The national disgrace that is Donald Rumsfeld and the horrific Bush administration will be with us until January 20, 2009, when another administration will take office. Any administration will do.

Rumsfeld's outrageous comments the other day in defense of the Iraq War have provoked a national debate. Many are livid over public comments to the effect that war opponents are comparable to the Nazi appeasers during World War II. In fact, war protests are as patriotic as apple pie and Chevrolet. Sending young men to fight in an unncessary war that nobody wants is anti-American in the most basic sense of the phrase.

But there is nothing we can do about this but bitch and moan. This is because our constitutional system makes it almost impossible to remove the President for malfeasance. So bitch and moan we will.

The below article from the Washington Post summarizes the new Bush public relations strategy. There is not a word in my vocabulary to describe how I feel about the vicious, wild animals now in control of our government. At least not any words that I can get away with publishing for www.planetwaves.net, where mothers read our commentary to their children.

Bush Team Casts Foes as Defeatist
Blunt Rhetoric Signals a New Thrust

By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 31, 2006; A01

President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions.
With an appearance before the American Legion in Salt Lake City today, Bush will begin a series of speeches over 20 days centered on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he and his top lieutenants have foreshadowed in recent days the thrust of the effort to put Democrats on the defensive with rhetoric that has further inflamed an already emotional debate.

Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics "claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"A lot of the people who say we need to withdraw from Iraq say we'll be safer, and I don't think that's accurate," said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a key architect of the party's strategy heading into the fall congressional campaign. Mehlman noted that al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamic radicals have said they want to drive Americans out of Iraq and use it as a base. "We ought to not ignore when they say they're going to do that."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it is reasonable for Bush to presume that Democrats will try to cut off funding for the war if they take over Congress, noting that 54 House Democrats voted against a spending bill for military operations last year. "How would they force the president to withdraw troops?" she asked. "Yell?"

Democrats contended that the statements went too far. "Maybe there are some people in America who do not want to fight the war on terror, but I do not know them," Sen. Charles E. Schumer ( N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said yesterday. "We Democrats want to fight a very strong war on terror. No one has talked about appeasement."

A public relations campaign can only take you so far. A photo was posted at dailykos.com. It shows President Bush reassuring the public that things are OK in Iraq. But, at the same time, the news feed at the bottom of the screen shows widespread violence and death in Iraq.

This morning, meanwhile, Associated Press reports that

Rescue crews pulled bodies from the rubble of bombed buildings Friday after a barrage of coordinated attacks across eastern Baghdad neighborhoods killed at least 64 people and wounded more than 280 within half an hour, police said.

The latest spasm of violence on Thursday evening — which included explosives planted in apartments, car bombs and several rocket and mortar attacks on mainly Shiite neighborhoods — came even as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Iraqi forces should have control over most of the country by year's end.

The death toll from the Baghdad bombings increased to 64 people as more bodies were recovered, police Capt. Mohammed Abdul-Ghani said Friday.

The attacks — centered on neighborhoods controlled by Shiite militias, some of which Sunni Arabs accuse of running death squads — brought Thursday's death toll across the country to at least 85.

Now read the response to the Bush administration public relations strategy from one of the few people in the mainstream media who talks back to the ideologues on his prime-time TV show on MSNBC. Go get 'em, Keith.

There Is Fascism, Indeed
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC
Wednesday 30 August 2006

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis-and the sober contemplation-of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration's track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril-with a growing evil-powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the "secret information." It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's - questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England's, in the 1930's.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions - its own omniscience - needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic's name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History - and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England - have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty - and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute - and exclusive - in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today's Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count - not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden's plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their "omniscience" as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer's New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we - as its citizens- must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note - with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism."

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that - though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: "confused" or "immoral."

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular."

And so good night, and good luck.

You may have heard that the governor of Virginia made a racist comment in public a few weeks ago and has been apologizing for it ever since. The Republican Party has a history of vitriolic racism. The Democratic Party is also no stranger to racial politics, but the ugliest examples typically involve the guys who claim to represent the party of Lincoln.

One constant presence on cable news as a political commentator is Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter who also worked for Ronald Reagan. Now he writes books about immigration and complains that our white culture is evaporating. Here's what he said recently: "What I would like is — I’d like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country."

The below summary of Buchanan's views is from ThinkProgress.org.

In his new book, State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan argues for “an immediate moratorium on all immigration.” Why? To preserve the dominance of the white race in America. Buchanan explains on pg. 11:

America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.

Indeed, Buchanan argues quite explicitly that only whites have the appropriate “genetic endowments” to keep America from collapsing. From pg. 164:

In 1994, Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times…volunteered this thought:

“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted by a different people.”

Had Francis said this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievements of the West for Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bounds of tolerance. He was summarily fired.

Buchanan goes on to praise those who, implicitly or explicitly, talk about the genetic superiority of the white race, including John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves, Bell Curve authors Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, and Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (Campanis said that blacks “may not have the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.” He added that blacks were often poor swimmers “because they don’t have the buoyancy.”)

Buchanan calls Francis views on white racial superiority the “Great Taboo.” But refusing to acknowledge it, according to Buchanan, is “like not telling one’s doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you.”

The reference to the Bell Curve was a book published in the 1990's which tried to scientifically prove that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. The book gave the racists some kind of intellectual hook to hang their hats on. John Rocker was a punk whose Major League Baseball career went down the chute after he insulted racial minorites, gays and foreigners in New York City.

The Republican Party began to really play the politics of race in the 1960's in order to exploit the backlash growing out of the civil rights movement. When Republican Barry Goldwater got creamed in the 1964 presidential election, his right wing supporters noticed that his strongest support was in the south, where formerly Democratic Party strongholds suddently switched to the party that catered to racial fears. Republican Party big-wigs decided that the best way to regain power was the "Southern Strategy." This strategy exploited racial fears with code words like "state's rights" (the rallying cry against school integration) and anything to do with "busing" (one of the court-ordered remedies to combat intentional school segregation). The Southern Strategy was new, but its underpinnings are tried and tested: win elections by playing to fear and loathing among the electorate. Fear and sometimes even hatred wins elections.

During the 1980's, President Reagan gave a speech about a "welfare queen" in Chicago who cheated the system by living lavishly off the public trough. This woman did not exist, the media later discovered. As usual, Reagan made it up. But the anectode accomplished a few objectives: it allowed the Republicans to demonize people on welfare ("too lazy to work!") and associate this rip-off with black Americans. To this day, many of our comrades associate welfare with racial minorities. As the great William Grieder wrote after Reagan died:

a chilling meanness lurked at the core of Reagan's political agenda (always effectively concealed by the affability), and he used this meanness like a razor blade to advance his main purpose--delegitimizing the federal government. Race was one cutting edge, poverty was another. His famous metaphor--the "welfare queen" who rode around in her Cadillac collecting food stamps--was perfectly pitched to the smoldering social resentments but also a clever fit with his broader economic objectives. Stop wasting our money on those lazy, shiftless (and, always unspoken, black) people. Get government off our backs, encourage the strong, forget the weak. In case any white guys missed the point, Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in the 1960s. His speech extolled states' rights. The tone was sunny optimism.

Beyond Macaca: The Photograph That Haunts George Allen by MAX BLUMENTHAL

Barnstorming around Virginia in the re-election campaign that Republican Senator George Allen hopes will provide the impetus for his 2008 run for the presidency, he has suddenly been forced on the defensive. Time and again, he has felt compelled to explain that his mocking of S.R. Sidarth, a young Indian-American staff member for his Democratic opponent, as "macaca," or monkey, was an unintentional gaffe. "It was a mistake. I made a mistake," he told a reporter from a local NBC affiliate at a campaign stop on Thursday. Hours later, he told the ABC affiliate, "It was a mistake, I was wrong." On Fox News's Sean Hannity show, he echoed, "It was a mistake."

But was it an isolated "mistake"?

Only a decade ago, as governor of Virginia, Allen personally initiated an association with the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the successor organization to the segregationist White Citizens Council and among the largest white supremacist groups.

In 1996, when Governor Allen entered the Washington Hilton Hotel to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative movement organizations, he strode to a booth at the entrance of the exhibition hall festooned with two large Confederate flags--a booth operated by the CCC, at the time a co-sponsor of CPAC. After speaking with CCC founder and former White Citizens Council organizer Gordon Lee Baum and two of his cohorts, Allen suggested that they pose for a photograph with then-National Rifle Association spokesman and actor Charlton Heston. The photo appeared in the Summer 1996 issue of the CCC's newsletter, the Citizens Informer.

According to Baum, Allen had not naively stumbled into a chance meeting with unfamiliar people. He knew exactly who and what the CCC was about and, from Baum's point of view, was engaged in a straightforward political transaction. "It helped us as much as it helped him," Baum told me. "We got our bona fides." And so did Allen.

Descended from the White Citizens' Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, the CCC is designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In its "Statement of Principles," the CCC declares, "We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races."

The CCC has hosted several conservative Republican legislators at its conferences, including former Representative Bob Barr of Georgia and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. But mostly it has been a source of embarrassment to Republicans hoping to move their party beyond its race-baiting image. Former Reagan speechwriter and conservative pundit Peggy Noonan pithily declared that anyone involved with the CCC "does not deserve to be in a leadership position in America."

Asked whether Allen supports or deplores the CCC, John Reid, his communications director, pleaded ignorance. "I am unaware of the group you mention or their agenda and because we have no record of the Senator having involvement with them I cannot offer you any opinion on them," Reid told me in an e-mail response.

In posing for a picture that he knew the CCC would use to promote itself and him, and would be circulated to true believers, Allen joined a tradition of conservative Southern politicians seeking to burnish their neo-Confederate credentials. In 2003, former Republican National Committee chairman and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour took a photograph with revelers at the CCC's "Blackhawk Rally," a fundraising event for white "private academies." In the subsequent hailstorm of media criticism, after reporters discovered that the CCC had posted photos of Barbour on its website, Barbour pointedly refused to demand that the group remove them. Though Barbour came from an old and influential Mississippi family in Yazoo, he had spent a long time as a lobbyist in Washington. "In Mississippi, one of the biggest problems he had was they thought he [Barbour] was a scalawag. So it didn't hurt him in Mississippi," Baum said of the photos. "Nobody said, 'Oh my golly!'" Despite the CCC photos becoming a campaign issue, or partly perhaps because of it, Barbour handily won re-election in 2003.

But George Allen's relationship with the CCC is different; it went beyond poses and portraits. In 1995, he appointed a CCC sympathizer, Virginia lawyer R. Jackson Garnett, to head the Virginia Council on Day Care and serve on the Governor's Advisory Council on Self-Determination and Federalism. According to the CCC's Citizens Informer, Garnett delivered a speech before a CCC gathering saying that the Federalism Commission was "created to study abuses by the Federal government of constitutional powers that rightfully belong to the states."

Later that year, Garnett closed the Virginia Council on Day Care after accusing it, as he wrote in a letter to Governor Allen, of attempting to "form the minds of our young children with a radical ideology before they enter public schools." The Virginia Council had aroused Garnett's ire, according to the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, for preparing an "anti-bias" curriculum for daycare teachers. Allen approved the shut-down.

Allen's Advisory Council on Self-Determination and Federalism bore an eerie resemblance to the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, a state agency that engaged in lobbying and propaganda in support of "massive resistance" to integration. One typical pamphlet published by the Commission declared, "We do not propose to defend racial discrimination. We do defend, with all the power at our command, the citizen's right to discriminate."

A year after the trashing of the Virginia Council on Day Care, Allen expressed his fervent belief in states' rights in a letter to the largest neo-Confederate group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans. On the occasion of the group's centennial, in 1996, Allen wrote, "Your efforts are especially worthy of recognition as across our country, Americans are charting a new direction--away from the failed approach of centralized power in Washington, and back to the founders' design of a true federal system of shared powers and dual sovereignty." Then Allen appropriated Lincoln's language in the Gettysburg Address about "a new birth of freedom": "By doing so," wrote Allen, "our country is helping to foster a rebirth of freedom for all Americans and will allow the states to chart their own course and control their own destinies as intended by the Constitution."

Allen was not alone in sending congratulations to the SCV; twelve other governors and Mississippi Senator Trent Lott--an SCV member--joined him. However, according to Ed Sebesta, a Dallas, Texas-based researcher of the neo-Confederate movement, Allen's letter was unique. "The other governors wrote mostly sentimental blather to the SCV," Sebesta said. "But Allen's letter really expressed the neo-Confederate view of the Southern tradition and showed him to be a neo-Confederate in his thinking."

The year after his letter to the SCV, Allen issued a proclamation, drafted by the local SCV, declaring April as Confederate History and Heritage Month--the month Fort Sumter was attacked and Lincoln assassinated. Once again, Allen's proclamation was laced with neo-Confederate ideology, describing the Civil War as "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights." He avoided any mention of slavery.

Days after Allen's proclamation, the SCV celebrated at the US Capitol. The featured speaker was Richard T. Hines, an influential Republican lobbyist and neo-Confederate financier who, a year earlier, had protested the erection of a memorial to black tennis star Arthur Ashe in downtown Richmond, Virginia as "an attempt to debunk our heritage." The NAACP condemned Allen's SCV-inspired proclamation, while Confederate Memorial Association President John Edward Hurley called the SCV's celebration at the Capitol one of "the worst capitulations to white supremacy" since the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1920.

At the same time Allen also cultivated support from the SCV's sister organization, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. He was a frequent guest at their conventions and in March, 1997, in his second letter of commendation to the group, praised its members for "promoting historical accuracy and a clear understanding of the War Between the States," employing a euphemism for the Civil War popularized by neo-Confederate groups. (An article in a 1989 issue of the UDC magazine asserted that "the worse suffering group among those engaged in the [slave] trade" was "the crews of slave ships.")

When asked whether Allen supports or deplores the SCV, his communications director Reid replied in an e-mail, "Governors routinely send greetings to individuals and organizations and that is what the constituent service office did in this case. I am certain you will note the inclusive language in the letter advocating 'a rebirth of freedom for all Americans.'" As with the CCC, Reid did not offer any condemnation of the SCV.

At the height of Allen's governorship, in Spring 1995, the CCC's Citizens Informer praised him: "Residents of the Old Dominion are rejoicing." But the CCC's invisible support became a potentially controversial matter after a 1998 Washington Post article by Thomas Edsall disclosed the CCC's links to Bob Barr. CPAC head David Keene ousted them from his conference, bluntly telling the Post of his sudden discovery: "They are racists."

Baum, for his part, maintains that Keene and CPAC's attendees were well aware of his group's racial views. "David Keene, he knew who we were," Baum told me. "I mean, you have Confederate flags on each sides of your booth--like, duh. But after the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan, he didn't want us there." (Baum said he "finagled" tickets for the 2006 CPAC convention and promoted the CCC from behind the National Rifle Association's booth.)

In 2001, Governor Allen became Senator Allen. Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, he was forced to choose between the Lost Cause and his own ambition. Trent Lott set in motion Allen's supposed reconstruction. At a 2002 birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Lott praised Thurmond's segregationist 1948 presidential campaign. At first, Allen rushed to Lott's defense, calling him "a decent and honorable man." Lott, however, soon became radioactive. The Washington Post reported Lott's links to the CCC; his tenure as Senate Majority Leader became wobbly. Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist and a White House aide, pressured Republican senators to remove Lott from his leadership position. (Rove preferred the more compliant Bill Frist in the Senate's top post.) Allen saw his own opportunity in Lott's disgrace. Overnight, he went from being staunch Lott supporter to outspoken Lott critic. Calling for Lott's resignation, Allen dubbed his remarks "offensive...to those touched by the viciousness of segregation."

In the wake of Lott's fall, Allen dramatically pronounced the end of institutional racism. "This is a day that the United States Senate, with Trent Lott's resignation, has buried, graveyard-dead-and-gone, the days of discrimination and segregation," he proclaimed. With discrimination "graveyard-dead," Allen clearly hoped questions about his own past would be buried as well.

In 2000, he had hung a noose at his law office. When that fact was reported, he claimed it had "nothing to do with lynching." When it was reported that he also hung large Confederate flags in his house, he explained they were part of his flag collection. Allen had also opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act and making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday.

Using the Lott incident, Allen stepped forward as a champion the legacy of the civil rights movement. He boasted to Ryan Lizza of The New Republic of his "civil rights" pilgrimage to Selma, Alabama in 2002 with Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a former Freedom Rider. In 2005, together with Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Allen co-sponsored a formal apology for slavery. He was carrying the banner of a new brand of Republicanism that compensated for its opposition to affirmative action and social spending with symbolic condemnations of what President George W. Bush deemed "the baggage of bigotry."

But the goodwill Allen may have earned with his image makeover evaporated on August 11 in Breaks, Virginia, a rural town deep in the heart of Appalachia. Before an all-white crowd, he called S.R. Sidarth "Macaca, or whatever his name is." When Allen asked the crowd to "welcome Macaca here" to "America and the real world of Virginia," his audience hooted and hollered. Below the media's radar--and away from every camera except the one in Sidarth's palm--Allen was raising a supposedly buried but still vibrant racially charge populism.

Now Allen finds himself in a quandary. While he atones for his racist gaffe in order to succeed in the 2008 Republican primaries, he cannot afford to alienate the neo-Confederate movement that helped propelled his career during the 1990s. As Allen begs forgiveness for his "mistake," his spokesman avoids criticizing groups like the SCV and CCC. "The neo-Confederates could break a Republican candidate, especially in South Carolina, where they're extremely organized," Sebesta observes.

Senator John McCain's misadventure with the neo-Confederate movement in the 2000 South Carolina primary provides a cautionary tale that must not be lost on Allen. Facing George W. Bush in South Carolina, McCain hired Richard Quinn as his state field manager. Quinn was an editor of the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, and a frequent critic of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who he once dubbed a "terrorist." Before the primary, Quinn organized a rally of 6,000 people in support of flying the Confederate flag over the statehouse. Quinn dressed up McCain volunteers in Confederate Army uniforms as they passed fliers to the demonstrators assuring them that McCain supported the Confederate flag.

As soon as news spread that McCain had called for removal of the Dixie flag from the statehouse, the SCV's Richard T. Hines funded the distribution of 250,000 fliers accusing McCain of "changing his tune" and describing Bush as "the [only] major candidate who refused to call the Confederate flag a racist symbol." Bush surged ahead of McCain and took South Carolina, dooming McCain's presidential hopes.

"People didn't buy it," Baum told me about McCain's gambit. "When he thought the flag issue would help him, he was for it. When he thought it wouldn't help him, going North, he denounced it. And you still have all these gullible liberals who think McCain's a saint."

Now, Allen is trying to lay the groundwork for his own Southern Strategy in 2008. On August 9, he took time out of his re-election campaign to keynote the South Carolina GOP's state convention. If he can overcome the controversies over his past in his Senate race, Allen may yet get to play his old game once again.

The national outrage over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comment last week comparing war protesters with Nazi appeasers of the 1930's satisfies me like a slice of pizza after a tough day of shoveling the driveway. Over the weekend, Frank Rich of the New York Times echoed my thoughts exactly by sizing up this old fool as follows:

Last week the man who gave us "stuff happens" and "you go to war with the Army you have" outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who "ridiculed or ignored" the rise of the Nazis in the 1930's and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a "moral or intellectual confusion" and fail to recognize the "new type of fascism" represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of "Defeatocrats" but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.

What made Mr. Rumsfeld's speech noteworthy wasn't its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That's old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld's performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America's fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here's how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler's appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain's hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn't go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld's trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator's use of torture - "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" - on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld's Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University's National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary's own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

It's good to read this in the New York Times, one of the papers that sold us the war in Iraq back in 2003 by highlighting Saddam's alleged WMD stockpile. (Look here for more on the Times' role in selling us the war). But I would bet that few Americans actually know that Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam back in 1983. If celebrity babies make the front page and stale who-done-it's still make the headlines, why can't the wonderful picture of a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein make the front pages these days? For God's sake, it should be on a billboard in every city in the country.

More recently, according to the New York Daily News, Secretary of State Rice

compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine. "I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?''' Rice said.

Can you believe this? Comparing the public's desire to leave Iraq with support for slavery? Is anyone vetting what adminstration officials are saying?

In the hall of fame of chutzpah, this kind of hypocrisy would get a bronze plaque alongside the fitness instructor who eats at McDonald's. But this country suffers from national amnesia, where big news is forgotten a few weeks later and entire blocks of memory go out the window after a few years. The newspapers print new material every day and I guess the editors think that's what the public wants, not news analysis or historical context. Few stories have staying power, and I would bet that a certain percentage of the American public cannot recall who was president during 9/11.

But is it amnesia if no one knew about it in the first place? How many people know that the U.S. had a close relationship with Saddam Hussein during the 1980's, even after he used chemical weapons on his own people? The national obsession during that decade was Iran, not Iraq. Most of us did not know that Saddam was a brutal thug because the media was not ramming it down our throats. Saddam was our friend, back then. No one paid attention when some diplomat by the name of Donald Rumsfeld had a fireside chat with Saddam in 1983 and told him how much the U.S. loved him.

A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that the Bush wiretapping program was unconstitutional. A similar lawsuit is pending in New York City, where a judge yesterday heard argument on whether the program is legal.

At the argument, the government's lawyer dropped a potential bombshell. It has been generally assumed that the wiretapping program violates a law passed by Congress in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires the government to get a warrant if it wants to listen in on phone conversations within the United States. These warrants are routinely issued by a special court like Halloween candy, and if the government faces an emergency and it can't get the paperwork together fast enough, it can actually get the warrant after-the-fact, something that routine police officers cannot do in searching your home.

Lawyers know that you can't make every conceivable argument to a judge and that you stick with your strongest arguments. The government in the past did not try to argue that the surveillance program was consistent with FISA, arguing more broadly that the president's authority to wage war trumps any statute. Now the government has perplexed the judge in suggesting that the wiretapping program does not violate FISA. Since the lawyer for the government revealed this position in court for the first time and did not set forth this argument in writing beforehand (the usual way to present your arguments), I have no idea what he's talking about. Sometimes, when someone is on the defensive in court, the best offense consists of arguing that black is white, and that the roll of Scotch Tape is really a court stenographer's machine.

So, in order to get what it wants, the administration is presenting the judge with a doomsday scenario. According to Associated Press, "A government lawyer used a dramatic scenario of a nuclear attack on Washington to illustrate his arguments Tuesday in defense of President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. Anthony Coppolino, a special litigation counsel based in Washington, said the Constitution gives Bush the right as commander in chief to do what is necessary to surveil terrorists and stop them from attacking the United States, including interrogating someone who might have information about an imminent attack. 'Suppose for example the president obtains intelligence that a nuclear bomb was planted ... right there in Washington, and the only way he was going to find out whether that was going to happen was to grab the person and interrogate him,' Coppolino said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. 'Would that be in his constitutional authority? I would say so.'"

This doomsday argument does not take into account how the government can get warrants after the fact. Doomsday scenarios also do not trump day-to-day application of the FISA law. There is always room to manuever in emergencies (such as a pending nuclear attack), but what about routine wiretapping of U.S. citizens, which is what these lawsuits are all about? The government's argument is broader than mere legalities. It says that the Bush administration should do whatever it wants.

September 6, 2006 Judge Hears Arguments on Federal Spying Program By ADAM LIPTAK New York Times

In a lively oral argument lasting almost three hours, a federal judge in Manhattan indicated yesterday that he had serious reservations about the legality of a National Security Agency surveillance program that monitors the international communications of people in the United States.

. . .

In a move that surprised Judge Lynch and lawyers who have been following the debate over the surveillance program, a government lawyer seemed to shift tactics to bring one more legal question within the scope of the privilege.

It has been widely assumed that the government has acknowledged that the surveillance program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that requires the government to obtain a warrant from a secret court before wiretapping the international communications of Americans for national security purposes.

“We don’t agree,” the lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, said, “that the government has specifically conceded that point.” He added that the question could not be answered without endangering national security.

Statements from government officials that seemed to make the concession, Mr. Coppolino said, “may not be fully complete, as they have all indicated.”

Judge Lynch was taken aback by the shift in tactics. “This is the first time,” he said, “that I have understood that the government is taking the position that it is a contested issue whether this violates FISA.”

Judge Lynch said he did not recall anything in the government’s briefs on this argument. Mr. Coppolino was unable to provide a citation.

Judge Lynch was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. He had been a professor at the Columbia University School of Law for more than 20 years, specializing in criminal law, constitutional theory and legal ethics.

He has not left the classroom behind entirely. The argument yesterday was studded with colorful hypothetical questions and echoes of the Socratic method. In response to one of his questions, about whether Yankees fans threatened with being strip-searched before entering the stadium would have standing to sue, Mr. Coppolino literally threw up his hands. “I don’t know,” he said, exasperated.

Judge Lynch appeared troubled by Mr. Coppolino’s argument that the president’s inherent constitutional power was enough to override Congressional enactments like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The judge also discounted the argument that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force granted the president the power to violate the surveillance act. “I’m not too impressed by that one,” he said.

Judge Lynch pressed Mr. Coppolino with a series of questions on the limits of presidential power in the face of Congressional prohibitions.

“So he can build a B-1 bomber if he wants to?” the judge asked. “If the president feels it necessary to break into a psychiatrist’s office to find out what Al Qaeda is up to, he can do that?”

Mr. Coppolino did not offer direct responses to those questions, but he was willing to say that the executive branch was sometimes entitled to take extraordinary steps. Asked if an American lawyer who had communicated with Al Qaeda could be grabbed on the street and interrogated about it, Mr. Coppolino responded, “I would say it is possible, depending on the scenario that is at stake.”

Judge Lynch did not appear persuaded. “It’s pretty uncharted ground that you’re asking me to get on,” he said. Then, apparently recalling the government’s state-secrets argument, he added, “Or, you’re asking me to stay off of it.”

Summing up, Judge Lynch said: “We’re debating a rather abstract but rather vital issue. Does the president have the power to do something despite the fact that Congress said ‘thou shalt not have this power’?”

He added, “I have no idea at this point how I’m going to come out on this.”

For us, problems are not really problems until it's an emergency. That is, its not a problem until its a PROBLEM. The car is sputtering but, what the hell, it runs. Then it breaks down on the highway and the tow truck is your lift home. Or you feel some pain in your tooth but then it goes away and there's no way I'm going back to the dentist. Next week, you are in the dentist's chair and he's revving up what looks like an electric power drill.

Global warming? We get less snow during the winter. That's good, right? The summer growing season is longer. That's good, right? The Goddamned ice caps start melting and the sea level rises. That's good, right? Wrong.

Many years from now, our grandchildren will go the library to read about world history. They will wonder why the cities are under water. And why it's 70 degrees during the New York City winters.

Here are some global warming updates. Things are not getting better; they are getting worse.

Scientists see new global warming threat By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer September 6, 2006 New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tends to shut it off."

The effect reported in Nature is seen mostly in Siberia, but also elsewhere, in a type of carbon-rich permafrost, flash frozen about 40,000 years ago. A new more accurate measuring technique was used on the bubbling methane, which is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the more prevalent carbon dioxide.

"The effects can be huge," said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "It's coming out a lot and there's a lot more to come out."

Another study earlier this summer in the journal Science found that the amount of carbon trapped in this type of permafrost - called yedoma - is much more prevalent than originally thought and may be 100 times the amount of carbon released into the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels.

It won't all come out at once or even over several decades, but the methane and carbon dioxide will escape the soil if temperatures increase, scientists say.

The issue of methane and carbon dioxide released from permafrost has caused concern this summer among climate scientists and geologists. Specialists in Arctic climate are coming up with research plans to study the effect, which is not well understood or observed, said Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a group of 300 scientists.

"It's kind of like a slow-motion time bomb," said Ted Schuur, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the University of Florida and co-author of the Science study. "There's these big surprises out there that we don't even know about."

Most of this yedoma is in north and eastern Siberia, areas that until recently had not been studied at length by scientists.

What makes this permafrost special is that during a rapid onset ice age, carbon-rich plants were trapped in the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, the carbon is released as methane if it's underwater in lakes, like much of the parts of Siberia that Walter studied. If it's dry, it's released into the air as carbon dioxide.

Scientists aren't quite sure which is worse. Methane is far more powerful in trapping heat, but only lasts about a decade before it dissipates into carbon dioxide and other chemicals. Carbon dioxide traps heat for about a century.

"The bottom line is it's better if it stays frozen in the ground," Schuur said. "But we're getting to the point where it's going more and more into the atmosphere."

Vladimir Romanovsky, geophysics professor at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said he thinks the big methane or carbon dioxide release hasn't started yet, but it's coming. It's closer in Alaska and Canada, which only has a few hundred square miles of yedoma, he said.

In Siberia, the many lakes of melted water make matters worse because the water, although cold, helps warm and thaw the permafrost, Walter said.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Greenland is melting. The way I remember it, Greenland should have been called Iceland, and Iceland should have been called Greenland. While "Greenland" sounds like a bucolic and pleasant meadow-like island, it's actually very icy. But not for long.

Greenland's Melting Ice Sheet May Speed Rise in Sea Level Study Finds No Boost in Antarctic Snowfall to Mitigate Problem

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006; A03

Two new scientific studies measuring Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheet and the pace of Antarctic snowfall suggest that the sea level may be rising faster than researchers previously assumed.

The papers, both published yesterday in the journal Science, provide the latest evidence of how climate change is transforming the global landscape. University of Texas at Austin researchers, using twin satellites, determined that the Greenland ice sheet, Earth's second-largest reservoir of fresh water, is melting at three times the rate at which it had been melting over the previous five years. A separate study by 16 international scientists concluded that Antarctic snowfall accumulation has remained steady over the past 50 years, with no increases that might have mitigated the melting of the ice shelf, as some researchers had assumed would occur.

Taken together, the two reports indicate that global sea level rise may increase more rapidly in the coming years, though the Greenland study is based on only 2 1/2 years of data. The melting of 57 cubic miles a year from Greenland's ice sheet could add 0.6 millimeters alone, which is higher than any previously published measurement for Greenland, according to University of Texas Center for Space Research scientist Jianli Chen.

"It's a very big number," Chen said, noting that for at least a hundred years the sea level has increased an average of 1.8 millimeters annually.

Byron Tapley, one of Chen's co-authors, said the ice loss along the sheet's eastern shoreline is particularly significant because it could help weaken the counterclockwise flow of the North Atlantic Current. The more buoyant fresh water from the ice melt could lower water temperatures and ultimately make Western European winters colder, he said.

"If enough fresh water enters the Norwegian Current and you interrupt return flow, then there could be climate effects in Europe," Tapley said.

But Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, questioned why scientists are drawing broad conclusions from data covering such a short time span.

"We now have 'the sky is falling down' on the basis of a few years of data," said Ebell, whose group is partly funded by the fossil-fuel industry.

The second paper, written by 16 scientists from seven countries, challenges computer projections that higher temperatures in the southernmost continent will spur greater snowfall accumulation and compensate for the world's melting ice sheets. Using satellite data that looked at both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets, the researchers concluded there has been no real increase in precipitation in the region in the past five decades.

Andrew J. Monaghan, a meteorologist at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center, said in an interview that his findings suggest the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2001 prediction that Antarctic snowfall would increase 15 to 20 percent by the end of the century may not be borne out. Some researchers had hoped increased snowfall in the region would thicken the Antarctic ice sheets and help counterbalance any future melt.

"It's a much more complex situation than assuming a temperature rise is going to lead to a commensurate increase in precipitation," Monaghan said.

Five years on, 9/11 remains the dominant story of our time. That's because, as they say, 9/11 is the "new normal." The state of alert will be with us for a very long time. The "war on terror" will never end. Presidents will come and go, but the threat of another attack will always loom, and the horror of a possible nuclear attack will also be with us, one of the byproducts of the cold war, when two superpowers spent billions of dollars on weaponry. Some of these weapons are not accounted for.

It's fashionable to say today that you knew 9/11 was coming. Right wing Republicans have adopted a new talking point, repeated endlessly on talk radio and Fox News: that Bill Clinton dithered when terrorists were plotting against us during the 1990's, starting with the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and continuing with attacks on an American embassy and the U.S.S. Cole.

But the reality is that this country was sleeping during the 1990's. The growth of the Internet and more television news stations only made us dumber. The Internet is wonderful and much news is disseminated without gatekeepers, but you have to know where to find the information. It's like a library hidden in the forest. As for television news, despite more 24-hour news channels, they broadcast absolute shit most of the time, fixating on true-crime stories and echoing war propaganda.

It never occurred to us that terrorists would strike the U.S. Recent books about the "war on terror" show that the country was on a secret red alert during the late 1990s and early 2000s as intelligence specialists began to obsess over bin Ladin and issued warnings about his intent to strike the U.S. But the country was distracted by the Clinton impeachment story of 1998, which broke in January when Monica Lewinsky's picture went on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and ended in December, when the U.S. Senate voted to impeach the President. We lost a full year during the 1990's to a bullshit scandal that never justified the wasted millions of dollars and hours in trying to undo Clinton's electoral victories.

The 2000 presidential election was a turning point. All the right wingers who complain that Clinton did not care about terrorism forget that the Republicans nominated an inexperienced Texas governor who said nothing during the campaign about terror, soothing us instead with pap about "compassionate conservatism" and maintaining a "humble" foreign policy without any nation-building. These campaign promises were either lies or wholly delusional. The election was rife with irregularities and a disgraceful Supreme Court ruling handing Bush the win. The real tragedy is that the American public gave Bush enough votes to make it close.

Memories of the 2000 election result were receding by September 2001. We did not know that summer that bin Ladin was plotting to terrorize the country. We did not know that some people in the foreign policy establishment were fixating on war with Iraq. The country should have been on red alert that summer. Anyone familiar with the Presidential Daily Briefing knows Bush learned on August 6 that bin Ladin wanted to attack inside the country. On vacation, probably reading some book about baseball and clearing brush in Crawford, Texas, Bush responded to this alarming news by telling the intelligence agent that he had covered his ass. Those were Bush's exact words, according to Ron Suskind, and the Bush administration has not questioned that account. Bush and his staff had reason to know that terror was around the corner, but on September 10, 2001, "Mr Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to the White House. It covered 68 programmes, none of them related to counter-terrorism. He also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities. Counter-terrorism was not on the list. He turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorist threats."

We were sleeping during the first week of September 2001, and the Bush administration was sleeping also. Could September 11 have been prevented? We will never know. What if Bush flew back to Washington on August 6 and gave a televised address that week on the terror threat and issued an executive order to lock down the airports and secure the cockpits? Would that have deterred the attacks? Criminals run away when they know they are detected. Hindsight is 20-20. But these are questions worth asking. Sadly, no one is asking them.

One of the real tragedies is that a true clown was in the Oval Office on September 11. Insiders tells interesting stories about how the presidents actually farts in the presence of new staffers and curses like a drunken sailor. It is an absolute fact that the President has almost no intellectual ambition. No one felt secure in the knowledge that Bush was handed massive decision-making responsibilities on September 11. He was not elected to fight wars or to make important national security decisions. He probably thought being president would be easy. It seemed easy for Clinton, riding high on the technology boom, fouling up his legacy only through his sexual relationship with an intern. Surely, Bush thought to himself, I would never have an extra-marital affair, and the government pretty much runs itself these days, particularly with a bureacracy numbering in the thousands. We know that, in running for president, Bush calculated that his legacy would be complete with a successful war in Iraq. Building a good legacy was easy in late 20th Century America.

September 11 taught us that the President does make a difference. It also makes a difference who advises the President. Few raised an eyebrow when Bush's Vice Presidential pick was a man who can only be described as a social degenerate. Here's the Wikipedia entry for Dick Cheney:

Among the many votes he cast during his tenure in the House, he voted in 1979 with the majority against making Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, and again voted with the majority in 1983 when the measure passed.

He voted against the creation of the U.S. Department of Education, citing his concern over budget deficits and expansion of the federal government. He also claimed the department was an encroachment on states' rights.

He also voted against funding Head Start. As a vice presidential candidate in 2000, he reversed his position.

In 1986, after President Reagan vetoed a bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its official policy of apartheid, Cheney was one of 83 Representatives who voted against overriding the veto. In later years, Cheney articulated his opposition to "unilateral sanctions," against many different countries, stating "they almost never work." He also opposed unilateral sanctions against communist Cuba, and later in his career he would support multilateral sanctions against Iraq. However the comparison to Cuba is not exactly apt, as the European Community had voted to place limited sanctions upon South Africa in 1986.

In 1986, Cheney, along with 145 Republicans and 31 Democrats, voted against a nonbinding Congressional resolution calling on the South African government to release Nelson Mandela from prison, after the majority Democrats defeated proposed amendments to the language that would have required Mandela to renounce violence sponsored by the ANC and requiring the ANC to oust the Communist faction from leadership. The resolution was defeated. Appearing on CNN during the Presidential campaign in 2000, Cheney addressed criticism for this, saying he opposed the resolution because the ANC "at the time was viewed as a terrorist organization and had a number of interests that were fundamentally inimical to the United States."

Halliburton operates two major business segments: The Energy Services Group provides technical products and services for oil and gas exploration and production, and the KBR subsidiary is a major construction company of refineries, oil fields, pipelines, and chemical plants.

Cheney is now running the country, according to nearly all insider-accounts of the Bush administration. Did anyone care that a war profiteer would have its foot in the Oval Office? No one cared. When we did start to care, it was too late. President Bush could not be removed from office when he launched the Iraq War, and Halliburton's relationship with that war is now the stuff of legend. But there is nothing we can do about it but protest.

Protesting is as American as apple pie. And it's not as fattening. Protesting is natural and even required no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Our foreign policy is usually up to no good, and our domestic policy is no better. The system is so corrupt that even President Ralph Nader would have risked becoming a war criminal. The system is larger than any one man.

Much was lost on that day. The loss of life goes without saying. The new normal means endless war for whatever purpose the government decides. Today Iraq, tomorrow Iran. The next day, a country as obscure to us as Iraq was during the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan played footsie with Saddam Hussein and we directed our hate towards Libya. The new normal also means that dissent is demonized by the most powerful elements of American society, and we face the very real prospect that another terror attack could curtail civil liberties forever.

As it now stands, your phone may be tapped and you will never know it. The history of cold war America was the history of surveillance against leftist activists. If I'm a betting man, I would say that some component of the infamous Cointelpro surveillance program is still with us. It did surface out of the blue during the 1980s when the Reagan administration declared war on those who dissented from American foreign policy in Central America. The stakes are higher today because now we have a real enemy. And the infrastructure that sought to silence dissenters is still with us. Whatever the government tells us about its intentions in tapping the phone lines of terrorists, the very real possibility that your phone is also tapped cannot be discounted. Tapping the lines of innocent people has always been the American way. Whatever the government is doing in this regard, it will continue to do it for maybe the rest of our lives.

Newspaper columnist Bill Press is not a household name, but a recent column raised good questions about the current Bush policy of demonizing dissenters. Recall a few weeks ago when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared war protesters with Nazi appeasers. It's not that Bush is a Nazi or even a facist. It's that he does what any good authoritarian does in times of war. I can't say it any better than Bill Press:

Americans won’t be fooled by Bush’s new terror tactics, any more than they’ll be spooked by his new fondness for comparing Osama bin Laden to Hitler and critics of the Iraq war to Nazi sympathizers. But Bush keeps plugging away, on the theory that if he tells the same lies often enough, people will start believing them. As he explained in March 2005: “In my line of work, you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in . . . to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Sound familiar? It should. Bush’s words are strikingly similar to those of another famous propagandist: “Of course, the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.” That’s how Hermann Goering put it at the Nuremberg trials in 1945.

So who’s sounding like a Nazi now?

You didn't have to watch TV last night to know that the President's 9/11 anniversary speech was more of the same. The newspapers today have devoted much space to this speech, confirming once again that the President sets the news agenda in this country. The Commander in Chief is also the Editor in Chief.

The news behind the news continues to pile up. After telling us for years that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with al Qaida, the U.S. Senate finds otherwise.

Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq.

The report also newly faults intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

You may say, what's the big deal? Everyone knows that Saddam had no relationship. Well, not everyone knew. It's how the war started. And it's how Bush got re-elected. Over the weekend, Vice President Cheney continued with his blowhardian analysis that Saddam had a "relationship" with al-Qaida. Read the analysis over the Daily Howler which shows once again that the public relations apparatus out of the Vice President's office still operates at full throttle. It's been this way for years. The below excerpt is from a web posting in April 2004:

U.S. public perceptions about former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) continues to lag far behind the testimony of experts, boosting chances that President George W Bush will be re-elected, according to a survey and analysis released Thursday.

Despite statements by such officials as the Bush administration's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay; its former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke; former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix, as well as admissions by senior administration officials themselves, a majority of the public still believes Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and had WMD stocks or programs before U.S. troops invaded the country 13 months ago.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to read the following article on the front page instead of yet another Bush speech about the "war on terror" and our efforts to make the world a better place? The below article shows that, after hijacking 9/11 to fight the war in Iraq, the Bush team had no plan for a post-Saddam Iraq. That is why the country is now mired in civil war and American men and woman are in harm's way. Their deaths are on the hands of Bush and Rumsfeld.

"HE WOULD FIRE THE NEXT PERSON THAT SAID THAT"....Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

...."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

It was actually a small newspaper in Virginia which broke this story. The article begins: "Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday. In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq."

Compare this kind of excellent journalism with the pap which appears on the front of every newspaper in America this morning, depicting President Bush laying wreaths at the site of the terror attacks and then addressing the nation from the Oval Office. That story could have been written over the weekend. But the story from the small newspaper in Virginia is the real story of the war on terror. An incompetent and pathetic Bush administration which is shipping young men and women to fight in a sorry war from which they may never return.

Click here to find out why.

Never let the conservatives or the Republicans browbeat us into believing they are more patriotic than we are. Few public commentators are hitting as hard as Keith Olbermann from MSNBC. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, this commentary is available for all. This was broadcast last night.

Over the weekend, Vice President Cheney told Tim Russert of Meet the Press that the terrorists benefit when Americans debate the merits of the Iraq War:

So you look at situation today in Afghanistan or even in Iraq, and you’ve got people who have doubts. They want to know whether or not if they stick their heads up, the United States, in fact, is going to be there to complete the mission. And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States, suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.

Also over the weekend, Cheney continued to claim there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaida even though the Senate Intelligence Committee had just issued a report showing no such relationship existed. This alleged relationship helped sell the Iraq War. The pros at ThinkProgress.org set it straight better than I can:

On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. According to the report, “a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein’s government ‘did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.’” In fact, Hussein tried to capture Zarqawi.

This morning on Meet the Press, Cheney repeatedly cited Zarqawi as the link between pre-war Iraq and al-Qaeda. When Tim Russert mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Cheney said he “hadn’t seen it.”

Cheney has blown it so many times and exaggerated the facts and smeared administration opponent so frequently that I am beginning to think this is a calculated effort to throw red meat to the true-believers, those who will always support the administration and cheer on Bush and Cheney no matter what. This is what President Nixon did in the early 1970's, when felon Spiro Agnew as Vice President saber-rattled in a way that Nixon probably deemed beneath the Oval Office. Here's Wikipedia on Agnew, who resigned because of unrelated criminal activity:

Agnew was known for his tough criticisms of political opponents, especially journalists and anti-Vietnam War activists. He was known for attacking his opponents with unusual, often alliterative epithets, some of which were coined by White House speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan, including:

"nattering nabobs of negativism," (written by Safire)
"pusillanimous pussyfoots",
"hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history",
"the liberal intellectuals...masochistic compulsion to destroy their country's strength",
"effete corps of impudent snobs", and
"radiclib," a portmanteau of "radical liberal".
In short, Agnew was Nixon's "hatchet man" when defending the administration on the Vietnam War. Agnew was chosen to make several powerful speeches in which he spoke out against anti-war protestors and media portrayal of the Vietnam War, labeling them "Franco Un-American".

Cheney is too smart to believe what he is saying. At some point during the Bush administration's early stages, he was probably designated the hatchet man, assigned to say outrageous things to rally the faithful just like Agnew did. That's no excuse, of course, for slandering the American public.

Nick Drake was a brilliant English folk singer who recorded three albums before dying in 1974, still in his 20's. For reasons that I cannot understand, he is the greatest folk rock artist you have never heard of. This video shows the master and one of his greatest songs, River Man. Click here and let this autumnal and wonderful song blow you away.

Is it too much to ask that the police not look down our pants during an arrest? An interesting case recently from the State of Virginia highlights the limits of police conduct in arresting people on the street.

Most of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution are vaguely written. It's strange that our greatest rights as citizens are written in vague terms that courts may interpret any way they wish. But the Fourth Amendment is quite specific and says that searches and seizures must be reasonable and the police need a warrant. Here's what it says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The right of the people to be left alone was important to the people who wrote the Constitution because they were tired of police abuses. But the courts have carved out exeptions under the Fourth Amendment to deal with special circumstances, like when someone is arrested on the street and the police think the suspect may have a hidden weapon. Obviously, there's no time to get a warrant under those circumstances, so the police generally can do a quick search to make sure the suspect cannot pull off a surprise attack.

You can imagine how that exception can be abused. Some police officers might think that someone suspected of committing a crime on the streets would have contraband or some other illegal things on his person, so a quick body check might do some good. With a hat-tip to the Crime and Federalism blog, That's what happened to a guy in North Carolina.

In a case decided recently, the Court of Appeals in North Carolina ruled that an officer had no right to shine a flashlight into the pants of a suspect. While the suspect did consent to a seach, the Court ruled that he could not have reasonably expected that the officer would be looking down his pants and into his crotch, where he found drugs stashed away. The Court explained:

We conclude that Officer Correa exceeded the scope of defendant's consent when he inspected defendant's genitals. First, Officer Correa did not obtain specific consent to visually inspect defendant's genitals. Officer Correa simply obtained general consent to search defendant's person. Second, given the scope of Officer Correa's first search of defendant, a reasonable person would not have expected the second search to entail such an intrusive genital inspection. Third, the fact that defendant did not expressly limit the scope of the second search does not make the second search reasonable. Defendant could not reasonably have expected that Officer Correa would visually inspect defendant's genitals. Therefore, defendant had no reason to limit the scope of the second search. This is further demonstrated by defendant's reaction when Officer Correa pulled defendant's sweat pants away from defendant's body and trained his flashlight on defendant'sgenitals. Defendant objected to this intrusion; however, the trial court found that Officer Correa had already seen the white cap of the pill bottle. Nevertheless, defendant's reaction demonstrates that he could not reasonably have expected the excessive scope of Officer Correa's second search.

. . . At the suppression hearing, Officer Correa testified that when he asked for consent to search defendant a second time, he "was not really expecting to find anything, honestly." Officer Correa also testified on cross-examination that "[w]hen I ask if I can search, I check everywhere. That's just standard procedure, that's just the way I was taught, that you search everywhere because drugs, guns, money, weapons, anything can be concealed under their clothing as well." Officer Correa's testimony demonstrates that he did not have any reason to suspect that defendant, in particular, was concealing weapons or contraband near his genitals. Rather, Officer Correa conducted genital searches as a matter of course. Furthermore, Officer Correa had already conducted a full search of defendant's person, which had not uncovered any weapons or contraband, when he conducted an inspection of defendant's genitals. Because Officer Correa's first full search did not uncover any weapons or contraband, OfficerCorrea reasonably did not expect to find anything on his second search, and accordingly had little justification for conducting a visual inspection of defendant's genitals. Officer Correa's discovery of the cash in defendant's pocket, while suspicious, did not authorize Officer Correa to proceed with such an intrusive search.

So the officer would search people like this as a matter of course. I would imagine the discussion would go something like this:

What are you searching for?

I don't know. I'll know it when I find it.

The consequences of this illegal search were dramatic. As a result of the contraband found in the suspect's pants, he was found guilty and sentenced to 130 to 165 months in prison. The successful appeal won him a new trial.

The only news anchor today with the courage to stand up to this administration is Keith Olbermann, a former sportscaster. There's no irony here. Sports reporters cannot make things up or slant the truth. The games are broadcast for all to see, and there is no way that a sports journalist can shuck and jive the public. If a team's playing lousy, then the team's playing lousy. Sportwriters can also be the best writers at the newspaper. The have to weave poetry and keen observation skills in analyzing the game.

Olbermann has been hitting Bush hard these days. He did it again on Monday night.

The link to Olbermann's recent commentary shows a flustered Bush answering a question that no one asked of him. The strategy is to answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.

What will happen to us? I am not optimistic. There is much speculation that the Republicans will lose the Congress in this November's midterm elections. I'm not so sure. Fear is a wonderful emotion if you're running from a wild animal. But its easily exploitable. The Republicans know that fear works. It worked in 2002 and 2004. Bush's popularity ratings are on the rise. If his handlers link this to Bush and Co's assault on independent thought, then we're all in trouble.

Some people think that kids should be seen and not heard. Some people think that school is only for learning. But you can learn things outside the classroom, like the meaning of the First Amendment.

Generally, students in public schools have fewer speech rights than everyone else. That's because schools have a particular focus in educating the kids and some speech will disrupt the educational process. Similar limitations on speech apply to the military and prisons. For one kid in Vermont, the school must have felt like the military or prison. His lawsuit in its own way is a landmark student speech case that coincidently dovetails with current events.

The 1960's saw a sea-change in how we saw the world. These changes affected how the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment for schoolchildren. I can imagine the speech restrictions that took place in the public schools prior to 1968. But that year, the Court ruled that a school district in Iowa could not punish a student for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. This was the Tinker case.

The Supreme Court does not rule on student speech rights very often, so a ruling that came down a few weeks ago by the United States Court of Appeals was decided with little concrete guidance from the Supreme Court. It involved a seventh-grader who came to school with an anti-Bush shirt depicting the President as a cocaine-snorting drunk who dodged the draft and became a chicken-hawk. The school told the student to change his short or put duct tape over the drug references, but the Court of Appeals said the shirt was legal and the school cannot censor this political speech.

While schools can censor student speech that's offensive or lewd, these legal standards typically involve vulgarity, obscenity and profanity. The parameters were best summarized by one judge's observation that students can wear Tinker's armband but not Cohen's jacket. The jacket reference was a 1970 Supreme Court ruling that allowed an anti-war guy to walk through a courthouse with a jacket that said "Fuck the Draft." Since speech restrictions are broader at school, Cohen's jacket would be prohibited there. Since the anti-Bush shirt did not articulate a pro-drug or pro-alcohol message, the fact that it was controversial and offensive to some was not enough for school officials to make the student take it off or cover it with duct tape.

The anti-Bush tee shirt case has generated a lot of media coverage. Here's how the Associated Press saw it:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. student who sued school officials after he was made to censor his T-shirt that labelled President George W. Bush "Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief" and a former alcohol and cocaine abuser won an appeal on Wednesday to wear the T-shirt to school. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favour of Zachery Guiles, who through his parents claimed his free speech rights had been violated when school officials made him put duct tape over parts of his T-shirt that showed a Bush image surrounded by cocaine, a razor blade, a straw and a martini.

Guiles, who as a seventh grader in 2004 wore the T-shirt to Williamstown Middle High School in Vermont once a week for two months after purchasing it at an anti-war rally, appealed the case after a lower court ruled in favour of the school.

The school argued the images were offensive because they undermined the school's anti-drug message.

The T-shirt read "George W. Bush" and "Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief" with a picture of the president's face wearing a helmet superimposed on the body of a chicken.

The back of the T-shirt showed lines of cocaine, a martini glass and smaller print that accused Bush of being a "Crook," "Cocaine Addict," AWOL," "Draft Dodger" and "Lying Drunk Driver."

The appeals court said while the T-shirt "uses harsh rhetoric and imagery to express disagreement with the president's policies and to impugn his character," the images depicted "are not plainly offensive as a matter of law."

"We conclude that defendants' censorship of the images on Guiles's T-shirt violated his free speech rights," the ruling said, noting the T-shirt was censored after only one parent with opposing political views complained.

"Guiles's T-shirt did not cause any disruption or confrontation in the school," the ruling said.

Some may decry the loss of civility in schools when the courts allow an anti-Bush shirt at a time of war. But how often do middle-school students actually voice an opinion about anything important? The controversy would hopefully trigger some kind of teach-in at the school where students could learn about and debate the First Amendment, war and peace and even students' rights. Note to those school administrators: seize the moment!

Newsmakers this week were aghast when the President of Venezuela called President Bush the "devil" during a speech at the United Nations. Hugo Chavez is the latest enemy in our search for enemies. These enemies rally the faithful as war-lovers bang the war drums more loudly each week. How dare Hugo Chavez criticize our beloved President. How dare he!

The national amnesia that infects public discourse in this country prevents us from fairly examining why someone like Chavez would say this. To put it bluntly, the Bush administration was complicit in efforts to overthrow Chavez, an elected President of a sovereign country. We do not have the right to do this. But the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America is the history of U.S.-sponsored coups against elected officials in sovereign countries. For decades, all the U.S. establishment had to in order to get away with this was to say the coup was necessary because the ousted government was Communist. Even if it wasn't.

This article from the London Guardian provides some insight into the 2002 coup. This link from Project Censored also gives a good overview of what happened. The below article from Newsday a few years ago is also worth a read. And ask yourself this: if you knew that someone was trying to kill you (or at least throw you out of your house and take over your family), wouldn't you call him the devil? Wouldn't you?

Published on Wednesday, November 24, 2004 by the Long Island, NY Newsday CIA Knew of Plot Against Venezuela's Chavez Leader Not Warned, Documents Reveal by Bart Jones and Letta Tayler The U.S. government knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks prior to a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the putsch.

Yet the United States, which depends on Venezuela for nearly one-sixth of its oil, never warned the Chávez government, Venezuelan officials said.

The Bush administration has denied it was involved in the coup or knew one was being planned. At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after the 47-hour coup, a senior administration official who did not want to be named said, "The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow - or to get Chávez out of power."

Yet based on the newly released CIA briefs, an analyst said yesterday that did not appear to be the case.

"This is substantive evidence that the CIA knew in advance about the coup, and it is clear that this intelligence was distributed to dozens of members of the Bush administration, giving them knowledge of coup plotting," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington.

However, Kornbluh said that while the documents show U.S. officials knew a coup was coming, perhaps implying tacit approval, they do not constitute proof the United States was involved in ousting Chávez, Venezuela's elected leader. That is partly because the briefs are from the intelligence side of the CIA, not the operational side.

A CIA spokeswoman contended the agency played no role in the coup and was merely collecting information about political events in Venezuela for top U.S. officials. She said it was up to those officials and not the CIA to determine what to do with the information.

"The CIA was simply doing what it is we do, in terms of analyzing events and providing policy-makers with our best estimate of the events as they unfold," said the spokeswoman, who declined to be named. She added that alerting Chávez to the impending coup "would suggest we would meddle in the affairs of another nation."

Asked to comment on the CIA documents, a U.S. State Department spokesman would say only, "As we've stated before, there is no basis to claims the United States was involved in the events of April 12-14 in Venezuela."

One of the CIA documents filed just five days before the coup would appear to support that statement. It notes that "repeated warnings that the U.S. will not support any extraconstitutional moves to oust Chávez probably have given pause to the plotters."

White House and National Security Council officials had no immediate comment.

Chávez was traveling in Spain yesterday and could not be reached for comment, although his information minister, Andres Izarra, said through a representative that his government had not yet taken a position on the documents. Tarek William Saab, a state governor and member of the president's inner circle, said the documents showed "that the United States was implicated in this coup and did nothing to stop it."

The Bush administration and Chávez, a fiery former paratrooper, have clashed repeatedly, with Chávez accusing the United States of backing the coup against him and U.S. officials denouncing his leadership as authoritarian. The United States was one of the few nations to embrace the coup initially, though it later reversed its position.

The documents were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by Eva Golinger, a Long Island attorney and pro-Chávez activist who also is investigating U.S. funding of groups opposed to the Venezuelan leader. Golinger said she was outraged by the documents. "If they knew that a democratic government was going to be overthrown, why wouldn't they send signals to it or at least explain what was going to happen?"

The documents - called Senior Executive Security Briefs - are one level below the highest-level Presidential Daily Briefs and are circulated among about 200 top-level U.S. officials, Kornbluh said.

Chávez was arrested and overthrown on April 12, 2002, after military dissidents blamed him for violence at an opposition protest march that left 19 people dead and 300 wounded. He was returned to power two days later.

All the CIA documents were heavily censored before being released. One, dated April 6, 2002, states that "dissident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month."

The document adds: "The level of detail in the reported plans [censored] targets Chávez and 10 other senior officials for arrest - lends credence to the information, but military and civilian contacts note that neither group appears ready to lead a successful coup and may bungle the attempt by moving too quickly."

The brief also states, "To provoke military action, the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month or ongoing strikes at the state-owned oil company PSVSA."

While there is no requirement that one government inform another with which it has diplomatic relations that it may be facing a coup attempt, such an alert would be in keeping with the spirit of the Inter-American Democratic Charter of which both Washington and Venezuela are members, according to international relations experts.

Julia Sweig, deputy director of Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Washington, said: "The fact that we didn't call Chávez and say, 'This is brewing,' reflects the incredible antipathy toward Chávez at that time" on the part of the Bush administration.

Jones was reporting from Long Island and Tayler from Caracas.

Who is our greatest intellectual? I would nominate Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist who doubles as a one of the most influential critics of U.S. foreign policy.

No bookshelf is complete without at least one of Chomsky's books. Just as his work influenced the Vietman War-era protesters in the 1960's and early 1970's, I was impressed by his books about U.S. policy in Central American in the 1980's, as well as his work analyzing media bias and government propaganda. His name remains a dirty word among conservatives who love authority and take the government at its word, but if you want to think for yourself and read about American policy, warts and all, then Chomsky's your man.

Many people know Chomsky's name but his books remain obscure, though his prolific output probably brings him more readers than we think. One of his books hit number 1 on the Amazon list last week after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez actually plugged it during a United Nations Speech. The New York Times covered the book surge over the weekend in what can only be described as a hit job.

Chomsky has been tough on the New York Times, attacking this influential newpaper's foreign coverage for decades. He crucified the Times during the 1980's in particular when its foreign correspondents were parroting U.S. government propaganda in covering Reagan's illegal and brutal wars in Central America. So the Times probably never cared for Chomsky. But rarely did the Times body slam Chomsky on the front page.

The article starts out OK, but keep reading:

September 23, 2006 U.S. Best Seller, Thanks to Rave by Latin Leftist By MOTOKO RICH

All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes & Noble, and booksellers around the country have noted a spike in sales.

The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” a detailed critique of American foreign policy that Mr. Chomsky published two years ago, hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the last two days.

“It doesn’t normally happen that you get someone of the stature of Mr. Chávez holding up a book at a speech at the U.N.,” said Jay Hyde, a manager at Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In his speech, in which Mr. Chávez excoriated President George W. Bush as the “devil,” he held up a copy of “Hegemony” and urged his audience “very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.”

Calling it an “excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century,” Mr. Chávez added, “I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.”

. . .

Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

. . .

Mr. Chomsky, 77, is hardly an obscure writer. Many people have heard of the outspoken professor, who is a darling of the left, even if they have not yet read his work. “I think Chávez speaking to it renewed interest and made people say, ‘I know that author and I’m going to check it out,’ ” said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble.

So far, so good. The article does not really tell us what Chomsky says about U.S. foreign policy or the research that backs up his central theory: that the U.S. government routinely wages illegal and immoral wars against Third World countries in order to exploit cheap labor, grab their natural resources and generally project power. This power is usually up to no good. It should come as no suprise that few governments wield power in a benevolent manner. It's just that we have been conditioned to believe that our government alone does things out of love and a desire to spread peace and democracy. These false beliefs are absolutely shattered by Chomsky's books. There is just too much evidence to sustain the view that our government acts in good faith around the world. Chomsky's strength is that he attacks policies of both major political parties, deeming them cut from the same cloth.

Here is where the article runs afoul of good taste:

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

"I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16."

Dershowtiz has actually written some decent books, including a great one about his career as a crusading criminal defense lawyer. But let me ask this question. Who the f*ck cares what Alan Dershowitz thinks of Chomsky's books? The Times does not tell us that Dershowitz and Chomsky have been feuding for decades. The Times had to be aware of this. But the newspaper tells us nothing about their feud. Couldn't the Times find a more objective person to comment on Chomsky's books? Is it fair to quote someone who says that people only buy Chomsky's books for show without reading them?

Never before has one of Chomsky's books gotten this attention. The public would do well to read his stuff, and the Times had an opportunity to do justice to his views, whatever the newspaper thinks of them. My suggestion: go to the Chomsky website and read his work for yourself. Entire books of his are reproduced on this website. I know of no other major author who makes his books available like this. This one is a good start.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003 many people predicted that the invasion would cause more harm than good. This was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. There had better be a damned good reason for this, people said, because we have already sent troops to Afghanistan. The Bush administration sold the war by declaring that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that in a post-9/11 world we could not afford the possibility that Saddam would forge an alliance with bin Ladin. Indeed, many war-mongers said, Saddam already had a relationship with bin Ladin and war with Iraq is a necessary way to reduce the threat of terror.

We know through congressional and other investigations that all the justifications for the Iraq War were false and strong evidence suggests that the Bush administration actively misled the American public about the most important policy decision that a President can make: the decision whether to go to war.

War patriots called the war critics unpatriotic in denouncing the war in Iraq. It's tough to fight back rhetorically when people say that you are pro-Saddam and that indecision on these issues will come back to haunt us. But the critics were right. Yesterday's New York Times reported on the front page the sad reality that the Iraq War has made the terror threat even more ominous.

This is serious. We went to war for pretextual reasons and not only killed thousands of American soldiers and God knows how many Iraqis, but the war has actually made the terror threat worse. This story is one of this "holy shit" moments, like when you realize on a hot day that your car is overheating on the highway and there's no antifreeze in the trunk, or that the condom broke or that a cop is pulling you over and you had too much to drink. There is no turning back. That's the problem with war. Unintended consequences cannot be ignored, unless you are a war-monger who loves war and violence and you want to flex your muscles to a world that will fight back and make you pay.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

By Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times
24 September 2006

Washington - A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," said one American intelligence official.

. . .

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

. . .

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said that the White House "played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism." The estimate's judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe," concludes one, a report titled "9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges." "We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism."

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. "The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry," it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, "exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies."

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says that "Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack."

. . .

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of "self-generating" cells inspired by Al Qaeda's leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

Recent news that the Iraq War has made us less safe should be shouted from the rooftops. The Bush administration dove head first into the swimming pool without checking to see if there was any water. There was no water, and now thousands of Americans solders and Iraqi citizens lay at the bottom of the pool, paralyzed, bloody, wounded for life and dead.

We are to blame for this. Sure, maybe the polling places were hacked and thousands of Kerry voters were disenfranchised. True, the Supreme Court handed Bush the election in 2000 on a dubius legal theory. But the vote should not have been so close that these kinds of shenanigans would have made a difference. Millions of Americans put down the remote control long enough to allow Bush to scare them with terror before giving this punk another four years.

Over the weekend, the newspapers reported that the National Intelligence Estimate -- a group of all the intelligence experts in government -- concluded that "The American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks." I wonder what Bush was thinking in August when he said, "You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of "we're going to stir up the hornet's nest" theory. It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East." Interesting thing is that the National Intelligence Estimate was from a report completed in April 2006. Did the President read it? What about his speech writers?

As suggested by TalkingPointsMemo.com:

For the last six weeks and, in fact, the last six months, the White House and the president have been engaged in a coordinated campaign to convince the public that despite the setbacks and mistakes, the war in Iraq is a critical component of fighting the War on Terror. Making that argument is their plan for the next six weeks until the election. All the while, they've been sitting on a report that says that's flat wrong, a lie and that precisely the opposite is the case.

In the meantime, Iraq is on fire. Stories like the one below will haunt us for years to come. The victims who were burned to death in Iraq over the weekend are no different from the people we love. They did not ask for this war.

Women and Children Slaughtered in Baghdad By Amit R. Paley and Salih Dehema The Washington Post

Sunday 24 September 2006

Baghdad, Iraq - A fiery explosion tore through a line of people waiting to buy fuel Saturday and killed at least 38 people, mainly women and children, continuing the wave of tit-for-tat sectarian killings that have defied U.S. efforts to stanch the bloodshed.

The horrific blast sent women engulfed in flames screaming through the streets. Two preteen girls embraced each other as they burned to death, witnesses said. Later, wailing mourners thronged the scene of the blast, which was strewn with the shoes of victims and a woman's bloodied cloak, and voiced doubt that the reprisal violence would ever end.

"We carry our death certificates with us now, waiting only to fill in the date of death," said Bayan Jasem al-Kaaby, 40, a minibus driver, after he was burned by the explosion that rocked the Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City at about 10 a.m.

A Sunni Arab insurgent group, Jamaat Jund al-Sahaaba, asserted responsibility for the bombing. The group said in an Internet statement that the attack was retribution for assaults on Sunnis in Al-Hurriyah district of Baghdad, where police said two mosques were attacked and five people killed Friday.

"We tell the malicious Shia that our swords are able to reach the depths of your areas, so stop the killing" of the Sunni people, the statement said, according to a translation by the SITE Institute.

It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion. Jamaat Jund al-Sahaaba asserted it had detonated a booby-trapped car, but witnesses said they saw a female suicide bomber, wearing a black veil that left only her eyes exposed, blow up as she tried to cut into the line of women waiting for kerosene. The bomber pushed a cart carrying a metal barrel filled with ball bearings, witnesses said.

An Interior Ministry official, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Salman, said at least 31 people had been wounded.

By midafternoon, the street where the explosion took place was still littered with abandoned yellow, red and blue jerrycans. Bits of flesh flecked the muddy ground, and blood pooled in front of Um Ali's home, left by a woman who clutched her infant child as she bled from a wound in her neck.

Bush was asked by CNN about increasing violence in Iraq recently. He downplayed it as "just a comma." Here is a transcript and some good commentary from TheCarpetbaggerReport.com on that interview:

BLITZER: Let's move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that's the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there's also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy.

Even by Bush's already-low standards, it was a stunning comment. We're talking about a war that has claimed 2,700 American lives and seriously injured 20,000 more. It's a crisis that has, by any reasonable measure, made the threat of terrorism against Americans considerably worse. It's a misadventure that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, to fight a war sold under false pretenses, and mismanaged with almost child-like incompetence.

Asked to explain himself, the president is unconcerned. Everything we're seeing is "just a comma." I'm sure that will bring comfort to the families of those who have sacrificed so much for Bush's mistakes.

Now, I think I know what the president means. As he sees it, history takes a long view, so three and a half years of mistakes, violence, poor judgment, and corruption are minor details that will be easily overlooked by a long-term triumph. Or so Bush says. Of course, by this logic, everything is "just a comma." Every life, every conflict, and every generation can be dismissed and made to appear trivial by backing up enough degrees.

It is, in other words, the ultimate cop out. Conditions in Iraq are getting worse, not better. The attacks are growing, not shrinking. The casualty rate is going up, not down. More than ever, we're looking to the president for leadership, sound judgment, and clear answers.

Instead, we get, "just a comma." Amazing.

It takes only a few minutes each night to realize that cable news is almost totally devoid of news that we can use. The prime-time newscasts are really shouting matches dominated by conservatives who defend President Bush the way a six year old defends his father. And God forbid a missing person becomes news. The search will dominate news for weeks or even months as the news channels piggy back on each others' coverage. Meanwhile, the world burns.

I try not to get excited about the good guys on cable news. Keith Olbermann is the best guy out there, but even he devotes time to celebrity news. But when he goes after Bush, like any good newsman should, look out! Olbermann has been the focus of many lefty blogs lately because he is calling it like he sees it and is hitting Bush hard. This is the media's job, but widespread media negligence raises serious questons about their commitment to professional standards.

So click and enjoy. Watch it here. I apologize for the silly commercial that precedes the commentary.

The recent furor over the National Intelligence Estimate on the Iraq War is muffling other news of importance to those who care about the future, presumably all of us. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out the City of New Orleans in 2005, some experts suggested a link between warmer oceans and other bodies of water and more violent hurricanes.

A few years ago, when the Environmental Protection Agency issued a damning report on the human causes of global warming, Bush, a former oilman, made it plain that he did not want to discuss the issue. Here's the story from CBS news from 2002, when Bush dissed the report as the product of a meddlesome bureaucracy.

President Bush dismissed on Tuesday a report put out by his administration warning that human activities are behind climate change that is having significant effects on the environment.

The report released by the Environmental Protection Agency was a surprising endorsement of what many scientists and weather experts have long argued — that human activities such as oil refining, power plants and automobile emissions are important causes of global warming.

But it suggests nothing beyond voluntary action by industry for dealing with the so-called "greenhouse" gases, the program Bush advocated in rejecting a treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 calling for mandatory reduction of those gases by industrial nations.

"I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Mr. Bush said dismissively when asked about the EPA report, adding that he still opposes the Kyoto treaty.

The report was the first by the Bush administration to mostly blame human activity for global warming.

Since we all hate faceless bureaucracies, his reaction was intended to deflect attention from an issue that his corporate supporters want to sweep under the rug. We cannot wish this news away, however. More recently, Bush has blocked the release of a report on global warming which answers the questions that arose after Hurricane Katrina. You would think that a formal study on this issue is newsworthy. Why doesn't the Bush administration want us to see it?

White House Said to Bar Hurricane Report Sep 26, 5:40 PM (ET)

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday. The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - part of the Commerce Department - in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.

According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.

In May, when the report was expected to be released, panel chair Ants Leetmaa received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released, Nature reported.

Leetmaa, head of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said he had no details of the report.

NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher is currently out of the country, but Nature quoted him as saying the report was merely an internal document and could not be released because the agency could not take an official position on the issue.

However, the journal said in its online report that the study was merely a discussion of the current state of hurricane science and did not contain any policy or position statements.

A series of studies over the past year or so have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a strengthening that many storm experts say is tied to rising sea-surface temperatures.

Just two weeks ago, researchers said that most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, a study one researcher said "closes the loop" between climate change and powerful storms like Katrina.

Not all agree, however, with opponents arguing that many other factors affect storms, which can increase and decrease in cycles.

The possibility of global warming affecting hurricanes is politically sensitive because the administration has resisted proposals to restrict release of gases that can cause warming conditions.

In February, a NASA political appointee who worked in the space agency's public relations department resigned after reportedly trying to restrict access to Jim Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who has been active in global warming research.

Bob Woodward is the closest thing this country has to an "establishment" reporter. Any new book by Woodward on the goings-on in Washington are usually front-page news because he finds a way to get sources to speak with him. The below story is what greeted New York Times readers this morning. As I see it, news like this is OK anytime.

Woodward is sometimes criticized for cozying up with the establishment in writing his books. But he does have access to sources that no one else can speak to. His new book only confirms what we know, but with the Woodward stamp of approval, it's clear that the administration will have a harder time talking their way out of this.

The spin placed on the Iraq War by the Bush administration and its supporters is that the anti-war folks want to "cut and run" on Iraq. This slur suggests that war opponents want to leave Iraq high and dry. But Bush left our troops high and dry by not thinking the war through. This is why the presidency is for grown-ups, not spoiled rich kids who backed into every job they ever had and thought they could glide by with jokes, swagger and a handshake.

Woodword will be interviewed on 60 Minutes this Sunday. According to the CBS website, "Veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward tells Mike Wallace that the Bush administration has not told the truth regarding the level of violence, especially against U.S. troops, in Iraq. He also reveals key intelligence that predicts the insurgency will grow worse next year. In Wallace’s interview with Woodward, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. ET/PT, the reporter also claims that Henry Kissinger is among those advising Mr. Bush."

Kissinger advising Bush? There is no analogy to compare that relationship with. The best I can do is that it's like Nixon advising Nixon. Or O.J. Simpson advising a battered women's clinic.

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.