The frenzy of finger-pointing that followed the revelations of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison have targeted U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a handful of military police on the ground, and nearly everyone else in between. Blame has been leveled also at extended overseas assignments and even Iraq’s hot weather.

All of that may be relevant. But if the task is to explain how ordinary U.S. citizens can become party to repeated, deliberate, and smilingly organized acts of sadistic violence, another potential cause needs investigating: the dark and abusive underbelly of U.S. culture itself.

Consider the following facts:

• Nearly one-third of U.S. women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to information from the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
• State and local law enforcement agencies reported 7,462 hate crime incidents to the FBI for 2002, involving 8,832 offenses — the latest numbers available. Racial bias accounted for nearly half of the incidents, while religious bias motivated one-fifth.
• A major U.S. study in the mid-1990s, cited by the National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center, found that more than 60 percent of television programs contain some violence; that 43 percent of violent scenes involve humor either directed at the violence or used by characters involved with violence; and that nearly 75 percent of violent scenes feature no immediate punishment for or condemnation of violence.
• Pornographic web pages, according to ProtectKids.com, topped 260 million as of 2003 — nearly a 20-fold increase from 14 million in 1998. Meanwhile, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children estimates that more than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the Internet each week.

To be sure, these problems are not uniquely American: Some other nations have similar or higher figures. But a Martian observer, having only these facts, could be forgiven for imagining that U.S. citizens were violent and abusive, racially and religiously intolerant, and fixated on coercive sex. Arab observers, looking at the Abu Ghraib issues, unfortunately come to the same conclusions.

That doesn’t mean that U.S. military, intelligence, reserve, or contract personnel routinely display abusive tendencies. Most do not. But this outbreak of abuse should remind us that these tendencies have uncomfortable prominence in U.S. culture. It’s not simply that the statistics noted above suggest a subculture in which definable groups behave in these recognizably repugnant ways. More important, these tendencies lurk in liquid form as a mélange of violence, hatred, and coercion lying beneath the surface of daily experience and creating a general haziness of thought. How do we typically respond? To call it a shrugging acceptance of abuse is too strong. More exactly, it’s an unconscious failure of nonconsent. It’s a lack of courageous rebellion against the acceptance of evil — a refusal of the culture as a whole to rise up against what the poet Robert Burns called “Man’s inhumanity to Man.”

When that failure of nonconsent falls below a certain threshold, the evils it should help suppress burst through into visible action. That, apparently, is what has happened in Iraq. Somewhere in the conscience of the perpetrators, an alarm must have been turned off, a trip wire cut, a warning device overridden. Would these same perpetrators have marched Iraqis off to gas chambers or lined them up against a wall and shot them in cold blood? Probably not, because such acts already are etched deeply into public thought as epitomes of evil. Then how can we etch the horrors of abuse so deeply into conscience that no American, in or out of uniform, can ever contemplate doing such things in public life or in the privacy of his or her own home — whether under orders or not?

That’s a large task. It involves a massive shift of popular culture. But it can start with education and training. It’s increasingly clear that the reserve units sent to Iraq to staff the prisons were woefully undertrained. After this scandal, that will change. But unless their training covers a lot more than prison-warden techniques — unless it squarely addresses the low-grade background radiation of inhumanity within which so many recruits have unconsciously been raised — it will miss its mark. The training must be ethical in nature, character-building in outcome, and ubiquitous in practice. It must reinstall the triggers of conscience that can be set off by unethical orders. Ultimately, it must help us all shift the failure of nonconsent into a determined and proactive outrage against every kind of abuse, both at home and abroad.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“We’ve found some deeply troubling concerns, and the country wants to know the solution.”

– DeForest Soaries, Jr., the Republican head of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, speaking last week before the tiny agency’s first federal hearing on the security and reliability of electronic voting. This November, an estimated 50 million U.S. voters will be required to cast their votes electronically, sparking strong concerns about tampering, fraud, software flaws, and hackers. Soaries’ agency recently issued a report saying it is severely underfunded and unable to ensure that fall’s electronic voting will be secure, reported the Associated Press. (“E-Voting Oversight Overwhelms U.S. Agency,” AP, May 4)

WASHINGTON
The U.S. government scrambled last week to try to stem growing condemnation in the wake of allegations of serious and systemic abuse of Iraqi prisoners held in prisons overseen by U.S. forces.

Images of U.S. soldiers and contractors grinning and humiliating naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners sparked a nearly universal firestorm of criticism, forcing apologies last week from both President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Both Bush and Rumsfeld said they had been unaware of the abuse until only recently, but their delayed apologies and explanations failed to placate many observers, reported the New York Times.

Questions mounted following revelations that a February 2004 report by the U.S. Army found that abuse was widespread and apparently encouraged by some officials, reported the New Yorker, which broke the story.

The 24-page report, which was labeled “Secret,” found that Iraqi detainees were subjected to “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses,” reported the Associated Press.

Over the past 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 30 criminal investigations into alleged misconduct of prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 suspicious deaths, 10 cases of abuse, and two homicides, the Times reported.

Former Iraqi human rights minister Abdel Basset Turki last week said he warned U.S. officials about such abuse last November, without response, reported the Agence France-Presse.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it made similar warnings more than a year ago. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts,” Red Cross director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl told the AP. “There was a pattern and a system.”

So far, six U.S. military officers have been severely reprimanded and a seventh mildly admonished for failing to detect and halt the abuse. Six subordinates accused of perpetrating the abuse may face criminal charges, according to the New York Times.

Two contractors implicated by the classified Army report have yet to face any charges and their employers last week said they had not been contacted by the Pentagon for further information, according to the Times.

Also last week, the director of the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office said he would investigate why the Army’s report had been classified as “Secret.”

According to U.S. rules, the government is barred from blocking the release of material solely to hide embarrassing or incriminating violations, reported Slate.

Slate last week also worried about the scandal’s possible effects on U.S. military forces serving honorably in Iraq, noting that honest and careful soldiers may now be further imperiled when on their rounds or taken captive.

Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed similar sentiments, saying “the acts of a few must not overwhelm” the good intentions and honorable behavior by the vast majority of servicemembers, according to the AP.

WASHINGTON
Bush administration officials likely broke federal law by imposing a gag order on Medicare’s chief actuary, whose estimates likely would have derailed administration efforts to push through Medicare legislation last November.

Government actuary Richard Foster testified earlier this year that his former boss, Thomas Scully, had threatened to fire him if he provided Democratic lawmakers with his cost estimates for the proposed Medicare legislation.

While the Bush administration pledged the bill’s final cost at $395 billion over the next ten years, Foster’s numbers put the figure much higher — between $500 billion and $600 billion.

Had lawmakers learned of that higher number, the bill likely would have died since swing lawmakers had set a deal-breaking limit of $400 billion, reported Knight Ridder.

When Democrats asked Foster for his estimates, Foster says Scully ordered him to stay silent or be fired for insubordination — a threat Scully now says was meant in jest.

In the end, Foster kept quiet and the Medicare bill — touted at $395 billion — was passed. Shortly afterward, the Bush administration said the measure’s true cost would be $534 billion.

While the administration promised to provide Foster’s cost estimates to Congress in March, the government said a month later that it had changed its mind and would not release the information, according to the Associated Press.

After Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee effectively killed an inquiry into the matter, Democrats asked the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) to look into whether any laws had been broken.

Last week, the CRS said the answer appears to be yes.

Under federal laws in place since 1912, Congress’s “right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable,” the CRS wrote in its report.

In light of last week’s determination, Ways and Means Committee senior Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel (N.Y.) said he would ask the committee’s Republican head to subpoena both Scully and White House health policy adviser Doug Badger, who has invoked executive privilege and refused to testify.

NEW YORK
Former high-profile investment banker Frank Quattrone was convicted last week on charges of obstruction of justice for encouraging subordinates to delete email messages ahead of a federal investigation.

Quattrone, who has consistently denied wrongdoing, was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of witness tampering, reported the New York Times.

He faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison at a hearing scheduled for September.

While working for First Boston, Quattrone made a windfall while holding the hands of high-flying companies like Amazon.com and Cisco Systems when they went public in the 1990s.

As federal investigators began looking into whether First Boston was doled out IPO favors to investors in exchange for kickbacks, Quattrone endorsed a colleague’s email urging employees to destroy some records.

Prosecutors quickly seized on Quattrone’s email as evidence of obstruction, even though he was not a subject of their initial inquiry and no charges were ever formally brought against First Boston, noted the Times.

Quattrone insisted he was simply advising employees to follow standard First Boston policy on destroying records, not trying to hinder a federal investigation as alleged.

While his first trial ended in a hung jury last fall, Quattrone was convicted last week in a decision that came as a surprise to many observers, who said he and his team seemed more prepared this time around.

“I feel like we failed Frank,” lead defense lawyer John Keker said after the ruling, promising to appeal. “He’s innocent.”

Along with the recent conviction of Martha Stewart, last week’s ruling may mark a new trend for federal prosecutors: abandoning complex criminal cases in favor of obstruction charges, which carry a lower burden of proof, observed the Times.

In both the Stewart and Quattrone cases, the target of the obstruction charges was not the subject of the initial criminal inquiry, noted the paper.

“Jurors are saying, Even if you’re powerful and wealthy, don’t even think about influencing the government’s efforts to investigate,” said former federal prosecutor Orin Snyder. The convictions “send a loud signal to Wall Street that says, if you or your company or anyone in your vicinity is under investigation, do not do anything that could be interpreted by anyone as interfering in any way with that.”

HOUSTON
Former Enron employee Lea Fastow was sentenced last week to one year in prison for helping hide illicit funds funneled out of the company by her husband, former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow.

Lea Fastow’s deal, which requires a full 12 months in prison followed by 12 months of supervised release, was imposed by U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who last month rejected her earlier plea deal.

That failed plea bargain would have put Fastow in jail for only five months on a single misdemeanor charge — a deal Hittner rejected as far too lenient given her initial indictment on six felony counts, reported the Reuters news agency.

Hittner’s stiff sentence was accompanied by sharp words for Justice Department officials who had pushed for the lighter plea deal, which he said smacked of manipulation aimed at putting pressure on her husband.

“The Department of Justice’s behavior might be seen as a blatant manipulation of the federal justice system and is of great concern to this court,” Hittner said, according to Reuters.

Andrew Fastow has agreed to plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy, serve the maximum 10-year prison sentence, return nearly $24 million in cash and property, and help prosecutors build their cases against his former colleagues, noted the Associated Press.

Lea Fastow’s misdemeanor 12-month sentence is twice the average for similar tax offenders, even tax felons, noted the U.S. government’s Enron Task Force director, according to the Houston Chronicle.

TOKYO
Seven former executives from Mitsubishi Motors were arrested last week for allegedly conspiring to conceal the company’s liability in the death of a woman struck by a wheel that came off a truck.

The 29-year-old woman was killed and her two sons were injured when the wheel broke away from a Mitsubishi truck and struck them, reported the Agence France-Presse.

Mitsubishi Motors and its truck division, Mitsubishi Fuso, filed reports blaming the accident on shoddy maintenance by the truck’s owner, thereby avoiding a costly recall and bad publicity.

Two months ago, the company finally admitted that officials had known for more than a decade that hub defects were known to cause such problems.

Mitsubishi’s confession led to last week’s arrests, a third raid on Mitsubishi Fuso offices, and a separate criminal complaint from the transportation ministry, according to the Associated Press.

“The false report was an extremely malicious act conducted to avoid recall,” transport minister Nobuteru Ishihara said in a statement. “It is truly regrettable that this happened on the part of an automaker whose top priority should be safety and the environment.”

Those arrested included former Mitsubishi Fuso chairman Takashi Usami, former Mitsubishi Motors managing director Akio Hanawa, a former board director, and two former quality control managers, according to the AFP.

Mitsubishi, which has faced similar allegations in the past, is now recalling nearly 220,000 vehicles.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
One of Canada’s most renowned self-made business titans, Frank Stronach, overcame a prospective shareholder revolt over his compensation package, which at $39 million is reported to be one of the largest compensation packages for corporate leaders in the country.

At least six major institutional investors in Magna International, the company that Stronach built from scratch, opposed the board of directors proposed by the company.

But during the firm’s annual meeting, Stronach sharply criticized fund managers who “all of a sudden make such smearing attacks.”

He received a standing ovation and the proposed board was fully elected.

The successful global auto parts company is substantially controlled by Stronach, who serves as president.

Institutional investors showed particular concern over the very large consulting fees paid to Mr. Stronach for services provided to the European units of the company and over the lack of information about what was done to earn these fees.

TAMPA
A U.S. district judge last week rebuked the Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush for breaching the state’s constitution last October, when lawmakers intervened in a dispute over end-of-life issues between a man and his in-laws.

The dispute centers on the fate of Terri Schiavo, a woman who suffered severe brain damage in 1990 that left her unable to survive without the use of a feeding tube and constant medical care.

Her husband Michael has argued that although she never completed a living will, Terri Schiavo did not want to be kept alive under such conditions. Her parents say he is lying, reported the Tampa Tribune. She has been kept alive by artificial means for a decade.

After courts ruled that Michael Schiavo could remove the feeding tube, Florida lawmakers quickly enacted a law allowing Gov. Bush to overrule the courts and have the tube reinserted.

Last week, District Judge Douglas Baird ruled that Gov. Bush and the Legislature had violated at least four provisions of the Florida Constitution and breached the separation of powers, according to the Tribune.

The law they enacted “unjustifiably authorizes the governor to summarily deprive Florida citizens of their constitutional right to privacy,” Baird concluded.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida called the ruling “a very strong affirmation of the privacy rights of the people of Florida, and an equally strong rebuke to politicians who interfere with decisions that should be left to each of us.”

Bush attorney Ken Connor last week said the governor would appeal, characterizing Michael Schiavo as a man who wants to end his wife’s life so he can inherit her estate and solidify his relationship with another woman.

The case also has taken on political ramifications as Jeb Bush’s brother, President Bush, runs for reelection and looks for support to his conservative voting base, which backs Schiavo’s parents, reported the Tribune.

CHICAGO
The debate over genetic engineering picked up again last week following news that five children had been born from embryos screened to ensure that the babies’ stem cells would be usable by their critically ill older siblings.

The babies, the only ones to emerge so far from an experiment involving nine couples and 199 embryos, were born to five pairs of parents with children suffering from severe medical conditions such as leukemia.

Doctors used each couple’s eggs and sperm to create embryos, which then were screened to ensure a genetic match with the ill child. Forty-five embryos matched and 28 were implanted, leading to five births so far, reported the Baltimore Sun Sentinel. Stem cells were harvested from the newborns’ umbilical cords.

The news prompted renewed debate over the ethics of genetic engineering and the extent to which parents should be able to influence the chromosomal make-up of their children.

While critics complained that the newborn children were commodified and designed to fix medical problems in their siblings, others argued that the process — while new and startling — was not unethical.

Existing standards already embrace screening embryos for severe hereditary diseases and, in the case of follow-up children, for gender, allowing parents some control over the characteristics of their offspring, noted the Sun Sentinel.

The experiment at Chicago’s Reproductive Genetics Institute took those allowances once step further, permitting parents to select the viable embryo that offered the best chance to help heal their ill child.

All of the babies were born healthy and only couples already wanting another child were allowed to participate in the study, according to the Sun Sentinel.

“It does sort of verge on the horrors of cloning and the horrors of selective breeding for particular characteristics,” Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Georgia Vogelsang, told the Sun Sentinel.

“Even if you say — and I absolutely agree — this (selecting for donor compatibility) is completely benign, where do you then draw the line once you start doing things like this?” she asked. “Is it okay to — if there was a genetic marker — pick the embryo with the highest IQ?”

The study, as well as a companion editorial, are published in the current Journal of the American Medical Association.

LONDON
Despite turning down more than $12 million in business due to ethical standards, Britain’s Co-operative Bank last week said it more than made up the loss by attracting customers who support its principles.

The bank last week said its 2003 pre-tax profits rose by 6 percent to hit $232.5 million — with $72 million attributable to investments made by people attracted by the bank’s ethical standards.

Those standards prompted the Co-operative Bank to shun providing $12.3 million in financial services to several sectors, including companies supplying arms to repressive regimes, chemical firms prone to pollution, and those that engage in animal testing, reported the BBC.

While the value of spurned business jumped 58 percent from 2002, the profit from ethics-minded investors and clients also rose — from less than one-quarter of total profits to nearly one-third, noted the Financial Times.

“The figures clearly demonstrate that, whilst our ethical stance clearly leads to lost business, the customer value analysis shows that it has a very positive impact on our overall profits,” corporate affairs director Simon Williams said.

From CareerBuilder.com:

“Juggling personal and professional commitments continues to be a struggle for todays career moms. One-third of working mothers surveyed by CareerBuilder.com report dissatisfaction with their work/life balance, with nearly one-in-five stating their employers are intolerant of working shorter days due to their children….

“Bringing the office home is a common occurrence amongst working mothers, which can cut into quality time with their children. Although the vast majority of working mothers say they spend three or more hours with their children after work, 49 percent admit they are preoccupied with work while at home. Thirty-three percent say they always or often work weekends.

“Business demands have also resulted in working mothers having to miss significant events in their childrens lives. One-in-two said they missed at least one important occasion in their childs life due to a work commitment in the last year, nearly one-in-four said they missed three or more events….

“The good news is more employers today have programs in place to better accommodate family needs.

“…[Thirty-eight] percent said they would take a pay cut to be with their families more. To increase their face-to-face time with their families, working mothers say they have taken advantage of alternative work arrangements such as arriving to and leaving work early, taking personal days, and telecommuting. Seventy-four percent said these work style adjustments have not impacted their career progress….”

“It is bad enough to persevere in barbarism; it is worse to relapse into it; but worst of all is consciously to seek it out.”

– Aurel Kolnai (Hungarian philosopher, 1900-1973)