Update: Thanks to reader Jeff for this video of an outfit helping with Haiti’s water needs. It might be a better place for donations than any government relief effort.

Original Post:

I haven’t commented on the Haiti earthquake, mainly because I haven’t been on top of the details. Besides, there’s so much coverage in the MSM about it. My beat here remains the untold story.

But one angle does trouble me. The intervention of the military. I can’t bring myself to say they shouldn’t be involved, which would be the principled thing to say, but it bothers me a lot:

“Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to demonstrate just how much more the U.S. military is able to do than simply kill the enemy. Only the U.S. can initially control flights into and out of the Port-au-Prince airport from aboard a nearby Coast Guard cutter, while waiting for an Air Force special-ops team to set up shop at the airport and step up operations to 24/7. Only U.S. warships have the capability to generate up to 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Only the U.S. military can send a spy drone from California to fly lazy orbits over Port-au-Prince snapping close to 1,000 pictures a day, which when compared with similar ones shot last summer, create a map of the hardest hit areas that can be instantly relayed to those working on the ground.

Only the U.S. military has enough aluminum matting to boost the runway capacity of Port-au-Prince airport. Only the U.S. military has the surveillance capability to quickly assess additional Haitian airfields and seaports for use in rescue relief operations. Only the U.S. military has the wide variety of vessels and aircraft to utilize those fields and ports, including air-cushioned vehicles capable of ferrying 60 tons of supplies from ship to shore at 40 knots. (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the aftermath of the earthquake.)

But the limits of U.S. capability can also be seen: The Pentagon diverted an unmanned Global Hawk drone bound for Afghanistan to Haiti instead, to photograph the damage there. “We were about to send that Global Hawk over to the war” until the earthquake, explained Air Force Col. Bradley Butz. “It will stay here until the President says it’s time to send it forward.”

While the drone had no comment about its sudden change of mission, some of those bound for Haiti welcomed the new assignment after more than eight years of war. “Marines are definitely warriors first,” Captain Clark Carpenter said Friday as his unit prepared to ship out to Haiti from North Carolina. “But we are equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we like to show – a compassionate warrior that can reach out that helping hand to those who need it.”

Read more at Time for the corporate media’s view of the intervention.

And read Michel Chossudovsky, for the deep structure of the intervention, recent US interventions in Haiti, and the extent and implications of a US military presence there (he argues that it’s to monitor and intervene in Cuba and Venezuela).

I recall the tsunami relief effort in 2004 and the intrusion of military vessels and spy satellites into Indonesia and other regions in Asia. Humanitarian interventions are a prime locus for state meddling, because most people will feel reluctant to second-guess what’s happening. They don’t want come off as hard-hearted carping critics, with nothing positive to offer.

A life saved in Haiti is good PR for a life or two killed elsewhere. If such calculations are mathematical (and with the state they always have to be), then we are indeed better off with the US military, many would say.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan, I see, is donating a million to the relief effort.

And Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America are giving a million apiece too. That will be millions taken from the tax-payer and rival banks long defunct. But from wherever it comes,  lives will be saved, right?

Thus do they wash their hands clean of guilt.

Who knows.

Maybe Lloyd Blankfein IS doing god’s work.

Or, at least, he’s Dean of the Jeffrey Levitt School of Philanthropy.

[For those with short memories, Levitt stole some $15 million in the 1980s, in the biggest white-collar crime in Maryland history, and almost single-handedly brought down the savings and loan business in the state.  One reason he was able to get away with his thieving for so long was that he was careful to make judicious and well-publicized charitable donations].