 371)
Given that the Holocaust, itself, has been the focus of intense controversies within a host of academic disciplines—for example, reactions to Gold- hagen’sHitler’s Willing Executioners (1996)—it is understandable that any scientific experiment claiming a meaningful connection to the Holocaust would prompt similar reactions. Certainly this controversy accompanied the obedience studies. My impression is that it was Milgram’s reference to the Holocaust in conjunction with the startling results of his 1963 report that set into motion the unparalleled impact of this study. Baumrind’s ethical criti- cisms (1964) inThe American Psychologist, appearing only a few months af- ter the original obedience publication, also had the unintended effect of in- troducing the obedience studies to a large readership.
People, Milgram stated, are often obsessed with carrying out their jobs; they become dominated by “an administrative, rather than a moral, outlook” (1974, p. 186). He emphasized the role of the mission itself, its noble purpose: “In the experiment, science is served by the act of shocking the victim against his will; in Germany, the destruction of the Jews was represented as a ‘hygienic’ process against ‘jewish vermin’ (Hilberg, 1961)” (p. 187). He addressed the role of silence in the process of destruc- tive obedience: “In Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identi- fied with the ‘final solution,’ it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings. . . . Subjects in the experiment most frequently experience their objections as embarrassing” (p. 187). Milgram was careful to note that obedience was not, in its essence, a bad or dangerous activity, and that it could have life-enhancing consequences.
Milgram’s Recognition of Distinctions between His Research and the Holocaust
By the appearance of Milgram’s 1974 book, the linkage of the obedience research to the Holocaust had already become extremely well known and cited in diverse texts. Here Milgram explicitly recognized importantdiffer- encesbetween his experimental paradigm and the Nazi Holocaust:
The experiment is presented to our subjects in a way that stresses its posi- tive human values: increase of knowledge about learning and memory pro- cesses. . . . By contrast, the objectives that Nazi Germany pursued were themselves morally reprehensible, and were recognized as such by many Germans. [Milgram does footnote the idea that the regime itself viewed killing Jews as a virtuous activity to cleanse the Reich of subhuman ver- min.]The maintenance of obedience in our subjects is highly dependent upon the face-to-face nature of the social occasion and its attendant surveil- lance. . . . The forms of obedience that occurred in Germany were in far greater degree dependent upon the internalization of authority . . . to resist Nazism was itself an act of heroism, not an inconsequential decision, and death was a possible penalty. Penalties and threats were forever around the corner, and the victims themselves had been thoroughly vilified and por- trayed as being unworthy of life or human kindness. Finally our subjects were told by authority that what they were doing to their victim might be tempo- rarily painful but would cause no permanent damage, while those Germans directly involved in the annihilations knew that they were not only inflicting pain but were destroying human life. So, in the final analysis, what happened in Germany from 1933 to 1945 can only be fully understood as the expres- sion of a unique historical development that will never again be precisely rep- licated. (pp. 176–177)
Thus, Milgram explicitly articulated key distinctions between his studies and the Holocaust—precisely what many critics have accused him (and legions of his advocates) of completely ignoring in his analysis. Nev- ertheless, Milgram’s position on the M–H issue varied. At times, he was a strong proponent of the linkage. He felt that he had identified a fundamen- tal psychological process that was common to both the laboratory and the real-world context:
Yet the essence of obedience, as a psychological process, can be captured by studying the simple situation in which a man is told by a legitimate authority to act against a third individual. This situation confronted both our experi- mental subject and the German subject and evoked in each a set of parallel psychological adjustments. (1974, p. 177)
Milgram’s views could thus be termed complex and diverse by his support- ers or inconsistent and ambiguous by his detractors. Clearly, however, the linkage between Milgram’s studies and the Holocaust was to become the prevailing thesis in the eyes of most social psychologists. Numerous schol- ars, other than social psychologists, have both championed and refuted the M–H thesis (Miller, 1986).
Social Psychology Textbooks: Positions on the M–H Linkage Where can we find discussions of the obedience experiments? I am tempted to answer, “Not quite everywhere, but close to it!” I wish to fo- cus, however, on social psychology textbooks, which have been the pri- mary source for generations of students and social scientists. To assess the current treatment of the M–H thesis, I examined seven recent editions of popular textbooks. The Milgram obedience research continues to receive extraordinary attention. The number of pages allotted to the obedience re- search varied between five and 15, most accounts featuring detailed analy- ses of the many experimental variations in Milgram’s paradigm and pho- tographs from his laboratory. Contemporary authors emphasize a point that Milgram himself regarded as highly underappreciated, namely the ex- traordinary degree to which harmful obedience to authority is responsive to variations in the specific experimental context:
The degree of obedience varied sharply depending upon the exact manner in which the variables of the experiment are arranged in an experimental condi- tion. Yet, in the popular press, these variations are virtually ignored, or as- sumed to be of only minor importance. (1979, pp. 7–8)
In this context, there is a tendency for many people to misunderstand the obedience experiments even after hearing a discussion of the research and watching Milgram’s filmed account of the study (Safer, 1980). Instead of recognizing (correctly) the situationally specific nature of obedience, that is, that (the same) people may be highly obedient in some circum- stances but very defiant in others, many observers conclude, erroneously, that most people are simply obedient to destructive ordersregardless of the situation.For example, one frequently observes the assertion that Milgram’s primary finding is that people are “blindly obedient” to author- ity, a finding virtually completely at odds with Milgram’s actual observa- tions. As I have noted, this tendency to infer personal or internal causes of behavior, even when it occurs under highly constraining circumstances, is viewed by many social psychologists as a major judgmental error or attributional bias (Ross & Nisbett, 1991). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.198-9)
Does Milgram’s Interpretation Exonerate Those Who Obey Malevolent Authority?
In my view, the answer to this question is a qualified “yes.” Consider the following from Milgram (1974):
It is the old story of “just doing one’s duty” that was heard time and time again in the defense statements of those accused at Nuremberg. But it would be wrong to think of it as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of thinking for a great many people once they are locked into a subordinate position in a structure of authority. The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority (p. 8). . . . For the social psychology of this century reveals a ma- jor lesson: Often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. (p. 205) (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.218)
In his address to the nation on March 17, 2003, prior to ordering the invasion of Iraq, Pres- ident George W. Bush recognized but explicitly disavowed the exonerating implications of obedience to authority: “And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen care- fully to this warning. . . . Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’ ” (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.219 footnote)
Furthermore, a gender-similarities approach could result in a backlash against feminist activism aimed at addressing violence against women. For example, reports of women’s violence toward men have been used by op- ponents of the women’s movement to argue against funding shelters for battered women (Gelles & Strauss, 1988). (Note, however, that gender- differences approaches have also resulted in backlash. Researchers taking gender-differences approaches have been a target of critics such as Gilbert [1991] and Roiphe [1993], who argued that feminists have exaggerated the prevalence and seriousness of violence against women.) (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.250)
WHERE SHOULD WE FOCUS OUR RESEARCH ON RAPE PREVENTION: ON VICTIMS, PERPETRATORS, OR SOCIETY?
The Israeli parliament suggested a curfew on women when the rape rate increased. However, Prime Minister Golda Meir suggested a curfew on men because they were the ones doing the raping. —BART AND O’BRIEN (1985, p. 2)
Rape researchers and activists face political and ethical dilemmas when choosing the focus of their efforts. Researchers can choose to focus on vic- tims by exploring attitudes, behaviors, and personality characteristics that increase or decrease the risk of being raped. Alternatively, researchers can focus on the attitudes, behaviors, and personality characteristics of perpe- trators. Finally, researchers can focus on society, identifying stereotypes, social norms, and institutions that support and perpetuate rape. Similarly, activists can focus their rape-prevention efforts on potential victims, on potential perpetrators, or on society. Each of these approaches could help address the problem of rape, but each is also controversial in its political and ethical implications.
Research Focusing on Victims
Rape research focused on victims has provided valuable information about risk factors for victimization. For example, research suggests that women are at greater risk of rape if they frequently get intoxicated (Muehlenhard & Linton, 1987; Testa & Dermen, 1999), engage in casual sex (Testa & Dermen, 1999), or attend fraternity parties (Ullman, 1997), or if they have a history of child sexual abuse (Muehlenhard, Highby, Lee, Bryan, & Dodrill, 1998).
Such findings can help reduce the risk of rape. Identifying risky situa- tions and behaviors can help individuals make informed choices about their behaviors. Identifying background factors or personality characteris- tics that lead to patterns of repeated victimization can suggest appropriate therapeutic interventions to help alter these patterns.
However, different rape prevention strategies implicitly suggest differ- ent views of responsibility for rape (Krulewitz & Kahn, 1983). Rape prevention based on findings about victims’ traits and behaviors may im- plicitly suggest that those who are most at risk for rape—that is, women— should alter and restrict their behavior to avoid being raped. For example, information suggesting that attending parties is risky might be interpreted to mean that women should avoid parties in order to avoid being raped. This approach puts the burden of preventing rape on potential victims rather than potential perpetrators and limits women’s freedom.
Furthermore, focusing rape prevention on victims may be viewed as blaming the victim. Individuals who engage in risky behaviors and are raped might be blamed—by others and by themselves—for contributing to their own victimization. Such victim blaming is often evident in the legal system; when crime victims are seen as behaving in ways that contribute to their own victimization, legal cases against perpetrators are sometimes dis- missed or the charges are reduced (Miethe, 1985).
An alternative to focusing on risk factors for victimization is to focus on resistance strategies women have used to thwart rape attempts. For ex- ample, research shows that active resistance strategies (e.g., physically fighting, screaming, and running away) are more strongly associated with thwarting attempted rape, whereas passive resistance strategies (e.g., pleading, crying, reasoning, or doing nothing) are associated more strongly with experiencing completed rape (Bart & O’Brien, 1985; Ullman 1997; Ullman & Knight, 1993; Zoucha-Jensen & Coyne, 1993). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.251-2)
ACKNOWLEDGING THAT SEXUAL VIOLENCE DOES NOT HAVE UNIFORMLY SEVERE CONSEQUENCES
The politics of research have caused many studies to have been undertaken in a less than complete way. For example, we know very little about what kinds of circumstances mediate positive and negative outcomes after sexual abuse. There has been little acknowledgement of the fact that although rape, child sexual abuse, and wife battering are terrible experiences to have gone through, many people have “survived” and moved beyond them, feeling as if their victimization is not something that has defined them or continues to affect them. —LAMB(1996, p. 46)
On July 12th the U.S. House of Representatives voted 355–0 to condemn certain conclusions of our article; the Senate quickly followed suit. —RIND, TROMOVITCH, ANDBAUSERMAN(1999, p. 11)
Does sexual violencealways have severe consequences? This question in- volves issues of politics, definitions, and meaning.
An article published inPsychological Bulletin illustrates the politics of this issue. Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman (1998) conducted a meta- analysis of 59 studies comparing the adjustment of college students who reported having experienced child sexual abuse (CSA) with those who did not report CSA. Their meta-analysis revealed small differences between the two groups, with CSA accounting for less than 1% of the variance in adjustment (ru= .09, with a 95% confidence interval from .08 to .11). It also revealed that the outcomes reported by men were less negative than those reported by women.
These results could have been interpreted as a message of hope for victims of CSA and their families, contradicting the idea that individuals experiencing CSA are doomed to a life of depression and despair. Instead, through a complicated series of events, the authors—and the American Psychological Association, which publishesPsychological Bulletin—found themselves under attack (Rind et al., 1999).
The attack was initiated by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a psychoanalytically oriented group that still regards homosexuality as a mental disorder. Conservative talk show host “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger and the conservative lobbying group, The Family Research Council, joined the attack (Rind et al., 1999). Finally, on July 12, 1999, the U.S. Congress voted to condemn the study and “any suggestion that sexual relations between children and adults . . . are anything but abusive [and] destructive” (Rind et al., 1999, p. 11).
The question of whether sexual violence has uniformly severe conse- quences—and, if not, what conditions affect the consequences—deserves careful thought. There are many aspects to consider. Here we discuss two such issues: other experiences that reproduce the dynamics of sexual vio- lence, and individual differences in the meaning of sexual violence. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.257-8)
One extremely harmful form of aggression that appears to result, in part, from the pursuit of self-esteem, is domestic violence. Research has docu- mented the self-perpetuating nature of domestic violence. Many abusive men either have witnessed violence in their family of origin or been the vic- tim of child abuse and experienced parental rejection (Mischel & Shoda, 1995); domestic violence is highly correlated with child abuse (Osofsky, 1999).
Infants who are maltreated either through exposure to abuse or as a direct victim of abuse are more likely to experience insecure relationships with caregivers (Kaufman & Henrich, 2000). As a result of their unmet needs, attachment relationships are compromised, leaving these individuals with a pattern of sensitivity to rejection, insecure attachment styles, and unsatisfying relationships (Feldman & Downey, 1994). Insecure attachment is also implicated in tendencies to inhibit or exaggerate negative emotions and other emotional regulation problems (Kaufman & Henrich, 2000). Unmet attachment needs, anxiety, and rejection fears are thus hy- pothesized to be important factors in the occurrence of domestic violence (Downey, Feldman, & Ayduk, 2000; Mischel & Shoda, 1995), which is used as a coping strategy to feel better following felt rejection (Bushman et al., 2001). Abusive men seek attention from their spouse through an inter- action pattern of low-level conflict that, at times, erupts into violence (Gottman, Jacobson, Rushe, & Shortt, 1995), or they use aggression to maintain the spouse’s closeness and control her behavior. In other words, it seems that abusive men use defensive strategies to cope with an excessive need for reassurance and approval.
Domestic violence is clearly linked to behavioral and emotional dysregulation and the inability to cope with emotion in the context of interpersonal relationships with significant others. At the physiological level, behavioral regulation patterns indicate that most abusive men expe- rience heart rate increases and other signs of emotional arousal during conflict-laden discussions. Abusive men who experience increased physio- logical arousal may also rely more on a self-regulatory style that is impul- sive, based on emotions, fears, and passions (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999) that undermine self-control. A smaller subgroup of abusive men who are the most violent display decreased physiological arousal under conditions of low-level conflict with a significant other. This group of men is also more likely to use violence against others as well as their domestic partner (Gottman et al., 1995). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.280-1) Evil is a strong word when applied to behaviors, but even more so when applied to persons. Many people are uncomfortable with the notion of identifying or labeling others as evil. For some, the concern is the strong value judgment inherent in the term. For others, the concern is the heavy religious connotations associated with the notion ofevil. Still others worry that the term is damning, implying an intractable trait with no hope for redemption. “What do we gain by using the term evil at all?” asked one of our graduate students. “How does it help us to better understand human behavior to develop an index for evil?”
No question about it,evil is a hot term—emotionally loaded, morally judgmental, full of brimstone and fire. But it is a construct that has been with us—often, centrally so—throughout human history. It is a deeply en- trenched construct that will not go away. Precisely because it is such an emotionally “hot” construct, it may be especially important to develop ob- jective measures, based in rational methods, preferably using “cooler” ter- minology. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.338)
We wish to emphasize that use of the PCL-R to assess psychopathy— or “evil”—does not imply any particular etiology of this construct. The PCL-R is “descriptive”: It measures certain traits and behaviors that are considered to be indicative of psychopathy. It contains no implications as to the root cause of psychopathy, which could be genetics, bad parents, bad childhood, impaired superego, the devil, a “disorder of emotion” caused by brain dysfunction, or just bad luck (Blair, 1995, 2001, 2002; Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001; Karpman, 1948; Mealey, 1995a, 1995b; Porter, 1996; Weiler & Widom, 1996). The jury’s still out on the causes of psychopathy, but in order to answer the all-important eti- ology question, we need a reasonably objective, repeatable (e.g., reliable and valid) method for measuring characteristics associated with evil. A de- scriptive scientific index is a prerequisite.
Use of the PCL-R to assess psychopathy is not cheap. It requires an average 6 hours of time from a specially trained clinician, including client interview, records review, scoring, and interpretation. But if one is inter- ested in quantifying “evil” by using strict, empirically-derived criteria in order to minimize subjectivity (Hare, 1991); if one is interested in predict- ing recidivism (Harris, Rice, & Quinsey, 1993; Hart, Kropp, & Hare, 1988; Serin & Amos, 1995); or if one is interested in identifying the root causes of psychopathy in order to effectively intervene, the PCL-R is clearly the instrument of choice. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.340)
Our guess is that an important part of what sets psychopaths apart from nonpsychopaths is that the latter have some capacity for moral emo- tions. They may engage in bad (even evil) deeds, but they are not bad evil people. When they do commit bad acts, they know they have done some- thing bad, and they feel bad about it (even if they do not readily acknowl- edge these feelings to others). The key question to explore regarding this large majority of current and future inmates is, Whatkind of moral emotion(s) do they feel? Are they inclined to feelguilt about their specific mis- deeds and feel a proactive press to repair and make amends to the harmed person? Or are they likely to feelshame as a person? Shame leads to de- nial, defense, and retaliation in response to the mistaken notion that be- cause they did bad (even evil), theyare bad, evil persons….
For most of the past century the predominant model in the field of correc- tions was one of rehabilitation. This perspective changed during the 1970s and 1980s, when the concept of “nothing works” gained ground based on several reviews of the treatment literature (Martinson, 1974; Sechrest, White, & Brown, 1979). Recently, due to the development of more sophis- ticated methods, such as meta-analysis, and tighter control over program implementation, studies have begun to show that rehabilitationcan effec- tively change some offenders (Cecil, Drapkin, MacKenzie, & Hickman, 2000; Cullen & Gendreau, 2000; MacKenzie, 2000; Wilson, Gallagher, & MacKenzie, 2000). There is now a call for more “evidence-based” correc- tions’ models (Farrington, Petrosino, & Welsh, 2001; MacKenzie, 2001). As Cullen and Gendreau (2001) state, we need to now move from “noth- ing works” to “what works.” An even more important question may be “What works withwhom?” In the search for “what works,” criminolo- gists and forensic psychologists now emphasize that a “one-size-fits-all” approach is not terribly effective when designing treatment for criminal offenders. What is needed is a better understanding of the key moderators of response to treatment—an understanding ofwhat works forwhom. Based on a comprehensive meta-analysis of four decades of correctional research, Andrews and colleagues (1990) identified three elements—risk, need, and responsivity—as the variables most strongly linked to successful outcome. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.342-4)
One of life’s lessons is that nothing is all good. Even chocolate cake has calories and cholesterol. This lesson makes us leery of terms such asgood andevil, value assessments that present pure opposites. Has anyone ever seriously and sanely admitted to being evil? People admit to misbehavior, to moral shortcomings, even to crimes, but not to evil. Yet with increasing frequency political leaders and pundits are ready to apply this label to oth- ers with phrases such as “the Evil Empire,” “the Great Satan,” “a war be- tween the forces of good and the forces of evil.” These labels are applied not simply to point out the others’ shortcomings but to justify totally dis- missing the others’ point of view and agenda. Talk of good and evil is used to imply the speaker’s own innocence, virtue, and license to punish, even to kill. Not surprisingly, those who bandy charges of evil are often seen as the very incarnation of evil by the targets of their epithets. To avoid fan- ning these flames of moral one-upsmanship that blind more than illumine, we shall speak not of good and evil, but of benefits and liabilities. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.359)
Second, Milner, Halsey, and Fultz (1995) examined the empathic re- sponsiveness of mothers while they watched videotaped segments of an in- fant who was smiling, was looking around, or was crying. The mothers were in two matched groups, those identified as being at high risk of phys- ically abusing a child and those identified as being at low risk. On average, the high-risk mothers showed no reliable change in empathy across the in- fant conditions, whereas low-risk mothers showed a highly significant in- crease in empathy while watching the crying infant. Rather than empathy, high-risk mothers reported feeling more personal distress and hostility while watching the crying infant (see Frodi & Lamb, 1980, for parallel physiological data). These responses of the high-risk mothers are congru- ent with clinical reports that physical child abusers experience less empa- thy and more hostility in response to a crying child. Also related is the finding that clinical interventions aimed at increasing empathy reduce the reported likelihood of abuse, rape, and sexual harassment on the part of men identified as being at high risk for committing sexual assaults (Schewe & O’Donohue, 1993). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.364)
There is also evidence that empathy-induced altruistic motivation can in- crease cooperation in conflict situations. Paradigmatic of such situations is the one-trial “prisoner’s dilemma.” In this dilemma, it is always in one’s own best interest to defect (compete) regardless of what the other person does. Accordingly, game theory and the theory of rational choice both pre- dict no cooperation in a one-trial prisoner’s dilemma because each theory assumes that only one motive exists: self-interest. The empathy–altruism hypothesis predicts, however, that if one person in such a dilemma is induced to feel empathy for the other, then for this person two motives exist: self-interestand empathy-induced altruism. Although self-interest can be best satisfied by defecting, altruism can be best satisfied by cooperating. So the empathy–altruism hypothesis predicts that empathy should lead to mo- tivational conflict and to increased cooperation. Batson and Moran (1999) reported an experiment in which they found precisely these results.
In a subsequent experiment, Batson and Ahmad (2001) tried an even more stringent test of the ability of empathy to increase cooperation in a conflict situation. Rather than the standard one-trial prisoner’s dilemma, in which participants make their decisions simultaneously without know- ing what the other has done, Batson and Ahmad altered the procedure so that when each of the female research participants made her decision, she knew that the other participant had already defected. Thus, she knew that if she cooperated, the other participant would receive a very high payoff and she would receive nothing; if she defected, the other participant would receive the same moderate payoff as she. Predictions for behavior in this situation from game theory, from the theory of rational choice, and even from theories of justice and social norms are clear and obvious. There is no longer a dilemma at all; the only rational thing to do is to defect. Not only will defection maximize one’s own outcome, but it will also satisfy the norms of fairness and distributive justice. Moreover, there is no longer any need to fear feeling guilty about having taken advantage of the other, should one defect and the other cooperate, as can happen in a simulta- neous decision dilemma. The other has already defected. Not surprisingly, in the very few previous studies that have bothered to look at responses in such a situation, the proportion of participants cooperating has been ex- tremely low (around 5%). (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.365-6)
In a number of studies, investigators have examined the role of parents’ reactions to, and discussion of, emotion in children’s empathy-related responses. When parents reactions to children’s emotions are positive and supportive they may foster an environment wherein children feel free to experience and express emotions….. (Arthur Miller "The Social Psychology of Good and Evil" 2005 p.404)
58 a paperback edition with introduction by Gore Vidal (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.295)
On September 17, Blackwell limited the use of provisional ballots, effectively disenfranchising over 100000 citizens, according to Bob Taft, Ohio's Republican governor. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.27)
Contrary to a prior understanding, Blackwell also kept foreign monitors from the Ohio polls. … OSCE… kept out…. Blackwell, who refused them letters of approval, on the basis of a very narrow reading of the Ohio law. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.29)
Throughout Perry County, the number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent.
Ohio was bizarrely stricken with an epidemic of pro-Bush “machine…. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.31)
1-19 Anita Miller, ed., What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Chicago: Chicago Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005), p. 2. (In the interests of full disclosure, I note here that Academy Chicago is owned (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.296-7)
In fact, as of this writing, Blackwell has not filed a compliance report with the Government Services Administration, which had given him $41 million to enforce the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in Ohio. In other words, the secretary of state has not accounted for the funding, which he clearly spent not for the good of the electorate but on wholly partisan devices, tactics, litigators. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.37)
Sometime on the night of Friday, July 2, or in the wee hours of that Saturday, persons unknown somehow stole into the offices of Burges and Burges, an Akron consulting firm employed by the Ohio Democratic Party. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.44-5)
Peter King (R-NY), seemingly a tad inebriated at some function ... "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting." Despite all that and much more, the press seemed not to bat a single eye at the anomalous victory (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.51)
Such irony is based on Tom Delay’s perception that “Almighty God” is his team captain, coach, co-pilot, comrade, co-conspirator-or, as they say in Texas, his “asshole buddy”….
Like Clarence Thomas’s “defense,” DeLay’s long jihad has been an exercise in projectivity, his every bilious shot (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.70-1)
DeLay has called the EPA “the Gestapo of government,” the International Criminal Court “Kofi Annan's kangaroo court,” the House Democrats intoxicated by “the arrogance of power.”1 But who, really, are those swaggering, jackbooted martinets goose-steppiong through the congressman’s vituperation? (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.82)
On March 21, 2005, for instance, three local residents were forcibly removed from a museum in Denver, where Bush had come to give a speech on Social Security…. They were thrown out because there was an antiwar bumper sticker (“No More Blood for Oil”) on the car that they had parked outside (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.85-7)
* programming codes are deemed proprietary information, that the machines are highly insecure and, most important, that they leave no paper trail. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.104)
On July 16, Sean Hannity reported that Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) had “had a virtual meltdown” in the House, “while debating a bill that would allow international monitoring of the presidential election in November.” They showed a clip of Brown's remarks:
I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again…
Her remarks were stricken from the record on a vote of 219 to 187, with 28 abstaining… (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.107)
(Moreover, while OSCE did, in its executive report, approve the contest overall, its individual members were less sanguine. “Monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler,” noted Konrad Olszewski, an OSCE observer stationed in Miami, in a post-election interview with the International Herald Tribune.) (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.123)
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever loss. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable longstanding American concepts of "fair play” (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.128-9)
Quote from Doolittle Report on at least ten additional books
107. Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, also know as the Doolittle Report, 9/30/54, Appendix A. 108. Stephen Ambrose, Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Jackson, Mississippi, 1999) (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.314)
John Pappageorge (R-MI) as speaking very frankly of his party’s prospects in his state” “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.” (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.134)
In Clark County, Nevada, on October 10, Dan Burddish, former executive director of the state Republican Part, tried to have 17,000 voters, mostly Democrats, disqualified from voting. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.135-45)
And so it was a bit of a surprise when Bush apparently outdid all expectations by winning 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, while Kerry’s margin was a mere 9 points. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.146-8)
There was a different kind of pro-Bush computer glitch in Craven County, another small Republican domain just north of Carteret… There Bush go 11,283 more than entire number of votes cast for president. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.183)
(Other Busheviks have posed as Democrats-Theresa LePore, the infamous designer of the Palm Beach County “butterfly ballot,” among them (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.)
In late July, flyers were sent out to party members in Miami, urging them to vote by absentee ballots-because the touch-screen machines would leave no paper trail, and therefore could not “verify your vote.” (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.212-3)
At one point journalist Irene Dische, covering the convention for the German magazine Die Zeit, was hustled into temporary custody when, chancing onto the floor before the president’s appearance, she refused to take and wave a tiny U.S. flag-a story that, in the United States, ran only in Salon.
*Michael Morre’s film and Moore himself, were vigerously censored in October. On October 1, it was reported that TV networks had refused to air ads for the movie-which, on Oct. 16, was itself pulled from Time-Warner’s In Demand pay-per-view service “for legal reasons.” (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.262-3-5)
“Journalists from England, Sweden, Holland and other friendly countries are being detained at U.S. airports, strip-searched and deported,” Salon reported on June 16. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.267-8)
"Reporters in Chains" By Robert Schlesinger Boston Globe June 15, 2004 www.american-pictures.com
When, three days before Election Day, a Pennsylvania school board voted to include “intelligence design” in the curriculum, the news came forth in press releases from the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). As with such local symptoms, so the press ignored the far more dangerous national drive towards theocracy. When, on September 23, the House passed legislation to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the question as to whether “under God” should be deleted from the Pledge of Allegiance, the motion was for once, reported widely. The purpose of that legislation, however, was to pave the way for passage of the Constitution Restoration Act, which would establish God, not the Constitution, as the sovereign basis of all law in the United States-a step that would enable any judge to base his rulings on the tribal strictures in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. When this book was introduced into both houses of Congress, on February 11, 2004, it was not covered anywhere; and in the months to come, the only journalists to right about it were Katherine Yurica on her excellent Web site (yuricareport.com) and Chris Floyd in the Moscow Times (in Russia).
When, in October, the White House announced its approval of a book claiming that the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah’s flood-a book therefore available at bookstores in our national parks-the news was broken by a press release from Public Employees for environmental Responsibility (PEER). When the white House distributed, free to churches, 300,000 DVDs of a film entitled “GWB Faith in the white House”-in which Bush appears at one point in a split-screen tableau with Jesus-that stroke of propaganda was reported by Frank Rich in his weekend column in the Sunday New York Times. When, at the 2004 Republican convention in New York, there were crosses clearly visible in the design of both the podium and a small table next to it, that blasphemous display was either laughed off by the press (the RNC denied that they were crosses), or reported as a grievance by non-Christians, as in the Reuters story on September 1,……. (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.275-6)
Trish Bowcock is a retired attorney…. Debi Smith is a homemaker
Silenced By The President By Trish Bowcock
A few weeks before my father died, he woke me in the wee hours of the morning. He needed to talk. He was worried about Attorney General John Ashcroft and the destruction of American civil liberties. I comforted my father, believing he was delusional from medications. I was wrong.
I write this from my home in Jacksonville Oregon (population 2,226). President George W. Bush came here this week. The purpose of his visit was political. Southern Oregon has been deemed a "battle ground" area in the presidential race. John Kerry has made incredible inroads in this traditionally Republican stronghold. President Bush's campaign stop was an attempt to staunch the slide.
Jacksonville is an old gold mining town. Our main street is only five blocks long, lined with restored storefronts. The sidewalks are narrow. We are a peaceful community. The prospect of an overnight presidential visit was exciting, even to me, a lifelong Democrat. My excitement turned to horror as I watched events unfold during President Bush's visit.
In the mid 1800s, when Indians invaded Jacksonville, citizens clambered upon the roof of the old library. It was the one building that would not catch fire when flaming arrows were shot. This week it was a different scene. Police armed with high powered rifles perched upon our rooftops as the presidential motorcade approached. Helicopters flew low, overhead. A cadre of motorcycle police zoomed into town. Black SUVs followed, sandwiching several black limousines carrying the president, his wife and their entourage as they sped to the local inn where they would eat and sleep.
The main street was lined with people gathered to witness the event. Many supported the president. Many did not. Some came because they were simply curious. There were men, women, young and old. The mood was somewhat festive. Supporters of John Kerry sported signs, as did supporters of George Bush. Individuals, exercising their rights of free speech began chanting. On one side of the street, shouts of "four more years" echoed in the night air. On the other side of the street, chants of "three more weeks" responded. The chants were loud and apparently could be heard by President Bush. An order was issued that the anti-Bush rhetoric be quieted. The local SWAT team leapt to action.
It happened fast. Clad in full riot gear, at least 50 officers moved in. Shouting indecipherable commands from a bullhorn, they formed a chain and bore down upon the people, only working to clear the side of the street appearing to be occupied by Kerry supporters. People tried to get out of their way. It was very crowded. There was nowhere to move. People were being crushed. They started flowing into the streets. Pleas to the officers, asking, "where to go" fell upon deaf ears. Instead, riot police fired pellets of cayenne pepper spray into the crowd. An old man fell and couldn,t get up. When a young man stopped to help, he was shot in the back with hard pepper spray balls. Children were hit with pepper spray. Deemed "Protesters" people were shoved and herded down the street by the menacing line of armed riot police, until out of the President's ear-shot.
There the "Protesters" were held at bay. Anyone vocalizing anti-Bush or pro-Kerry sentiments were prohibited from venturing forward. Loud anti-Bush chants were responded to by the commanding officer stating: "FORWARD," to which the entire line of armed police would move, lock-step, toward the "Protesters," forcing backward movement. Police officers circulated filming the crowd of "Protesters." Some were people like me, quiet middle-aged women. Some sported anti-Bush signs, peace signs, or Kerry signs. A small group of youth, clad in black with kerchiefs wrapping their heads chanted slogans. A young woman in her underwear, sporting a peace sign sang a lyrical Kumbaya. Mixed among the "Protesters" were supporters of the President. One 19 year- old man shouted obscenities at anyone expressing dissatisfaction with the president, encouraging the police to "tazar" the "Stinking Protesters." Neither the "Protestors," nor the police harassed this vocal young man. Across the street, individuals shouting support for the president were allowed to continue. Officers monitored this group but allowed them to shout words of support or hurl derisions toward Kerry supporters, undisturbed. Honking cars filled with Bush supporters were left alone. A honking car full of Kerry supporters was stopped by police on its way out of town.
The standoff with "Protesters" continued until the President finished his dinner and was secured in his hotel cottage for the night. Only then were the riot police ordered to "mount-up," leaping upon the sideboard of a huge SUV, pulling out of town, and allowing "free speech" to resume.
In small town American I witnessed true repression and intimidation by law enforcement. I saw small children suffering from the effects of being fired upon by pepper bullets. I felt legitimate fear of expressing my political opinions: a brand new feeling. Newspaper accounts state the chaos started when a violent "Protester" shoved a police officer. No one I talked to witnessed this account.
It is reputed that President Bush and his staff will not allow any opposition activity to occur within his ear or eye sight. I can confirm, that in tiny Jacksonville, Oregon, this was true. Physically violent means were taken to protect the president from verbal insults. Freedom of speech was stolen.
My father was not paranoid as he lay dying. He was expressing great insight into the dangers of our current presidential administration and its willingness to repress personal freedoms. If I could talk to my father today, I would say, "I am sorry Daddy for doubting you." And, no matter what, I will continue to exercise my individual right to freely express my opinions. Americans cannot take four more years.
“Silenced By The President” By Trish Bowcock
“To Be Silenced, Or Not to Be: That is the Question” by Debi Smith
Last week, both vice presidential nominee John Edwards and President George W. Bush visited Southern Oregon. Considering the area is relatively rural, sparsely populated, and Oregon is a state that usually gets little attention in a presidential election, it was an unprecedented and rather exciting occasion. I decided to try and get tickets to both events for my kids and myself.
Getting tickets from the Jackson County Democratic Party Headquarters for the Edwards event was pleasant and easy. They didn’t ask me to declare a party, didn’t ask who I was voting for, didn’t ask me to provide personal information or a DNA sample.
Not so at the Jackson County GOP headquarters. First they wanted to know my name, address, phone number, email, and my driver’s license number. "Do they really have the time, funds, and need to run all this data through some security check? What are they afraid of?" I asked myself. But hey, if it’ll get me some tickets, I’ll grudgingly fill out the application.
It didn’t get me the tickets. "Are you a Bush supporter?" I was asked. I explained that I was a registered Independent and not necessarily a Bush supporter. "Are you going to vote for Bush?" I was asked. "No," I honestly, and out of curiosity to see what would happen, replied. I was summarily told that if I wasn’t planning on voting for Bush, I wasn’t welcome. "John" came over to make sure I got the message. I told him I’d taken my kids to similar events (we saw Clinton and Gore in 1996) and didn’t he think it was good to get my kids involved in the democratic process early? To take them to events such as these and let them make up their own minds? I guess not. He just kept repeating, in a rather intimidating way, that if I wasn’t a supporter, I wasn’t welcome. (Funny how he wasn’t worried about how this sort of attitude might affect the future of the Republican Party. Hmm.)
I initially found the whole thing absurdly funny even though I was shaking (intimidation will do that to you) as I walked out of GOP headquarters. As the day wore on and the more I reflected on the starkly different experiences I’d had at both headquarters, the more frustrated and indignant I became. What is happening in this country that my children and I are kept out of a rally for the man who is currently our president? I had no intention whatsoever of causing any disturbances or protesting the event in any way. We’re a homeschooling family that uses a variety of life experiences and opportunities as our classroom. This was simply just another unique event for my children and I to attend and learn from.
Incidentally, I observed nary a protest during the entire Edwards rally the following day, despite the fact that there had been no effort to keep anyone out based on their viewpoints or political affiliations. Why couldn’t the Bush Campaign and the GOP behave in the same congenial and democratic fashion I wondered, and again asked myself, "What are they afraid of?" I even tried to come up with a new acronym for the GOP. Grand Old Paranoia came to mind.
Feeling more and more outraged by the sanitation of the Bush event, I decided to attend the unWelcome Bush rally to be held in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is a tiny little dot on the map (pop. 2245). It’s a well-preserved gold mining town that now houses museums, tiny boutiques, eateries, and small inns. Bush would be spending the night here following his presumptuous and premature "Victory Rally" being held a few miles away in Central Point. A politically active friend of mine had organized the peaceful demonstration and had spoken several times with local authorities, informing them of the event, and asking all the pertinent questions. She was told that as long as people remained on the sidewalks, there should be no problem and that they were there to protect the president as well as our right to peaceably assemble.
Our group started out small, 70 or so people carrying signs, water bottles, video cameras, and children. As the evening wore on more people began gathering-Bush supporters, and protesters alike. There were several blockades, manned by security, at different intersections to the west of where we were. People, to my knowledge, were respecting the requests not to move beyond the blockades as well as continuing to respect the request to keep to the sidewalks. When a helicopter started making low passes overhead, a portion of the motorcycle motorcade came by, and a throng of riot cops made their appearance guarding the west end of the block, we assumed the President was on his way. Everything continued to remain fairly calm, even with the mixture of chanting from both sides.
Suddenly, an officer within the line of riot cops ordered the crowd to move back two blocks to 5th Street. They allowed about four seconds for this to sink in and then started pushing us back by moving forward in a line. The sidewalks could not contain the sudden movement of people, and subsequently the streets became crowded and chaotic. If their desire for us to move had been communicated earlier, or if that portion of the street had been blocked off to begin with, people probably would have, in general, respected it, even though we were in our legal right to be in the vicinity. But instead, the authorities in charge chose to create confusion and conflict instead of wisely diffusing it ahead of time. And the result was an unnecessary melee: sudden gunfire; people running, falling, being shot with pepper bullets; children upset by the gunfire, and coughing from the pepper; women who were carrying their children being grabbed and pushed violently; people daring to ask questions being forcibly pushed and intimidated. It must be reiterated, this event was organized to be peaceful, non-violent, and family friendly. And, even though there was a mixed demographic on the street, the event remained non-violent and relatively peaceful…except for the actions of a few of the less than restrained riot cops. Riot cops, who were, we have to remind ourselves, taking orders from a higher command.
I fully expected to see the presence of the secret service, the snipers, and a multitude of officers at this event. What I didn’t expect to see was a completely unnecessary use of extreme force in a situation that clearly didn’t warrant it. If there was, and to my knowledge there wasn’t, anyone doing something illegal or outside their constitutional rights, then why couldn’t a couple of these well-trained officers peacefully remove the offenders? I was at the front of the crowd when the mayhem broke out and I saw nothing that would warrant shooting pepper bullets, especially into a crowd so full of young children. After returning home from this disturbing event, I turned on the news. The only thing that aired on my local NBC affiliate regarding the event was an interview with a Bush supporter in the darkened street. I did learn later that a couple other outlets offered a slightly more balanced, though still sanitized, viewpoint. Several independent video clips documenting the overuse of force have also been sent to various media outlets over the past few days, and to my knowledge, none have been aired. More sanitation. Could this be happening all over the country? How many valid stories are going unreported by the major media? Or are so sanitized as to be a faint glimmer of the actual truth? (Mark Crispin Miller “Fooled Again” 2005 p.281-8)
“To Be Silenced, Or Not to Be: That is the Question” by Debi Smith at common Dreams
During the early 1970s, the women of urban Afghanistan enjoyed a level of personal freedom and autonomy that was relatively liberal for a conservative Muslim society. According to the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council, a significant percentage of the women in Kabul worked for a living--tens of thousands of them serving in medicine, law, journalism, engineering, and other professions. In the country's rural areas, of course, the opportunities for female education and employment were far more limited; but in Kabul itself, unveiled females could be seen inside factories and offices, on television newscasts, and walking the streets wearing Eastern European-style dresses and high heels. Within the first week of taking Kabul, the Taliban stripped away these privileges and summarily rendered the female population silent and invisible.
In every major city and town across the country, women were now forbidden to go outside their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative and clad in an ink-blue burka. The few who dared venture out in public were not allowed to purchase goods from male shopkeepers, shake hands with or talk to men, or wear shoes whose heels made a clicking sound. Any woman who exposed her ankles was subject to whipping, and those who painted their nails could have the tips of their fingers cut off. Young girls were banned from washing clothing in rivers or other public places, participating in sports, or appearing on the balconies of their homes. Any street or town that bore the name of a female had to be changed. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.73)
When we met in his office, the minister informed me that less than a quarter of the aid money that President George W. Bush had promised to his country had actual y been delivered. Of those funds, Dr. Ghani explained, $680 million had been "redirected" to build runways and bulk up supply depots in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar for the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan was now receiving less than a third of the per-capita assistance that had been plowed into reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, East Timor, or Rwanda--and of that, less than half was going to long-term development projects such as education. Moreover, to administer this inadequate stream of cash, a massively expensive bureaucracy had sprung up.
As bad as this sounded, I learned later that the situation was even more bleak. A significant amount of the development money offered by the United States was, it turned out, simply recirculating into the hands of American contractors, some of whom were paying Afghan construction workers five or ten dollars a day to construct schools and clinics whose price tags could exceed a quarter million dollars per building. Equal y disturbing, almost none of the tiny amount of money that was actual y reaching Afghan citizens in Kabul was flowing beyond the capital and into the rural areas, where the devastation was even greater and the need for assistance even more desperate. Twenty miles beyond Kabul's suburbs, most of the country was largely on its own--a state of affairs that seemed to be lost on Dr. Ghani, overwhelmed as he was by the devastation at his feet. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.81)
The upheaval of Partition produced one of the largest migrations of refugees in modern history (twenty-five mil ion people) and the slaughter of nearly one mil ion civilians, as Hindus and Sikhs fled south into India while Muslims raced in the opposite direction toward Pakistan. Another casualty was India's northernmost principality, the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Muslim-majority population ruled by a Hindu maharaja named Hari Singh, whose great-grandfather had purchased Kashmir from the British in 1846 for 7.5 mil ion rupees, or about 5 rupees per citizen--the cost of a cup of tea at an Indian roadside cafe. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.162-3)
Unfortunately, some of the smartest and most effective assistance was provided by groups of Islamic militants. Within seventy-two hours of the earthquake, Al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a dramatic videotaped message urging Muslims around world to help the victims of this disaster. "I cal on al Muslims in general, and I cal on al Islamic humanitarian associations in particular, to move to Pakistan to provide help to their Pakistani brothers, and that they do it quickly," he declared. "Al of us know the vicious American war on Muslim humanitarian work." In response, resourceful and energetic young jihadis were often the first to show up during the earthquake's aftermath, in many cases appearing days or even weeks before the Pakistani army or the international aid organizations arrived. According to Ahmed Rashid, author of Descent Into Chaos and the foremost independent journalist reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan, seventeen extremist groups that were either on the United Nations' list of terrorist organizations or banned by the Pakistani government were reactivated during this time as Islamic NGOs. They did an impressive job of putting together sophisticated relief operations, delivering supplies and medical care to victims with speed and efficiency when no one else could.
One of the first such groups on the scene was Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political arm of the banned extremist militia Lashkar-e-Taiba, the pro-Taliban, Pakistan-based organization that would carry out the horrific terrorist attacks in Bombay in November 2008 that resulted in the deaths of 173 civilians. Another elaborate operation was run by the extremely conservative group Jamaat-e-Islami. After setting up base camps in several ravaged towns, Jamaat's Al-Khidmat Foundation began dispatching its operatives to remote areas where motorized vehicles could not penetrate. Not far from the Jamaate-Islami operation in Muzaffarabad was another camp sponsored by the Al Rashid Trust, which was created by Dr. Amir Aziz, a British-trained orthopedic surgeon who has admitted to treating Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
Amid the rush to provide tents, food, and medical supplies, few of the western NGOs seemed to be giving much thought to schools. Based on past experience, however, the militant groups who were busy setting up their aid networks ful y understood the power of education under such circumstances. Back in the winter of 1989, when the Soviets had pul ed out of Afghanistan and the country was struggling to get back on its feet after ten years of war, the Saudi government had sponsored thousands of conservative madrassas, religious institutions open only to boys and designed to instil a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. During the 1990s, about eighty thousand boys who had received hard-line religious instruction in these madrassas were fed directly into the ranks of the Taliban. Now, it seemed a similar dynamic was beginning to unfold in Azad Kashmir. Within a year, a number of these camps would become fertile recruiting grounds for Islamic militants looking for new followers. ,p. Inside one refugee camp that I saw in Muzaffarabad, the mess tent where families came to receive their daily rations had been set up directly adjacent to an enormous tent that functioned as a madrassa where young boys were being tutored on the nuances of jihad. Many of the refugee parents were not happy about the fact that their children were attending these extremist schools, but because the jihadis were providing them with food, shelter, and medicine, they were reluctant to object.
Combining aid with ideology was a highly effective strategy--and this same formula would repeat itself four years later when two mil ion Pakistani civilians were displaced by the Pakistani army's offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Val ey. (By the summer of 2009, hard-line Islamist charities had established precisely the same kind of foothold and were pushing their anti-western agenda among the residents of the Swat refugee camps.)
I have always been dismayed by the West's failure--or unwil ingness--to recognize that establishing secular schools that offer children a balanced and nonextremist form of education is probably the cheapest and most effective way of combating this kind of indoctrination. Despite the fact that the American government has never grasped its importance, this calculus has been at the heart of what we do from the very beginning--and with Sarfraz in the lead, we continued to pursue this agenda in Azad Kashmir during the winter of 2005.
By January, Sarfraz had managed to commandeer several UNICEF tents from army depots in Balakot and Muzaffarabad. After transporting these tents to the most distant vil ages in the Neelum Val ey, such as Nouseri, Pakrat, and Behdi, Sarfraz set about identifying the leaders--the most energetic people, who were the survivors in the broad sense of the word. With their help, he then located teachers, arranged for their salaries, and then started rounding up the parents and kids in order to get the schools going.
Within a couple of months, Sarfraz had set up more than a dozen of these little operations in places that lay beyond the reach of the most outstretched NGO or government authority. Needless to say, in a region where every school in every community had been completely destroyed, this was barely a drop in the bucket. But everyone who works with the Central Asia Institute believes in the value and the power of this little drop. On the grand scale of things, Sarfraz's tent schools were miniscule; but among the people at the end of the road, these projects offered a catalyst for hope.
Amid the devastation of Kashmir that autumn, this is what passed for sharing three cups of tea. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.178-81)
In 2001, my initial support for the U.S. decision to go to war in Afghanistan quickly faded after I began hearing about the high level of civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombing campaign-and estimated 2,700 to 3,400 deaths between October 7 and December 10 according to Marc Herold, an economist at the University of New Hampshire. What disturbed me was not only the level of suffering inflicted by the Department of Defense on the Afghan population but also the manner in which these tragedies were described. In his daily press briefings, Donald Rumsfeld triumphantly cataloged the losses inflicted on Taliban and Al Qaeda forces by American bombs and cruise missiles that were dropped into heavily populated areas. But only when pressured by reporters- and even then, resentful y and as an afterthought--did he bother to mention the "collateral damage."
In my view, Rumsfeld's rhetoric and his demeanor conveyed the impression that America's army of laptop warriors was largely indifferent to the pain and misery that were being inflicted on innocent women and children. This impression was reinforced by the Bush administration's complete disinterest in acknowledging, much less compensating, those civilian victims. In the end, the signal that this wound up sending--both to me and to the Central Asia Institute's staff and friends in Afghanistan--was that the United States placed little or no value on the lives of noncombatants in one of the poorest and most desperate countries on earth. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.249-51)
Prior to these meetings, my judgment of the American military’s conduct in Afghanistan was harsh and rather uncompromising- and even after these encounters, I still have my objections. (Greg Mortenson “Stones into Schools”2009 p.257)
So eager were many Mormon faithful to accumulate wealth (and blessings), and so trusting of Church leaders, that they would buy the Brooklyn Bridge-twice. Or better yet, “gold certificates” worth, according to the nice young Mormon man who sold them, a hundred or even a thousand times the up-front investment. When he was finally caught, the nice young man had unloaded $612 billion worth of bogus certificates-an amount equal to half the national debt. “What you have out here,” says a local newspaper reporter, “is a bunch of people who are basically educated from birth to unquestioningly believe what they’re told, and they do right up through adulthood. The conditions for fraud are perfect.” (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.25-8
Sometime in 1839, while conversing with St. Peter-he held frequent dialogs with biblical figures-Smith happened to mention the problems he was having with the dissident members of the Church. According to Smith’s own telling,…the punishment for dissent in his Church would be death. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.39-41)
One like Ervil Lebron When Ron Lafferty was arrested, the police found a written revelation in the pocket of his shirt: (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.42-5)
By all accounts, Mark William Hoffman was the ideal Mormon child….
Obedient
“Your faith’s not strong enough,” he insisted. “If you have a testimony, your religion doesn’t need proof.” When Mark pressed, his father flew into a rage. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.60-5)
Gradually as the Church was transformed from a radical sect into an ultraconservative social institution, the crackdown on polygamy grew teeth. By 1904, a man could be excommunicated for taking a second wife. References to polygamy were expunged from official Church histories,… (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.65)
And what a history it was. Beginning with the story of the Israelites sailing to America in 600 B.C. on a boat designed by God, it was a curious history indeed. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.75-80)
Ever damaging revelations about the Church’s bitter campaign against the ERA (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.90)
Somewhere in all the excitement someone suggested that perhaps they aught to authenticate. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.92)
Dawn Tracy believed that too-until Tuesday, May, 19, 1983.
…. intellectuals called to their Bishops daily (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.116-21)
But there were, in fact, two Steve Christensens, and men like Gordon Hinckley saw only one of them. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.136)
Joseph Smith was the butt of many jokes during his lifetime, but none more famous than the joke played on him by three men from the town of Kinderhook, Illinois. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.218)
“We’re not talking to them. We’ve got to call your father. I want to call your father.” Yengich had known Hoffman only since eleven that morning, when Bill Hoffman first contacted him. But he had already seen enough to know that Mark Hoffman obeyed his father.… At the mention of his father Hoffman’s blood pressure/heart rate alarm went off. (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.271-2)
His tactics gave bleeding heart-liberals heart failure, but the people loved him.....
Like a twister, throwing everything they could find into a big green garbage bag. No grids, no diagrams, no tweezers, no magnifying glasses. As a result, the sheriff’s men had missed several key pieces of evidence, including major bomb part at the Sheets house. (The ATF’s Jerry Taylor found them on a follow-up search days later.) (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.291-3)
But they could trust the heavily Mormon FBI, which worked hand-in-glove with Brent Ward.....
At last thought Farnsworth, they’re going to let us see what they’ve got. But it turned out that by “sharing information,” Ward meant that the local agents should share their information with the federal agents, not the other way around.
Police weren’t the only ones who began to wonder whom exactly Brent Ward was collecting this information for. Confidential FBI files were known to have wound up on certain desks in the Church Office Building. Was Ward running a damage-control operation for the Church, sending FBI men out ahead of local police to find out just what the church exposure was? (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.294-9)
There was one last obstacle to the deal, an obstacle that even Bob Stott’s inexplicable enthusiasm couldn’t overcome.
That obstacle was Bill Hoffman.
At the hospital only a day after the third bomb exploded and the police announced that Mark was their primary suspect, Bill Hoffman had gone to his son’s bedside and said very gravely, “If you did it you should turn yourself in and ask for the death penalty, because that’s the only way your soul can be saved.” Bill Hoffman believed in Blood Atonement.
But Mark had assured him: “I didn’t do it.”
Since then, Bill Hoffman had gone on television to proclaim his son’s innocence. He had mortgaged his house to pay for his defense. And finally, he had announced that God himself had reassured him that his son was blameless. No one who knew Bill Hoffman was surprised. When he was right he was a rock.
Lu Hoffman, on the other hand, apparently had doubts, even in the beginning….
But Bill Hoffman continued to believe. Like Dorie, he protected his certainty by refusing to read newspaper accounts of the case or watch reports on television….
Brent Metclalfe was visiting Mark one day when Hoffman Senior walked into the living room and found several books on evolution that Mark had bought for his kids. He looked at them and said in a grave voice, “These kinds of books should not be lying around the house. This isn’t the view presented at the Temple.” Mark Hoffman was thirty-two years old and he still hadn’t found the courage to tell his father about his views on evolution.
How could he ever tell him he was guilty of murder? .....
Mark went white. “Get that guy out of here.” (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.421-4)
Judge Rigtrup would sentence Mark immediately after the plea was entered and he would be led directly from the court room to prison. Mark Hoffman wanted it that way (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.428)
Marion G. Romney was “released” as first counselor on November 5, 1985, making room for Gordon B. Hinkley (Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith “The Mormon Murders” 1988 p.442)
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course----'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said. 'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children----'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero' was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.….
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence…..
'For Hate Week. You know--the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort--going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.'
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.
'Ah, well--what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.'
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent--might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes--said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?'…..
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department--she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.
It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed….
It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?'…….
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'……
As the door opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
'YOU here!' he said.
Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance.
'What are you in for?' said Winston.
'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done anything--only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't they? YOU know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I? I'll get off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?'
'Are you guilty?' said Winston.
'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit--never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.
'"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."'
'Who denounced you?' said Winston.
'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.'…….
The tradition--the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell…..
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
'Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me----'
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (George Orwell “1984”)
“If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein
I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move; though the quit everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.19)
“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt.”
Smith's Second Vision came (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.)
I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof." Joseph Smith's First Vision from http://lds.org/library/display/0,4945,104-1-3-4,00.html
The Kirtland bank he tried to establish fared no better. One way of getting lots of money is to print it, and Smith tried that. Since he did not have the capital to establish a licensed bank, he took the pile of notes on which he had already printed “the Kirtland Safety Society bank” and instructed the printer to ad the prefix anti- and the suffis –ing to the word Bank on each note. For a brief while in early 1837 everyone seemed to have lots of money, but it soon became clear that the notes were worthless paper, and merchants in places like Cleveland were not amused. Failed land speculation and failed banks elsewhere in the nations added to the general economic malaise. Since Smith’s society could not redeem the notes with coin, and land values had collapsed so that real estate also failed to secure the notes, a predictable string of law suits followed. There was even an usnseemly brawl in the temple itself. When a warrant was issued on January 12, 1838, on a charge of banking fraud, Smith and First Counselor Rigdon fled on horseback in the middle of the night, one step ahead of the law. Their horses were pointed towards Missouri. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.31-2)
(Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.)
(Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.)
(Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.)
Evidence of Smith's unconventional ideas about marriage dates back to 1830, when contradictory accounts imply his hasty exit from Harmony may have been because Emma's cousin, Hiel Lewis, “accused Joseph of improper conduct with women told in a vision Marinda Nancy Johnson’s brother tarred and feathered Fanny Alger (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.60)
Nancy Rigdon… Mayor John C. Bennet Smith letter published (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.64-5)
But polygamy continues to break into the news and the courts every now and then. … By Melton’s count, at least seventeen polygamous leaders were murdered in the 1970’s mostly members of the LeBaron clan or its rivals. Additional lurid murder cases were splashed into the headlines in the 1980s and later, regarding the Singer Swapp-clan, the LeBarons, and others-the stuff of pulp fiction.…..
(Additional information from 2007 edition not in the first edition includes info on Warren Jeffs and Elizabeth Smart)
Polygamy was the catalyst for change in the LDS Church, and the issue that rallied the country, but for some the deeper issue was political. Senator Frederick T. Dubois of Idaho wrote in his autobiography, ….. “opposed domination of church (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.74-5)
The following February the First Presidency issued a “political manifesto” requiring General Authorities to sign a statement that they would seek church approval first before seeking public office. Both Roberts and Thatcher refused to (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.83)
Mauss believes …. There is no reason for even the most orthodox Mormon to be threatened by the realization that the prophets do not do everything by revelation and never have." Conversion and retention may be a looming difficulty among US blacks, (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.106)
In 1940 the General Authorities drafted a joint anti-FDR statement but never issued it. Hostility to Roosevelt’s New Deal as an affront to economic gumption and individualism produced a benign by-product. In 1936, after a survey showed. …(later the Church Welfare Program) …. There was much mythology; it was hardly true that all Mormons went off the government dole. But neither was the program “fictitious,” as one FDR agent claimed…..
Senator It took until 1950, but conservative Mormon Republicans finally whipped Thomas with one of their own, Wallace F. Bennet. ….and author of the 1958 testimonial book Why I Am A Mormon. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.109)
When the estimates given here…LDS formal reply:
“Your estimates were greatly exaggerated” not provided hints In 1978 Los Angeles-based reporter Jeffrey Kaye tried to expose the western ranges of the Mormon financial empire for New West magazine in a piece titled “An Invisible Empire: Mormon Money in California.”
A few years earlier Kaye had Shupe (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.115-6)
The talented church managers run a tight and profitable financial ship and can spend the cash any way they choose. They are not held accountable to the unquestioning flock in any way. The officials make their investment decisions in secret and report no dollar figures to anyone outside of the group of white-haired, life tenured gentlemen at the top. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.118)
Does the Mormon Welfare system actually work? The best assessment an outsider can make is that, yes, it seems to. A recipient of Mormon welfare may be paid…. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.127)
But no where is the Mormon presence more solidly expressed as a voice in the American mainstream than in the world of politics. After the 1998 elections a record sixteen Mormons were seated in congress, signifying their people’s secure place in the American establishment. 16-5/11 (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.131-7)
Another colorful Washington personality, though briefly, was Paula Hawkins, the crusading housewife who was elected to the U.S. Senate from Florida in 1980. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.135-6)
These three versions may combine to cover most of the segment; the following is part of the updated version
Mormon prominence in American public life escalated considerably in 2007 with republican Mitt Romney’s decision to run for president and the simultaneous installation of Democratic Harry Reid as the U.S. Senate’s majority leader, considered the most influential LDS office holder in American History. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.131-7 significant updates in 2007 edition for the 2008 election)
(differences between editions?):
Huntsman professed that the Book of Mormon “allows us to understand how a civilization existed on the American continenet and what the role of the Savior was in coming forth to this continent.” He said “there has never been a question in my mind that Jesus Christ established this church at this point in time so that men and women could derive happiness and could prepare themselves for his second coming and perform the ordinances necessary in this mortal state.”
President Hinckley’s own nephew, Mark WIlles, became a more controversial Mormon executive when he moved from General Mills to become chairman of the Times Mirror media company and publisher of the flagship Los Angeles Times.... (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.138)
It is only 6 percent of the deaths from emphysema, asthma, homicide, (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.176)
In this article Arrington quoted from an 1861 speech by the colorful Brigham Young, who took note that “many of the brethren chew tobacco” and ended with these instructions: “We request all addicted to this practice, to omit it while in this house [the tabernacle].… Publication was suspended for a year. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.177-8)
Education here is a bargain. President Merrill J. Bateman, former professor, dean, and senior vice president of the Mars candy company, declined to divulge a figure, but reportedly about 70 percent of the budget comes from church tithes ... to provide the university with an annual recommendation from their ward bishops, a significant control mechanism. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.222)
The church itself, however, has stated that it will not formally support any additional institutions of higher learning.
Instead, the LDS is focusing on strengthening the Church Educational System (CES). Mormon wards operate weekly…..
…..Writes Mauss, “A struggle thus ensued within CES between the original philosophy of reconciliation with outside learning and the emergent philosophy of particularistic indoctrination.
Mauss maintained the latter philosophy has “gained clear ascendancy,” since the new teachers selected by CES are those “much more amenable to the indoctrination philosophy.” The remarks of Apostle Mark E. Petersen at a 1962 CES staff summer school made a strong impression on George S. Tanner, longtime director of the institute at the University of Utah. As Tanner recorded the message in his journal, loyalty had priority over learning, and CES teachers were to develop faith and testimony in their students while avoiding intellectualizing. The CES had no room for academic freedom or intellectual inquery, and teachers who did not like it were to go elsewhere. Since then, writes Mauss, CES has become increasingly anti-scientific and anti-intellectual, more inward-looking, more intent on stressing the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the Mormon version of the gospel as opposed to all other interpretations, whether religious or scientific.” (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.227-9)
Other denominational schools blacklisted by the American Association of University Professors have included the Yeshiva University (1982),….
BYU’s first purge occurred in 1911 when the hot issues were evolution and higher criticism of the bible….. Wilkinson organized students into spy rings to report on their professors. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.232)
The earliest clear example of this is the checkered history of mother Lucy Mack Smith’s Biographical sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and his Progenitors for Many Generations, first published by Orson Pratt (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.250)
“Most damaging to our work were the steps he took to remove all the scholars from the department,” Arrington wrote. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.257)
The older polemical traditions split on two sides of a simple prophet/ fraud dichotomy: either Joseph Smith was everything he claimed to be, a true prophet entrusted with a new scripture from authentic ancient golden plates, or he was a charismatic fraud…..
Some friendly non-Mormons celebrate Joseph Smith as a highly creative religious original….
Stark thinks Mormonism may be the most important new word religion to arise since Islam appeared in the seventh century A. D., providing interesting phenomena for sociologists to observe…..
For Stark the divine acts through history with human agents, and application of a social science model does not necessarily imply hostility to the supernatural. Stark thinks that ideology plays almost no role in the beginnings of conversion, which occurs almost entirely through human networking. As he sees it, questions of literal historicity are not central to the Mormon religion…. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.261-2)
The older true prophet or charismatic fraud middle path
Stark thought Mormonism may be the first new world religion to arise since Islam appeared in the seventh century A.D., providing an interesting phenomena for sociologists to observe…..
Apostle Orson Pratt, in his 1851 works wrote, “The Book of Mormon claims to be a divinely inspired record….This book must be either true or false….If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid impositions ever palmed upon the world, calculated to deceive and ruin millions who will sincerely receive it as the word of God, and will suppose themselves securely built upon the rock of truth until they are plunged with their families into hopeless despair.
Apologists from the earliest times to the present day have stressed Smith’s lack of education as proof that he was not the author of the Book of Mormon. How could a simple farm boy have written such a complex literary work as the Book of Mormon, and so quickly, dictating while he looked into his hat? Lucy Mack Smith laid the ground work for this defense in her 1853 family biography, saying that he was thoughtful but less bookish than her other children; Emma hale Smith at the end of her life reminisced that Joseph was not capable of writing a literate letter, let alone composing so complex a work as the Book of Mormon. A current expression of the same idea comes from Richard bushman, a Columbia University history professor and devout Mormon: “How did these 584 pages of text come to issue from the mind of an untaught, indolent ignoramus, notable only for his money-digging episodes?” Yet some of smith’s contemporaries believed he had a startlingly unique knowledge of divine things. Pious Islamic tradition similarly maintains that Muhammad was not literate, and the Quran is also highly complex, though Mormons do not recognize it as scripture.
Every copy of the Book of Mormon is printed with the Testimony of the Three Witnesses and of the Eight Witnesses…..none of them disavowed their written testimonies even though most of them broke with Smith’s church. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.261-7)
additional Google citations of Orson Pratt quote
Jon Lloyd Stephens 1841 “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan”
Smith went to work on the papyri and, with the help of his scribes, developed a working list of characters, his Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, which is in the Utah church’s possession, as are four manuscript copies of the Book of Abraham…..
plurality of Gods,….out of nothing. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.279)
Joseph Smith Translation (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.289)
According to Joseph Smith’s scriptural account of his 1820 First Vision, he asked god and jesus which of the competing “sects” was correct. “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight: that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof." (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.320)
Does “Mormonism Attack Other Religions?” at Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry
Extracts from the “History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet” at lds.org
Joseph Smith's First Vision at lds.org
The “Anti-Mormon” literary movement has long antecedents, dates back to 1834, when phosphorescent materials about the origins of the newborn faith were collected and published in Painesville, Ohio, by the journalist E. D. Howe. His title:
Mormonism Unveiled: or, a faithful Account of that Singular Imposition and Delusion, from its Rise to the Present Time. With Sketches of the Characters of its Propagators, and a Full Detail of the Manner in Which the Famous GOLDEN BIBLE Was Brought Before the World. To Which are Added, Inquiries into the Probability that the Historical Part of the Said Bible Was Written by One Solomon Spalding, More than Twenty Years Ago, and By Him Intended to Have Been Published as a Romance.
The affidavits that Howe published were a collection from the Mormon dropout D. P. Hurlbut and included statements from people in Palmyra and Manchester who had known the Smith family…..
….as in the case with other religious and political ideologies. Almost without exception, they are Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants, who simultaneously view Mormon as moral soulmates and major religious rivals. The U.S. Catholic Church expends little effort on the LDS issue, perhaps because it’s too big to bother and it has not yet reacted significantly to competition in Latin America. The mainline and Liberal Protestant denominations generally lack the evangelistic and theologic energy. The conservative Southern Baptist convention, America’s biggest Protestant body, seems to be the only denomination that invests much sustained effort in the Mormon wars, through its Interfaith Witness division in Atlanta.
Most of the combatants are independent “para-church” organizations that together constitute a cottage industry. The 1996 Directory of Cult Research Organizations lists 752 anti-cult agencies and individuals, of which 561 are motivated by Evangelical religion and 102 focus on Mormonism. Some of the Evangelical groups work against a whole range of so-called cults, for instance, the Christian Research Institute of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, and the Watchman Fellowship of Arlington, Texas, James R. White’s Phoenix-based Alpha and Omega Ministries takes on everyone from Catholics to Jehovah’s witnesses, but his first love is targeting Mormonism. His volunteers are often seen disseminating tracts during LDS conference time in Salt Lake.
Writing for FARMS, the LDS stalwart Louis Midgley rates five organizations in the first tier of “anti-Mormon” ministries: the southern Baptists; the Utah Lighthouse Ministry (discussed later in this chapter); Bill McKeever’s Mormonism Research Ministry (also known as Religious Research Institute) of Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Ed Decker’s Saints Alive in Jesus Issaquah, Washington. The directory lists four others in the front rank: Dick Baer’s Ex-Mormons and Christians Allience of Orangevale, California; Chuck sackett’s Sword of the Shepherd Ministries of Westlake, California; Thelma’s “Granny” Geer’s To Mormons With Love of Safford, Arizona; and John L. Smith’s Utah Missions Inc. of Marlow, Oklahoma.
In addition there’s the enormous exmormon.org website run by the anonymous Recovery from Mormonism (eleven links to temple endowments, thirteen on blood atonement, and links to other ex-Mormon web pages). This site make religious, secular, and feminist attacks on the LDS system and includes 104 anonymous personal stories in the “Why We Left” section. There is also an e-mail news group and a nationwide list of ex-Mormon contacts. The site claimed to receive 1.85 million hits in a year’s time.
Decker’s outfit, known for its “God Makers” books and videos, is harshest in the attacks. It has been condemned by the liberal Mormon Alliance and accused of “religious bigotry” by the National conference of Christians and Jews. But Decker’s most damaging critics are Jerald and Sandra Tanner of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry, fellow Evangelicals and fellow ex-Mormons, and the only important foes based in Salt Lake City. The Tanners, self-taught historical researchers, had previously gained credibility in 1984 by early proclaiming Mark Hoffman’s Martin Harris “salamander letter” to be a phony. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.345-8)
E. D. Howe. His title “Mormonism Unveiled” 1834
E. D. Howe. His title “Mormonism Unveiled” 1834 brief review and selected excerpts
Mormon Outreach: defending Christianity from Mormon doctrine
Concerned Christians: bringing Jesus to Mormons
Jerald and Sandra Tanner of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry
Anderson also coedits Case reports of the Mormon Alliance. ….. BYU refused to let woman professors issue a study of seventy-one LDS women who had suffered childhood abuse; two of the professors quit and published the research in 1999……
Anderson was never informed exactly what her 1993 “apostasy” consisted of. But everyone knows that she is being punished for delivering a paper at the 1992 Sunstone Symposium, and publishing a version of it in Dialogue in 1993 that compiled data on more than one hundred examples of church repressions against intellectuals. After the article came out, church members sent her information on another hundred cases. Rather than being removed for heresy, in other words, Anderson is suffering church discipline because she conveyed information on church discipline. Her most incendiary accusation was that headquarters operates a systematic clipping service to monitor individual Saints, carefully filing their letters to the editor, other writings, quotes in the media, and public activities. ‘We must protest, expose, and work against an internal espionage system that creates and maintains secret files on members of the church,’ she has declared.
The First Presidency later admitted that it had established the Strengthening Church Members Committee, led by two apostles, which ‘serves as a resource to priesthood leaders throughout the world.’ The Presidency cited precedent in Joseph Smith’s 1839 scriptural command that Saints document ‘abuses’ against them and collect the ‘libelous publications that are afloat’ (D&C 123). A spokesman said that Salt Lake officialdom merely supplies the data and that local church officials are responsible for any resulting actions taken against members.
No other sizable religion in America monitors its own followers in this way. The files are only one aspect of a meticulous system of internal discipline through which contemporary Mormonism operates more like a small cult than a major denomination….see google …But other denominations usually remove those who are found guilty from their jobs without expelling them from the church altogether. The LDS Church, however, is unusual in penalizing members for merely criticizing officialdom or for publishing truthful—if uncomfortable—information. Also, mainstream churches openly state the charges that are at issue (and Protestants often conduct public tribunals), while Mormon officials shroud their procedures with secrecy. The Mormon Church prosecutes many more of its members than do these other religious groups, which tend to focus discipline on clergy in important positions such as theology professorships. Such discipline of rank-and–file members in other churches is virtually unknown. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.353-5)
Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 see also Mormoninfo.org
Paul Toscano, a Salt Lake City attorney, was a founder of the Mormon Alliance and longtime critic of the church leadership. His excommunication trial dealt largely with his observations about the general Authorities in a Sunstone Symposium address titled “All is not well in Zion: False Teachings of the True church.”
D. Michael Quinn, the most important scholar among the six and a resigned Brigham and Young historian, wrote a 1985 Dialogue article…. on the Early Mormonism and the Magic World View…. Deborah Laake Secret Ceremonies (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.356-7)
Action was indeed take nearly on against a feminist pioneer, Sonia Johnson. Like Lavina Anderson, Johnson had a conventional upbringing, in her case as the daughter of a teacher in the church’s high school seminary system..... “Mormons for the EPA” excommunicated
Though….;and refusal to let the two female professors publish their study on Mormon survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The AAUP concluded that BYU “has a history of suppressing scholarship and artistic expressions representing the experience of women.” (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.367)
Yet Joseph Smith Jr. was nothing if not a dissenter in his own time. And dissent has its uses, four of which are listed by Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher in their anthology on Mormon dissidents, Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History. (Richard N. Ostling, Joan K. Ostling “Mormon America” 1999/2007 p.370)
Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 www.sjsd.net/~bhull/S020609C7-020609C7.11/Branded.doc
Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 few quotes only
(Alissa Quart “Branded” Urban Youth Workers Institute
In 1991, ad spending in the United States equaled $126.4 billion; in 1994, it equaled $150 billion. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.8)
The marketers make the teens feel important (one teen trendspotter says she is good friends with the woman at the corporation she advises; (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.19)
Amy’s parents aren’t as flustered as I am by their daughter’s fixation on high-end cosmetics. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.29)
Within a month, though, the mourning was transformed into patriotism. Mall-going was prescribed as the contemporary version of planting the victory garden. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.32)
Alissa Quart “Branded” also cited in “The no-nonsense guide to women's rights” By Nikki van der Gaag
The kids got the message. “It’s patriotic to shop,” Amy tells me…..
Katie Sierra…was suspended for her antiwar sentiments in October 2001. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.33)
They have taught their children, now teenagers, to “need” luxury products rather than want them. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.34)
Teenagers have come to feel that consumer goods are their friends-and that companies selling products to them are trusted allies. After all, they inquire after the kids’ opinions with all the solicitude of an ideal parent. Tell us how best to see you our products, they ask. If you do, we will always love you. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.35)
“The kids are happy to participate [in focus groups]. They are happy to get attention and that someone cares about their tastes,” says cool hunter Jane Lacher, (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.42)
Golden Marble Awards are given to the best kids advertisers. Held on the precipitous date of September 10, 2001, the fourth APK was celebrating marketers’ ability to take advantage of the kids’ market and also deploying their industry’s favored neologism, KGOY, or Kids Getting Older Younger. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.47)
By 1964, an estimated $50 million was spent on advertising di¬rected at kids. In the early 1960s, Eugene Gilbert's company, the Gilbert Marketing Group, held "Youth Market Clinics" for corpo¬rate types.
But it would be twenty years before marketing to kids found its avatar. Dr. James U. McNeal. McNeal's 1986 book Children As Consumers: Insights and. Implications rocketed the kid business into an en¬tirely new orbit by quantifying how much children influence family purchases (up to $130 billion back then).
McNeal, now a gentlemanly older man in Texas who runs his own consulting firm McNeal and Kids, sees the mistake of the early marketing models was their construing of kid consumers as "adult rational thinkers." When he spoke of his research in the early 1960's, he therefore encountered "bored people like the head of Chrysler and head of Kmart," the sort of people who would later, of course, not be bored at all by McNeal's courting of youth. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.50)
McNeal's efflorescence started in the 1980's, he says, a result of children having more spending power, with their so-called incomes increasing at a rate of 15 percent a year. Suddenly he was a corporate consultant.
In 1989, corporations spent about $600 million on marketing to" kids. In 1999, they spent twenty times that amount. Numbers of ad dollars are only one indicator of the excitement about selling to children. The size of kid business publishing is another. Retail anthropologist Paco Underhill, in his book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, suggests, among other things, that merchants should ensure that kids become media consumers as early as possible. He also provides a how-to. Books and videos, he writes, should be placed on the low shelves of stores, allowing kids to better "grab Barney or Teletubbies unimpeded by Mom and Dad, who possibly take a dim view of hyper-commercialized critters." (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.51)
The most vocal group there, however, consisted of a collection of anticonsumerist academics whose aversion to children’s contact with violent media has led them to become much more political and publically outspoken than is the norm for those in the professorate. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.56)
Who now say they are willing to spend upwards of $40,000 on their children’s birthdays and bar mitzvahs. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.66)
Marie Theresa Hernandez, a professor at the University of Houston, told the Houston Chronicle in 2001. “There are instances where parents are willing to spend $15,000 on a quinceanera, but there is nothing in the college fund.” (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.68)
Alissa Quart “Branded” also cited in Houston Chronicle
“There’s a cult of special-ness in the American middle class,” says Rabbi Salkin. “Kids have to be special, the party has to be special, and the families are unwittingly a partner in a communal narcissism, believing they or their children own the ceremony. It’s God’s service.” (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.71)
The entity that gets video product placement right, he says, is the army, as the game Operation Defend Freedom, with its American Army logo. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.108)
The increased selectivity of the colleges begets a rarified quality…… Admission to top colleges is like the American version of getting into the aristocracy.” (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.143-5)
A more common symptom of these extremes, though, is the ever-rising rates of early decision (ED) and early applicants, part of the culture begotten by the U.S. News branding of university life. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.154-5)
Vizzini is as thoughtful about his authorial financial arrangements as he is about forwarding his writerly fame. “I was eighteen when I signed my contract. I should have sent it to a lawyer because I gave away my media rights. Now I don’t get extra profits,” he says. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.167)
In May 2001, seventeen-year-old Tristan Kading was threatened with suspension from his public high school in Stoningham, Connecticut, when he challenged a McDonald’s representative while the rep held “practice interviews” with the school’s students in the cafeteria. Triston accused the visitor of fronting for an exploitive company that lies about what substance its French fries are cooked in… (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.190)
In the middle of December 2001, more than 2,500 teenagers walked out of their Philadelphia public high school classrooms and onto the city’s intersections….
They partially succeeded. In the fall of 2001, Mark Schweiker, the governor of Pennsylvania, had proposed contracting the management of the entire public school system’s central administration to Edison, along with the operation of up to sixty schools. On April 17, a state panel voted to give only twenty city schools to Edison. The entire district was not turned over, only some contracts; in addition to the Edison-run schools, twenty-five are to be run by two universities, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, and a range of smaller for-profit companies such as Chancellor Beacon Academics Inc. and Victory Scholls Inc. As the panel conducted its deliberations, the student activists were rallying around the building. Few in the media picked up on the critical role played by students; their part has been overshadowed by stories about the Edison’s sliding stock prioce and desperate (though finally successful) quest for a new infusion of funds. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.215-6)
Mark Schweiker Edison schools Inc. Student walk out 2001 Philadelphia Public School Notebook
“Students protest against school privatization” People’s World.org
Students protest privatization of Philadelphia schools By Betsey Piette at Workers World.org
“Philly students walk out to protest takeover” Pocono record
“In Largest Schools Takeover, State Will Run Philadelphia's” NYT 12/22/2001
“When we hold bake sales for fund-raisers, our principal tells us we couldn’t serve juice and hot chocolate because those drinks compete with the soda brand in our school’s beverage machines, Coca-Cola,” says Max, rolling her eyes. (Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.221)
(Alissa Quart “Branded” 2004 p.)
When Bush was elected president the federal government had not used the death penalty for thirty-eight years. Bush Reinstated it. (Bloggers note: This claim may be misleading, the death penalty was on the books long before Bush became president and other presidents and candidates also supported it; however the appeals for federal inmates on death row did run out at this time so the death penalty was in practice reinstated.) when he was governor of Texas, that state had more executions than any other, and Bush signed 152 death warrants-more than any previous governor of Texas, or any other American governor in modern times. Typically, he made his life-and-death decision after a half-hour briefing with his legal counsel. Only once, as governor, did he stop an execution.
Millions of viewers watching the second presidential debate in October 2000 were shocked when Bush described the fate of the three men who murdered James Byrd: “Guess what’s going to happen to them?” they’re going to be put to death. It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death.” (debate transcript) the words alone do not convey the exultation, almost glee, that appeared on Bush’s face when he spoke of the coming execution of the men who had been convicted of murder. (As a questioner from the audience in the third presidential debate put it, Bush seemed to “overly enjoy” the fact that Texas leads the nation in the execution of prisoners. Bush denied that this was the case, but those who saw his expression in the earlier debate must have had difficulty in believing his assurance.) Undoubtedly the crime was dreadful, but such levity about the infliction of the death penalty makes a poor fit with the idea of promoting a culture of life.
To support the death penalty while opposing the killing of embryos or fetuses need not be inconsistent. As Bush said in A Charge to Keep: “Some advocates of life will challenge why I oppose abortion yet support the death penalty. To me, it’s the difference between innocence and guilt.” But to hold the two positions consistently, one would at least need to be very careful about supporting the death penalty. Since humans are fallible, any legal system that puts a large number of people to death will risk executing people innocent of the crimes for which they were charged. Several studies list people who have been condemned to death, and in some cases executed, who were later shown to be innocent. The Death Penalty Information Center has a list of 102 people wrongly sentenced to death in the United States between 1976 and 200. An investigation by the Chicago Tribune of all the 682 executions in the United Sates between 196 and 2000 found that at least 120 people were put to death while still proclaiming innocence, and in four of these cases there was evidence supporting the claim of innocence. When Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan retired, he said that there were several cases in which he had “grave doubts” about the guilt of people executed in Florida. If Kogan had doubts, then so should we-he was chief prosecutor of the Homicide and Capital Crimes division of the Dade County State Attorney’s Office before becoming a circuit judge and then Chief Justice. Even a highly critical study of the Death Penalty Information Center list, published on a pro-death penalty Web site, acknowledges that there were thirty four people sentenced to death who were released on the basis of serious claims of innocence. After reaching that figure, the study points out that this is less than half of one percent of all defendants sentenced to death in that period. But even if 199 out of 200 people sentenced to death are guilty, that does not erase the wrong done to the one who is innocent.
Bush’s attitude toward the risk of putting to death the innocent is in contrast to that of another Republican state governor who had once been a supporter of the death penalty. In 1999, Governor George Ryan of Illinois became concerned about the risk of putting innocent people to death when an investigation by students in a journalism class at Northwestern university proved that another man committed a murder for which Anthony Porter, a death-row inmate for sixteen years, was about to be executed. Ryan set up a commission that, over three years, conducted the most thorough study of the death penalty over carried out in a single state. It concluded that thirteen condemned prisoners were innocent. The commission’s findings, Ryan later said, showed that “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.” The commission proposed changes to the criminal justice system that were repeatedly rejected by the Illinois legislature. Finally, just before he left office, Ryan could no longer live with the risk of executing the innocent: he commuted all death sentences in Illinois to terms of imprisonment.
No matter how careful Bush may have been, it remains possible-the Illinois experience suggests that, given the large number of executions in Texas, one could say “probable”- that during his tenure as governor of Texas, an innocent person was put to death. To justify taking this risk of executing the innocent, one would need to be very sure of one’s grounds for supporting the death penalty. How sure is Bush entitled to be? He has written; “I support the death penalty because I believe, if administered swiftly and justly, capital punishment is a deterrent against future violence and will save other innocent lives.” In the third of his debates with vice President Al Gore, when asked by Jim Lehrer, the moderator, whether he believed that the death penalty “actually deters crime,” he committed himself even more firmly, saying. “I do. It's the only reason to be for it. Let me finish, sir. I don't think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don't think that's right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people's lives.” (debate transcript)
The problem with this defense of capital punishment is that most of the evidence is against it. Whether the death penalty is a deterrent is a factual question. Since it is not difficult to compare murder rates before and after the abolition or reinstitution of the death penalty, or in different jurisdictions that do and do not have the death penalty, there is relevant data. For example, after the 1976 U.S. supreme Court ruling that the death penalty is constitutional, a dozen states chose not to enact laws allowing it. These states have not had higher homicide rates than the states that did enact such laws-in fact, ten of them have had homicide rates lower than the national average. South Dakota has it, North Dakota does not. The homicide rate is higher in South Dakota than in North Dakota. Connecticut has it, Massachusetts does not. Again the homicide rate is higher in the state with the death penalty. The states in these pairs are roughly comparable in terms of their economic and ethnic mix. Moreover, homicide rates have risen and fallen in roughly symmetrical patterns in states with and without the death penalty, suggesting that the existence or absence of the death penalty has little effect on the incidence of homicide.
In 1992, California carried out its first execution in twenty-five years. Homicide rates in Los Angeles rose. Something similar happened when Oklahoma restored the death penalty. Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood took the scrutiny down to the county level, comparing 293 pairs of neighboring counties, differing in their use of the death penalty but otherwise carefully selected to be similar in respect of their location, history, economy, and inhabitants. They found no deterrent effect from capital punishment, executions, or whether a county has a population on death row. They did, however, find higher violent crime rates in death penalty counties. Finally, it is worth noting that a study of the effect of executions in Texas from 1982 until 1997 (and thus including part of Bush’s term as governor) concluded that the number of executions was unrelated to murder rates.
Admittedly, there are some studies that suggest that the death penalty does have a deterrent effect. On closer examination, they usually turn out to have serious flaws. In any case, if Bush supports the death penalty only because “it saves other people’s lives,” he should, before signing 152 death warrants, have taken a hard look at the evidence to see whether it really does save lives. If he had done so he probably would have concluded that that the death penalty does not save innocent lives. Or at the very least, even if he were to take the most skeptical possible view of the abundant evidence against the deterrent effect of the death penalty, and a more favorable view of the few studies suggesting that it does have such an effect, he would have realized that he cannot possibly have any confidence that the death penalty does save other people’s lives. Given that, and the risk-slight in any particular case, perhaps, but substantial when the death penalty is used frequently, as it was in Texas when he was governor-that an innocent person will be executed, someone who is concerned about protecting innocent human life should oppose the death penalty.
There is one other respect in which Bush’s hard-line support for the death penalty does not fit well with his support for the protection of innocent human life. A person who is seriously mentally retarded is likely to be incapable of understanding right and wrong, and thus to be morally innocent, even if he or she did commit the crime. As a national consensus against executing the mentally retarded began to build, Bush, as governor of Texas, came out against a bill that would have prohibited the use of the death penalty against profoundly retarded criminals, with IQ’s of less than 65. His explanation for this position was simply: “I like the law the way it is right now.” Although Texans strongly support the death penalty, on this issue Bush was more extreme than most of his constituents-a 1998 poll showed that 73 percent of Texans were opposed to executing the retarded. The bill was passed by the Texas Senate, which is dominated by Republicans, but with Bush opposing it, it failed in the House. In May 1997, Bush denied an appeal for clemency on behalf of Terry Washington, a thirty-three-year-old mentally retarded man with the communication skills of a seven year old. Washington was executed.
If Bush supports the death penalty because he believes that it saves lives by deterring potential murderers, and if mentally retarded people are morally innocent, then in signing the death warrant for Terry Washington, Bush was deliberately causing the death of a morally innocent human as a means of saving the lives of others. That is of course, exactly what he refuses to support in the case of human embryos.
In June of 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, given the growing national consensus, executing retarded persons is “cruel and unusual punishment” and hence a violation of the Eigth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.(Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.45-9) Murder rates by state. Death Penalty Information Center
Tom Paine, the supporter of American Independence and author of the Rights of Man wrote in Dissertations on First Principles of Government: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself”. (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.75)
Suppose someone says, “We should clone human beings because aliens have told us to do so.” We would, if we were to take this ridiculous claim seriously, ask for evidence that these aliens really exist, that they have told us to clone humans, and that there is some reason why we should do what they tell us to do. Suppose their response to our questions is, “I have encountered aliens in moments of deep despair, and they have entered into my head and my heart, and I love them and know I can trust them. Open your hearts to them, and you too will come to love them and see they are right.” If we are told that no evidence for the existence of the aliens will be offered, and we should take these claims on faith, we would, rightly, refuse to pay them any further attention. So suppose, then, that someone tells us that human embryos should not be destroyed because "human life is a sacred gift from our Creator." He also refuses to offer evidence, and when asked how he knows this, says it is a matter of faith, and we should open our heart to the Lord, and to Jesus, his only son, and we too will see things as he does. That answer may be more widely held than the justification that the bizarre Raelian sect has given for setting out to produce a human clone, but as a justification for public policy within the sphere of public reason, it fares no better. (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.104) also cited by John Burgeson (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.104) also cited on Talking Points Memo
Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch in New York, which has lobbied for the court's creation, said the suspension of military aid today amounted to a defeat for the current campaign against the court. "This policy is creating a dilemma where the administration has to chose between sound military cooperation with democratic nations and this campaign of ideology against the international criminal court," he said. (from original source cited
Dicker then added pointedly, “I’ve never seen a sanctions regime aimed at countries that believe in the rule of law rather than ones that commit human rights abuses.” (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.133-4) also cited on Talking Points Memo
When, shortly after taking office as president, George W. Bush was asked what he would do about global warming, his answer was, “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.” Asked whether the president would call on drivers to sharply reduce fuel consumption, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, replied, "That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one." (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.135) also cite in Brad’s Useful Quotes (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.135) also cite in AMK’s Journal
In an internal memo leaked to the New York Times, an EPA official stated that the White House version “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.” (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.136)
The most notorious example of a country going to war against another nation for harboring and supporting terrorism is still Austria-Hungary’s attack on Serbia in 1914, which triggered a world war that cost nine million lives. Austria-Hungary’s case for going to war rested on Serbian involvement in the assassination of the Austria-Hungarian crown prince and his wife in Sarajevo. The conspirators admitted that they had been trained, armed, supported, and given safe passage across the border by Serbian government official. Austria-Hungary handed the Serbian government an ultimatum, demanding that it bring the conspirators to justice and allow Austria-Hungarian officials to supervise the prosecution to ensure that the trial of guilt was pursued to the end. This ultimatum was widely seen as a violation of the principle of national sovereignty. The British foreign minister, Sit Edward Grey, called it “The most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one State to another that was independent.” The American Legion’s official history of the Great War denounced it as a “vicious document of unproven accusation and tyrannical demand.” Many historians studying the origins of the First World War have condemned the ultimatum, as failing to respect Serbia’s sovereignty. They are especially critical of the fact that after the Serbian government accepted many, but not all, of the demands in the ultimatum, Austria-Hungary refused to enter into negotiations, instead declaring war.
Although the U.S. administration-unlike the Austro-Hungarian government in respect to Serbia-had no evidence of the involvement of Afghan’s government officials in the events of September 11, Bush’s ultimatum to Afghanistan was no less threatening to that country’s sovereignty than Austria- Hungary’s was to Serbia. He demanded the closure of all terrorist camps, and access for U.S. officials to ensure that they were no longer operating. In one important respect, he went further than Austria- Hungary, which was content for Serbia to put those who had aided the terrorists on trial. Bush insisted that Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan be handed over to the U.S.-where one might suspect that it would be difficult for them to get a fair trial. (The subsequent history of American procedures for dealing with those captured in Afghanistan has shown this to be reasonable.) (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.145-6)
Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, asked the U.S. government to provide evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the events of 9/11, and indicated that if this was done, he would be willing to hand bin Laden over to an Islamic court in another Muslim country. (This proposal was later softened to a requirement that the court have at least one Muslim judge.) There was also a suggestion that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of more than fifty Muslim countries, should be consulted. The request for evidence of bin Laden’s involvement-no such evidence had been made public at that time-was surely a reasonable one, in accord with normal requests for extradition. The U.S. would itself insist on evidence before handing someone within its borders over to another nation wishing to put him on trial for a capital offense. Yet, the request, and the proposal for a meeting, appear to have been totally ignored, just as Hungary ignored Serbia’s counter offer in 1914. (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.151)
The result has been graphically described by Philip Gourevitch, author of we Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, a heartbreaking book on the Rwanda genocide:
…seven hundred poorly armed U.N. peacekeepers in the north-eastern Ituri region have watched helplessly over the past few weeks as massacres by tribal militias have filled graves with fresh corpses at about the same clip that the dead of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror have been exhumed in Iraq. (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.)
22“If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. 23“But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, 24eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (Exodus 21:22-5) (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.206)
Tertullian, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria-leading thinkers of the early church- all agreed that a Christian could not be a soldier. If one of the faithful becomes a soldier, Clement said, he must be cast out of the church, for he has “scorned God.” It was not until 312, when Constantine, the Roman Emperor, became a Christian, that this attitude changed, and Christian thinkers like Augustine began to develop the doctrine of the “just war.” (Peter Singer “The President of Good and Evil” 2004 p.207)
Tom Paine, “Dissertations on First Principles of Government”
Philip Gourevitch, “Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families”
And how could any rational person make sacrifices on behalf of unseen supernatural entities? The answer: When it comes to religion, apparently reasonable beings are unreasonable- religion is rooted in the irrational. Keep in mind that claims about the irrationality of religious sacrifices have not been limited to great sacrifices such as asceticism or martyrdom. At issue are such ordinary acts as prayer, observance of moral codes, and contributions of time and wealth.
Whether it be the imputation of outright psychopathology, of groundless fears, or merely faulty reasoning and misperceptions, the irrational assumption has dominated the field. The notion that normal, sophisticated people could be religious has been limited to a few social scientists willing to allow their own brand of very mild religiousness to pass the test of rationality-as in Gordon W. Allport’s concept of “intrinsic” religion…… “The rise of Mormonism” By Rodney Stark, Reid Larkin Neilson p.86
“Acts of faith: explaining the human side of religion” By Rodney Stark, Roger Finke
It was not bishops but the religious “fantasies” of the masses that most concerned Engels. Freud wrote about religious illusions, not about church taxes, and Wallace asserted that “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world” (1966:265), because as Bryan Wilson explained, “the rational structure of society itself precludes much indulgence in supernaturalist thinking” (1975b:265).
Third,, implicit in all is the claim that all aspects of modernization it is science that has the most deadly implications for religion…… “The rise of Mormonism” By Rodney Stark, Reid Larkin Neilson p.97
additional Google books with the same quote
hannah arendt and jean baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society )
Real-life Monopoly
But there’s another side to what scholars Shirley and Joe Kincheloe have insightfully called the “Corporate Construction of Childhood.” It’s the growing scope, market power, and political influence wielded by the small number of megacorporations that sell most of what kids buy. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.27-9)
With so many more dollars at stake, that strategy was risky, so companies hired psychologists, child development specialists, anthropologists, and sociologists to help craft more compelling messages. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.42)
(Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” also cited in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FVE/is_9_4/ai_54631243/
When all else fails, there’s always nagging. Or what the British side of the industry calls Pester Power. Thanks to Cheryl Idell’s widely influential “nag factor study,” and numerous derivative reports, this time-honored technique of kids has become heavy artillery in the industrial arsenal. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.61)
…Chat rooms are seeded with paid representatives to promote brands. E-mail lists are used to advertise products. While teens and young adults have been the target of many of the early viral campaigns, these techniques are filtering down to children….
One of the more intriguing companies in the bussiness is the Girl’s Intelligence Agency. In 2002, its first year of operation, the company had already developed a network of 40,000 girls, aged eight to eighteen, ready to swing into action on the drop of a dime to create buzz for whatever product the company sends their way.. GIA was founded by Laura Groppe, an academy award winning film producer…. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.76)
Juliet Schor “The Commodification of childhood: Tales from the advertising front lines”
The use of academic to promote sales has a long history in certain areas, such as drugs and health products. And academia has played a role in the kids’ marketplace too, for example, when educators and psychologists endorse “worthy” toys and books. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.82-3)
Opposition has prevented Channel One from growing for many years. But with some notable exceptions, it has mainly managed to hold on to its existing clients…..Zapme….was forced to suspend operations. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.88-9)
The main impetus for commercialization is the chronic underfunding of schools. As budgets tighten, officials become more receptive to selling access to their students. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.90-1)
Some of the worst examples of bias have been found among the corporate environmental materials. In the early 1990’s, energy, paper, and other primary materials companies became concerned about what they considered an excessively proenvironmental attitude among the nation’s youth. They worried that existing environmental education curricula were exacerbating those sentiments. So the companies began what can only be described as an extensive propaganda effort to obscure the nature of the environmental problems facing the planet. For example, Consumers Union concluded that Exxon’s elaborate Energy Cube curriculum “implies that fossil fuels pose few environmental problems and that alternative energy is costly and unattainable.” (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.94)
Businesses are willing to spend millions of dollars on crummy classroom material, but have proven unwilling to pay taxes to support high-quality, serious curricula for the nation’s children. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.96)
Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” University of Orogon review of book
Schools have sold rights to probe kids as young as age seven. Noggin, a joint venture of Nickelodeon and PBS, set up shop an elementary school in watching, New Jersey....
…..Each kid was equipped with a headband with a lens built into it, which was then connected to a camera hidden in a backpack. They were sent into the store and asked to pick any twenty things they would like to buy, the camera recorded everything the children did, such as what they looked at, which aisles they lingered in, what they picked up, and what they ultimately chose to put in the cart. The study was conducted with what at Strottman are called “rookies,” that is, kids who had not yet been interviewed or briefed by the firm. (They were also unaware of the purpose of the study.)….
….Unfortunately, the Bush administration, a recipient of considerable sums of money from tobacco, alcohol, and big pharmaceutical companies, rejected these insightful suggestions.
Levi Strauss…was one of the earliest companies to employ children in innovative ways…as official consultants…
Josh reports that, “they were pretty blunt.” If he didn’t comply with their request, they made it clear he would be fired. They’d send a disposable camera, a notebook, and a tape recorder, and ask him to comb the city. He was on the lookout for cool kids he could interview and whose outfits and accessories he would record. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.103-6)
In the early days, Fogg recruited her own family and employees’ kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews. As they ran out of family members, she began attending outdoor civic events and giving presentations. Now her colleague Ron Coughlin explained, “we have a very aggressive recruiting program in schools.” They work only with private and parochial schools, because safeguards and regulations at public schools are too complex-“the reality is that they [the children] are working,” says Fogg. She presents the program to the boards of the schools and then to the parent meetings, offering cash or other compensation to the school in return for their participation. In her spiel, she promises that the children will gain self-esteem because “someone” is listening to them, and that they will be thrilled to see products they’ve worked on being advertised on television. She promises the kids will have fun, get to be creative, and “never do the same thing twice.” In 2003, the firm embarked on an ambitious recruitment effort, through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which had agreed to facilitate access to the 3,700 children in the organization. Fogg reports that she’s never been asked in advance by school or organizational officials about the kinds of products the kids will be working on, whether alcohol or cigarette advertising would be part of the work, or about violent video games or sexist portrayals. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.107)
As with many other child researchers, he was trained originally to help children, and his funding came from the nonprofit sector. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.109)
One planner I met in New York has a more eclectic approach. He regularly consults with university brain scientists, hypnotizes consumers, and is hard at work developing an emotional field theory that can “tap into the human mind….[into] the brain functions which control emotions….When I send out a virus, I’m trying to do it in a way so that it will be more receptive. I’m not calling for some Orwellian vision of the future,” he says, but “we’ll be able to…” At this point his voice trailed off, perhaps because he was contemplating a lucrative future of irresistible ads….
Reiher explained to me that he is very concerned about how advertising can manipulate viewers’ attention mechanism and “downshift” the brain, that is, activate the emotional midbrain and the instinctive reactive centers. Such downshifting makes it virtually impossible for critical thinking and effective reasoning to occur while watching an ad. In combination with age-inappropriate content, Reiher believes that downshifting can have a negative impact on brain development in children. In his view, “The ‘muscle’ of metacognition is the key to the higher thought process and this can be compressed by high powered entertainment experiences that keep the brain engaged in the emotional and instinctive modes of processing.” Reiher worries that what the people using MRI scanning techniques and other advanced brain technologies are doing is trying to discover more effective brain downshifting techniques. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.110-2)
Surprisingly although many schools ask to see copies of the surveys in advance, not all do. This gives researchers tremendous latitude and suggests that many principals are asleep at the switch. So too are the school boards that are sanctioning the use of valuable classroom time for market research with no educational value. These practices are a costly subsidy from the taxpayers who fund the schools to the private companies that are reaping the benefits of the research. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.114)
Furthermore, the widespread practice of doing in-store research without prior permission ignores the privacy of other customers in the store, who may be taped and have their behavior analyzed without their knowledge. That’s one reason store managers are reluctant to allow such taping. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.116)
In fact, after surveying twenty-five years of Saturday morning food advertising, and nearly 1,400 food ads from 1972, 1976, 1987, 1994, and 1997, the authors reported that with the exclusion of some public service announcements, “there have been no food advertisements for fruits and vegetables…in the past 25 years.” Furthermore, this study found that the nutritional content of advertised products is getting worse. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.120)
In 2003, information emerged that food companies know more about this than they’ve been letting on. The London Telegraph reported that “scientists working for Nestle and Unilever have been quietly investigating how certain foods, such as chocolate biscuits, burgers and snacks, make people binge-eat, thereby fuelling obesity. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.125)
They’re active on many fronts, but they are failing miserably at what is ultimately a simple task: the production of healthful food. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.127)
In early 2003, responding to the barrage of adverse publicity, Coca-Cola signed a million-dollar agreement with the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry to promote “education and research.” The arrangement was immediately criticized on the grounds that it created a conflict of interest….
The Bush administration has sided squarely with Big Food against its critics. Secretary of health and Human Services Tommy Thompson got public attention when he spoke out against obesity, but behind closed doors, he urged members of the Grocery Manufacturers Association to “go on the offensive” against the critics. Part of the offensive has been to downplay the connection between food and obesity, defining the problem as inadequate exercise. The administration has engineered a taxpayer giveaway for a lifestyle ad campaign called VERB, run by a private-public partnership between HHS, the Centers for Disease Control, and what Commercial Alert’s Gary Ruskin has dubbed the “obesity lobby.” (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.128-9)
A second industry theme is that parents can “just say no.” Paul Kurnit takes the view that “if you don’t want your child to eat pre-sweetened cereals, don’t buy them. If you don’t want your child to eat at McDonald’s, don’t take your child to McDonald’s. I mean, on some level it is truly that simple.” [Child marketer Amanda] Carlson concurs: “They [the parents] should set the guidelines. They should set precedents. They should be good examples, which they’re not, in terms of how to eat healthfully.”
A careful look at industry practices suggests things aren’t as simple as Kurnit and others claim. The soft drink companies have demanded exclusive access in schools. The chains dominate highway rest stops, airports, malls, and other public places, so fast or junk food is usually all that’s available. Agriculture and food lobbies have pushed through food disparagement laws in twelve states where they’re politically powerful. (These laws make certain statements about food products illegal.) Oprah Winfrey was sued by a group of Texas cattlemen under their “veggie libel law” after she did a show on mad cow disease. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.130-1)
(Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” the simple dollar book review
Juliet Schor “When Childhood Gets Commercialized, Can Children Be Protected?” 2005
Chapter 9: Empowered or Seduced?
The Debate About Advertising and Marketing to Kids
A line has been crossed . . . advertising and entertainment and all mediums are blurred now. I think we are reaching a point of an overall degrading of values. . . . And it seems like people get desensitized, and then they have to cross yet another line.
-Richard Goldstein, creative director, major New York ad agency
As marketers have become more brazen, parents, educators, and health professionals have begun to fight back. This is not the first time advocates for children have tried to rein in marketers. In the 1970s, television advertising was the focal point, because it was the major avenue for reaching children. In 1974, the Federal Communications Commission explicitly recognized children's vulnerability to ads and enacted regulations that prohibited host selling and program-length commercials, mandated separators between ads and programs, and restricted advertising time to nine and a half minutes per hour on the weekends and twelve minutes on weekdays. Action for Children's Television, a public interest group, argued that the 1974 regulations were inadequate and pressed the Federal Trade Commission to enact a ban on all advertising to children. In 1978, after considerable deliberation, the FTC issued a report that concluded children under age seven "do not possess the cognitive ability to evaluate adequately child-oriented television advertising." However, by 1981, the agency was unwilling to take on industry, and in any case, Congress stripped it of its ability to do so. At about this time, the FCC reversed its stance on program-length commercials, which remain legal.
The next decade and a half was relatively quiet, but opposition began to surface in the second half of the 1990s. This time, critics took aim at a wider range of practices than television commercials. Ralph Nader, a long-standing opponent of corporate marketing to children, published The Parents' Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators and founded Commercial Alert, which has become a major catalyst for activism, organizing professionals and parents on a variety of issues from school commercialization to junk food marketing. George Gerbner warned that corporations were becoming our children's "story-tellers" and the dominant transmitters of culture. Consumers Union opposed the growing commercialization of schools, as did the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education and the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education. In August 1999, the Center for a New American Dream launched its Kids and Commercialism Campaign, just in time to help parents cope with the annual marketing blitz associated with back-to-school sales. Some months later, a group called the Motherhood Project, associated with the right-wing Institute for American Values, put together a broad-based statement titled "Watch Out for Children," which attacked the larger consumer culture being sold to youth. Not long afterward, a new coalition called Stop the Commercial Exploitation of Children developed, on the success of a series of events countering the industry's Annual Golden Marble Awards for the best children's ad.
Major national organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund, the National Education Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have also entered the debate about kids and consumer culture. The American Psychological Association began studying whether it should amend its code of ethics to prevent members from conducting marketing research on children. The issue reached the political mainstream in the 2000 elections, as Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that "too many companies simply see our children as little cash cows that they can exploit." Clinton called for a ban on ads to preschoolers and in public elementary schools. The debate heated up and one industry publication declared that "marketing to kids is now officially under the gun." As I've described, 2002 was a watershed year for opponents of food marketing. By 2003, the annual KidPower conference was taking note. "We are accused of manipulating and exploiting kids," the conference brochure intoned. "The kid industry is under attack for selling products to children that are presumed to make them greedy, violent and fat." Organizers added a session that would enlighten participants about "how worried" they should be about growing criticism in the press and the spread of advertising bans now in place in some European countries.
Under attack from many sides, industry has mounted three lines of defense. The first is that they are empowering kids. The second is that advertising to kids is necessary for the economic health of the industry. The third is that parents are the guilty party.
The New Discourse of Kid Empowerment
The core of what I call the new discourse of kid empowerment is the idea that ads and products help children to feel powerful. It says that kids need to feel independent and master their environments to feel in control of their parents. Lisa Morgan argues that "kids want to be in control in a world where they create their own rules . . . we always try to put them into situations where they . . . demonstrate mastery of a specific situation." Gene del Vecchio contends that "kids have very little control over the world in which they live. Therefore, they love to gain any measure of control over their sphere of existence. . . . Control touches a strong need that children have to be independent." Del Vecchio and others argue that a sense of control can be achieved through learning how to operate a toy, having the opportunity to choose among products, even something as simple as choosing among color variations, or watching an ad in which children triumph over adults.
Is it true that ads can create positive psychological outcomes? If a kid buys a pair of Nike shoes and feels better about himself or herself because of them, then Nike's ads may enhance self-esteem. But the messages are a double-edged sword because they also do the reverse, undermining self-worth. Sometimes the reality doesn't meet the promise. Sometimes kids desperately want a product because they're convinced it's essential to their happiness but there's no money to pay for it. As the nation's children are increasingly likely to live in poor and low-income households, this gap between desire and means is likely to grow. Many psychologists already find this a worrisome trend. Allen Kanner and M. E. Gomes have argued that many young people are suffering from feelings of deep inadequacy brought on by an inability to keep up with consumer culture.
Empowerment is also raised in a defense of the widespread antiadultism of commercial culture. Paul Kurnit defended an ad he produced for the board game Operation in which adults are portrayed as buffoons, saying it "levels the playing field" between children and adults. But there's a fine line between wholesome kid mastery and destructive antiadultism, and many believe that line has been crossed. Social conservatives argue that advertising and the media have become unacceptably disrespectful toward adults, undermining children's proper deference and obedience. However, even those who do not believe that adults have a God-given authority over children find themselves disturbed by some of today's advertising, wondering if the pervasive antiadultism is undermining mutual respect between parents and children. Bob Garfield, the influential columnist of Advertising Age, called a Nintendo spot that ridiculed parents an "exercise in craven cynicism and moral abdication." Garfield acknowledged that Nintendo was hardly alone in putting forward the "make-fun-of-grown-ups" message. Nevertheless, he argued, "At some point someone has to take a stand. These people have no right to speak to our children this way, and they had damn well better stop." James McNeal, responding directly to Kurnit, called his position "detestable."
Similar issues arise with direct targeting of children. After the gatekeeper model collapsed in the 1980s, industry went full steam ahead, selling their clients on nag factor kid influence. But the further industry goes down this road, the more it must defend itself against charges that it is having excessive and undue influence on kids. Industry has responded by claiming that children are capable of managing the persuasive pressure of commercial messages and are neither overly swayed nor harmed by them. This has led to the idea that kids are different than they were in the past, as, for example, in the 1970s, when research showed that children had rather limited abilities to understand and withstand advertising. Industry insiders now ignore or denigrate this research on the grounds that it's no longer relevant. They describe today's children as savvy, not able to be manipulated. Martin Lindstrom, a branding expert, thinks that kids have "an advertising filter which is greater than any previous generation. Advertisers and marketers cannot lie, and they cannot deliver crap quality." Wynne Tyree argues that "kids are much more sophisticated than most adults understand, and their sophistication levels are ever increasing at younger ages. There is a lot of evidence that kids are cognitively (and physically) developing more rapidly." Lisa Judson of Nickelodeon contends that "kids have a kind of truth meter. They are able to tell when marketers are being truthful and straightforward and they can tell when marketers are trying to trick them." Geoffrey Roche, an award-winning Canadian creative director, opines, "I don't think there is any way that we, as advertisers, can convince children of anything." Of course, this isn't always to the companies' benefit. One McDonald's advertiser, explaining the dynamics of Happy Meals, explained wistfully that "the kids have become a little more savvy, a little more demanding."
As a consequence, industry spokespeople argue that children do not need protection in their dealings with marketers. Those who are pushing for stricter regulations are put down as know-nothings. Paul Kurnit contends that the people who want to protect kids are "overprotective. . . . It is an issue where we often find that the people who are the most vocal about it have the least understanding of what's going on in kids' lives."
It's hard to dispute the view that children have become more sophisticated and worldly. However, there's little evidence on how that newfound sophistication affects children's ability to resist the persuasive power of ads, and whether growing up faster is empowering in the ways marketers suggest. I've found only one study that evaluates whether children's ability to understand and critically process advertising has grown over time. It's a meta-analysis by Mary Martin of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that assesses the findings of twenty-one previous studies, conducted between 1972 and the mid-1990s. Martin finds that the ability of younger children to understand ads appears to have increased somewhat since the 1970s, although the correlation is weak and may be due to changes in the way researchers have measured understanding. Furthermore, the crucial question of whether young children can resist the persuasiveness of advertising has not been adequately explored. As I noted in Chapter 3, there's evidence that young children's ability to withstand persuasion is limited. Until there's more research, the industry's claims remain unproven.
The Instrumental Benefits of Ads The industry's second argument is that advertising is justifiable because it creates other benefits, such as free television, better products, and economic growth and employment. Psychologically, these are the most powerful arguments because they reinforce the utter inevitability of advertising. But their logical power is weak.
Let's start with the claim of free television. First, it's not true. Television only appears to be free. The public funds ads and programs by paying higher prices for advertised products. The fact is that if you're a consumer, you pay for television, whether you watch or not. What's more, nominally free television is a bad thing because it leads kids to watch too much of it. Indeed, given the extensive body of research on the detrimental effects of television, free TV hardly makes a compelling case for advertising. Perhaps the strongest argument for free television is that it's available to low-income consumers who cannot afford other forms of entertainment. But given that low-income children spend so much time watching television and are disproportionately affected by some of the most harmful aspects of consumer culture, such as violence, obesity, and depression, this is a hard position to defend. It would be preferable to subsidize other forms of entertainment or to offer pay-per-view at heavily reduced rates to low-income households.
A second argument is that ads promote competition and indirectly lead to better products. More likely, they do the reverse. Advertising is expensive, and therefore creates barriers that make it harder for new products and companies to enter the market. With today's monopolized industries, the high cost of ad campaigns keeps the giants in control and the newcomers out. If we really wanted to maximize product innovation and improvements, we'd structure the system so advertising was inexpensive and mainly informational.
Finally, the industry has long taken the stance that ads create consumer demand, which creates more production and employment. Without ads, the argument goes, the economy would collapse. But most economists don't agree with this logic. They see advertising as mainly affecting brand choice rather than overall sales. And even if it were true, it's a problematic argument. During my research, I had lunch with a man who was then president of one of the nation's largest advertising agencies. He began our conversation by telling me that he believed advertising had become a terribly destructive force around the world, putting fast food joints everywhere, undermining local cultures and global diversity. As he looked over his career, he had lost faith in his business. So how do you live with yourself? I asked. His answer was that he put food on the table for his many employees. By that criterion, he is willing to advertise tobacco, which his firm does, and other harmful products just to maintain business. When it involves children, this instrumentality is even more questionable. Indeed, there's precious little justification for advertising to children merely to keep agencies profitable. Policy should be based on what's best for kids, not on arguments about how using them in one way or another yields particular outcomes for adults. When we argue that it's okay to use kids for the sake of making money, it's much harder to draw lines to protect their health, safety, and well-being. If society permits advertising to children, it should be because we're confident it isn't harmful, deceptive, or overly enticing.
A few marketers have taken that tack, claiming that advertising is actually good for children, helping them to be savvy consumers, and providing product information. But evidence suggests the opposite conclusion. For example, one study found that youth who watch more ads turn out to be more trusting of them, not less. A controlled study comparing students in Channel One and non-Channel One schools found that the former are more positive about the advertised products than those who don't see the broadcasts. If we want children to grow up with good consumer skills, we need to teach them directly, through media literacy courses, lessons in financial management, and information about how to become an informed consumer.
Findings from a Center for a New American Dream poll I collaborated on in 1999 suggest that relatively few parents buy into the industry's claims. Only 15 percent believe that advertising "is a good way for kids to get accurate information about products," and only 23 percent say that "children today are very sophisticated about advertising and are not really influenced by it all that much." To take the "we're doing good for kids" line seriously, one would need to see evidence for the causality that underlies this view: that kids who watch more ads have higher self-esteem and better friendships, are more content with their lives, and are more positively empowered. I found just the reverse.
Industry Blames the Parent
Industry's final line of defense is that parents always have the option of protecting their children from advertising. They can turn off the television and just say no. When parents let their children watch, they are giving tacit approval. Of course, the proliferation of marketing in schools and other public institutions undermines this claim, but it remains a mainstay in the industry's arsenal of arguments. Recently, the debate has gone further, as marketers blame parents for the excesses of consumer culture. If children have become too materialistic, or obese, or aggressive, it's because parents aren't doing their jobs. "The reason that there's childhood obesity is because caregivers don't have enough time to spend with their children. So what they're doing is giving their kids eight hours of TV a day," says Kenn Viselman, the media producer who brought Teletubbies to the United States. Other marketers hold a similar position. Peter Reynolds, CEO of Brio Toys, says, "Parents aren't losing control, they're giving it up. . . . The responsibility of the purchase always lies with the adult. Yeah, seventy-two times a day you're going to be asked, 'Can I have that toy? Can I have that toy?' But if the answer is 'no' seventy-two times a day for three or four weeks, then they stop asking." Paul Kurnit says parents are responsible for the decline of the gatekeeper model: "A decade ago I called it 'the unmanned tollbooth.' Today I call it 'Easy Pass.' " Arnold's Jerrie van Gelder worries that industry critics will lead us down a slippery slope: "If we start to remove the responsibility from the parents . . . I wonder where it stops."
This line of argument is powerful because it possesses an essential truth. Parents should and do bear responsibility for restricting children's access to consumer culture. When they fail to exercise judgment or set limits, the outcomes can be disastrous. I subscribe to this perspective as a researcher and as a parent. I've shielded my own children to a degree some people find excessive. But the undeniable fact of parental responsibility does not imply that it's only parents who should be held accountable. The complexities of life today render that approach far too simple-minded. Looking at the evolution of relationships between children, parents, and marketers, we see how much more entangled and difficult this triangulation has become. In the process, it becomes clear that all three parties need to behave differently.
Some of the more thoughtful advertisers I encountered understand this triangulation well. Wynne Tyree describes the case of food, explaining that the pervasiveness of unhealthful choices "puts moms in a tough position-the battle or the surrender." Tyree believes that mothers have only the best intentions for their children and care about their health. "But moms today, unlike many moms of yesterday, want their kids to be happy as much as they want them to be healthy. This is particularly true of those moms who are more time-constrained and/or work outside the home. Since kids want the sweets, the fats, and carbs, the result becomes a child with a little extra baby fat moms are sure their kids will grow out of." Tyree also recognizes the problem of what social scientists call "path dependency"-that what we do today affects our behavior tomorrow. "There's the problem of kids' palates that never get exposed to healthy foods and thus never develop a taste for them." Introducing young children to unhealthy food, even as treats, can undermine their ability to maintain a healthful diet over the long run.
The industry's critics are not so far from this perspective, explaining that it is increasingly difficult for parents when they are overextended and stressed and advertising comes at kids from so many angles. Harvard University's Susan Linn contends that we have put parents in the position of "playing David to the corporate Goliaths." And neither Linn nor others in the critics' camp are arguing against parental responsibility. They're asking for help. Indeed, one might argue that it is precisely because it is getting harder for parents that there should be more restrictions on marketers. We should be focusing less on who's to blame and more on a workable solution that protects children's well-being.
Parents have mixed attitudes about responsibility and blame. The Center for a New American Dream's poll asked about where the responsibility lies-with parents or marketers. Forty-one percent of parents took the view that "it is getting harder and harder to set limits with kids because so much advertising is aimed at making kids feel they need all of these products in order to fit it." A nearly identical number (43 percent) felt that "blaming advertisers is just an excuse parents give because they do not know how to say no." Interestingly, 12 percent volunteered that they agreed with both of these sentiments, an option that was not offered by the interviewers.
The poll also found that the vast majority of parents willingly accept responsibility for their children. But most don't think they should be forced to fight the battle alone, and there is strong support for restrictions on advertising. Seventy-eight percent of parents are opposed or strongly opposed to showing commercials for brand-name products in school; 64 percent believe Internet providers are not doing enough to protect children from online advertising; and 65 percent believe TV networks should be required to reduce the amount they advertise to children. When asked how they felt "when your child pressures you to buy something as a result of an advertisement," 20 percent said "angry" and 38 percent said "pressured." By contrast, only 6 percent reported themselves "ready to please," and 17 percent were "happy I have the money to buy it." A large majority (78 percent) also reported that they believe "marketing and advertising puts too much pressure on children to buy things that are too expensive, unhealthy, or unnecessary." Seventy percent feel "advertising and marketing aimed at kids has a negative effect on their values and world view," and 87 percent think "advertising and marketing aimed at kids today make children and teenagers too materialistic."
These findings reveal that although more than 40 percent of parents don't primarily blame advertisers, most of those respondents are critical of many of the practices marketers are engaged in. The poll suggests that parents have a pragmatic and balanced view of the issues.
Many advertisers speak with a forked tongue about parental responsibility. To the public they extol it. To their clients, they boast about their ability to exploit parental weakness. Whether it's dual messaging, going around parents by advertising in schools, finding the battles that moms are too exhausted to fight, or encouraging pester power, much of children's marketing has become an effort to break down parental opposition. Food marketers search for a believable (never mind true) nutritional claim. ("Give 'em a vitamin, give 'em calcium," David Siegel of the Wondergroup advises.) Toy manufacturers slap on the word educational. Companies anointed with the wholesome halo venture into questionable territory, knowing that parents trust them.
Surveying the commercial landscape, it seems that we've reached the point where it is no longer fair to put the onus exclusively on parents. Those who are trying to limit marketers' access to their kids deserve a reasonable chance of success. They shouldn't have to sequester their kids from so much in the environment. That puts an undue burden on both child and parent. The failure to address these issues also unfairly exposes those children who, for whatever reason, don't have parents setting limits for them. Despite his strong rhetoric about parental responsibility, Peter Reynolds's company markets only to parents, not to kids. "I want to save the children from the parents who don't take responsibility," he says. Such a stance is rare.
Advertising Doubts
When I began my research, I wasn't particularly interested in how those within the industry felt about their work. I just wanted to figure out what they were doing. Perhaps naively, I assumed that most would either believe in what they do or, if they didn't, would have well-developed rationalizations to keep their consciences at bay. I was unprepared for the spontaneous articulation of doubts I encountered. Mary Prescott raised her criticisms in both of our conversations: "I am doing the most horrible thing in the world. . . . We are targeting kids too young with too many inappropriate things. It's not worth the all-mighty buck." And later she confessed that "at the end of the day, my job is to get people to buy things. . . . It's a horrible thing and I know it." Thomas Kouns, of Truth Moderating and Qualitative Research and a former strategic planner at a number of agencies, also identified a problem at the core of the enterprise: "We have a message which says to be worth anything, you have to have the product. . . . Brands are about giving you value, giving you self-esteem. Fundamentally, that's really flawed. It stunts your emotional growth in a lot of ways. . . . We're so culpable, everybody's culpable." Mark Lapham, who founded and then sold his own promotions company, seemed as if he's marking time until he makes enough money to retire and do something he can be proud of. Martin Lindstrom decried the growth of materialism among tweens and worried that we've produced a generation that is not very nice. He described how it feels to "wear two hats." As a marketer, he counsels brands that they need tween strategies. But "from a parent point of view, I think this is a sad phenomenon." A marketer with a flair for the dramatic repeatedly foretold a future in which she'd "burn in hell."
For some, the problem isn't so much advertising as the way it's carried out. Langbourne Rust issued a blanket condemnation of his colleagues' use of nag factor: "It is assumed by most of them that it's all about pester power. We end up creating a world and culture around this idea. And we end up with a culture of kids at odds with their parents-wheedling, whining, and cajoling." Kenn Viselman takes a similar view. Referring to Idell's original nag factor study and the direct marketing that followed it, Viselman noted that "ever since that study came out, the concept of advertising to kids has become more and more widespread. It's become a way of life in our country and it's totally wrong. It's sacrilegious. We should be doing whatever we can to protect our youth, and instead we're just selling them out so we can make a few dollars." I encountered a few marketers who refuse to promote violent products or stress the need for positive approaches, but in my experience, these concerns mainly get lip service.
Rita Denney is one of the few professionals I discussed this issue with who shared the critics' view that advertising to children is inherently unfair. She's also one of the most highly educated and knowledgeable people in the field and holds a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago. She understands a lot about children's development, and this is the basis of her refusal to work on children's products or accounts. "I have a third grader who I've watched grow up with television." Denney explains that it's too hard for her daughter to understand the rules of advertising and that she can't make certain kinds of judgments. "I'm willing to sell anything to adults," she explains. But she draws the line at kids.
The most poignant case I encountered was Susan Davies (pseudonym), a senior executive and a single mother who confessed her longtime ambivalence about the whole enterprise of marketing to kids. She's had to advertise products she doesn't believe in and wouldn't let her own children use. This leaves her feeling morally conflicted and unhappy with her work, so she's left the job a number of times. But she keeps returning because she needs the money. "The biggest issue is finding some peace." This is not always easy because, as she explains, in the advertising business you "can't really be critical of the product . . . you can't have a judgment on the product."
In the end, Davies identified the crux of the problem: the industry lacks sufficient moral accountability. In the agencies, people are afraid to confront the clients. In the companies, there's a similar lack of accountability. And all the while, the pressure to make money is overwhelming the need to do well by kids. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.177-88)
My own experience also supports this view. After our first child was born, we decided not to expose him to television…..But a funny thing happened: he never asked. (Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.207)
(Juliet Schor “Born to Buy” 2004 p.217 imediately after organization list)
WHEREAS, the nurturing of character and strong values in children is one of the most important functions in any society; Parents Bill of Rights
But it was Haig that made the news that day. He stepped unhesitatingly before the State Department press corps for his first press conference as Secretary and tagged the Soviet Union with “the training, funding and equipping” of international terrorists. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.64 on Google )
McMahon had a reputation as a man of caution. Several years earlier, when the CIA put together what was known publicly on who supported and funded several dozen anti-CIA groups and publications such as the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which tried to expose CIA operations and operatives McMahon had blown up. “Stupid sons of bitches,” he had yelled at a senior-staff meeting, “spying on Americans, If anyone got hold of this… Don’t you see? The perception.” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.103-4 )
Casey was discovering that the CIA had virtually no good intelligence penetrations of human sources among the Sandinistas. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.113-4 )
One beneficiary of the CIA assistance was a fifty-five-year-old civil engineer who had been educated in the United States, at Notre Dame University-Jose Napoleon Duarte. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.117 or p. 91 on Google)
General David C. Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior military person and the only holdover from the Carter Administration, looked at the approval of a Nicaragua operation with some dismay. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.174-7)
“We refuse to assassinate any person,” the Libyan leader said, placing his hands under his chin and looking up in the air dreamily at one point. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.185)
A later SECRET State Department analysis from the department’s intelligence division stated: “CIA records indicate, however, that the source of one of the reports that Libya intends to attack the Sixth fleet has in the past had sustained contact with a Soviet diplomat.” The other reports of plans to attack U.S. principals were “most later discounted.” The analysis also noted “the obvious probability that reporting breeds reporting where the U.S. is perceived to have an interest.” In all, the memo suggested that all the hit-squad reports may have been misinformation feeding off itself. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.186 in print copy or p. 167 on Google copy)
Barnes was stunned. He knew the Latin American players: no one, including the CIA, would be able to control the Argentines, who were known for their ruthlessness. The agency might as well have picked Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.187 or p. 168 on Google)
But on the operations and covert-action side, Inman was growing increasingly troubled. Casey was aligning the CIA with some of the major unsavory characters in the world.
Casey had received a visit from Israeli defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a burly, trucelent former general with extreme hawkish ideas. Israel was giving covert paramilitary support to the main Christian militia in Lebanon- the rightist Phalangist party, headed by Bashir Gemayel, a baby-facedruthless warlord. At thirty –four, Gemayel had developed into one of Lebanon’s most important and charismatic leaders, forging a unique and powerful future for himself. The Israeli game plan was working, and Sharon wanted $10 million in secret CIA paramilitary support to go to Gemayel.
Inman was opposed. In 1978, Bashir’s forces had made a lightning attack on the summer-resort home of Tony Frangieh, the political heir to the rival Christian faction, slaughtering him, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, the bodyguards and even the domestic staff. In 1980, Bashir’s militia had come close to wiping out the rival Christian militia of Lebanon’s ex-president Camille Chamoun.
Bashir was a savage murderer.
But their was more- something hidden in the intelligence files.
Back in the 1970’s, after studying political science and law in Lebanon, Bashir had come to the united States to work for a Washington law firm and had been recruited by the CIA. As the youngest of the six children Peter Gemayel, he was no doubt destined to relative obscurity in the powerful family. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.203-4)
Since the 1977 public disclosure that King Hussein of Jordan had been a CIA paid agent for twenty years, the agency had been reluctant to keep heads of state on the payroll. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.218 or 201 on Google)
Casey got the point and became somewhat more approachable. The Catholic Church was opposing the Sandinistas, he said, and if there were truly free elections in Nicaragua the Sandinistas would not win.
How about the U.S.-backed Contras? McCurdy wanted to know. What kind of message were they spreading in the countryside in the battle for the hearts and minds of the locals? They were blowing up bridges. A granary and a ranch had been hit. A power plant had been attacked; the CIA had said the power plant was a military target, but it turned out that only about 10 percent of the power was for the armed forces; the rest was for civilians. That was the opposite of the REA. That was destroying, not building. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.242-3 )
The claim that the Sandinistas wouldn’t win in a fair election was from Casey, who has demonstrated a strong bias. In the 1984 elections, this received little if any attention from Casey and perhaps Woodward, the Sandinistas won easily. According to some reports cited by Noam Chomsky they were far fairer than the ones in El Salvador and Guatemala and some of the biggest problems may have been caused by the Contras with the support of the US and CIA. If the Nicaraguans weren’t unifying against the Contras they might have been able to address other issues and considered some other candidates besides Daniel Ortega, who wasn’t as bad as the US propaganda made him out to be.
In Senator Dodd’s televised response for the Democratic side, he adapted a typical Reagan tactic, one single graphic image. He chose El Salvador: “I have been to that country and I know about the morticians who travel the streets each morning to collect the bodies of those summarily dispatched the night before by the Salvadoran security forces-gangland style- the victim of bended knee, thumbs were behind the back, a bullet through the brain. We recoil at such an image for our association with criminals….” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.251 ) (Scribd the CIA: an expose of the Agency’s History and Covert Operations )
In Zaire, formerly the Congo, (it has since resumed the name the Congo) Casey met with the leader Joseph Mobutu. CIA ties with Mobutu dated back to 1960, the year the CIA the year the CIA had planned the assassination of the Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. An August 25, 1960 cable to the CIA station chief from then DCI Allen Dulles stated that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.” Before the CIA plot could be effected, Lumumba was murdered by another group of Mobutu supporters. Casey had an important, personal relationship with Mobutu, and now they exchanged intelligence. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.268 )
The following excerpt describes an event where a plane was shot down as William Cohen and Gary Hart were visiting Nicaragua. Evidence linking the CIA to the plane and covert activity that could potentially have caused the death of both senators was indicated.
The Nicaraguan officials produced a briefcase which had been retrieved from the plane. Cohen and Hart peered inside. There was a manuscript instructing the pilot to meet someone in Costa Rica at a certain restaurant, a bill of lading from Miami and the pilot’s Florida driver’s license, U.S. Social security card and American credit cards.
And there was more, including some code-word identifications for the operation and the contract. Both Cohen and Hart recognized them as authentic CIA paperwork. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.272-5 )
That summer the first serious public fissure appeared among Reagan’s inner circle when White House chief of staff Baker said it was Casey who had provided him with briefing papers that President Carter had used to prepare himself for the nationally televised debate in the 1980 presidential campaign. Investigations by Congress and the FBI were launched.
This excerpt goes on to tell about a possible espionage effort within the campaign of Ronald Reagan and a memo which implicates Hugel that was not disclosed but witness testimony indicates that it did exist and this investigation was cut short without completion and forgotten. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.277-80 )
The United States was vulnerable, he said. There were no standards, no rules, no laws, on spying abroad. Only one rule, “Don’t get caught. If you do don’t admit it.” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.309 on the print copy on Google this excerpt is on page 300 )
Horton had felt uncomfortable about some of the other intelligence efforts in the year he had been the Latin American NIO. Casey wanted an assessment of the opposition to Castro inside Cuba. Horton wasn’t able to come up with much hard intelligence, because it didn’t exist. CIA sources in Cuba were meager, it was true, but Horton concluded that it was also possible that Castro didn’t have much internal opposition. That didn’t sit well with Casey and he responded suspiciously, as if his contempt for Communists was universal and of course Castro must have had opponents....
Horton felt sour. Perhaps it was unfair, but he found a metaphor that he thought apt: Casey was like the new chief executive officer of a large corporation who came in to milk the corporation for what he could get out of it before throwing it to one side. Sure, Casey saw himself as an old OSS operator and had a sentimental feeling about inteligence work, but if any cans were going to get hung around any neck for Central America, it would be Reagan’s or Casey’s. those cans would go around the CIA. The seeds for a gigantic backlash, a repeat of the church and Pike investigations, were being planted.
Horton knew that Casey had to be credited with keeping in touch with many people, but almost all shared his world view, as Mexico demonstrated. Horton had spent hours sitting in Casey’s office, before his desk, dragged in for one matter or another. Casey was to rough on people, on Horton.
He thought that Casey was not attached enough to the CIA and its need for independence. The CIA had become once again a tool for the administration bent of forcing its view on the world. The distortion and ploys were many. Some were subtle. Horton felt he could stand stubbornly at the gate only for so long. He didn’t want to be a martyr. It was personal. Somebody else could have handled Casey much more smoothly. Gates did it. For him, a few or even many compromises on paper maybe didn’t add up to much.
There was another factor in Horton’s decission to leave. It was hard for him to evaluate the significance of this, but it wasn’t that he just didn’t get along with Casey. The DCI was a bully. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.345-6 in book 340 on Google )
One person bought Casey’s argument-Reagan. Six days after this latest Beirut bombing, the President was on the campaign trail in Bowling Green Ohio. This excerpt goes on to describe a disagreement between Reagan and both Carter and his DCI Stanfield Turner (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.381 in print copy or 379 on Google )
CIA Primer Tells Nicaraguan Rebels How to Kill New York Times (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.388)
The word “neutralize” appeared under the heading “Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects.” …. “If possible professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective ‘jobs.’ “ (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.389 excerpt also cited in Google Book “Eating Fire, Tasting Blood”)
Senator Moynihan recognized the manual for what it was. At Harvard he had read a paper on Mao Tse-tung’s technique of insurgency: identify the landowner single him out and have a public trial. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.391)
Bandar knew how to have a conversation that never took place. He was funnelling millions to the contras; this was widely suspected and he just denied it routinely with a confident laugh and a long lecture about the implausibility. Their relationship was the kind that both Bandar and Casey valued- one in which men of authority could have frank, deniable talks and emerge with an agreement only they understood. Bandar and Casey agreed that a dramatic blow against the terrorists would serve the interests of both the United States and Saudi Arabia. They knew that the chief supporter and symbol of terrorism was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fadlallah, the leader of the Party of God, Hizbollah, in Beirut. Fadlallah had been connected to all three bombings of American facilities in Beirut. He had to go. The two were in agreement.
Later it was decided to give effective operational control to the Saudis, particularly as the CIA bureaucracy grew more and more resistant to active anti-terrorist measures. The Saudis came up with an Englishman who has served in the British Special Air-Service. The elite commando special operations forces. This man travelled extensively around the Middle East, and went in and out of Lebanon from another Arab state. He would be an ideal leader of a sophisticated operation. The CIA, of course, could have nothing to do with "elimination." The Saudis, if asked would back a CIA denial concerning involvement or knowledge. Liaison with foreign intelligence services was one CIA activity out of the reach of congressional oversight; Casey had flatly refused to the committees about this sensitive work. And in this case, the CIA as an institution did not know. Nothing was written down, there were no records. The Saudi $3 million deposited in the Geneva account was "laundered" through transfers among other bank accounts, making certain it could not be traced.
The Englishman established operational compartments to carry out separate parts of the assassination plan; none had any communication with any other except through him. several men were hired to procure a large quantity of explosives; another man was hired to find a car; money was paid to informants to make sure they knew where Fadlallah would be at a certain time; another group was hired to design an after-action deception so that the Saudis and the CIA would not be connected; the Lebanese intelligence service hired the men to carry out the operation.
On March 8, 1985, a car packed with explosives was driven into a Beirut suburb about fifty yards from Fadlallah's high-rise residence. The car exploded, killing eighty people and wounding two hundred, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who had happened to be in the immediate neighbourhood was killed, hurt or terrorized, but Fadlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge "MADE IN US" banner in front of a building that had been blown out.
When Bandar saw the news account, he got stomach cramps. Tracks have to be meticulously covered. Information was planted that the Israelis were behind the car bombing. But the Saudis needed more to prove their non-involvement. There was only one way. They provided irrefutable intelligence that led Fadlallah to some of the hired operatives. As Bandar explained it, "I take a shot at you. You suspect me and then I turn in my chauffeur and say he did it. You would think I am no longer a suspect."
Still Fadlallah was a problem, now more than ever. The Saudis approached him and asked whether, for money, he would act as their early-warning system for terrorist attacks on Saudi and American facilities. They would pay $2 million cash. Fadlallah accepted but said he wanted the payment in food, medicine and education expenses for some of his people. This would enhance his status among his followers. The Saudis agreed.
There were no more Fadlallah-supported terrorist attacks against Americans.
"It was easier to bribe him than to kill him," Bandar remarked.
Casey was astounded that such a comparatively small amount of money could solve such a giant problem. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.396-7 )
He talked about his childhood in Queens, a universe of simple, permanent affiliations. Walking to and from public schools 13 and 98, there were fistfights, he recalled. It was the late 1920’s after World War I, when boys just circled up and fought. “Win some, lose some,” he said. Did he remember any of the kids who beat him? “Of course, do you think I forget anyone?” He stared hard, his dentures full of peanuts. “Particularly anyone who beat me?” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.403-4 )
For More than a month I had known that President Reagan had signed the finding to create three secret Lebanese units for preemptive attacks on terrorists. Lauder, Casey’s press man, had tried to dissuade the post from running the story. We had discovered that the top-secret finding had been rescinded after the Beirut car-bombing had killed eighty people. We knew only about the role of the Lebanese intelligence service at that point, and nothing about the secret role of the Saudis or their $3 million contribution to the operation. We saw no reason to withhold the story, since the operation had failed and the finding was history.
“It’s like hitting an old woman with a hammer,” Lauder said in exasperation. The story ran on May 12: “Antiterrorist Plan Rescinded After Unauthorized Bombing.”
Three days later George Lauder wrote to Casey: “It seemed clear Woodward was planning to go ahead with the story irrespective of what I told him. I strongly stated that his story was grossly irresponsible and an ‘invitation to murder.’ I said that if he were Fadlallah and had seen a great number of supporters, including woman and children, blown up and then read the Washington post story, he couldn’t help but want to take revenge against the Americans in Lebanon, … this excerpt continues on Google Books page 407 (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.405 )
Why should we not print what the Soviets already know?
It has to do with the atmospherics of intelligence operations, the official said…. P.455
“There’s no way you run that story without endangering the national security,” Casey said. He sipped a scotch and water. “I’m not threatening you, but you’ve got to know that if you publish this, I would recommend that you be prosecuted.” This of course was not the only problem for the Post. “We’ve already got five absolutely cold violations.”
He explained that he was referring to the Post and the four other publications. He added matter-of-factly that he had just come from the Justice Department, where all five cases were pending upon his recommendation. He implied the train had already left the station.
Bradlee asked if it was the 1950 law.
“yeah, yeah,” Casey said. “I don’t practice law anymore. You know what I’m talking about.”
Bradlee and Downie attempted to get some specifics. What was the problem? First it was the Soviets, then other countries, and now what?
“Look,” Casey said, “hold the story for a week.” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.459 in print copy or 466 on Google )
On October 2, we ran a long story on the memos headlined “Qaddafi Target of Secret U.S. Deception Plan, elaborate Campaign Included Disinformation that Appeared as Fact in American Media.” (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.476 in print copy or 483 on Google )
Casey had been an attractive figure to me because he was useful and because he never avoided the confrontation. He might shout and challenge, even threaten but he never broke the dialogue or the relationship. (Bob Woodward “Veil: the Secret wars of the CIA p.506m in print or end of Google excerpts Woodward goes on to say that because of the eighty innocent people killed in the attempt to kill Fadlallah Casey was the one with blood on his hands not Woodward. )
Powell asserted that everyone in the international coalition was willing to go after al Qaeda, but extending the war to other terrorist groups or countries could cause some of them to drop out.
The president said he didn’t want other countries dictating terms or conditions for the war on terrorism. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.81)
Wolfowitz seized the opportunity. Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about 100,000 American troops bogged down in mountain fighting in Afghanistan six months from then. In contrast, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable. He estimated that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks.” The U.S. would have to go after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.83) also cited in the American Conservative
He had several other ideas. “Stay away from CNN,” he suggested. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.87)
“An enemy,” Bush said, interrupting the chief of staff, reminding them it was a war way beyond al Qaeda. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.90)
At his home in the Washington suburbs the next morning, Tenet took out a pen, some paper and began writing longhand. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.93)
“Not a legal case,” countered Rumsfeld. “It’s not event-related.”…
“Is Iran in the coalition?” asked Steve Hadley.
“It’s not a single coalition,” said Rumsfeld. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.104)
But Bush insisted he would not soft-peddle America’s determination to win the war. We will defeat our enemies, we will set a tone for future presidents, he said. “Two years from now only the Brits may be with us.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.106)
Did they want or need a white paper? Rumsfeld asked. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.135)
Turning to the outline of the war, Rumsfeld said, “We ought to have a broad beginning and an ending. It ought to be focused on al Qaeda-it shouldn’t be focused on UBL….It’s not over if we get his head on a platter. And the failure to get his head on a platter is not failure. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.136)
“The president and the war counsel have got to obviously be decisive, but not be hasty.”
So provocation was going to be one tool. Did he explain or warn Rice or the other war cabinet members that he was testing, planning or being provocative?
“Of course not. I’m the commander-see, I don’t need to explain –I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.145-6) Also cited in Third World Traveler
“We will be meeting like this for some time,” Bush said….
“Many believe that Saddam is involved,” he said. “That’s not an issue for now. If we catch him being involved, we’ll act. He probably was behind this in the end.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.167) “I think the precedent is bad of having to go out and make the case publicly,” Rumsfeld said, “because we may not have enough information to make our case next time, and it may impair our ability to preempt against the threat that may be coming at us.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.176-7)
Appearing before parliament on Thursday, Prime Minister Blair presented evidence that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network was responsible for the September 11 attacks. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.196)
Bush called Nick Calio, the White House chief of congressional liaison, to the Oval Office.
…memo limiting access to information to a small number of members of congress… “I don’t care. Get it up there. This is what’s going to happen,” Bush ordered.
“Okay,” said Calio, “but I just want to tell you that you can expect-“
“I’m not defending it,” Bush said. “Do you get the picture here?”
Calio nodded.
“Get it up there to them, okay?”
“Fine,” Calio said.
“It’s tough shit,” the president said.
Bush later talked with Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was the longest conversation Graham had ever had with Bush, and he heard a real stream of Texas profanity.
Calio then undertook what was basically an intense Middle East-style shuttle diplomacy between Bush and Congress trying to bring both toward the middle. Finally Bush agreed to lift the order. He had sent the message that he could cut them off if he wanted. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.198-9) On Israel, Powell referred to Sharon’s statement that Israel would not itself to become Czechoslovakia. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.203)
“The president’s recent job approval increase is unprecedented even for a time of crisis.”
…discussion about poll jump…
Rove took the polling information to Bush, and explained that if history is a guide, they had about 30 to 40 weeks before the polls returned to the norm.
…somebody else could handle. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.206)
Another reporter asked, “Are you running the risk of being characterized as attacking the Afghan people rather than military targets?” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.210)
The president said he would be asking children to contribute $1 each to an Afghan Children’s Fund. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.217)
Rumsfeld launched into a discussion of what should be said publically about the possible use of U.S. weapons of mass destruction if the other side used them. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.218)
The meeting turned to Syria, well documented as a state supporter of Hezbollah. Syria had condemned the September 11 attacks. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.221)
Rumsfeld put forth one of his trademark aphorisms: “Do no good and no harm will come of it.” Doing good is risky. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.222)
The CIA briefers reported how important it would be to offer incentives to the Pashtuns to withdraw support from the Taliban. What would the message be? “Withdraw and get fed? If you don’t withdraw you don’t get fed.” One said. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.227)
But the atmosphere was generally one of deference to authority, especially by Franks to Rumsfeld. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.251)
Look, We’re entering a difficult phase. The press will seek to find divisions among us. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.262)
Powell worried again that it was bombing for bombing’s sake, unconnected to a military objective. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.275)
Watching from owner George Steinbrenner’s box, Karl Rove thought, it’s like being at a Nazi rally. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.277) also cited by Common Dreams
cited in the Future of Freedom Foundation
And because it would be the policy of the United States, the only superpower, the rest of the world would have to move over, would have to adjust over time. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.281)
“They may have nukes,” Cheney said, laying out the worst case scenario. They may have CW/BW. The allies in the region are a fragile proposition for us. The strategic consequences of a radical takeover in Pakistan or Saudi would be enormous. And third, the degree of patience in the United States may dissipate if we get hit again.
“Therefore, Cheney said, addressing Franks and Rumsfeld, “We may need to think about giving you more resources, a different timeline, more forces and a higher tempo of operations.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.291 )
“It is clearly an estimate,” Rumsfeld replied, “I did not suggest one, two, or three months; I said months rather than years. That means it could be as long as 23.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.296 )
He had yet another piece of bad news. “The Iranians may have switched sides and gone to side with the Taliban.” (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.298 )
In one case, $50,000 was offered to a commander to defect. Let me think about it, the commander said. So the Special Forces A-team directed a J-DAM precision bomb right outside the commander’s headquarters. The next day they called the commander back. How about $40,000? He accepted. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.299)
Musharraf said his deep fear was that the United States would in the end abandon Pakistan, and that other interests would crowd out the war on terrorism.
Bush fixed his gaze. "Tell the Pakistani people that the President of the United States looked you in the eye and told you we wouldn't do that."
Musharraf brought up an article in the New Yorker by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, alleging that the Pentagon, with the help of an Israeli special operation unit, had contingency plans to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should the country become unstable.
"Seymour Hersh is a liar," Bush replies. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.303 )
In the end, Tenet believed they would find state sponsorship of the September 11 attacks….He believed that eventually they might find Iranian tracks in September 11. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.317)
We wanted to deal with specific moments, and Balz asked him [Rumsfeld] about the day after the attacks when Rumsfeld had raised the question, 'Is there a need to address Iraq as well as Bin Laden?
“What the hell did they do!" Rumsfeld exploded. "Give you every goddamn classif--... take that off the..."
I urged him not to worry.
"I didn't say that," Rumsfeld declared and then tried to pretend someone else had shouted. He pointed to Larry DiRita, his civilian special assistant. “Larry, stop yelling over my shoulder, will you please?"
I said that perhaps we could put an 18 1/2 second gap in our tape.
"Now you're talking," Rumsfeld said.
The 19-page transcript that the Defense Department later released of the interview deleted his explosion and the “hell” and goddamn." (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.319 ) also cited at activist times
One of Powell’s greatest difficulties was that he was more or less supposed to pretend in public that the sharp differences in the war cabinet didn’t exist. The president would not tolerate public discord. Powell was also held in check by his own code- a soldier obeys.
Bush might order, Go get the guns! Get my horses! -- all the Texas, Alamo macho that made Powell uncomfortable. But he believed and hoped that the president knew better, that he would see the go-it-alone approach did not stand further analysis. Hopefully, the success in the first phase of the war in Afghanistan had provided the template for that understanding.
The ghosts in the machine in Powell's view were Rumsfeld and Cheney. Too often they went for the guns and the horses. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.322 also cited in Washington Post article 11/17/2002)
In the spring of 2002, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became so violent that it threatened to overwhelm the war on terrorism….
…Bush said he wanted to send Powell to the Middle East to see if he could calm things down…. Powell was reluctant. He said he didn't have much to offer, too little leverage with either side….
We are in trouble, the president told Powell. "You're going to have to spend some political capital. You have plenty. I need you to do it."
"Yes, sir," Powell said….
Do you understand what you’re saying to the Israelis? Powell asked him You’re going to have to look Sharon in the eye and say get out.
He said he understood.
On April 4, Bush delivered a Rose garden speech calling on the Palestinians to end the terror…..
Rice called Armitage at the State Department to ask him to tell Powell to scale back his statement, make less of a commitment about future negotiations. There were real concerns that Powell was going too far.
In Washington, Armitage was almost chained to his desk so he could talk to Powell between his meetings. It was midnight, 7 a.m. in Jerusalem, when Armitage explained Rice's concerns.
Powell went nuts. Everybody wanted to grade papers! he said. No one wanted to step up, face reality! They wanted to be pro-Israel and leave him holding the Palestinian bag by himself. They had sent him out on a nearly impossible mission.
"I'm holding back the [expletive] gates here," Armitage reported. "They're eating cheese on you" -- an old military expression for gnawing on someone and enjoying it. People in the Defense Department and the vice president's office were trying to do him in, Armitage said. He had heard from reliable media contacts that a barrage was being unloaded on Powell. He was leaning too much to Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. The White House was going to trim Powell's sails; he was going to fail. Armitage said he couldn't verify who was leaking this, but he had names of senior people in Defense and in Cheney's office.
"That's unbelievable," Powell said. "I just heard the same thing." He had had cocktails with some reporters traveling with him, and they reported that their sources in Cheney's office were declaring he had gone too far, was off the reservation, and about to be reined in.
"People are really putting your [expletive] in the street," Armitage said.
Rice reached Powell and said all the others thought it was best he say nothing more, and announce that he was going back to Washington to consult with the president.
Powell, who had been engaged in a grueling diplomatic shuttle, erupted. Was he just supposed to say, thank you very much for your hospitality, good-bye!
Rice said she was worried that he was committing the president and the administration more deeply than they all wanted.
Guess what? Powell countered. They were already in. They couldn't launch an initiative with a high-profile presidential speech like the one Bush had given in the Rose Garden on April 4, and not expect to propose some plan or follow-up. But he agreed to trim back on his statement.
(Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.323-6) also cited in the Washington Post
In early August, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made the diplomatic rounds in Indonesia and the Philippines and, as always, kept in touch with what was happening at home. Iraq was continuing to bubble. Brent Scowcroft, the mild-mannered national security adviser to Bush’s father during the first Gulf War, had declared on a Sunday morning talk show on August 4 that an attack on Iraq could turn the Middle East into a “cauldron and thus destroy the war on terrorism.”
Blunt talk, but Powell basically agreed. He had not made clear his own analysis and conclusions to the president and realized he needed to do so. On the long flight back, from nearly halfway around the world, he jotted down some notes. Virtually all the Iraq discussions in the National Security Council had been about war plans -- how to attack, when, with what force levels, military strike scenario this and military strike scenario that. It was clear to him now that the context was being lost, the attitude and views of the rest of the world that Powell knew and lived with. His notes filled three or four pages.
During the Persian Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly, that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political. Now as secretary of state, his account was politics -- the politics of the world. He decided he had to come down very hard, state his convictions and conclusions so there would be no doubt as to where he stood. The president had been hearing plenty from Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, a kind of A-team inside the war cabinet. Powell wanted to present the B-team, the alternative view that he believed had not been aired. He owed the president more than PowerPoint briefings. (Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 p.331-2 also cited in Washington Post article 11/17/2002)
Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 and book excerpts from other books from On the Issues
(Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 Christopher Hitchens book review )
Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 Book review some out of context )
Bob Woodward “Bush at War” 2002 Book review )
In 1972, then-strongman but not yet leader Saddam Hussein signed a Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union.
(more on support of the Iraqi Kurds then abandoning them when they made a deal with the Shah) (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.69-70)
Powell knew deeply, intimately, that war is fought by kids, even teenagers who would die because of decisions made in Washington….. Only he had been in combat (of those involved in the decision making)…..
Such a back-channel contact outside the chain of command was risky for both of them, especially Franks, who would have to protect himself and might have to let Rumsfeld know there had been a conversation. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.78-80)
Asked how he thought the Iranians might respond to being called part of an “evil” axis, Bush said, “I doubt the students and the reformers and liberators inside Iran were displeased with that. I made a calculation that they would be pleased. Up hear the president speaks so clearly about the nature of the regime and the harshness and the repression they have to live under. Now I’m confident the leaders didn’t like it.
…he said “I say that freedom is not America’s gift to the world. Freedom is God’s gift to everybody in the world. I believe that….” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.88)
Vice President Cheney told General Franks that he was planning a trip to the Middle East in March and asked what countries he should visit. Who might be ripe for solicitation, pressure to assist in a war against Iraq? (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.111)
When do kids start in school here in Bahrain? Mrs. Cheney inquired.
This isn’t Bahrain, the wife replied. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.112)
“The stated mission is regime change,” the president said. “but all this talk from the level four people… [they] are talking about things they know nothing about. Our intent is serious. There are no war plans on my desk….” Bush July 31 2002 (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.137)
Other unanswered questions included: What if Syria attacks Israel? What if Iraq just sort of implodes and someone kills Saddam? What would the U.S. do?
It was pretty much agreed that the U.S. would still have to enter Iraq with the military because they would not know who the new Iraqi leader might be. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.147)
The UN itself ought to be made an issue since it had failed for more than a decade, unable and unwilling to enforce its own resolutions that directed Saddam to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and to permit weapons inspections inside Iraq. The U.N. had to be challenged. “Go tell them it’s not about us. It’s about you. You are not important.” The U.N. was running the risk of becoming irrelevant and a mockery, he (Cheney) said. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.157) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited at On the Issues
At the NSC meeting, Cheney said to the president, “Well I’m going to make that speech.”
“Don’t get me in trouble,” Bush half-joked.
Trouble is what Cheney had in mind.
“Cheney said Peril of a Nuclear Iraq Justifies Attack,” read the headlines in the New York Times on the morning of August 27. Powell was dumbfounded. The vice president had delivered a hard-line address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville and basically called weapons inspections futile. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions," Cheney had said of Hussein. "On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.' " (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.164) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 also cited in the Washington Post
Christine M. Ciccone “….I found myself struggling to keep from laughing out loud at times, especially when Sec. Rumsfeld became a caricature of himself with the ‘we know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know we know there are things we know we don’t know we don’t know.’ “ (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.171)
Bush and Blair took questions from reporters. They said they were committed to ending Saddam’s threat once and for all. How or when went unanswered. Bush asserted unequivocally, “Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.178) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in the Daily Howler
“The definition of a first tier-terrorist was somebody who was either involved in the events of September 11th or harbored and provided sanctuary to those involved. And there’s not evidence that Iraq fell into either one of these two categories….” Bob Graham (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.192-3)
Bush scoffed….“At some point, we will conclude that enough is enough and take him out. He’s a liar and he’s no intention of disarming.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.240)
That evening, December 18, my wife, Elsa Walsh, and I attended a huge White House Christmas Party for the media hosted by the president and his wife. The Bushes stood for hours in a receiving line as a photographer snapped pictures with the first couple. When we reached the front of the line, the president remarked that my book was selling well.
“Top of the charts,” he said, and asked, “Are you going to do another book?” He then stretched out his arms and indicated with his body language that there might be a story there, that it should be done.
“Maybe it will be called ‘More Bush at War,’” I said.
“Let’s hope not,” Laura Bush said, almost mournfully. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.243-4) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 also cite in the Daily Howler
For example, Rumsfeld advocated what he called the “toolbox approach” to problems, noting that if the only tool you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.281)
Later Powell got word that Rumsfeld had kicked Warrick and O’Sullivan out of the Pentagon, ordering them to leave by sundown.
“What the hell is going on?” Powell said in a phone call to Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld said that as they got into post-war planning, the work had to be done by those who were truly committed to this and supporters of the change and not those who have written or said things that were not supportive. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.283-4)
Libby used the intercept of the two suspected terrorists laughing about killing a donkey with ricin that McLaughlin had discarded as unreliable. He said that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, was believed to have met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer and cited intelligence of as many as four meetings. The others knew the CIA had evidence of two meetings perhaps, and that there was no certainty about what Atta had been doing in Prague or whether he had met with the Iraqi official. Libby talked for about an hour.
Armitage was appalled at what he considered overreaching and hyperbole. Libby was drawing only the worst conclusions from fragments and silky threads.
On the other hand, Wolfowitz, who had been convinced years ago of Iraq's complicity in anti-American terrorism, thought Libby presented a strong case. He subscribed to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's notion that lack of evidence did not mean something did not exist….
The most important response came from Karen Hughes. As a communications exercise, she said, it didn't work. The sweeping conclusions at the head of each section were too much. The president, she said, wanted it to be like the old television series "Dragnet": "Just the facts." Let people draw their own conclusions….
So who then should present the public case? Rice and Hadley pondered that. The case would have to be made to the United Nations, so the chief diplomat, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, was the logical choice. Hadley believed there were additional reasons to choose Powell. First, to have maximum credibility, it would be best to go counter to type and everyone knew that Powell was soft on Iraq, that he was the one who didn't want to go. Second, Powell was conscious of his credibility, and his reputation. He would examine the intelligence carefully. Third, when Powell was prepared, he was very persuasive.
"I want you to do it," Bush told the secretary of state. "You have the credibility to do it." Powell was flattered to be asked to do what no one else could. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.289-90)
Colin, the vice president said, look carefully at the terrorism case that Scooter prepared. Give it a good look.
Sure, Dick, Powell said. He generally used the vice president's first name when they were alone. Cheney was not ordering him or trying to direct him. It was just a request to take a serious look.
Powell looked at it. Four Mohammed Atta meetings in Prague. That was worse than ridiculous. He pitched it.
Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Hussein and Sept. 11. It was a separate little government that was out there -- Wolfowitz, Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and Feith's "Gestapo office," as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was. Cheney would take an intercept and say it shows something was happening. No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that somebody talked to somebody else who said something might be happening. A conversation would suggest something might be happening, and Cheney would convert that into a "We know." Well, Powell concluded, we didn't know. No one knew. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.292) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in War without end
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said, “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program since its elimination of the program in the 1990’s,” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.293)
Bush then spoke 16 words that would become notorious: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.294-5)
Then he gave the Prime Minister his pep talk. “This is going to change. You watch, public opinion will change. We lead our publics. We cannot follow our publics.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.296)
“We really don’t know,” Rumsfeld said, once again expressing skepticism about intelligence. “People may be lying to us,” he said. “Their seriousness with us will depend on their judgements about how serious we are.” Implying that the intelligence people were stringing some sources or agents along, he said, “At some point things change and the diddler can turn into the diddlee.” The implication was that the deceiving or diddling of others might reap a harvest of lies in return, but it was a rumsfeldism that left several shaking their heads. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.330)
The president was very worried. He called Blair for one of their regular conversations. They explored the possibilities, which other countries on the U.N. Security Council they could get to support them with a second resolution.
“If they don’t vote with us,” Bush said, “what I want to say you is that my last choice is to have your government go down. We don't want that to happen under any circumstances. I really mean that." If it would help, Bush said, he would let Blair drop out of the coalition and they would find some other way for Britain to participate.
If it would help, Bush said, he would let Blair drop out of the coalition and they would find some other way for Britain and its 41,000 military personnel in the region around Iraq to participate. “I said I’m with you. I mean it,” Blair replied. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.338) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in the Washington Post Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in the Washington Post
At the Pentagon press briefing the next day, March 11, Rumsfeld indicated that the British might not participate if there was war. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.341)
Bush said that Chirac was a “bully,” especially to the East European nations. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.346)
If there were a delay, he said, “Public opinion won’t get better and it will get worse in some countries like America.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.357)
“I was the guy that said they [the U.N.] ought to vote. And one country voted — at least showed their cards, I believe. It's an old Texas expression, show your cards, when you're playing poker. France showed their cards. … They said they were going to veto anything that held Saddam to account. So cards have been played, and we’ll just have to take an assessment after tomorrow to determine what that card meant.” Bush said he wanted to talk about the U.N.’s importance. “In the post-Saddam Iraq, the U.N. will definitely need to have a role. And that way it can begin to get its legs, legs of responsibility back.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.360)
(Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.)
“The Iraqi generals are war criminals,” he told them and added a new and significant twist. “If Saddam leaves we’ll go in anyway. That way we can avoid ethnic cleansing. We’ll go in in a peaceful way, and there’ll be a list of country after country after country all who are solidly with us in this coalition.” Going in was important to get the WMD and to deal with the Baath Party leadership. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.369)
Bush later recalled that moment. “It was emotional for me. I prayed as I walked around in a circle. I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty, that there be minimal loss of life.” He prayed for all who were to go into harm’s way and for the country. “Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will….I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness.” (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.379) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in the Washington Post
Bush was worrying about the woman and children. This could be a kind of baby milk factory, he said, recalling an incident from the 1991 Gulf War when the Iraqis had claimed a suspected biological weapons plant that was bombed was really for the production of milk…. Could Iraq use this as a public relations exercise?.... (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.487)
At one point Franks said, “There are 30,000 Iraqi casualties estimated.”
Rumsfeld had been trying to make sure they didn’t provide numbers. He later recalled “I remember leaping in and suggesting that that person probably realy doesn’t know that number and that my impression would be that it would not be helpful that people walked out of the room with that number in their heads.”
"In other words, we had just been mowing them down as we're coming in,” the president commented later in an interview...I mentioned that some generals estimated that 60,000 Iraqi military were killed, but no one knew because they didn't find the bodies…. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.407)
Rice expressed her concern to Powell. "You can blame Rich if you want," Powell replied, but "Rich had the guts to talk to you directly about this, so I don’t think he is the source."… Powell thought Rice was more interested in finding someone to blame for the public airing of the problem than in fixing it….
Powell believed it was the hardest of all tasks to go back to fundamentals and question your own judgment, and there was no sign it was going to happen. So he soldiered on once again against the current. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.415-6)
“The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee,” Rove now argued to an associate in his second floor West Wing office. Dean's unconditional opposition to the Iraq war could have been potent in a face-off with Bush. "One of Dean's strengths, though, was he could say, I'm not part of that crowd down there." But Kerry was very much a part of the Washington crowd, and he had voted in favor of the resolution for war. Rove got out his two-inch-thick, loose-leaf binder titled "Bring It On." It consisted of research into Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate. Most relevant were pages 9 to 20 of the section on Iraq. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.431) Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in the Washington Post
Relations [between Powell and Vice-President Cheney] became so strained that Powell and Cheney could not, and did not, have a sit-down lunch or any discussion about their differences. Never.
[After reading an unfavourable news story about him, White House political advisor Karl] Rove had figured that State — or Powell — wanted to strike back at the White House …. He was just collateral damage.
[Powell] and Rumsfeld got into another big fight. This time it took a week to resolve …. Powell couldn’t believe the silliness.
Both the president and she were “mad,” she told the secretary of state. Powell had “given the democrats a remarkable tool.”…..
Powell did not particularly enjoy being dressed down by someone 17 years younger who held the job he had held 15 years earlier.
Whenever anyone suggested that Powell should have pangs of conscience on the war, Powell said he had done everything in his power. In August 2002 he had nearly broken his spear, laying before the president all the difficulties of a war … He had warned the president. It was the president’s decision, not his. (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” 2004 p.436-7) (Bob Woodward “Plan of Attack” also cited in Frum Forum
(Bob Woodward “The War Within” Scribd copy
"Control is what politics is all about," legendary journalist Theodore H. White wrote. War is also about control-both on the battlefield and in Washington, where the strategy and policy are supposed to be set. But from the start, no one in the administration had control over Iraq policy. (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.20)
"Attached is a worrisome DIA report on coalition detention facilities and insurgent networks," Rumsfeld wrote on December 12 to Casey, Abizaid and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad.
The attached five-page SECRET report from the Defense Intelligence Agency brought more disturbing news from Iraq, suggesting that the aggressive detention program was creating more terrorists.
"Insurgents and terrorists use coalition detention facilities to trade information on successful tactics and techniques, teach detainees insurgent and terrorist skills, preach radical Islam and recruit new members into the insurgency," it stated.
At one detention facility, the report stated, detainees had an insurgent training program to prepare detainees for their release, in which they taught new recruits how to become suicide bombers, use IEDs-improvised explosive devices-and carry out kidnappings and torture.
That was especially troubling, considering that more than 75 percent of detainees were released within six months of their capture, including a substantial number of insurgents and terrorists.
"Many detainees are determined to be innocent of any involvement in the insurgency," the report continued. "Insurgent recruiters, however, exploit their feelings of humiliation, anger and fear to entice them to join the insurgency while in coalition custody or immediately after release."
The report concluded, "insurgents, terrorists, foreign fighters and insurgent leaders captured and released by coalition forces may be more dangerous than they were before being detained." (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.34-5)
Petraeus pounced on the public relations opportunity. He knew that Hadley and others in the administration were searching for a dramatic event…..
“I’ll be on Fox Sunday,” Petraeus said, “and I’ll emphasize all these points, so that you get from me the support on the talk shows. Or at least on Fox.” (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.368)
The president had little patience for briefings. "Speed it up. This isn't my first rodeo," he would say often to those presenting. It was difficult to brief him because he would interject his own narrative, questions or off-putting jokes. Presentations and discussions rarely unfolded in a logical, comprehensive fashion. Satterfield thought this reflected an insecurity in Bush. The president was a bully. (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.408)
"What's the definition of the job of president?" I asked. "My definition is to determine what the next stage of good is for the majority of people in the country....and then develop a plan to carry it out, and then carry it out."
"That's not the way I think about it," Cheney replied. "I tend to think about it more in terms of there are certain things the nation has to do, things that have to get done. Sometimes very unpleasant things. Sometimes committing troops to combat, going to war. And the president of the United States is the one who's charged with that responsibility....
"The stuff you need the president for is the hard stuff. And not everything they have is hard. They do a lot of things that are symbolic, and the symbolic aspects of the presidency are important. And they can inspire, they can set goals and objectives-'Let's go to the moon'-but when they earn their pay is when they have to sit down and make those really tough decisions that in effect are life-and-death decisions that affect the safety and security and survival of the nation, and most especially those people that we send into harm's way to guarantee that we can defeat our enemies, support our friends, and protect the nation.
"That's the way I think of it." (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.418-9)
"There's nothing that I'm prouder of than the liberation of Iraq," she said without hesitation. "Did we screw up parts of it? Sure. It was a big, historical episode, and a lot of it wasn't handled very well. I'd be the first to say that."
But Rice largely absolved herself of accountability for the problems with the war during its first 20 months, when she had been Bush's national security adviser. "It wasn't my responsibility to manage Iraq," she said. "Look, the fact of the matter is, as national security adviser you have a lot of responsibility and no authority." (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.421)
Josh Bolten ducked into the Oval Office and said the president had lunch plans that were being delayed.
"Yeah. Get moving, will you?" Bush said to me. "How many more questions you got?"
"Just a few," I said. Of course, I had hundreds.
"You better hurry. I'm getting less indulgent, as you can tell. One, I'm hungry. And two, I've got a meeting."
"Is there kind of a recentering of American power in the Middle East?"
"Absolutely," the president said. "And it should be. And the reason it should be: It is the place from which a deadly attack emanated. And it is the place where further deadly attacks could emanate. And the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is a very dangerous notion. And the idea of people having the capacity, a nuclear capacity, and giving those to terrorist groups that could use them is a very deadly notion, as well."
"And so we have military hegemony in the region, just as a practical matter?"
"We've got freedom hegemony we're pushing. We're trying to get freedom moving," the president answered.
Hadley interrupted, alerting the president to the implications of the word "hegemony," which means dominance or leadership and carries overtones of empire.
"It's a loaded word, as you know very well," the president said.
"It is a loaded word," I agreed.
"It's a very tricky, Washington loaded word. It was very tricky, Woodward. Very tricky," Bush said.
"No, no," I protested.
"Yeah, it was. It was a Woodward tactic," Bush said.
"If you listen to Secretary Rice on this subject," I said, "She is absolutely delighted that we have all these troops there."
"Is it hegemonistic to have troops in Korea?" the president said. "I don't think so. Is it hegemonistic to have them in Japan? Was it hegemonistic to have them in Germany? No. The United States has got a troop presence at the invitation of governments to help provide security. Which, by the way, also helps provide the conditions for liberty to advance." (Bob Woodward “The War Within” 2008 p.424-5)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20621358/The-Lucifer-Effect-by-Philip-Zimbardo
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32615441/The-Lucifer-Effect
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18102814/The-Lucifer-Effect
http://www.scribd.com/doc/23890551/The-Dark-Alliance newspaper article 109 pages
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
Modern behaviorist say that shyness is a learned phobic reaction to social events. This learning may be the product of : • a prior history of negative experiences with people in certain situations, either by direct contact or by watching others getting “burned”;
• not learning the “right” social skills:
• expecting to perform inadequately and therefore becoming constantly anxcious about your performance;
• learning to put yourself down for your own “inadequacy”-“I am shy,” “I am unworthy,” “I can’t do it,” “I need my Mommy!”
According to behaviorists, a child can learn to become shy by trying to be effective in a world dominated by adults. A forty-nine-year-old teacher relates this story:
John B. Watson quote along with some material on conditioning
Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.42-3)
In our culture where, as James Dobson says, Beauty is the gold coin of human worth and intelligence it silver coin, shyness may be the debit statement….
To be labeled “communist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s was to be condemned as an evil tool of Russian totalitarian forces of oppression. It’s the other way around for “bourgeois capitalists” in Moscow. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.51-2)
Birds don’t do it, bees don’t do it; but parents and educated teachers do it. They lay shyness trips on their children and students. They do so by tossing around the shy label when it is not deserved, by being insensitive to their shyness when it is there, and by creating or perpetuating environments t5hat breed shyness. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.58)
I remember one day way back when I was in second grade. The little girl seated in front of me was squirming in her seat long enough that it was obvious to us kids where she had to go. Her hand went up, but Mrs. Bachman did not notice it. The hand began waving more frantically until it caught the teachers attention. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.69-70)
Such a “catastrophe theory” of child development runs contrary to traditional ideas that deprived, abusing environments breed madness and badness. Serene, benign, enriched environments were thought to be the cradles of sanity and adult success. The support for this view came largely from observations that adults who were mentally ill or law breakers came from impoverished or high-stress backgrounds. The thinking behind this is faulty. Only a minority of all those who grew up under adverse circumstances are in our jails and mental hospitals. Those who bend instead of breaking may develop and utilize the self-reliance necessary to carve a significant place for themselves in society. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.74)
The point to be made here is that we must encourage our children to express their feelings-positive and negative ones-when they are being experienced. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.112-3)
Behavior always occurs in a context; try to understand the context before evaluating, judging, and reacting to the behavior. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.191)
“Have you hugged your kids today?” Rosita Perez poses this question on her bumper sticker. She hugs hers and thinks we should hug ours because it’s good for their well being. Researcher James Prescott goes further in advocating physical contact as a means to reduce violence between people and nations. His research shows that cutures where physical contact is minimal are more aggressive, and people who do not like close physical contact with others are more punitive in their values toward lawbreakers, endorse the death penalty for capital crimes, and are more bigoted and authoritarian. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.198)
In a Washington, D.C. facility for delinquent boys, violence was an ongoing problem that the staff dealt with in all the usual ways. They voiced their concerns, rewarded nonviolence, gave counseling and therapy to repeated offenders, and punished the incorrigible troublemaker-all exercises in futility. It was not until they decided to analyze the situations in which aggressive behavior occurred that the violence was controlled. Most of the incidences of aggression took place in the hallways, particularly at corners, where one boy often bumped into another coming around the bend. One bump led to another, push came to shove, and another fight erupted. The simple solution was to break down the wall with its blind turn, widen it, and curve it. No more traffic accidents at the intersection, and the incidents of violence were significantly reduced. Philip G. Zimbardo, “Shyness: What it is and what to do about it” 1977,1992 p.209-10)
Eugene Debs “The master class has always brought a war, and the subject class has always fought the battle.” (Zinn p41)
Eisenhower told Henry Stinson “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. (p52) also cited at common dreams.org Admiral William Leary “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” also cited at Doug-long.com
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71. cited at Doug-long.com
Douglas MacArthur was allegedly in favor of using the bomb in Korea though and supposedly it was Truman who refused to do so this time.
Colin Powell when asked about Iraqi casualties at end of the first gulf war “That is not a matter I am terribly interested in.” (Zinn p90)
Antonin Scalia at the University of Chicago Divinity School “For the believing Christian death is no big deal.”
“In 1970, the US government and several multinational corporations were linked in opposition to the candidacy and later the presidency of Salvador Allende” (Zinn p.147) original source the Church Committee Report
Amartya Yen “Global capitalism is much more concerned with expanding the domain of market relations than with, say, establishing democracy, expanding elementary education, or enhancing the social opportunities of society's underdogs." (p 210) also cited in the world traveller
All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their children: "And surely there is in all children ... a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.20)
White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity. Besides, they did not come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival. Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p. 25)
Fear of slave revolt seems to have been a permanent fact of plantation life. William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia slave owner, wrote in 1736:
We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms, and these numbers increase every day, as well by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline kindle a servile war... and tinge our rivers wide as they are with blood. Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.35)
At the very start of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the governor, John Winthrop, had declared the philosophy of the rulers: "... in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection." Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.48)
Locke's statement of people's government was in support of a revolution in England for the free development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad. Locke himself regretted that the labor of poor children "is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old" and suggested that all children over three, of families on relief, should attend "working schools" so they would be "from infancy . . . inured to work." Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.73-4)
Before this, the Cherokees had, like Indian tribes in general, done without formal government. As Van Every puts it:
The foundation principle of Indian government had always been the rejection of government. The freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon infinitely more precious than the individual's duty to his community or nation. This anarchistic attitude ruled all behavior, beginning with the smallest social unit, the family. The Indian parent was constitutionally reluctant to discipline his children.' Their every exhibition of self-will was accepted as a favorable indication of the development of maturing character.. . Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p. 137)
The presidential election itself had avoided real issues; there was no clear understanding of which interests would gain and which would lose if certain policies were adopted. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator on that era, wrote to a friend about the election:
“We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved… But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did he not live with more than one Mistress.” (Zinn "Peoples history of the United States p.)
….The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead, the family was used-men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when tidings weren't going right…..
….The approach was summed up by the warden at the Ossining, New York, penitentiary: "In order to reform a criminal you must first break his spirit." That approach persisted. Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.514)
The fundamental facts of maldistribution of wealth in America were clearly not going to be affected by Carter's policies, any more than by previous administrations, whether conservative or liberal. According to Andrew Zimbalist, an American economist writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1977, the top 10 percent of the American population had an income thirty times that of the bottom tenth; the top 1 percent of the nation owned 33 percent of the wealth. The richest 5 percent owned 83 percent of the personally owned corporate stock. The one hundred largest corporations (despite the graduated income tax that misled people into thinking the very rich paid at least 50 percent in taxes) paid an average of 26.9 percent in taxes, and the leading oil companies paid 5.8 percent in taxes (Internal Revenue Service figures for 1974). Indeed, 244 individuals who earned over $200,000 paid no taxes. Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.571)
A Carnegie Endowment study showed that two young people of equal standing on intelligence tests (even accepting the dubious worth of intelligence tests for children brought up under different circumstances) had very different future depending on whom their parents were. The child of a lawyer, though rating no higher on mental tests than the child of a janitor, was four times as likely to go to college, 12 times as likely to finish college, and 27 times as likely to end up in the top 10 percent of American incomes. Howard Zinn "Peoples history of the United States” p.663)
Noam Chomsky: "Deterring Democracy" 1991 for free online copy click here
"Rethinking Camelot: JFK, Vietnam and the political culture" by Noam Chomsky
Sam Harris “The End of Faith” 2004 on line copy
Jeremy Scahill: “Blackwater” 2007 on line copy at issuu.com
Jeremy Scahill: “Blackwater” on-line copy at knizky.mahdi
Bob Woodward “State of Denial” download site source
Howard Zinn: "A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)" 2005 for free copy click here
http://www.ebookf.com/
http://www.socialist-federation.org/Books.html
http://www.lumkan.com/leptis-magna-regularly-looted.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ConsentPOP_Chom.html
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3402/
Report of the Select Committee of Assassinations of the US House of representatives
additional information available at History Maters.com
Copy of JFK’s “Peace Speech” at American University
James Douglass Ground Zero Center for nonviolent Action website
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