The Rag Blog

Last night I had the strangest dream.

Dick Cheney died and I was asked to deliver his eulogy. As far as I can remember this is what I said:

How shall we live without him? Without Dick Cheney, who will lie to us? Who will hide from us? Who will shoot without looking? Who will start the needless wars and instruct the President to tap the endless phone calls? Ah, the nation mourns.

To whom else should we turn in the future when we need someone to express true contempt forwell, not just for common people, but for all of humanity. Dick Cheney was a man of powerful beliefs: He believed himself better than anyone else on this planet. He believed he had the right to steal elections, pollute the environment ’til it was as tainted and gruesome as his own face, to conduct himself like a pasha and to impoverish every man woman and child to whom he did not personally bow and scrape. If you believe that God is merciful, we shall not see his like again.

Where will we find a man who shoots a man and then has the courage to stand up and acknowledge … that no one else pulled the trigger with him. Who else could so boldly ignore all the real questions? Where else will we find another squint-visaged pipsqueak chicken hawk to start wars for his masters in the oil industry? Where else will we find a man who holds secret meetings with his masters to determine our nation’s energy future and plot God knows what and refuses to release the information on which masters, exactly, to any public inquiry?

Who the fuck else will take Antonin Scalia hunting so at least justice has a CHANCE of being served?

In the future Dick Cheney’s name will be invoked when the greats of the past are mentioned: McCarthy, Hussein, perhaps Mussolini, the true tyrants of our time. When self-satisfied cruelties need to be performed in the service of power and corruption, it will take a singular individual, indeed to replace him. And while it would be out of place to mention the name of his most obvious role model, yes, our Veep did die in a manner befitting him: Cowering in his bunker.

And yet, at the end, I am still convinced of this: Dick Cheney is today in the place he wanted and deserved to be. A place where no one can find him, no one can hold him accountable. Oh shrink back in fear, ye demons of hell. And get the fuck out of the way. Whoever was the biggest, most selfish, most fascistic prick among you just stepped down a notch.

Cue: “Shotgun”

Dave Marsh is editor of Rock & Rap Confidential. Marsh’s definitive and monumental biography of Bruce Springsteen has recently been reissued, with 12,000 new words, under the title Two Hearts. His latest book is The Beatles’ Second Album. He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

Brian McGough, a 31-year-old former Army staff sergeant who was wounded in a roadside attack in Iraq, knew he wouldn’t get a warm response from talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he starred in an ad by the anti-Iraq war veterans group VoteVets.org. The ad, which featured a photograph of McGough’s shaved head with jagged scars, was a response to Limbaugh’s implication during his broadcast last week that antiwar vets were “phony soldiers”:

“Rush, the shrapnel I took to my head was real. My traumatic brain injury was real. And my belief we are on the wrong course in Iraq is real,” McGough says in the ad. “Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service.”

Limbaugh responded on air Tuesday, comparing McGough metaphorically to a suicide bomber. He said the ad was “a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into.”

With the 2008 presidential primary season at a fevered pitch, both sides of the political noise machine are cranking up the volume, looking for opportunities to slam the other side for bad behavior, bad word choice or bad intentions. Schoolyard-style taunts flung by irrepressible partisans are blown up into national debates.

Last month, the Republican side amped up after the left-wing group MoveOn.org ran an ad in the New York Times characterizing U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus as “General Betray Us” on the eve of his congressional testimony about the Iraq war’s status. Both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to condemn the ad.

This week, it was the Democrats’ turn to wage all-out noisefare after Limbaugh made his “phony soldiers” remark during an exchange with a caller Sept. 26.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) composed a letter to Limbaugh’s boss, Clear Channel Communications’ Chief Executive Mark Mays, urging him to “publicly repudiate” Limbaugh’s comments and to ask the talk show host to apologize. Though Reid said he was confident that Senate Republicans would join Senate Democrats “in overwhelming numbers,” none signed the letter. Of 41 signatures, all were Democrats, including four presidential contenders — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Christopher J. Dodd.

In a written response to Reid, Mays said that he would not intercede because Limbaugh was exercising his right to express an opinion. He added that “if Mr. Limbaugh’s intention was to classify any soldier opposed to the war in Iraq as a ‘phony soldier,’ which he denies, then I, along with most Americans, would be deeply offended by such a statement.”

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) called the issue “a manufactured controversy.” The brouhaha over Limbaugh’s remarks, he said, was an attempt by MoveOn.org and others “to change the subject away from the slanderous advertisement” about Petraeus.

Some observers simply shook their heads.

“This is why people hate politics in America and why they are so desperate for a change,” said former GOP pollster Frank Luntz, a consultant for Fox News Network. “Everyone is looking for the political advantage. Everyone is looking for a story they can use to beat the other guy over the head.”

Limbaugh maintains he was not referring to antiwar veterans. He was, he said, referring to antiwar activist Jesse MacBeth, a 23-year-old Tacoma, Wash., man who was sentenced to five months in prison last month after his false claims about his military service were revealed by conservative bloggers.

During his show Wednesday, Limbaugh, who did not respond to e-mails and a faxed request for an interview, expressed disappointment that more officials had not come to his defense, and announced that Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson had defended him. Thompson, in a brief statement on his website, accused congressional Democrats of “trying to divert attention from insulting our military leader in Iraq and pandering to the loony left by attacking Rush Limbaugh.”

Jon Soltz, the Iraq veteran who co-founded VoteVet.org, said Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark was brought to his attention by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America, with whom he is friendly but not affiliated. “This man has insulted these troops, and there is accountability for this stuff,” said Soltz, who was not pleased with the “General Betray Us” ad either.

“What we need to do, as veterans of the Iraq war, is to distance ourselves from personal attacks and focus on the policy issues,” Soltz said.

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a 2004 Democratic presidential contender, said he was unmoved by Limbaugh’s assertions that he was not insulting antiwar vets. “In the past, he’s been very outspoken in attacking veterans who had honorable service because he doesn’t agree with their political views. I think he has a selective memory.”

McGough, who is nearing the fourth anniversary of his Oct. 17, 2003, wounding in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, said he was upset but not surprised that Limbaugh compared him to a suicide bomber. He said he had even received e-mails from Limbaugh fans who said they respected him though they disagreed with his antiwar stance.

At last week’s annual Congressional Black Caucus conference, Louisiana Representative William Jefferson hosted a panel entitled “Recovery by Whom, for Whom?” Invited speaker Mayor Ray Nagin answered Jefferson’s question as he auctioneered off New Orleans to the audience, stating that the city is undergoing “the biggest economic development in history.”

The prices of homes and even hotels are a steal, and deep pockets are invited to swoop down and take advantage of the still-struggling New Orleans. Mayor Nagin represented the city as a “buffet,” and shamelessly summoned private business “to eat all they can eat.” He called on them to take advantage of the “schmorgesborg” that is New Orleans–there is enough for everybody.

Everybody except the scores of residents who remain displaced. The disadvantaged, who are predominately Black, low-wage workers, the disabled, the elderly, all of whom are poor. I have developed close relationships with some of these residents, which has made being an eyewitness to the impact of their abandonment by our government particularly painful.

Ms. Williams and Ms. Jennings recently invited themselves to my wedding (which does not yet exist), saying that they will rise to give testimony to my good work when prompted to “speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Ms. Lewis proudly shares with me updates of her granddaughter who started college this fall, and ends each conversation with “I love you.”

They are my clients, and my surrogate grandmothers. Over the past 15 months, I have watched the palpable deterioration of their physical and mental health. They often remind me that they do not have many years left.

Then there are the younger, single, working mothers who are my role models. Ms. Mingo, who works two jobs, cares for four children and a grandchild, and feeds the homeless on the weekends because she considers it her obligation to take care of the less advantaged. She lived in the one of the public housing developments before the storm, and is a leader in the fight for residents’ right to return.

Juxtaposed against these and tens of thousands of other stories of struggle, Nagin’s speech and the federal government’s abandonment are nothing short of criminal.

A FEMA trailer was parked one block away from the CBC conference. Acquired by a grassroots Mississippi organization, Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, the trailer was making its debut in DC to help raise awareness that there is no official plan to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast–the government has thrown public housing, education, and health to the private market vultures. We parked the trailer earlier in the week on 17th and K streets, visible to the lunchtime traffic of lobbyist, lawyers, and others who work in that bustling area. We urged people to take a tour of the 32 x 10 foot trailer that is supposed to sleep six to eight: “Come see how people are living, two years after Katrina!” We reported on the toxic construction of the trailers that have left residents sick, and in some cases, dead: “Formaldehyde comes on the side!”

Was this public education, or have we–the eyewitnesses–gone mad? The week before the event, the federal judge presiding over the lawsuit we filed in June 2006 on behalf of displaced public housing residents suddenly threw out of his courtroom a case for the right of return. That was on Monday. By Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the demolition of over 5,000 homes. The judge’s decision left no buffer between residents’ homes and the bulldozers. Demolition is targeted to start in November.

The FEMA trailer was parked one block from the CBC conference because, despite sponsorships from Representatives Waters and Thompson, the trailer was excluded from the conference exhibition. Earlier in the week, our designated resident spokesperson was excluded from testifying at the Senate Banking Committee hearing on S. 1668, a bill that provides for the immediate opening of at least 3,000 units and one-for-one replacement for units demolished. The week before that, we were prohibited from pursuing in open court the right of thousands of families sinking deeper into poverty and despair from returning home anytime soon, or ever. For two years, over 3,800 families have been shut out of their public housing homes in New Orleans. And as Naomi Klein points out in her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, for at least 25 years the public sphere in New Orleans has been permitted to erode, the culmination of which the world watched unfold after August 29, 2005.

Enough was enough. The CBC black tie dinner was the next night. The demolition of 5,000 homes is scheduled to start in a month. People, who paid one thousand dollars a ticket, would be adorned in silk, satin, and gems, and so our FEMA trailer needed to suit up and crash the party. Wearing a tuxedo topped with a six-foot-long bowtie, the trailer circled the Convention Center for over two hours while guests arrived at the dinner. The trailer asked one plaintive question: Where is my table? The reaction was priceless. At first people would smile and return our wave; then as they read the sign and heard our urge to not forget Katrina survivors, their face fell. It was a combination of guilt and scorn–I know, but how dare you try to ruin my evening.

Call it an existential gesture toward the void, and I would be hard-pressed to argue. But we cannot advance civil rights by merely serving as eyewitnesses. The government and the people who permit unjust governance have to be made accountable, up until the bitter end. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This to have succeeded.” Success is also to know that even one politician has breathed harder because you have protested.

10/03/07 “The Oregonian ” — – Suppose you hire a person to check groceries but, instead of doing so, he tells customers to put their items back on the shelves. Do you fire him? Of course you do.

Now suppose we hire a president whose constitutional job description is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Instead, he issues more than a thousand signing statements saying, in effect, he’s not going to execute parts of the very laws he has signed. Do we fire him? Of course we do.

Impeachment is not a political issue. It’s a constitutional issue. The U.S. Constitution describes impeachment more fully and carefully than practically any other power delegated to Congress. Impeachment is mentioned six times in the Constitution as the remedy for any misbehavior of our high officials. Yes, President Clinton’s impeachment was a political circus, but impeachment of President Bush is necessary to maintain our government’s separation of powers, our checks and balances, our Constitution’s integrity.

While The Oregonian’s recent editorial (”The emptiness of impeachment,” Sept. 29) opined that impeachment would be “pointless,” my view is that it is essential because, after all, the Constitution is the “supreme law of the land.” What could be more important than preserving the rule of law? It is the bedrock of our democratic society.

Let me give you an example of a signing statement, this one issued on March 9, 2006, when Bush signed the renewal of the USA Patriot Act. Part of the signing statement says: “The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . which could impair the deliberate process of the executive.” In other words, Congress cannot expect the reports of FBI activities that the law requires. Not only will President Bush not enforce the law, but he also has told Congress to pound sand.

As The Oregonian points out, Congress has “waived its own oversight responsibilities.” But just because Congress is weak-kneed doesn’t mean that we ought not to require it to execute its constitutional duties — for the House to impeach and the Senate to try President Bush on the basis of his refusal to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

There may not be much time left. There may not be much political will among our elected representatives. But this issue goes to the very heart of who we are as a people. Either we are a nation of laws, or we are nothing.

President Bush has taken the oath of office prescribed for him in the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Instead, he has engaged in a concerted course of constitutional vandalism.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

10/03/07 “ICH” — – -One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people. Now war is peace and terror and occupation is liberation. In order to make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand everything within the context of a specific economic philosophy, and the distorted capitalist system that spawned it.

That ideology was crafted by a diminutive economist named Milton Friedman, at the University of Chicago some five decades ago. The holy trinity of Friedman’s version of capitalism—privatization of the public domain, corporate deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending—has resulted in enormous societal inequity and socio-economic classes. It has given us the haves and the have-nots, the haves and the have-mores.

Friedman and his disciples, collectively known as ‘The Chicago School’ do not believe in a minimum wage—much less a living wage, unions, worker rights, environmental protections, worker safety, or any other kind of restraint imposed upon corporations. In Friedman’s view, the market should rule and profitability should be the guiding principle, the end results always justifying the means.

The implementation of Friedman’s version of unfettered capitalism relies upon munificent corporate welfare, tax cuts to the wealthy, exploitation of workers, and the outright theft of other sovereign nation’s natural wealth through military force—including oil and minerals, water supplies and other societal infrastructure; cheap labor, and a procession of consumers of goods and services without limits—an impossibility in a closed ecological system.

Convincing the public to support policies that are, in fact, detrimental to them, requires enormous marketing skill, as well as a corporate owned and operated propaganda apparatus that is second to none. This is accomplished by cloaking harmful policies in patriotic language, and other forms of seduction.

In order to achieve this objective, which is really nothing less than unqualified global corporate dominance, the public domain must be privatized and run not for use, but for profit; and the unparalleled might of the US military brought to bear against any nation or people who stand in the way.

It is this thinking—the dominant economic paradigm that shapes all US policy—that has brought us an endless succession of wars and other human tragedies; exacerbated global warming, and unprecedented rapacious planetary destruction, including the mass extinction of much of the world’s flora and fauna — all for corporate profit.

Decades ago, in order to field test the economic theories that were formulated by the right wing think tanks at The Chicago School, Friedman and his disciples descended like locusts upon Latin America. The results were devastating: Democratically elected governments were systematically overthrown and brutal dictators friendly to US business interests were installed in their place—all of which were subsidized by US tax dollars with the complicity of the CIA.

As a result, US-trained death squads roamed the countryside torturing, murdering, and disappearing dissidents, union organizers, and indigenous land holders—a process that continues to this day. The corporate media, itself, an essential cog in Friedman’s capitalist machine, referred to these death squads as freedom fighters, and canonized the likes Ronald Reagan as champions of liberty.

But the recipients of US policy in Latin America—those who survived them—know better. Now the same policies are being implemented in the Middle East, and with the same disastrous results. Elements of Friedman’s policies have been in play here in the US for decades, and the intent is to do to the US what was done in Latin America and Iraq.

Language is a tool that can be used to either conceal or reveal truth; it can be used to inform or to distort. Given the track record of private enterprise, it is not surprising that everything associated with Milton Friedman’s capitalism has been hopelessly perverted, and language is no exception.

Understanding the role played by Friedman and his disciples in shaping US policy—a doctrine adopted and praised by Republicans and Democrats alike, is critical in order to bring the big picture of world events, including our own domestic policies, into clear focus.

The disciples of Friedman’s economic theorem have skillfully manipulated the language to deceive the subjects of those policies. Stripped of the garments of seductive language, the hidden kernel of truth is clearly seen: unregulated corporate power that masquerades as free market trade. The nations that have undergone Friedman’s economic shock therapy: Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Indonesia, and many others, were opened up to privatization and corporate plunder that soon left them impoverished and wasted.

The once sustainable and vibrant local economies, most of them characterized by broad public ownership, were thoroughly globalized, as capitalism was forced upon those who had rejected it at the ballot box or through armed revolution. Local manufactures were no longer protected from multi-nationals: prices soared, wages fell, workers lost their jobs, unemployment rose astronomically, and the infrastructure that once provided inexpensive or free public services—among them, potable water and inexpensive food—were privatized and rendered unaffordable to the multitudes.

Shared prosperity quickly gave way to abject poverty and misery; while predatory US corporations bled nation after nation of their natural wealth, and kept the profits to themselves.

Here in the US, the people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina experienced the same economic shock and awe as Latin America. The poor were relocated and resorts for the rich quickly supplanted affordable public housing. The public school system was virtually dismantled and privatized. Contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater reaped enormous profits on the misery and suffering of the Gulf Region’s working poor. Corporate profits mattered more than the lives of the people. New Orleans will never be the same.

All of this was accomplished by stripping language of its traditional connotations and perverting it into its opposite meaning. Thus lies became truth and predatory capitalism morphed into beneficent public service. The new definitions are designed to conceal the real intent of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, and are employed as marketing tools to make blatant theft and exploitation appear palatable to the multitudes, and to the helpless victims of unfettered capitalism.

Had the hidden agenda of our elected officials been widely known to the public, the people would likely find these policies not only objectionable, but morally reprehensible and offensive. Now Orwellian doublespeak is the norm, resulting in the enforcement arm of capitalism—the police state and an emerging Gestapo society, perpetrated in the name of a democracy that does not even exist.

The dictum of freedom, as understood by rational and conscientious human beings everywhere, has traditionally been applied to people and refers to their treatment by one another and their respective governments. However, when free market capitalists speak of freedom and democracy, as we are witnessing in the catastrophic situation they have created in the Middle East, they are not referring to human freedoms at all—but to unfettered capitalism, absolute corporate rule, and human servitude to wealth garnered at public expense—essentially a global terrorist slave state. That is what is meant by so called free markets as it pertains to the human condition.

Thus democracy, rather than meaning self-government of the people, by the people, and for the people, is perverted into support for deregulated corporations that are accountable to no one, the ultimate arbiter of all forms of power—the market as a Holy Grail; the decisive triumph of private ownership over people and the public welfare by the global elite.

And that, in a nutshell, is what we are fighting for not only in the Middle East, but in 135 nations around the world. These are the American interests the military is protecting; these are the freedoms they are defending from democracy.

In the idiom of free market capitalism, all things—whether soil, mineral, plant or animal, including human beings (wage slaves), are diminished and commodified, and valued only in proportion as they can be privatized and exploited by the champions of Laissez-Faire capitalism.

Furthermore, let it be understood that the president and his cabinet, as well as every member of Congress (with one exception), are disciples of Friedman’s economic paradigm. Not only are they doing everything in their power to implement Friedman’s policies, they have been doing so for a very long time.

This perception certainly demystifies the remarkable homogeneity of US policy that has sent countless young men and women dressed in military uniforms to their deaths, and disappeared millions of leftist dissidents around the world. And it will continue unabated unless we the people put a stop to it.

Author’s note: Anyone wishing a more complete understanding of these policies should read Naomi Klein’s authoritative new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I cannot underscore enough the breadth and importance of Ms. Klein’s work in understanding capitalism, corporate globalization, and the grossly distorted governmental policies they have spawned. Every citizen, regardless of nationality, should read this book. It is that important.

Counting to Three

At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that “all Gaul is divided into three parts.” Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts — Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was “a significant milestone…, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy.” Murray added, “The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq’s constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution.”

In Iraq, the plan was termed a “disaster” by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution “a step toward the breakup of Iraq.” He added, according to Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, “It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states.” In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.

Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate “messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it.”

But here’s the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three — simply that it happened in the United States. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi Parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington DC or to allow California’s electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?

Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it — whether agreeing with the proposal or not — seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.

No matter how meaningless Biden’s resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems — specifically, that it is America’s global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…

Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty

Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and ten, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office — five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.

Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take “up to a decade.” (“In fact,” he told Fox News in June, “typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.”) Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one — not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress — will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true — if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: “[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we’ve seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who’s elected. So they’re not going to win on this.” Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, “Planning for Defeat,” laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, “Declare defeat and stay in.” Packer concluded: “Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won’t let it happen.”

Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: “I don’t see us getting out of Iraq for a decade.” In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: “George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…”) Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it’s becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.

And let’s remember that behind the five and ten counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the “Korea model.” As David Sanger of the New York Times’ wrote recently: “Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model — a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East.” (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind — though they weren’t calling it that at the time.)

This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on — a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a “stabilized” Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.

Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called “stability” and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.

Counting Bodies

Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: “We don’t do body counts.” And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team.”

Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it’s evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.

The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put “bait” out like “detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition” to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. (“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these “bait” items — or to have understood all too well their real use — and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant “insurgent” bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn’t supposed to be.

As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, “he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, ‘to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn’t have the evidence to show for it.'” (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, “described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy…. During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt ‘an underlying tone’ of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. ‘It just kind of felt like, “What are you guys doing wrong out there?”‘”)

And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too — and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of “allied to enemy dead” for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as “highly skilled U.S. unit” to 1:10, “historical U.S. average.” And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be “pushed beyond limits” any time “victory” or “success” or “progress” becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.

Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit — which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that “highly skilled unit” translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy — especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.

The outstanding investigative series by The Miami Herald discloses flagrant and rampant abuse of funding meant to benefit the poor–primarily African Americans–through the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust, a nonprofit founded to help create jobs in Miami-Dade County’s poorest neighborhoods.

The series amplifies “The House of Lies” by the Herald, which garnered a Pulitzer prize and focused on fraud and corruption at the Miami Dade Housing Agency.

A question arises: if it is not simple incompetence, corruption or ignorance that has victimized poor African Americans in Miami time and again, under the rubric of government supervision, what is it?

Again, as with the Miami Dade Housing Agency scandal, the arm’s length pushback by County Manager George Burgess is telling. Given the implosion of the Miami Dade Housing Authority–and his office’s failure to anticipate the problems–you have to wonder what is at work when he notes as “odd”, the dual roles of the former trust president, Bryan Finnie at the same time head of the county’s Office of Community and Economic Development.

Here is what I think is at work, and I’ve written about it before in context of the ‘hands-off’ treatment of the county housing agency that led to the “House of Lies”: the Cuban American majority on the county commission, dominated by Natacha Seijas, has made its deal with African American leaders– we’ll give you a piece of the action and won’t bother you in Overtown and Liberty City, so long as you vote our way on issues that are important to us, like zoning changes in farmland that benefit our primary political base, the Latin Builders Association and associated land speculators and production home builders.

It is scarcely a secret, for instance, that Sandy Walker, lobbyist and sister of African American county commissioner (charged with fraud in connection with a loan from the Empowerment Trust) Barbara Jordan, has been a prime mover in zoning changes in Homestead and Florida City, where their brother is mayor–the area of the county that was fastest growing until the building boom crashed in cinders.

Power is based, largely, on perception. It would be helpful for The Miami Herald to do more to clarify these matters, in connection with political power in which the interests of leveling the playing field for the poor are continually trampled underneath the stampede for wealth. This is not just a matter of ethical concern. In fact, the future economic viability of Miami–aside from as a playground for the wealthy–is at stake.

There should be no sacred cows when it comes to making these points clear: that solving the vast inequities in Miami Dade county is essential to a prospering region.

We have written extensively how Miami Dade county is the power base for former Governor Jeb Bush.

The base is defined, mainly, by developers and land speculators who have invested millions in farmland–much of it outside the Urban Development Boundary in anticipation of zoning changes and compliance with state mandates for land use planning.

One of Bush’s key Miami Dade loyalists, charged with coralling interests on behalf of that base, is Rodney Barreto–a former Miami policeman who became very wealthy as one of the lobbyists at the top of the county food chain. Barreto is also a developer and partner in speculative land investments outside the Urban Development Boundary. (As chairman of the Florida Wildlife Commission, his biography notes he chaired the 62nd annual US Conference of Mayors among other blue-chip achievements.)

It is telling that Barreto turns up in the Herald investigation as the only Cuban American to have taken a piece of the Empowerment Trust pie, in the African American community. (It’s a shame that the Herald reporters did not disclose how much of a profit Barreto took down, after repaying the loan–for which the Trust failed to secure a mortgage–for a piece of property in the Wynwood neighborhood. That number will emerge, in time.)

The chairman of the board of the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust, T. Willard Fair, is the one leader in the African American community who planted his flag, squarely, on the Republican political territory of Governor Jeb Bush.

Fair was a Bush appointee to the Florida State Board of Education and co-founder, with Jeb, of the Liberty Center Charter School, the first charter school organized in the State of Florida.

On April 1, 2007, the St. Petersburg Times ran a trenchant opinion piece on the charter school movement in Florida: “A decade after creating its first publicly funded charter school, Florida has turned a worthy educational experiment into a blank check for eager entrepreneurs. As a new report by the Orlando Sentinel suggests, the push for quantity has supplanted the pursuit of quality. And the students are the ones who suffer.

Just ask Don Gaetz, a Republican freshman senator and former Okaloosa school superintendent, about the transformation. “Charter schools were a movement,” he told the Sentinel, “but now charter schools are an industry. They have lobbyists – they walk around in thousand-dollar suits, some of them” … The sad reality is that because Florida has put more ahead of better, no one can say with clear authority just how well the students in charter schools are being served. In a state that so assiduously measures how each education dollar is invested and how each public school student performs, that’s simply unacceptable.”

But it is more than unacceptable.

You see, the frenzy of privatization and outsourcing–one of the mantras of Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor (and, by no small coincidence, of the Bush White House in the performance of the federal government)–turns out to be a mean-spirited opportunity for personal gain and political power wrapped in a silken promise. That’s the theme that runs through the Empowerment Trust scandal like a riptide.

When push comes to shove in the poorest parts of America, and especially where political power grows from scarcely concealed graft mixed with political gain, the results are clear as day. It’s a tragedy and a tragedy for Miami. And that is an opinion you won’t read in The Miami Herald.

It ought to be political suicide. A Bush administration official (specifically, the Defense Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs) told a group of six members of the British Parliament, “In any case, I hate all Iranians.” Three MPs attending the meeting have confirmed this to the British tabloid The Daily Mail.

The official in question, Debra Cagan, appears in the Daily Mail photo in a red leather blouse and what looks like a chain-mail choker around her neck, along with some sort of martial cross although I understand she’s Jewish. Her hair’s slicked back like that of a fifties street gang kid. She looks like a butch dominatrix. I hope she would not be offended by this description because it is accurate and I suspect it’s her intention to project such an image. (Compare Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in February 2005 arriving at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield wearing a black skirt showing just a little leg, a black gold-buttoned coat descending to mid-calf, and knee-high dirk-slim high-heeled boots. What fashion statement are these powerful political women trying to make?)

Dressed that way, she states in a casual aside to respectable Britons, as though they’ll understand and be anything other than appalled, “I hate all Iranians.” Did she preface the remark with, “Just between us imperialists”? Did she expect that they’d just nod in sympathy and keep the matter to themselves? The Mail reports they were in fact “taken aback,” which of course speaks somewhat well for them.

So now the word is out, but predictably, denied. “She doesn’t speak that way,” an unnamed Defense Department official assured the Mail. It’s not fashionable in the early 21^st century to hate entire peoples, and there are actually laws in civilized countries against hate speech. A Defense Department official cannot say to British MPs, “In any case, I hate all Jews,” for example. This was possible in the 1930s, but would be political suicide today. But maybe you can say what Cagan did, without job consequences.

When you have the entire Senate calling for the U.S. to “confront” Iran, the entire Congress deferring to AIPAC in its refusal to demand that Bush consult with it before attacking Iran, the Persian Empire of Xerxes ludicrously depicted as the enemy of “freedom” in a popular film, the president of a great U.S. university taking the opportunity of the Iranian president’s invited visit to insult him at length before conceding to him the podium—well, you know that norms of civility no longer apply. Logic, reason, balance pale before the power of myth and backwards reasoning of those seeking to create their own new, wild and spectacularly crazy reality. The Nazis called it “the triumph of the will”—the will that slams down the hated, weaker, lesser peoples and allows the Ubermenschen, the supermen, to realize their fate.

Somehow it seems fitting that a Defense Department official should speak so frankly as three U.S. aircraft carriers linger off the Iranian coast, the well-financed anti-Iran disinformation campaign swells, and neocon ideologues granted extensive White House access explicitly demand the bombing of Iran. It is the natural culmination of the vilification trend. If you hate all of them (and are grotesquely ignorant of their vast contribution to human civilization), why not nuke them, and their monuments and treasures, and destroy their 3000 year history, and “wipe them off the map”? Why not prepare public opinion for that shattering scenario, and grind those boot heels into the brains of any sympathizers of those you call “sand-niggers” as you try to spread Bush’s gospel of hate?

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

Mario Terán, a retired former non-commissioned officer sadly famous for having executed the legendary guerrilla, Ernesto Che Guevara, on October 9, 1967, in the tiny school of La Higuera in Bolivia, lives in complete anonymity in Santa Cruz. Mired in poverty, he lives only on his miserable pension of a former soldier and had lost his sight, victim of a cataract that he could not treat lacking resources.

In 2004, the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, launched a broad and continental humanitarian campaign bearing the name of Operation Milagro (Miracle), supported by Venezuela, which consisted in operating for free on the poor of Latin American suffering from cataract and other eye diseases. In 30 months, close to 600,000 people of 28 countries, including citizens of the United States, recovered their sight thanks to the altruism of the Cuban doctors. The stated objective is to operate on six million people by 2016. The election of Evo Morales as President of the Republic of Bolivia in December 2005… has allowed Bolivians to access the humanitarian programme that Cuba started. Close to 110,000 Bolivians have been able to regain their sight without paying a single centavo.

Among these is one Mario Terán, who could shake off his grave illness thanks to the Cuban doctors. Pablo Oritz, who works for the daily El Deber of Santa Cruz, tells the story: “Terán had a problem of cataracts and was cured… by Cuban doctors for free… The fellow is a complete stranger. Nobody knows him. He is a wreck and turned up in the Operation Milagro hospital. Nobody recognised him and he was operated upon. His son, who went to the newspaper to make an act of public gratitude, told us the story … It was in last August (2006).”

At times the story holds some surprises like that Che’s assassin was cured by doctors sent by Fidel Castro, the most loyal and intimate companion of the “heroic guerrilla”. Terán owes his sight to the health emissaries who follow the internationalist example of the man he killed. According to the former CIA agent, Félix Rodríguez, who participated in Che’s capture, Terán volunteered to execute the rebel leader. Before that he had killed in cold blood all the other prisoners. But facing Che, his courage failed him.

“When I reached the classroom, Che was seated on a bench. On seeing me, he said, ‘You have come to kill me’.

“I felt inhibited and lowered my head without answering. Then he asked me, ‘What have the others said?’

“I answered that they had said nothing and he commented, ‘They were brave!’

“I dared not fire. At that moment, I saw Che as big, very big, enormous. His eyes shone intensely. I felt they were on me and when he fixed his looks on me, it made me ill. I thought that with one rapid movement Che could take away my weapon.

“‘Be calm,’ he told me, ‘and aim well. You are going to kill a man.’

“Then I took a step back towards the threshold, closed my eyes and fired the first volley…I regained my courage and fired the second volley that got him in an arm, in the shoulder and in the heart. He was dead.”

[Gerardo Arreola of La Jornada, Mexico, quotes Ortiz as saying, “Terán does not want to be identified because he fears the ‘curse’ of Che,” a popular legend which arose from the many violent deaths of those directly linked to Guevara’s capture and execution.

The list is headed by Bolivia’s President of that time, René Barrientos, burnt to death when his helicopter crashed in 1969, in an incident that was never cleared up. Eduardo Huerta, the official who took part in the capture (of Che) died in a car accident… Honorato Rojas, who betrayed the guerrilla group, Colonel Roberto Quintanilla and General Joaquin Zenteno were finished off in incidents claimed by Guevara’s supporters. Captain Gary Prado was paralysed by a bullet. Juan José Torres was the chief of staff of the army that fought Che. Years later, he came to power on a Left ticket and was deposed in a military coup. An ultra-Right commando assassinated him in Argentina.]

On the eve of the fortieth anniversary of his end and despite the execrable international media campaign destined to sully the image of one of greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, Che’s example remains “big, very big, enormous” and shines “intensely” thanks to the sacrifice of the tens of thousands of Cuban doctors who… persist in the faith that another world, less cruel, is possible.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.

In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater employees were involved in a shooting in a Baghdad square that left at least eight Iraqis dead, an episode that remains clouded. The shooting set off outrage among Iraqi officials, who branded them “cold-blooded murder” and demanded that the company be removed from the country.

The State Department is conducting three separate investigations of the shooting, and on Monday the F.B.I. said it was sending a team to Baghdad to compile evidence for possible criminal prosecution.

Neither the State Department nor Blackwater would comment on Monday about the 15-page report, but both said their representatives would address it on Tuesday in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose Democratic staff produced the document. Based on 437 internal Blackwater incident reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, the report said Blackwater’s use of force was “frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.”

Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday are Erik Prince, a press-shy former Navy Seal who founded Blackwater a decade ago, and several top State Department officials.

The committee report places a significant share of the blame for Blackwater’s record in Iraq on the State Department, which has paid Blackwater more than $832 million for security services in Iraq and elsewhere, under a diplomatic security contract it shares with two other companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

Blackwater has reported more shootings than the other two companies combined, but it also currently has twice as many employees in Iraq as the other two companies combined.

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report says that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

The committee report also cited three other shootings in which Blackwater officials filed misleading reports or otherwise tried to cover up the shootings.

Contempt for the empirical that can’t be readily jiggered or spun is evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in “Inherit the Wind.” Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of “science” against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the flag of social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific Darwinism is under renewed assault, a de facto alliance between religious fundamentalists and profit-devout corporatists has moved the country further into social Darwinism that aims to disassemble the welfare state.) Entrenched opposition to stem-cell research is part of a grim pattern that includes complacency about severe pollution and global warming — disastrous trends already dragging one species after another to the brink of extinction and beyond.

Disdain for “science” is cause for political concern. Yet few Americans and no major political forces are “antiscience” across the board. The ongoing prerogative is to pick and choose. Those concerned about the ravages left by scientific civilization — the combustion engine, chemicals, fossil-fuel plants, and so much more — frequently look to science for evidence and solutions. Those least concerned about the Earth’s ecology are apt to be the greatest enthusiasts for science in the service of unfettered commerce or the Pentagon, which always seeks the most effectively “advanced” scientific know-how. Even the most avowedly faithful are not inclined to leave the implementation of His plan to unscientific chance. So, depending on the circumstances, right-wing fundamentalists could support the use of the latest science for top-of-the-line surveillance, for command and control, and for overall warfare — or could dismiss unwelcome scientific evidence of environmental harm as ideologically driven conclusions that should not be allowed to interfere with divinely inspired policies. Those kinds of maneuvers, George Orwell wrote in “1984,” help the believers “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the liberal script hailed science as an urgent antidote to Bush-like irrationality. That was logical. But it was also ironic and ultimately unpersuasive. Pure allegiance to science exists least of all in the political domain; scientific findings are usually filtered by power, self-interest, and ideology. For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass transit have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed to the task of building better SUVs. And there has never been any question that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the future of humanity, but no one ever condemns the continuing development of nuclear weapons as a bipartisan assault on science. On the contrary, the nonstop R & D efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all about science.

When scientists found rapid climate change to be both extremely ominous and attributable to the proliferation of certain technologies, the media and political power centers responded to the data by doing as they wished. The GOP’s assault on science was cause for huge alarm when applied to the matter of global warming, but the unchallenged across-the-aisle embrace of science in the weaponry field had never been benign. When it came to designing and manufacturing the latest doomsday devices, only the most rigorous scientists need apply. And no room would be left for “intelligent design” as per the will of God. The neutrality of science was self-evident and illusionary. Science was impartial because its discoveries were verifiable and accurate — but science was also, through funding and government direction, largely held captive. Its massively destructive capabilities were often seen as stupendous assets. In the case of ultramodern American armaments, the worse they got the better they got. Whatever could be said about “the market,” it was skewed by the buyers; the Pentagon’s routine spending made the nation’s budget for alternative fuels or eco-friendly technologies look like a pittance.

We’re social beings, as evolution seems to substantiate. Blessings and curses revolve largely around the loving and the warlike, the nurturing and the predatory. We’re self-protective for survival, yet we also have “conscience” — what Darwin described as the characteristic that most distinguishes human beings from other animals. Given the strength of our instincts for individual and small-group survival, we seem to be stingy with more far-reaching conscience.

Our capacities to take humane action are as distinctive of our species as conscience, and no more truly reliable. As people, we are consequences and we also cause them: by what we choose to do and not do. The beneficiaries of economic and military savagery are far from the combat zones. In annual reports, the Pentagon’s prime contractors give an overview of the vast financial rewards for shrewdly making a killing. To surrender the political battlefield to such forces is to self-marginalize and leave more space for those who thrive on plunder.

The inseparable bond of life and death should be healthy antipathy.