“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.
Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.
He said the atrocities of the Iraq war–from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs–were highly predictable at the start of the war.
“Every war will lead to attacks on civilians,” he said. “Crimes against humanity, destruction beyond the needs of military necessity, rape of civilians, plunder–that always happens in wartime. So my answer personally, after working for 60 years on this problem and [as someone] who hates to see all these young people get killed no matter what their nationality, is that you’ve got to stop using warfare as a means of settling your disputes.”
You know, I was just thinking. Economists are sometimes forced to reckon people’s lives against monetary expenditure – that is, they have to assign some sort of price tag to the average person’s life. Typically the figure that’s kicked around is within an order of magnitude of a million dollars.
Well, this gives us another way to look at the cost of the war. George W. Bush’s war on Iraq is on track to cost a trillion dollars before it’s over (if it’s ever over). So let’s do the math:
(a trillion dollars for one war) divided by (a million dollars for one life)
equals (a trillion dollars for one war) multiplied by (one life for a million dollars)
equals, hold on, let’s be careful with the units,
a million lives for a war.
Which is surely within an order of magnitude of the claim I was making in my previous post. For indeed this is the scale we’re looking at. This is the magnitude of the crime. I beg you, think about this carefully. It might look like I’m playing with figures here but these million deaths are not a metaphor. This is the shit that happens when you send a nation to war. Bodies lie in the streets of Iraq – and in the streets of New Orleans. They are not philosophies, ideals, or propositions. They are, or used to be, human beings. And this… this “president” has killed them.
Oh make no mistake. This is no accident, this inconceivable and inexcusable slaughter. It is a deliberate payment. I say again, it is deliberate. For Bush, this is the price of power. The death of thousands is not something he tries to avoid. It is just part of the business of governing.
George W. Bush intended to create the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would die. He knew others might suffer – by the millions – for decades, if he made certain choices, and he went ahead with exactly those choices, so that he could be a star. He condemned those people to die: the ones cut down by cannon-fire and the ones cut down by poverty. Do not hesitate to blame George W. Bush personally and directly for these thousands upon thousands of weeping husbands and wives and parents and children because all this pain is his fault. He knew exactly what he was doing. For him a million deaths is just a risk: something he might get in trouble for, if he doesn’t play the rest of his cards right.
But so far, he’s been playing pretty good. He’s been winning and he’s still winning. He’s still the president, and people are still dying every day, all day long, so that he can be the president. He is terrifyingly strong, partly because he literally does not mind if, for him to win, every other living thing on this little green planet has to lose.
How do you fight something like that? It’s almost the only question that matters anymore. He has to go. He has to go. He has to go. We have to get rid of him somehow. But he has all the money and all the guns and so many Bible-toting thugs you can’t even imagine. So what can we do?
What can we do?
It’s not a rhetorical question.
Even if we assume, for the sake of argument – or “completeness,” as mathematicians put it – that at least some passenger screening measures protect us from at least some acts of terror – I do not believe that these measures are worth their cost.
I say again: even if passenger screening (which probably does not work) is protecting us from acts of terrorism (though, roughly speaking, there’s no reason to expect such things), I still say it’s too expensive.
I can’t add up the exact numbers, but I can point to how it would be done. Let’s pretend that by eliminating some “security” measures we allow some number of “terrorist” events to take place. Compare the estimated costs of this (imagined) terrorism with the estimated costs of the (real) measures that are supposedly preventing it. Start with obvious observations such as:
- The Transportation Safety Authority. For their staff of 50,000; their metal detectors and x-ray machines; their dogs, uniforms, buildings, cars, coffee-cups and so on, we are spending over five billion dollars per year.
- Effects on travelers. About two million people fly every day. “Security” measures cost them dearly.
- Direct expenses. People have to buy new stuff (for example, shoes with no metal in them) and they have to replace stuff that was confiscated (lipsticks, nail clippers, sports drinks – whatever it is fashionable to confiscate these days).
- Indirect expenses. An hour to get through screening is an hour when you could have been doing something else both more productive and more enjoyable.
- Inconvenience. We have to add some sort of inconvenience cost, even if it’s not measured in dollars – for the hassles, fear, humiliation, invasion of privacy, infringement of civil rights, warrantless suspicion, reinforcement of racial stereotypes… don’t even get me started. How to calculate the cost of these effronteries? We could ask how much people would be willing to spend to skip them. There’s going to be some sort of average offer. Imagine it’s a hundred dollars per trip. (Some people would go much higher.) For two million trips, that’s an incovenience cost of 200 million dollars a day, or 73 billion dollars a year.
- Effects on the economy
- The airlines are in trouble… but they seem always to be in trouble. Maybe that’s just the way of the world. Let’s set it aside.
- American businesses that rely on travel – which is almost all of them, I would imagine – are paying for “security” measure with diminished productivity, efficiency, and agility. The opportunity cost must be staggering.
- Airport passenger screening is among the many “security” measures that contribute to world-wide distrust in, and even distaste for, Americans. This too must take a severe toll on American businesses.
- If the Treasury is finite, then any funds for “security” have inevitably to be diverted from other projects. Almost any of these will have more utility, given that “security” per se has no utility at all. Here are some examples of programs that have acknowledgedly suffered in recent years:
- Health care
- Education
- Physical infrastructure – can you say “Katrina”?
- REAL crime prevention!
As you can see, the list is mighty long and mighty expensive. And these are just the first few things that come to mind.
Before we go further, I want to call your attention to the “health care” item under “funds diverted from other projects.” On the scale of countries, a diversion of funding is a diversion of mortality. Reduce spending on health care, and more prople will die. I don’t have an estimate on the trade-off, but there definitely will be one. “Security” spending might save lives later, but it is definitely costing lives now.
I think I will end this post here. I want to list more categories, and I want to fill in some numbers, but for now let’s just get the general idea out there.
All Air Travelers Must Remove Shoes For X-ray Screening.
Liquids, Gels And Aerosols Are Prohibited.
Gel-filled Bras And Similar Prostethics Are Allowed.–Transportation Security Administration web site, http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/, 23 Aug 2006
Airport passenger screening is out of control, and we should be asking why.
Why it’s out of control… and why we even have it in the first place.
“This is the way of life now,” said Craig Burgess, a UNICEF employee who got stranded at Heathrow […]. “I understand the caution and the safety. You’d rather have this happen than something tragic,” he said.
–Plot to Bomb U.S.-Bound Jets Is Foiled. Washington Post. Friday, August 11, 2006. Page A01.
Sure, I’d rather be safe than sorry, if I have an actual choice between the two. But we don’t have that choice. It’s not either passenger screening, or disaster. Actually, the screening is the disaster.
“You’d rather have this happen than something tragic,” says the passenger. He assumes, as we all are expected to assume, that we are in a position to choose between passenger screening on the one hand and some kind of tragedy on the other; that the screening is necessary and sufficient for the prevention of tragedy; that without screening a tragedy is substantially more likely to take place. All this is assumed. It has never been shown.
This should concern us deeply, even if only because we pay taxes. We spend over a billion dollars a year (almost 3 million dollars a day) on the Transportation Safety Authority – a program whose efficacy is not known, and could easily be zero.
In five years, air passenger screening has not intercepted a single terrorist. I mean, it’s not like they would keep it a secret! If that were to happen – if the TSA ever fingered an actual terrorist, at the airport, before he could get on an actual plane with an actual weapon – can you imagine the media frenzy!!! We would be hearing about it incessantly for weeks.
I strongly suspect, therefore, that it has not happened; that the TSA has never caught anyone before they could hurt us.
We have heard of “terrorist plots” being “foiled.” Extreme skepticism of such claims is warranted, but in no case have the alleged terrorists been apprehended at the airport.
And don’t try to tell me that failed detection demonstrates successful deterrence. If screening will not detect my weapon, then I need not fear being screened.
Airport security failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers, and it would fail to stop any similar mission today. Such a mission could not succeed today, but this fact has nothing to do with passenger screening.
“Exactly two things have improved airplane security since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door and teaching passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has largely been a waste of money.”
–Bruce Schneier, quoted in a Salon article
I ask again: what is the purpose of passenger screening? If it cannot detect criminals and prevent mayhem, why are we doing it – unless we just think it’s a good idea to spend billions of dollars hassling, humiliating and hoodwinking everyone who wants to fly?
Oops. I might have just answered my own question.
What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information,” he said. “We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It’s not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants.”
–Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/13/323226-chertoff-us-should-review-terror-laws
There are signs like this up and down Interstate 95, which connects Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
They look pretty fucking suspicious to me.
Photo by crowbert.
“Exactly two things have improved airplane security since 9/11,” Schneier says. “Reinforcing the cockpit door and teaching passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has largely been a waste of money.”
Security. That is such a comforting word. I love seeing guys with the word SECURITY on their uniforms. Like, when I take my kids to one of those regular playgrounds, where only kids and their parents go? I feel nervous. Uncomfortable. Vulnerable. But when there are men there? Armed men, in black jackets, with the word SECURITY across the back? Then I know we’re safe.
