Casualties of War

Collateral Damage

Look at this picture, if you can stand to.

Incredible as it may seem, Jade – the child in this photo, who suffers from what is described as a “mild” case of cerebral palsy – is five years old. She is not Iraqi or Lebanese, but she is just as much a victim of the Bush regime's campaign to “democratize” the Middle East as any of the children who have been on the receiving end of the regime's “humanitarian” terrorism.

Jade is from Salt Lake City, Utah, a community whose leaders (with the noble exception of Mayor Rocky Anderson) engaged in an orgy of sycophantic praise for the Idiot King during his recent visit to address the American Legion convention. Jade's mother, a single parent who enlisted in the military most likely out of economic desperation, was ripped from her side to serve in the Idiot King's illegal war in Iraq.



After Jade's mother was dispatched to Mesopotamia, her live-in boyfriend was given power of attorney to care for the child. At the time Mommy was sent off to war – contemplate, for just a second, the indictment of our nation that phrase implies – Jade was healthy, vibrant, and happy.

Michael John Bowden the boyfriend to whom Jade's mother entrusted her child, was too busy vacuuming out the mother's bank account and running up her cell phone bill to feed or otherwise care for the youngster.

On August 18, Jade's grandfather, Rafael Ferrando, finally bulled his way past the boyfriend to get a look at Jade, who by that time had wasted away to about 10-12 pounds.

Ferrando sought and obtained an ex parte protective order. Jade is in the hospital. Bowden is in jail. I would love to spend about fifteen minutes in an otherwise empty cell with him.

As the Middle East morass deepens, families across the country have been broken up, many of them permanently. From the Boston Globe comes what Radley Balko calls “the saddest story you'll read today” -- a description that would have been true had I not read about Jade – describing the use of “Flat Daddy” and “Flat Mommy” cardboard cut-outs of “deployed service members [given] to spouses, children, and relatives back home” by the Maine National Guard.

“The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession,” notes the story.

This belongs in the “Life Imitates The Onion” file, which is becoming downright obese as absurdities mount. When news of the “Flat Daddy” program first assaulted my offended and incredulous eyes, I was reminded of a scene from the early-80s Steve Martin film "The Lonely Guy," in which our titular hero discovers a line of life-size cardboard cut-outs he and other Lonely Guys can use to fill their otherwise drab and vacant bachelor apartments.

Military families are also subject to other forms of particularized misery.
Roughly a year after I had discussed how “Debt-Pushers” -- specifically, the “payday loan” racket – target military personnel, USA Today has reported: “As many as one in five members of the armed services are being preyed on by loan centers set up near military bases that can charge cash-strapped military families interest of 400% or more.” The ironic “good” news here is that some soldiers with sufficiently onerous debt loads aren't deployable.

ICC, USA

A few weeks ago, before the Birch Blog was euthanized, I pointed out that Injustice For All, a video documentary I helped produce back in 1998 about the UN's International Criminal Court, seemed to foretell the advent of the Bush regime's proposals to reconfigure our judicial system:

“In order to make the somewhat abstract discussion vivid and compelling, the video opened with a mini-dramatization involving what we would now recognize as the `extraordinary rendition' of a helpless guy named John Bills. Seized by thugs in a parking lot, Mr. Bills (not to be confused with the similarly unfortunate Mr. Bill) is stuffed into an airplane, flown overseas, summarily imprisoned on the basis of a `sealed indictment,' and arraigned before a Star Chamber-style `court' where Anglo-Saxon concepts of Due Process don't exist, and the rules are rigged to guarantee conviction.

Although, as we pointed out in the video, everything depicted in our dramatization either had happened, or could reasonably be expected to happen soon, in the UN's prosecution of alleged war criminals, the scenario we created seemed a bit fanciful in 1998.

Eight years later, the abuses we depicted have become standard policy not for the UN, but for the U.S. Government, presided over by a supposed conservative and purported enemy of the UN.

And with the eager support of the GOP-led conservative movement, and the passive acceptance of the rest of it, the Bush administration is seeking to codify those abuses into law.”

Under the ICC statute, the UN's new tribunal supposedly becomes the apex judicial body on the planet, claiming jurisdiction over individuals to extradite and prosecute them for what it defines as crimes against international law. Extradition is not necessary, under that statute, if a nation's judicial institutions qualify under the principle of “complimentarity” -- meaning that they are suitable instruments to enforce the UN's decrees.

What is happening, after a fashion, is that the abuses promoted by the Bush regime – judicial kidnapping, indefinite detention without judicial review, creation of courts empowered to use hearsay evidence and defy Anglo-Saxon due process guarantees – would align our “justice” system with the vision that begat the UN's International Criminal Court and its affiliates.

Yesterday, the War Street Journal published a house editorial that made – from the perspective of a partisan of the Bush regime – almost exactly the same point. (Subscription required.)

“[T]he allegedly problematic features of the proposed military tribunals -- such as the permissibility of `hearsay' evidence -- are little different from some of the compromises that have been made to facilitate the work of such institutions as the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and the permanent International Criminal Court,” noted the Journal. “Those two institutions enjoy the enthusiastic support of Human Rights Watch and other critics of the Bush Administration's tribunals.”



Bush's envisioned terror tribunals (whose jurisdiction would include U.S. citizens) would permit prosecutors to withhold evidence from defendants and to allow anonymous testimony, since doing otherwise “might mean allowing the defendant to learn the identities of informants or the existence of secret surveillance or money-tracking methods to which he could alert his al Qaeda compatriots if he is set free.”

Can you spot the pulsating fallacy in the middle of that argument? Unless you're handicapped with a Hannity-level IQ (in which case you wouldn't be reading this, or anything more challenging than a Bazooka Joe comic strip), you should be able to.
In the interests of clarity, and in the event that someone is reading this to Sean the nescient, here's the answer:

The argument above assumes either a) the mere accusation of conspiracy with al-Qaeda is as good as proof; b) that the Bush administration envisions allowing al-Qaeda operatives to be set free; or c) both.

This is because the tribunals – like the UN judicial bodies they would resemble – would place the burden of proof on the accused.
Having committed the foregoing offense against logic, the Journal insists that compromising due process in this fashion is appropriate because similar procedures have been used “at the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal (ICTY) on the grounds of` `exceptional circumstance.' The ICTY has routinely allowed the admission of hearsay evidence, for example, and has allowed witnesses to conceal their identities behind voice- and image-altering devices lest they face retribution at home. Those practices certainly compromise the right of defendants to confront their accusers, yet we haven't heard the human-rights crowd crying foul.”

Apparently determined to run the table of logical fallacies, the Journal uncorks a tu quoque -- “I know you are, but what am I?” -- after planting the axiom that only the self-described “human rights community” could criticize the Bush Tribunals, and then only out of narrow, spiteful motives. By this reasoning, if that word can be tortured into applying here, the question isn't whether the Bill of Rights should be destroyed, but rather whether this should be done by the UN or the executive branch of the US government.

Right now, the entire conservative movement, without a single organized exception of which I am aware, is either actively supporting the Bush regime's assault on the Bill of Rights, or passively conniving in that crime, either out of cowardice or opportunism. In this environment, the "patriotic" alternative is to do the job of destroying our own liberties, rather than out-sourcing the task to the UN.



Of course, at the rate we're creating enemies and depleting our wealth, there will be plenty of applicants in a few years, should the destruction of our freedom prove to be another of those "jobs Americans won't do."

The "Disaster Capitalist" Nomenklatura

Here's a good and sufficient illustration of the fact that the economic system of the United State (as the wise and provocative Nicholas Strakon calls our regime)is not free market capitalism.

According to recently published census data, Virginia's Loudon County is the wealthiest jurisdiction in the country, with a median household income of $98,000. Fairfax, Howard, and Montgomery County are close behind. Taken together, these suburbs of the Imperial Capital constitute the second wealthiest community in the nation, their affluence exceeded only by San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clarita California, which attracts tourists and retirees in addition to healthy agricultural and industrial economies.

What do the residents of the Imperial Suburbs produce? For the most part, nothing. They are minions of the Empire, government employees and quasi-private “contractors” whose work is purely consumptive. They are not like people who grow food or make steel, who produce something and add to the aggregate wealth of our society. The residents of these four counties, notes the Washington Post, have profited handsomely from "the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.... The result is that the Washington area's households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York."

Were we anything resembling a free market society, private producers would earn much more than government-sector consumers. But as documented by Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, the typical tax-fattened federal drone makes twice as much as his private sector counterpart:

“The Bureau of Economic Analysis released data this month [August] showing that the average compensation for the 1.8 million federal civilian workers in 2005 was $105,579 – exactly twice the average compensation paid in the US private sector, $53,289.”

Unlike productive Americans, for whom job security and retirement security are increasingly elusive (particularly in this era of “downward harmonization” of wage costs relative to China, India, and Latin America), federal parasites enjoy annual wage increases irrespective of the health of the economy. “Federal workers receive generous health benefits during work and retirement, a pension plan with inflation protection, a retirement savings plan with generous matching contributions, large disability benefits, and union protections,” notes Edwards. “They often have generous holiday and vacation schedules, flexible hours, training options, incentive awards, flexible spending accounts, and a more relaxed pace of work than private-sector workers.”

Once again, all of this is lavished on people who – in terms of adding to the tangible wealth of society – produce nothing. Their “work” consists of bleeding productive people through taxes and inflation, while slowly suffocating us through regulation.





The contrast described by Edwards summons memories of Raymond Stanz's despairing comment to Peter Venkman as they contemplated the impending end of their sinecure at Colombia University: “You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.” Stanz and Venkman did all right for themselves in the private sector, after hanging out a shingle advertising their services as “Ghostbusters.” (That film, incidentally, is an under-appreciated anti-government gem: Name one other film in which the chief antagonist is an anal-retentive commissar working for the Environmental Protection Agency.)

But Stanz and Venkman were fictional characters, after all, and in reality as we're sentenced to experience it those who wind up on the FedGov's payroll have no reason to leave. As Edwards summarizes, “the federal civilian workforce has become an elite island of secure and highly paid workers, separated from the ocean of private-sector American workers who must compete in today's dynamic economy.”




That's a very carefully modulated way of describing the emergency of a feudal society in which the political elite – politicians, bureaucrats, and politically connected corporate leaders – constitute something bearing an unmistakable familial resemblance to the Soviet Nomenklatura. And it's not limited to those directly employed by the federal government; that oligarchy includes the growing number of nominally private corporate contractors whose snouts are firmly fastened to federal teats.

Like its Brezhnev-era Soviet counterpart, our Nomenklatura is actively involved in promoting “wars of national liberation” abroad. The most active element within it, however, is involved in the new field of “Disaster Capitalism,” a term coined by left-leaning investigative journalist Naomi Klein (who will soon publish a book of that title).

This expression refers to the huge and growing segment of the Leviathan devoted to Homeland Security, post-catastrophe relief, and post-war reconstruction abroad. It implicates as many federal agencies as possible, as well as the familiar assortment of corporate contractors (Halliburton, Blackwater USA, Bechtel, and that ilk). Disaster Capitalism is the official ideology of what Charles Featherstone calls “that nexus of government, planning, and contracting/consulting that is the hallmark of the way Western countries and the United Nations do business anymore, regardless of whether the are planning individual projects, aiding in disaster recovery, waging war, or attempting to promote `economic development.'”

Ventures in Disaster Capitalism depend on a steady stream of human misery, whether as a result of acts of God (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes) or acts of State, such as wars – which tend to be much more destructive than natural catastrophes. While both kinds of tragedy can be profitable, wars are much easier to arrange than natural disasters.

Talk about moral hazard: The same people who provide the relief are the ones who can arrange the misery. This is a perfect illustration of the arrangement described by Isabel Patterson in her 1943 essay “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”: Statist humanitarians need people to be needy, and will do what they can to ensure an abundance of need, which is why they will eventually set up the guillotine to deal with those who resist being helped. “The humanitarian in theory,” she warned, “is the terrorist in action.”

The first Bush administration, by staging a humanitarian war that killed 100,000 Iraqi conscripts on the battlefield and then killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through an altruistic post-war embargo, cultivated the seeds that were harvested at the WTC five years ago. One shudders to think of the crop being sown by the incumbent Bush regime as it pursues humanitarian terrorism throughout the Middle East – but Disaster Capitalists are well-positioned to profit when that harvest comes in, as it will.

And those at the upper echelons of the Power Elite are always looking abroad for new fields to plow.

On August 5 of 2005, notes Naomi Klein, the Bush administration “created the office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, headed by Carlos Pascual, the former ambassador to Ukraine. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate `post-conflict' plans for up to 25 countries that are not, as yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations on different countries `at the same time,' each lasting `five to seven years.'”

“Fittingly,” continues Klein, “a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction. Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and drawing up plans to pick up the pieces” -- and then picking up those pieces in the slowest and most expensive way possible, the better to exploit the “cost-plus” billing arrangements most contractors enjoy.

In any corporatist system – call it “corporate socialism,” “corporate welfare,” or its correct name, fascism – those wired in to the State enjoy the best of all possible worlds. Their costs are subsidized, their losses are socialized, and their profits are privatized.



Disaster Capitalists have refined that formula in at least one important way. To the extent they're on board with the “global democratic revolution,” their business is getting into other people's business, and making other people angry enough to lash out at our country. So when we eventually catch the hell our oligarchs have been throwing at others, it will be the overworked, underpaid, tax-paying serfs who get the worst of it, just like on 9-11.

The Hive Mind

Utah is "the most culturally communistic society I'm aware of in the English-speaking world," commented Michael Humiston, a brilliant family rights attorney who lives in Heber City.

That's a remarkable assessment coming from a politically conservative man who was born and raised in Utah as an active Mormon (albeit one who -- last time I saw him, at least -- wore his straight, waist-length hair in a ponytail).




During the mid-1980s, Humiston studied abroad behind the Iron Curtain as part of a student exchange program. Upon returning to Utah, he noticed some uncanny similarities between the collectivist societies of eastern Europe and the most Republican state in the Union.




"From practically the time they're old enough to speak, most Utahns are taught reflexive deference to constituted authority, and to seek the security of collective
action rather than the necessity of independent thinking," Humiston told me during an interview in Milwaukee for a cover story I wrote several years ago. "They are indoctrinated in the belief that obedience is the first law of heaven, and that dutiful obedience sanctifies actions that would otherwise be morally unacceptable. These attitudes and inclinations are all very widespread in some eastern societies, and of course they're the foundation of most Communist regimes. But it's somewhat unusual to find them in cultures growing out of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and Utah is the worst case I can think of."



Humiston's speciality is defending parents targeted by the Child "Protection" bureacracy, and the collectivist traits he describes have caused him no small amount of frustration. Many of his clients "simply find it impossible to believe that people exercising authority would actually mean to do them harm, especially when those officials belong to The Church." (In Utah, only when referring to one church are people expected to use a definite article.)

Utah's variant of collectivism has been displayed to good advantage in recent days.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson is both a liberal Democrat and an ex-Mormon, which means that in the eyes of most Utahns he is a twice-damned infidel. Anderson, to his considerable credit, organized a protest rally today in anticipation of tomorrow's arrival of the Wee Decider to emit a batch of lies about the Iraq war in an address to the national convention of the American Legion.

Rocky's rally was deprived of its marquee attraction, Cindy Sheehan, who was recently hospitalized and couldn't attend. The prospect of Sheehan visiting Salt Lake to confront the Bushling was too much for Utah Republicans to abide.

Accordingly, a few days ago the Utah Republican Party urged its members "to call Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and tell him they disapprove of his scheduled participation Wednesday in an anti-war rally preceding a visit by President Bush," reported the Deseret Morning News. "The party put out radio ads Monday asking people to call Anderson and `tell him to stop embarrassing Utah.' The mayor's office had received 183 calls by late afternoon.

The purpose of this campaign, explained Jeff Hartley, Mullah of the Utah Republican Party, was to impress on Anderson the fact that his opposition to Bush "doesn't represent the majority of Utahns' opinions" -- and therefore, presumably, he should simply shut up.



It's the will of the Collective, the consensus within the Hive Mind.

Hartley and the Utah GOP also paid for radio advertisements denouncing Cindy Sheehan's supposedly "anti-American" views, and condemning her for trying "to convince you that America should retreat."

If we're advancing toward the abyss, then retreat is the only rational option. And given that the Iraq war, the offspring of deliberate deception, is making our country less secure, retreat is a patriotic imperative.




But even listening to such views, much less considering them on their merits, is anathema to people suckled on the truism, "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done."

To reinforce this message, the Deseret Morning News -- the journalistic organ of the Mormon Church -- gave prominent space on Monday to a guest op-ed written by war widow Collete Gourley entitled "Rocky is on the side of terrorists."

"I am ashamed to have Rocky Anderson representing this great city," wrote Mrs. Gourley. "He is a waste of space and energy. To think that he is protesting my husband's commander in chief makes me extremely irritated. I wholeheartedly agree with [the parents of Utah war casualty] Cpl. Adam Galvez's ... when they said that he [Mayor Anderson] is partly responsible for the deaths of our soldiers. As far as I'm concerned, it's either black or white — there is no gray area here. You are either in support of our military troops, or you are on the terrorists' side. I think Rocky has made it clear what side he is on."

While duly recognizing the loss suffered by Mrs. Goulette and her family, I must confess to some amazement that she directs her rage at someone who laments the death of her husband in an unnecessary war, rather than at the lying president who sent her husband abroad to die. And the language she employs stops just short of a literal fatwa against Anderson, whom she describes as useless at best and treasonous at worst, and directly implicated in the death of our soldiers.

In a house editorial last week, the Deseret News (whose editor, John Hughes -- no, not that John Hughes -- is a former undersecretary general of the United Nations and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)came as close as it comfortably could to a literal recitation of the "when our leaders speak, the thinking has been done" formula.

"Regardless of whether the United States was justified in invading Iraq," opined the paper, "the military [must] stay there until the region is stabilized." Bush's critics "can argue ad nauseam that the president started this war under false pretenses," continues the paper, this is "wrong" and "irrelevant," even though it is
true that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.... In any event, the nation can't turn back the clock and undo the war...."

Truth is "irrelevant," facts are "irrelevant," moral misgivings about a disastrous war are "irrelevant"; all that matters is obedience uber alles.

Thus decrees the voice of the Collective, speaking the will of the Hive Mind.

What will happen if, as the paper urges, we "Stay the course in Iraq"?

Some pregnant hints were provided in the following day's Deseret News house editorial, bearing the tin-eared headline "Military Recruiting Challenging."

"Never before has warfare been so complex," began the piece, written in the artlessly coy style of a singles bar Lothario trying to coax a prospective conquest down a very predictable path. "Never before, in a volunteer Armed Services, has the Army lowered the recruitment bar so low — all in the name of meeting recruiting goals in the face of a grueling war and a healthy job market at home."

After reviewing th increasingly dismal and desperate condition of current volunteer recruitment efforts, the editorial reached its inevitable destination:

"Can, in this economy, the military maintain its recruiting goals? More important, will Congress be forced into reinstituting a draft? Something's got to give to ensure the military can continue to entice the best and brightest to serve this country in an increasingly challenging season of warfare."

Of course, the most obvious and necessary "thing" that should "give" would be the demands of constant foreign wars, which would immediately solve the problems described in the editorial. But suggesting as much -- nay, even allowing such a thought the luxury of the most transient appearance in the theater of one's mind -- would be to question the leader. Such things simply aren't done in Utah.

Thus speaks the Collective, the voice of the Hive Mind.



Utah is a somewhat special case. None of the other affiliates of the United State (to use the very appropriate term coined by the insightful folks over at The Last Ditch) displays such a near-identity between an authoritarian church and the ruling political party. Mormons are bound by covenant to "sustain" their prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bush and a public supporter of Bush's wars.




So as far as most Mormon Republicans are concerned, Iraq is, quite literally, a holy war, its divine imprimatur nullifying any constitutional, moral, or legal objections.
The leaders have spoken. The thinking has been done.

But it shouldn't be thought that this heresy is confined to Mormon-dominated Utah. Variations on the same theme are taught at Mega-churches from California to Florida, and on the Sunday before the fifth anniversary of 9-11, pulpits across the land will resound with sermons enjoining the same docile, dutiful obedience to the Dear Leader, preparing young Christians for their future role as sacrificial offerings on the altar of the Warfare State.

Thus speaks the Collective, the voice of the Hive Mind.

But we must remember that resistance isn't futile.