The new book by Bob Woodward into the Bush administration's war policies and practices is the gift that keeps on giving. Woodward's interview on Sunday night by 60 Minutes suggests that Bush has cocooned himself into believing that the Iraq War is going well and that he will not withdraw troops even if his only remaining supporters are his wife and dog. This steadfastness goes beyond arrogance. We call it delusion.

A lengthy article on Sunday in the Washington Post (Woodward's home turf) tells us that the Bush administration consistently painted a rosy picture of Iraq when the truth as they knew it was far different:

On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."

Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.

Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."

A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.

On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."

There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.

It is also clear that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld shrugged his shoulders in hearing the news that the Iraq War was not going well:

On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.

"We've made three tragic decisions," Garner told Rumsfeld.

"Really?" Rumsfeld asked.

"Three terrible mistakes," Garner said.

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people."

Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around."

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. "Well," he said, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."

He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. "They're all reversible," Garner said again.

"We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said emphatically.

Equally alarming was the Bush administration's reliance on advice from Henry Kissenger, former Secretary of State under President Nixon. Kissenger was a pathological killer who waged several immoral and devastating wars at once during the early 1970's. Kissinger's relationship with Bush may not get the attention that other relevations in the Woodward book will generate. But Bush's advice from Dr. Death is like asking a habitual child molester for advice on how to run a child care center.

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him."

The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.

In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.

"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."

To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.

"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.

Pay attention to how Kissenger views the American public: we are a bunch of circus animals who can be manipulated. Kissenger told Bush that withdrawing some troops is like giving people salted peanuts; we will want even more salted peanuts. As Kissenger said this, some poor American soldier was getting his arms blown off in Iraq.

We have also learned about a meeting between CIA director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black and Condi Rice on July 10, 2001:

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”

Our friends at ThinkProgress.org ran a piece by counsel for the 9/11 Commission, who writes that the Commission was never told about this meeting even though Bush administration officials testified under oath:

If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know. Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation — questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the Commission been told about this significant meeting. Suspiciously, the Commissioners and the staff investigating the administration’s actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting. As Commissioner Jamie Gorelick pointed out, “We didn’t know about the meeting itself. I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.”

The Commission interviewed Condoleezza Rice privately and during public testimony; it interviewed George Tenet three times privately and during public testimony; and Cofer Black was also interviewed privately and publicly. All of them were obligated to tell the truth. Apparently, none of them described this meeting, the purpose of which clearly was central to the Commission’s investigation. Moreover, document requests to both the White House and to the CIA should have revealed the fact that this meeting took place. Now, more than two years after the release of the Commission’s report, we learn of this meeting from Bob Woodward.

Was it covered up? It is hard to come to a different conclusion. If one could suspend disbelief to accept that all three officials forgot about the meeting when they were interviewed, then one possibility is that the memory of one of them was later jogged by notes or documents that describe the meeting. If such documents exist, the 9/11 Commission should have seen them.

The New York Times is also on the story. Monday morning's paper reports that "Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action. Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward. The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state."

Think Progress also tells us that the Bush administration willfully had its head in the sand, as Bush himself did not bother to fully debrief people who had returned from Iraq with bad news:

In February 2005, two weeks after Condi Rice became secretary of state, her top aide Phillip Zelikow “presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo” summing up his fact-finding trip to Iraq. “At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change,” Zelikow wrote.

Woodward writes, in those moments “where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him [in the Oval Office], he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all.”

Indeed, it seems clear that a few months before 9/11, Condi Rice was not particularly interested in hearing that bin Ladin was targeting the United States. She has defended the Bush administration's anti-terror efforts by stating that Bush was as aggressive as President Clinton. But who can believe her after reading the following:

On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called "findings" that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention.

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

In some ways, Woodward's book is old news. We know that the Bush administration misled the American public about the Iraqi threat to the United States and falsely gave the impression that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with bin Ladin and was sitting on dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The evidence keeps piling up however, in expose after expose, including books, magazine articles and investigative news articles, that this administration is run by habitual liars and blind optimists. Some people still support Bush and defend his honor. Why?

Jude over at Political Waves alerts us to the below story about Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's speech about the judiciary's role in times of war. What Gonzales is saying is that the courts should butt out, that foreign affairs is no business of the courts and that the Presidency reserves for itself all policy decisions on war and peace.

Gonzales Cautions Judges on Interfering MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, AP Friday, September 29, 2006

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.

He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.

It's hard to imagine this happening today, but back during the 1960's and 1970's, at least on judge on the Supreme Court deemed it the Court's duty to end the Vietnam War. This was a judge from the World War II generation who did not want the country to slide further into the Vietnam quagmire.

In 1970, the Court decided not to hear a case challenging the legality of the war. The State of Massachusetts actually brought the lawsuit. The general rule is that the Court cannot rule on legal issues that are best left to Congress and the elected representatives. These are called "political questions." War is a classic example of this kind of issue. Leave it to the voters. But what if the voters want an end to war and the President and Congress wage war anyway? Justice William O. Douglas wanted the Court to hear the case and filed a dissenting opinion. Since Congress never formally declared war, he said, the war is being fought illegally.

Today we deny a hearing to a State which attempts to determine whether it is constitutional to require its citizens to fight in a foreign war absent a congressional declaration of war. Three years ago we refused to hear a case involving draftees who sought to prevent their shipment overseas. The question of an unconstitutional war is neither academic nor "political." This case has raised the question in an adversary setting. It should be settled here and now.

The Vietnam war raged on for a few more years. Even the most liberal Supreme Court in U.S. history could not find the strength to stop it even though the case was brought to its doorstep. History repeated itself a few years later.

After President Nixon bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the nation was in a fury. The college students killed at Kent State University in Ohio were protesting that bombing campaign when the National Guard shot them down. It was inevitable that this controversy would end up before the Supreme Court. A few years later, the Court would not halt the bombing, but once again, Justice Douglas disagreed, filing a remarkable dissenting opinion which compared the lawsuit to a death penalty case in light of the obvious consequence of Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia:

This case in its stark realities involves the grim consequences of a capital case. The classic capital case is whether Mr. Lew, Mr. Low, or Mr. Lucas should die. The present case involves whether Mr. X (an unknown person or persons) should die. No one knows who they are. They may be Cambodian farmers whose only "sin" is a desire for socialized medicine to alleviate the suffering of their families and neighbors. Or Mr. X may be the American pilot or navigator who drops a ton of bombs on a Cambodian village. The upshot is that we know that someone is about to die.

Douglas then wrote that "It has become popular to think the President has that power to declare war. But there is not a word in the Constitution that grants that power to him. It runs only to Congress." He wanted to at least temporarily stop the bombing so the Court could decide whether the bombing was illegal. He explained, "even if the 'war' in Vietnam were assumed to be a constitutional one, the Cambodian bombing is quite a different affair. Certainly Congress did not in terms declare war against Cambodia and there is no one so reckless to say that the Cambodian forces are an imminent and perilous threat to our shores."

These court rulings would make it almost impossible for someone today to bring a challenge to the Iraq War. The Court is dominated by Republicans anyway, and it is impossible to imagine anyone even trying to stop the war through legal action. But 30 years after the fact, it is equally remarkable that even a single Supreme Court Justice thought the Court had a duty to end the Vietnam war.

The news of the week is the resignation of Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who exchanged some pretty nauseating and sexual text messages with teenagers who interned at the House of Representatives. Nothing about this story is defensible, but the Republican strategy seems to focus on blaming the messenger. This is a nice strategy for those with their heads in the sand.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert told rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh that the timing of the relevations was suspicious and that this only hurts America's efforts to fight terrorism:

they drop it the last day of the session, you know, before we adjourn on an election year. Now, we took care of Mr. Foley. We found out about it, asked him to resign. He did resign. He’s gone. We asked for an investigation. We’ve done that. We’re trying to build better protections for these page programs. But, you know, this is a political issue in itself, too, and what we’ve tried to do as the Republican Party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism — and we’ve worked at it ever since 9/11, worked with the president on it — and there are some people that try to tear us down. We are the insulation to protect this country, and if they get to me it looks like they could affect our election as well.

This is a guy who "interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages."

Meanwhile the radical right wing is taking the opportunity to throw potshots at gays. This from Think Progress.org:

Ben Stein, American Spectator:

On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys. He sent them suggestive e-mail. I agree, that’s not great. … I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.

Linda Harvey, WorldNetDaily:

Open or suspected homosexuals should never be elected. The problem with homosexuals is that they frequently don’t have common sense and don’t acknowledge appropriate boundaries. Weird sex, public displays of “affection” and nudity, and sex with youth are built into the “gay” sub-culture.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review:

The funny thing is that you would think the left — particularly the gay left — would be a bit more interested in not having 16 and 17 year old teenagers classified as young children for legal/sexual/political purposes. If that were the case, then a whole lot of dirty old men would need to be prosecuted for felonies when they pick up street hustlers.

Wall Street Journal, editorial:

But in today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys.

The worst pundit of them all, Sean Hannity, of course drags Bill Clinton into this mess, claiming that our "selective outrage" was never applied to a guy who actually got impeached in connection with a sex scandal. As the Daily Howler points out:

Simply put, Sean Hannity was lying right in his viewers’ faces, about a famous old press corps darling. Here’s a case of cosmic deception, from one of our most clownish “men:”

HANNITY (10/2/06): You know something? And I don't want to bring Clinton into it [the Mark Foley matter]. You're going to say, “Well, Monica was 19.” But hang on a second! Monica was a teenager, and she was an intern.

Simply put, Sean Hannity is willing to do and say anything! Our analysts threw their heads back and roared and this wonderfully pure bit of proof.

Let’s be fair. Hannity didn’t want to bring Clinton into this matter—but he denied himself, doing so anyway. And look at the way he clowned when he did! “You're going to say, ‘Well, Monica was 19,’” he exclaimed to Bob Beckel, his guest. But why on earth—why in the world—would anyone ever say that?

In fact, everyone knows The Standard Old Lie about the pundits’ old darling, Monica. Everyone knows you’re supposed to call her a “21-year-old White House intern.” In fact, Lewinsky was no longer 21, and no longer an intern, when she met Clinton and their concourse began. (She was almost 22 and a half—and she had accepted a paying job in the White House two days earlier.) But the story sounded much better with the false facts, so the “press corps” simply never stopped using them, excitedly rubbing their thighs as they went. Jay Leno used Monica’s correct age in his jokes, but consummate fakers, all through the press corps, just kept saying that she’d been 21! It seemed the very symbol of youth—and so did the pleasing word “intern.” So the phonies and fakers kept using fake “facts,” as we chronicled at length in real time. (Links below.)

Yep! Everyone knew to say “21,” even though she had been 22! But by Tuesday, that original lie was no longer enough. So Hannity played a new number!

What a moment! Everyone knows the original lie—including all of Hannity’s viewers. Everyone knows you’re supposed to say that Monica was just 21! But now, a teen-age page had come into play—and 21 was no longer enough. So Sean decided to hatch a new lie. The old lie? No longer enough!

The political whirlwind that smothers us each and every day sometimes causes us to overlook the larger picture. It was only 60 years ago that people were sent to die in gas ovens. EricFrancis.com has a series of essays and photographs on the Holocaust. I reprint Eric's October 4 entry. Everyone should read it.

Auschwitz Photo Series | Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006

WHILE I WAS visiting Poland last week, I went to pay my respects at Auschwitz. I actually didn't plan to go, and I didn't really want to go, but I've also had a lifelong commitment to do so, and this was my chance.

Avoiding the place was why I planned a trip to Warsaw for a week -- halfway across the country, far away. But everyone I talked to said that Krakow was the more beautiful city, not bombed so badly during the war, still intact with all its old character, and that I must see it. So I went to Krakow, 70km from Auschwitz, not sure what I would do when the time came to decide if I wanted to make the rest of the trip.

I arrived in my hotel, a beautiful, elegant little place that cost just $40 per night, including breakfast, and a dependable Internet connection in my room. There was a big Manora on the lobby window, facing out to the street -- the Jewish symbol of Hanukah. It seemed bold and reassuring to be staying in a place that was advertising its Jewishness to the world so close to where so much evil happened. Seeing that, I felt I had a purpose for being there.

The next morning, I woke up, and called Arthur, the taxi guy who'd taken me from the train station the day before, who also takes people to Auschwitz for the day. It didn't cost that much more than a tourist bus, and I wanted the freedom to keep my own schedule as I explored the territory. He showed up for me, my cameras and my iPod stereo, on which I played a lot of Grateful Dead songs driving through the Polish countryside for an hour on the way to the camp. Arthur happened to be a fan of old American rock and roll, he knew some impressive details, and he'd heard of Jerry Garcia and loved Johnny Cash. It was still a grim journey, despite the great tunes and even if the land and buildings were beautiful.

I've been involved with Holocaust studies for a long time, thanks to a teacher who ran a special center dedicated to the subject at my high school in Brooklyn. [This was Ira Zornberg at the Holocaust Education Center in the John Dewey High School library.]

There is a reason we study these things, which is so that we can both honor history, and respect the loss to humanity. But it's also to be forewarned, in the present, when something amiss is happening again. The real problem with the Holocaust is how systematically exterminating 12 million people in the midst of civilized Europe kind of snuck up on the world.

As part of my personal investigation, I had visited three different Nazi facilities prior to this -- first being the places I believe the Holocaust began in February 1933, in an urban neighborhood in Erfurt, Germany called Ilvers Gehoffen (see article "Hell's Bells" on the Planet Waves cover Wednesday). Incredibly, the one of the very first concentrations camp was surrounded by inhabited apartment buildings on all sides. On the same trip, I visited the Citadel of St. Peter and St. Paul, an actual citadel more than 1,000 years old, placed on a little hill in Erfurt. This is the walled-in Roman Catholic facility that was taken over by the Nazis and -- starting eight days after Hitler assumed office without havng been elected -- was used for imprisonment of people who disagreed with Hitler, for sham capital (as in death penalty) trials, and probably for executions. Napoleon had also been there -- the massive barracks he built in the Citadel were used by Hitler's army, too.

Then some days later, I visited Buchenwald, the famous concentration camp for political prisoners near Weimar, in the "green heart of Germany." Fifty-four thousand people were shot, strangled or died of starvation, disease and overwork at Buchenwald, but it was not a death camp, per se, it was a forced labor camp where many people lost their lives. These visits were in 1998, and I've been considering what I saw ever since. So I had some preparation.

Yet nothing prepares you for Auschwitz. I walked in knowing that. This was an industrial-scale factory devoted to mass murder and torture. It is as large as any full-scale state university campus, with land and buildings stretching in either direction as far as you can see. There were in fact three main camps and about 100 smaller sub-camps. Five gas chambers and crematoria were the murder scenes of as many as two million Jews, Poles, Sinti and Romany people, and nationals of every country in Europe from Russia all the way west to France; north into Scandinavia; and south into Greece.

I lived in Paris for a while, and on every street, I mean every block, there is a plaque somewhere about the people who were deported to the camps during the war.

They were sent to die in Auschwitz and similar facilities, sometimes after having been sold "new land" and "new businesses" in their "new homes" by the German government. Auschwitz was the prototype and the biggest of the death camps. About three-quarters of the people who arrived, with bags packed in earnest, with precious family photos and a little to eat, were taken to the gas chambers instantly on arrival; the strong were made to work for a month or two, to support the German war effort, and then they too were gassed.

Those deaths could be called humane, compared to the thousands killed following medical torture and sexual experimentation (from castration of men to sterilization experiments conducted on women), most of whom were killed by injections of phenol to the heart; who died of starvation and exhaustion; who were beaten to death; who died of the cold or of dehydration.

In this photo series, I'll share images of interior and exterior facilities at Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau as they exist today. When people were allowed to live briefly after arriving, they lived like we treat animals in industrial farms. They could be beaten or killed for having an accident outside the vastly overcrowded latrines. When condemned to die, they were made to strip naked and face a wall where they were shot, or died huddled naked together in gas chambers, breathing in cyanide. If they happened to be alive after the gassing, they were burned alive. Their hair, previously shaved off, was sent to a factory in Bavaria that made some kind of materials for the war out of it.

It all sounds like so much. It sounds like nothing that could ever happen, but it did happen, and it happened yesterday. Though there have been many genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of which are ongoing, the most frightening thing about what happened under the Nazis is that it occurred in a society just like our own, supported or acquiesced by normal people living normal lives. People with things to worry about other than the Jews or some dirty Gypsies.

We need to remember how modestly this started, with a few undesirable people here and there rounded up for "good reasons" (they were the wrong religion, they were gay or lesbian, they were alleged Communists, they were alleged terrorists, they did not want to work so hard, etc.), until it knew no limits -- and 1,500 men, women and children could be gassed and cremated in a single session. On the way out at the end of the war, the SS men dynamited the gas chambers and crematories to hide the evidence of their crimes.

The big problem with the Nazis is we consider them someone other than ourselves; a culture other than our own. But Nazi Germany was an advanced industrial and technical society, with ethics and an economy and lots of people who wore crosses around their necks and who went to church every Sunday.

Germans are proud, intelligent people who like to do things right. The mass murder that was perpetrated was conducted by well-heeled, supposed Christians; by the highest orders of elite military men; and supported by capitalists and businessmen. One of the big things the whole plan had going for it was a "united Europe" which meant big business for certain people. According to what I learned in Holocaust Studies and in my follow-up research, the gassing effort was also supported by IBM (whose German subsidiary lent computers to the Reich to track concentration camp inmates); by ITT (which provided other technology); by Dow Chemical (which provided chemical components for the cyanide gas, called Zyclon [Cyclone] B). Other United States corporations and some politicians were involved. Swiss banks that today still exist processed all the gold taken from the teeth of the victims. I have read recently that there is no processed gold on the market that does not contain traces of concentration camp gold.

And we forget how recently it happened. My parents were born in 1941 and 1942, when Auschwitz and many other death camps were in full operation. If something happened in your parents' lifetime, it happened yesterday, and it could happen tomorrow. The same is true if your grandfather or grandmother remembers it. That is the definition of 'very recently'.

Mainly, we forget how it happened -- because people let it happen; because they were in denial about what was going on two miles from their house, or right outside their window. We forget that an environment of anti-Semitism in Europe allowed the beginning to occur, and that fear of others was used as a weapon against people -- much like in our own country (UK, United States and Australia) where an atmosphere of anti-Muslim sentiments is allowing many laws that protect everyone to be suspended. Why? Because who cares about them? "They're all terrorists." Ah, but then all these really weird powers are in place and the normal rules of the game are off.

That is the true beginning, the elimination of basic rights: the ones you never hear of, such as Habeus Corpus. Or the ones you do, such as elections. Habeus corpus is the right of a person to demand to know why they are being imprisoned. It used to exist in Germany before the Holocaust, and it used to exist in the United States, before last week, when a law supposedly directed at "terrorists" took that right away, little noticed by the public and the media.

But at the heart of it all is cruelty. Cruelty is existent in the world, like bacteria. But it grows better under certain conditions, fuelled by its fertilizers, intolerance and hatred.

It is said that a picture paints so many words. All the images in the world don't quite sum up Auschwitz like this letter scribbled on a scrap of paper by a man about to have his life taken for nothing:

Farewell, my most beloved wife, my dearest Lolunia, and my mother. I am about to leave this world. I am going to be sent to the ovens on the 30th at 7 o'clock in the evening. I have been sentenced to death as a bandit.

My dearest Bronislawa, I am sorry to leave you. Believe me, I cannot write more because my hand is trembling and my eyes are full of tears because I die so consciously and without being guilty.

Fifty-eight of us will die, including ten women. I kiss you and Lolunia many times. At 7 o'clock in the evening...I think of you. On the 30th of October, pray, say your prayers. Tell Lolunia that father has already passed away. I cannot write. I cannot write. Farewell, all of you. Be with God.

History doesn't get old. It repeats itself over and over again. A new movie about John Lennon highlights what was wrong with the government back in the 1970's. That a major governmental scandal involved John Lennon only 30 years ago should have taught us some lessons. But we learn nothing.

The U.S. v. John Lennon is a recently filmed documentary about how the government spied on and harassed Lennon during the 1970's in an effort to drive him from the country. Click here for the trailer.

Lennon chose to live in the United States in the early 1970's, settling in at the Dakota building in Manhattan. Like the other Beatles following the breakup, Lennon tried to forge his own identity, taking the leftist anti-war crowd under his wing and donating time and music to the cause during the Vietnam War. The Beatles' fans had grown up, and John grew up, too. At times his music suffered from heavy-handed politics, but the best of his solo career drew upon his utopian world-view. Below are the lyrics to Imagine. The melody is gorgeous. But read the words carefully and marvel at how radical this song really was.

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try Nowhere below us Above only sky Imagine all the people Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Strangely, few of Lennon's contemporaries became political during this time. This meant that he enjoyed a marginal support network when the U.S. government went to war against him. This is a story that really should have produced a documentary a long time ago, but anytime is the right time for a story like this.

For those of you who hate George W. Bush, try to imagine what it was like during the early 1970's when a true sociopath occupied the White House. Bush may be a little bit dumb and surrounded by dangerous men. But Nixon was the dangerous one in the Oval Office back then, a Jew-hating racist who kept an enemies list and spent much of the time plotting against his detractors, ultimately resigning in disgrace after the Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal. This anti-American thug ran the country for six years the way a Mafia capo terrorizes the garbage industry. With the illegal Vietnam War raging and the blood of thousands of dead soldiers on his fingers, Nixon went to war against a domestic enemy: the U.S. population.

I have written much about Cointelpro over the years and deem it the greatest story never told. A more blatant violation of the First Amendment cannot be imagined. Books have been written about this government program, but it remains a stranger to public debate. Cointelpro was short for counterintelligence program, where the FBI and its goons spied on and disrupted leftists, anti-war protesters and anyone else who objected to confirmity, racism and war from the 1950's through the 1970's, when Congress finally investigated this treasonous program and uncovered abuses and horrors that would grow hair on your chest. Read about Cointelpro here. Or here if you want a brief overview for only a few dollars. Bottom line: for decades, the government maintained a political police force to harass and disrupt and otherwise spy on dissidents and free thinkers, at times killing them in cold blood.

In some ways, it's not shocking that the government would declare war on rank-and-file leftists. But the government also went to war against John Lennon. His political activity caught the attention of the rouges in government who did not want any more messiahs in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr. and other slain leaders who could have made a difference. Lennon was maybe the greatest rocker we ever had, and if the Beatles magic could extent to leftist political activism, who knows where his influence could take us?

Lennon was a British national living in New York. In the midst of his high-profile activism, Sen. Strom Thurmond tipped off the White House to the possibility that the government could terminate his visa and ship him back the England as a "strategy counter-measure." In a memo given to Thurmond, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee staff advised that leftist activist leaders wanted to use Lennon for political rallies/rock concerts to promote the anti-war cause, stimulate voter registration and recruit protesters for the 1972 political convention in San Diego, when Nixon would kick off his re-election campaign.

Strom Thurmond's tip-off got results. In a memo dated March 6, 1972, one of Nixon's assistants wrote that "in connection with your previous inquiry concerning the former member of the Beatles, John Lennon, I thought you would be interested in learning that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has served notice on him that he is to leave this country no later than March 15. You may be assured the information you previously furnished has been appropriately noted."

Think about this for a minute. Richard Milhous Nixon took the oath of office to faithfully execute the Constitution and ensure that the laws were faithfully executed. Then this paranoid animal went on to destroy constitutional freedoms and attempt to throw a cultural icon out of the country because of his political views. Imagine how far this kind of surveillance and harassment went. If they could do it to Lennon, they could do it to anyone.

In his wonderful book, Gimme Some Truth, Professor Jon Weiner documents the surveillance undertaken against Lennon. FBI goons (including confidential informants) followed Lennon around and took copious notes about his political activity, clipped newspaper articles about Lennon's activism, reviewed his song lyrics and generally obsessed over him the way that teeny-boppers in the mid-1960's obsessed over the smart Beatles.

Except that the teenagers who swooned over the Beatles in 1964 did not have authority to throw Lennon out of the country in retaliation for his defiant political views. The government initiated deportation proceedings to send Lennon back to England. The government used as a pretext an obscure drug conviction from 1968, when Lennon was living in Britian. This fight took several years before the United States Court of Appeals ruled that Lennon was allowed to stay in the country. Here's an overview of the case from his lawyer. Here's how the Court of Appeals began its ruling:

We have come a long way from the days when fear and prejudice toward alien races were the guiding forces behind our immigration laws. The Chinese exclusion acts of the 1880's and the "barred zone" created by the 1917 Immigration Act have, thankfully, been removed from the statute books and relegated to the historical treatises. Nevertheless, the power of Congress to exclude or deport natives of other countries remains virtually unfettered. In the vast majority of deportation cases, the fate of the alien must therefore hinge upon narrow issues of statutory construction. To this rule, the appeal of John Lennon, an internationally known "rock" musician, presents no exception. We are, in this case, called upon to decide whether Lennon's 1968 British conviction for possession of cannabis resin renders him, as the Board of Immigration Appeals believed, an excludable alien under § 212(a)(23) of the Immigration and Nationality Act . . . which applies to those convicted of illicit possession of marijuana. We hold that Lennon's conviction does not fall within the ambit of this section.

The Court of Appeals also tipped its hat to Lennon: "If, in our two hundred years of independence, we have in some measure realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help implement it. Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream."

Lennon stayed in the United States for another five years. Shortly after the Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, he went into seclusion through 1980, the year he was murdered. In fall 1980, Lennon bobbed to the surface with another album and a string of interviews in which he said that he stayed home to take care of his child. This may have been partly true. But we know from nearly every account of Lennon's seclusion that he was also burned out and need to recharge his batteries. I have no doubt that the strain of fighting deportation led to that burnout.

The legacy of Cointelpro did more than curtail Lennons' recording career. While Congress shut it down in 1975, it came back during the 1980's when the Reagan administration began spying on dissidents who protested our brutal foreign policy in Central America.

The movie U.S. v. John Lennon cannot come at a better time. The Bush administration is trying to convince the American public that it needs to monitor phone calls to combat terrorism. Most of us recognize the need to keep tabs on terrorists. But controversy arose when the New York Times revealed last year that some of this surveillance involved domestic calls without a warrant, contrary to Federal law. Debate over this issue totally overlooked the history of domestic surveillance in this country. I have little doubt that the active and vocal anti-war movement in this country is being closely monitored by the government just as the Nixon crowd was surveilling the anti-war movement in the 1970's. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, it's already happening. Some things don't change, and I cannot imagine that the thugs surrounding Bush these days have not embarked on some kind of surveillance program against non-terrorist anti-war agitators. All power is abused in this country. That there is little debate on the limits of domestic surveillance these days is a sad indictment on the national amnesia that consistently allows the government to overreach and outright violate our constitutional liberties.

Below is a New York Times editorial on the Lennon movie which provides some insight into what happened back then and why it matters today.

September 21, 2006 Editorial Observer While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon By ADAM COHEN In December 1971, John Lennon sang at an Ann Arbor, Mich., concert calling for the release of a man who had been given 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. The song he wrote for the occasion, “John Sinclair,” was remarkably effective. Within days, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Mr. Sinclair released.

What Lennon did not know at the time was that there were F.B.I. informants in the audience taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song. (“Lacking Lennon’s usual standards,” his F.B.I. file reports, and “Yoko can’t even remain on key.”) The government spied on Lennon for the next 12 months, and tried to have him deported to England.

This improbable surveillance campaign is the subject of a new documentary, “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.” The film makes two important points about domestic surveillance, one well-known, the other quite surprising. With the nation in the midst of a new domestic spying debate, the story is a cautionary tale.

It focuses on the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when the former Beatle used his considerable fame and charisma to oppose the Vietnam War. Lennon attracted worldwide attention in 1969 when he and Yoko Ono married and held their much-publicized “bed-ins” in Amsterdam and Montreal, giving interviews about peace from under their honeymoon sheets. Lennon put to music a simple catch phrase — “All we are saying is give peace a chance” — and the antiwar movement had its anthem. Two years later, he released “Imagine.”

The government responded with an extensive surveillance program. Lennon’s F.B.I. files — which are collected in the book “Gimme Some Truth” by Jon Wiener — reveal that the bureau was monitoring everything from his appearance on “The Mike Douglas Show” to far more personal matters, like the whereabouts of Ono’s daughter from a previous marriage.

The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics. At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in the politics — and at defeating President Nixon, who was running for re-election. There were plans to end the tour with a huge rally at the Republican National Convention.

The F.B.I.’s timing is noteworthy. Lennon had been involved in high-profile antiwar activities going back to 1969, but the bureau did not formally open its investigation until January 1972 — the year of Nixon’s re-election campaign. In March, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to renew Lennon’s visa, and began deportation proceedings. Nixon was re-elected in November, and a month later, the F.B.I. closed its investigation.

If Lennon was considering actively opposing Nixon’s re-election, the spying and the threat of deportation had their intended effect. In May, he announced that he would not be part of any protest activities at the Republican National Convention, and he did not actively participate in the presidential campaign.

After revelations about the many domestic spying abuses of the 1960’s and 1970’s — including the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. — new restrictions were put in place. But these protections are being eroded today, with the president’s claim of sweeping new authority to pursue the war on terror.

Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” would be a sobering film at any time, but it is particularly so right now. It is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.

The straw man argument is often made by political hacks who prove a point by mischaracterizing their opponent's position. Under one definition of the phrase, "A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To 'set up a straw man' or 'set up a straw-man argument' is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact misleading, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted."

The straw man is alive and well in American politics. It works because voters are uninformed and the use of straw men is an easy way to rally the faithful. It makes your political opponent sound much more unreasonable when you can tag him with outrageous political viewpoints and then strike them down like a bowling pin.

The Republican Party is in trouble because Bush's popularity has hit a ceiling and 50 to 60 percent of the American people don't like his policies. But he can still rally the faithful and drive home his points before the fawning sheep who attend Republican fund raisers and make campaign contributions.

One strategy is to argue that the Democrats are weak on terror and will not protect the homeland. That Bush and his cronies can get away with this argument is astonishing in light of the gross incompetence displayed pre- and post-9/11. It is clear, for example, that Bush and co. did not pay enough attention to the al Qaeda threat and that dire warnings received the brush-off, i.e., Bush's frat-boy response ("you've covered your ass, now") when an intelligence official told him three weeks before 9/11 that bin Ladin was coming perilously close to attacking the U.S.

In light of the pathetic disgrace that characterizes nearly every aspect of the Bush administration, he slapped the opposition party with the ultimate charge: Democrats will not do what it takes to protect the American people.

This is from the Washington Post:

"One hundred and seventy-seven of the opposition party said, 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists,' " Bush said at a fundraiser for Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) before heading to Colorado for gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez.

Asked about the president's statement, White House aides could not name any Democrat who has said that the government should not listen in on terrorists. Democrats who voted against the legislation had complained that it would hand too much power to the president and had said that they wanted more checks in the bill to protect civil liberties.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) called Bush's comment outrageous: "Every member of Congress, from both parties, supports listening in on terrorist communications, but the president still hasn't explained why we have to break the law to do it. It is time for the president to stop exploiting the terrorist threat to justify his power grab."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino defended Bush's remark as a reasonable extrapolation of the Democratic position. "Of course, they aren't silly enough to say they don't want to listen in on terrorists, but actions speak louder than words, and people should know what the Democrats' voting record is," she said.

Who's buying this shit? When the Bush administration is called on the allegation that Democrats do not want to monitor terrorist communications, a spokeswoman dissembles and offers up a sorry justification for Bush's inarticulate slander.

All of this is very sobering. All that we can do is to hit back, and to hit back hard. Click here to watch Keith Olbermann attack Bush in the strongest language possible. Olbermann is now running weekly monologues that hit the nail right on the head, telling Bush that "you have dishonored yourself." Someday, many years from now, people will watch these monologues and know that at least one person in the major media was fighting back. Watch it now.

An excerpt:

The president of the United States -- unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality -- has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, "177 of the opposition party said, 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.'"

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president's seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn't be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

President Bush hears what he wants.

Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, "Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond."

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.

And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind reader.

"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party," the president said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, "it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is -- wait until we're attacked again."

The president doesn't just hear what he wants.

He hears things that only he can hear.

It defies belief that this president and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.

Yet they do.

It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any president of this nation.

Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies of treason.

But it is the context that truly makes the head spin.

Straw men are the older brothers of propaganda. Propaganda works when highly skilled public relations experts endeavor to manipulate public opinion. But seeing how propaganda works behind the scenes is like eating hamburgers at a slaughterhouse. Here's a recent article that sheds light on administration thinking:

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in Washington "for commemoration of success" in Iraq and Afghanistan, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Congressional Republicans are now saying, in effect, maybe next year, The Times reported. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

The original legislation, the newspaper said, empowered the president to designate "a day of celebration" to commemorate the success of the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to "issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe that day with appropriate ceremonies and activities."

Twenty million bucks to celebrate victory at war? Try using that money to send Bush to a good speech therapist.

I don't care who it is. Anyone in power long enough turns into the very people they campaigned against. Re-electing the president is like giving a loaded pistol to the guy at work that everyone's afraid to talk to.

Bad news 'bout the Bush administration is bringing out the worst in the very people who campaigned to restore dignity and honor to Washington.

According to the New York Daily News, never a bastion for aggressive national investigative reporting, Bush is pissed off to beat the band over relevations that his administration is dysfunctional:

Scandals stymie W's momentum

BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON - Suddenly, like the fierce "blue northers" that sweep across Texas each autumn, the political winds have turned bleaker for Republicans - and President Bush's private mood has blackened accordingly.
Just two weeks ago, as gasoline prices plummeted and his tough-talking terror counterattack began moving poll numbers his way, Bush turned bullish on the November elections.

"He's on scent and he's driving hard," a longtime political confidant of the President reported early this month. "He's got the microphone and thinks he's controlling the political debate."

First Lady Laura Bush, who is even more in demand than her husband on the political stump this cycle, also was telling aides she thought the tide had finally turned.

Now, however, friends, aides and close political allies tell the Daily News Bush is furious with his own side for helping create a political downdraft that has blunted his momentum and endangered GOP prospects for keeping control of Congress next month.

Some of his anger is directed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic administration in his new book, "State of Denial."

In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.

"He's ticked off big-time," said a well-informed source, "even if what they said was the truth."

Woodward's book has touched a raw nerve. Appearing on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, the man whose investigative reporting brought down the Nixon administration reported that Vice President Cheney cursed him out for reporting that the administration has been taking advice from Henry Kissenger, who presided over the Nixon wars in the 1970's. From ThinkProgress.org:

MR. RUSSERT: Have you spoken to the president or the vice president since this book came out?

MR. WOODWARD: The vice president called me I guess as it was coming out 10 days ago.

MR. RUSSERT: And?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, he called to complain that I was quoting him about the meetings with Henry Kissinger that he and the president had. I had interviewed Vice President Cheney last year a couple of times at length about material I’m gathering on the Ford administration, on-the-record interviews, but he volunteered, he said, “Oh, by the way, Henry Kissinger comes in” and he, Dick Cheney, sits down with him once a month and the president every two or three months. And Cheney was upset I was quoting him. And I said, “Look, this–on-the-record doesn’t have anything to do with Ford, you volunteered that.” He then used a word which I can’t repeat on the air. And I said, “Look, on the record is on the record,” and he hung up on me.

MR. RUSSERT: What, what do you mean, he swore at you?

MR. WOODWARD: He, he said what I was saying was bull-something. No, but he, but he hung up. Now, look, I can, I can see, I went back and looked at the transcript that he can–ever had a disagreement about ground rules with someone. Have you?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, he thought he was talking, he thought he was talking to you for one project and you used it in another project.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, exactly. But it had nothing to do with it, and it’s clearly spelled out that it’s an on-the-record interview. And so–now, what does he do instead of saying, “Well, OK, I look at it this way, you look at it that way.” It’s a metaphor for what’s going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don’t want to deal with.

Cheney's mouth is legendarily filthy. He told Senator Patrick Leahy to "fuck off" on the floor of the dignified U.S. Senate. In June 2004, Reuters reported:

According to congressional aides, [Sen. Patrick] Leahy said hello to Cheney following the taking of the Senate group photo on the floor of the chamber.

Cheney, who is president of the Senate, then ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran.

....During their exchange, Leahy noted that Republicans had accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic because they are opposed to some of President Bush's anti-abortion judges, the aides said.

That's when Cheney unloaded with the "F-bomb," aides said.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

The death toll in Iraq is rising. According to a recent study, over 600,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S. invaded Iraq. Story from the Washington Post below.

President Bush says the Iraqis "tolerate" this. (Hat tip to ThinkProgress.org).

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure and do you consider this a credible report?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don’t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

Actions have consequences. Going to war means that people will be killed. Would you allow a hairdresser to handle the electrical problems in your house? Would you allow an electrician style your hair? Yet, Americans elected a guy who made the following statements about foreign policy and, more specifically, Korea, which has the world scared shitless over its nuclear tests. As reported in State of Denial, Bob Woodward's new book about the Bush administration, Bush wondered as a presidential candidate why he should care about North Korea:

George W. pulled Bandar aside. "Bandar, I guess you're the best asshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing." "Governor, what is it?" "Why should I care about North Korea?" Bandar said he didn't really know. It was one of the few countries that he did not work on for King Fahd. "I get these briefings on all parts of the world," Bush said, "and everybody is talking to me about North Korea." "I'll tell you what, Governor," Bandar said. "One reason should make you care about North Korea." "All right, smart alek," Bush said, "tell me." "The 38,000 American troops right on the border." ..."If nothing else counts, this counts. One shot across the border and you lose half these people immediately. You lose 15,000 Americans in a chemical or biological or even regular attack. The United State of America is at war instantly." "Hmmm," Bush said. "I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea." "Now I tell you another answer to that. You don't want to care about North Korea anymore?" Bandar asked. The Saudis wanted America to focus on the Middle East and not get drawn into a conflict in East Asia. "I didn't say that," Bush replied. "But if you don't, you withdrawl those troops back. Then it becomes a local conflict. Then you have the whole time to decide, 'Should I get involved? Not involved?' Etc." At that moment, Colin Powell approached. "Colin," Bush said, "come here. Bandar and I were shooting the bull, just two fighter pilots shooting the bull." He didn't mention the topic. "Mr. Governor," Bandar said, "General Powell is almost a fighter pilot. He can shoot the bull almost as good as us."

Also, according to Woodward, "When Bush started pondering a presidential run, in 1997, one of the first people he talked with was Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's US Ambassador. He told the Saudi, 'I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.'"

Allowing a guy who talks like this to serve as commender in chief results in stories like the one below.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; A12

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

"We're very confident with the results," said Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist.

We have known for quite some time that the Bush administration does not give a damn about the American people. Only yesterday did Bush tell the media that the Iraqi people are willing to "tolerate" hundreds of thousands of war dead in that country.

As an aside, I ran the below exchange yesterday but it's worth another look into how people act when they realize they are responsible for the deaths of others. I hope no one reading this has killed anyone. The closest analogy is getting into a car accident: that sickening feeling that something terrible has happened and it might be your fault. Imagine what it feels like to start a war that is going badly and the war dead are piling up. One way to deal with it is to say that the victims tolerate this misery.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure and do you consider this a credible report?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don’t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

We always assumed that the Bush administration does care about evangelical Christians who comprise an important part of his base and who are loyal to the Republican party. When all else fails, you can count on the religious conservatives for support. What the religious conservatives did not know was that the Bush administration thinks they're crazy.

A new book reveals that the Bush administration has as much contempt for the evangelical right as they do for every other segment of American society.

According to MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, an upcoming book titled Tempting Faith: An Inside Account of the Rise of Christian Conservatives, and Their Betrayal by the Bush White House is guaranteed to create a stir among Bush's evangelical base. According to the book's author David Kuo— a self-proclaimed religious Christian and the former Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives— the Bush White House used the evangelical right and its leaders for their votes with no intention of following-through with their campaign promises once elected.

Kuo's book claims that Bush's right-hand-man, Karl Rove, referred to the religious right as "the nuts," "out of control," "goofy," and "ridiculous," while recruiting them to ensure a strong turn-out in the 2004 election.

From Tempting Faith:

"National christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous' 'out of control' and 'just plain goofy.'"

MSNBC reports that Tempting Faith underlines how the White House "uses evangelicals for their votes while consistently giving them nothing in return." The book details how leaders, such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Ted Haggard, were granted meetings and phone calls with the White House to appease them but that, according to Kuo, "the true purpose of these calls was to keep prominent social conservatives and their groups or audiences happy."

Further, Kuo says evangelical leaders were allowed to meet with Bush and attend his political gatherings when he was visiting their respective states to pad their egos. The White House awarded evangelical leaders with trinkets (such as cufflinks bearing the presidential seal) to show how influential they were.

"Making politically active christians personally happy," claims Kuo, "meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda."

In regard to his tenure at the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Kuo claims that "the White House staff didn't want to have anything to do with the faith-based initiative because they didn't understand it any more than did Congressional Republicans.... they didn't lie awake at night trying to kill it, they simply didn't care."

According to Kuo, Bush even fabricated the amount the White House intended to spend on faith-based initiatives to mobilize his evangelical base. Kuo recalls one conversation with Bush where the president endorsed inflating the amount of money he planned to secure: "Eight Billion. That's what we'll tell them," said Bush. "Eight Billion in new funds for faith-based groups." Kuo claims the White House was especially interested in attracting evangelical voters with inflated promises since "the faith-based initiative.... had the potential to successfully evangelize more voters than any other."

Kuo ultimately resigned from his White House post after claiming that "there was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda." He told Beliefnet that "from tax cuts to Medicare," Bush never cared about the "poor people stuff."

As Olbermann pointed out on MSNBC, Kuo was not alone in his frustration. His former boss also resigned from his White House post claiming that politics were king in the Bush administration.

Tempting Faith claims the White House is "mocking the millions of faithful Christians who put their trust and hope in the president and his administration. Bush knew his so-called compassion agenda was languishing and had no problem with that."

Tempting Faith is due to hit the shelves next week.

I have long believed that talk radio in the U.S. is the achilles heal of our political system. At first glance, talk radio is democratic and consistent with the First Amendment because people call in and speak their mind to a host who engages them in dialogue. If you like reading letters to the editor, talk radio is like a national letters page.

But the ideal of an enlightened talk radio community will never come to pass. That why one of the few efforts to create a liberal talk radio empire is stumbling. Talk radio as it exists in the United States consists of a series of phone calls from listeners, each speaking for about 20 seconds before the host responds and throws out some pious opinion that may or may not bear some relationship with the caller's statements. Then the host takes another call.

These links will give the uninitiated a sense of the drivel that passes for informed political discussion on American talk radio. Click here for the most popular host of them all, Rush Limbaugh, a blowhard whose booming voice is part of the AM radio landscape the way that Pink Floyd is synonmous with FM radio. In turn, the shallowest of them all, Sean Hannity, dominates Fox News at night and has the drive-time slot on WABC radio in New York and hundreds of other markets. Michael Savage is simply emotionally disturbed. These guys owe a debt to the now-retired Bob Grant, who poisoned the New York airwaves for decades with racially-charged nonsense. The people sway millions of voters. If you want to know why Bush and co. keep winning elections, listen to these guys, or at least click the links to see what they're saying.

I listen to right-wing talk radio the way that other people slow down to see a car accident. It is impossible to resist the garbage that passes for political debate these days. The callers are dumb. The hosts are dumber. But what's important is these people vote and certainly are the reason why conservative Republican candidates prevail in tight races. If you know nothing about current events other than what you hear on talk radio, you'd vote Republican, too, in the belief that the opposition party and liberals/leftists are evil and dangerous.

Nearly all the popular and profitable talk radio hosts in the U.S. are conservative. There is a reason for this. Sloganeering and flag-waving is much easier to articulate in this format than serious discussion about structural problems with our system of government and historical analyses. That's what books and magazine articles are for. These ideas simply cannot be squeezed into a 10 to 20 second phone call. Rational thought cannot be compressed this way.

What got me thinking about this was a recent blog piece on the use of Republican Party talking points on talk radio. Read the piece here. Anyone listening to talk radio knows this must be true. I hear the same Republican-based arguments over and over on talk radio, the facts be damned. These shows are emotional and angry. As Thomas Frank pointed out in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas, the arc of discontent in this country leans right. Much of the dialogue on these shows consists of attacks on the opposition, i.e., liberals, the Democratic Party and leftists who want to destroy the country, are weak on terror and hate George W. Bush. In a country that largely rejects Bush and his policies the few remaining supporters are speed-dialing to speak with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other blowhards who re-assure them that they are right and that the opposition hates America and is intellectual dishonest.

Here is the blog entry from Prospect.org (links in the original entry):

TALK RADIO HOSTS AND CALLERS GETTING THEIR TALKING POINTS STRAIGHT FROM GOP. This is on the light side, but it's fun and worth a quick note. If you've ever wondered why right-wing talk radio is so often devoid of any real dialogue, this might help explain why: It turns out that the hosts and the listeners who call in and speak are getting their talking points straight from the GOP.

Seriously. If you go to the Republican National Committee's Web site and click where it says "call talk radio," you'll find yourself on this page. It lists the phone numbers of many major talk show hosts, but that's not all: It also offers a list of "talking points" for callers to use when they call the shows. Among them: "Stand with President Bush on increased defense spending that better prepares and protects our military," and "stand with President Bush in his efforts to protect the homeland by controlling the borders." You can see a screen grab of the page below.

The RNC's site also offers these helpful tips for callers:

Plan What You Are Going to Say: Print or write out your talking points to help you plan what you are going to say before you are on the air...
Be Clear and Concise: When you get on the air, sound upbeat and excited to be on the program.

What about the hosts? Well, they're getting their talking points from the same place the callers are -- the Republican National Committee. From the Washington Post:

The RNC is shipping reams of information to conservative radio hosts, television commentators and bloggers. Those GOP talking points detail the Democratic connections of groups including the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and American Family Voices, which are working to turn the scandal into an issue with national implications. And this is by no means an isolated case. So both hosts and callers are at least in some cases repeating lines fed to them by the RNC. Talk about an echo-chamber.

One reason this is interesting is that there isn't anything really comparable on the other side. Yes, Dem party officials, organizers and other liberal groups constantly urge supporters to write letters to newspapers, and even in some cases supply actual language. But the Democratic National Committee simply can't ship its talking points straight to editors of newspapers, secure in the knowledge that those talking points will faithfully and regularly be echoed in editorials and in letters to the editor.

Corporate greed rears its head from time to time in a manner suggesting that its public relations people take it for granted that the ignorant masses will do nothing in the face of our craven love for money and cheap goods.

A recent front page article in the New York Times says that China is thinking about revising its labor laws to promote unions. But corporate America is worried about the effect this will have on cheap labor. The corporate bigwigs cannot exploit American workers the way they can Chinese and other workers, so changes in foreign labor laws must sound on Wall Street like a three-hundred watt fire alarm in the middle of the night.

October 13, 2006 China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Abuse By DAVID BARBOZA SHANGHAI, Oct. 12 — China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.

Whether the foreign corporations will follow through on their warnings is unclear because of the many advantages of being in China — even with restrictions and higher costs that may stem from the new law. It could go into effect as early as next May.

It would apply to all companies in China, but its emphasis is on foreign-owned companies and the suppliers to those companies.

The conflict with the foreign corporations is significant partly because it comes at a time when labor, energy and land costs are rising in this country, all indications that doing business in China is likely to get much more expensive in the coming years.

But it is not clear how effectively such a new labor law would be carried out through this vast land because local officials have tended to ignore directives from the central government or seek ways around them.

China’s economy has become one of the most robust in the world since the emphasis on free markets in the 80’s encouraged millions of young workers to labor for low wages at companies that made cheap exports. As a result, foreign investment has poured into China.

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.

The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.

“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.

The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.

State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.

The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.

The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.

On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.

“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.”

China’s Labor Ministry declined to comment Thursday, saying the law is still in the drafting stages. Several American corporations also declined to comment on the case, saying it was a delicate matter and referring calls to the American Chamber of Commerce.

But Andreas Lauffs, a Hong Kong-based lawyer who runs the China employment-law practice at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, said some American companies considered the proposed rules too costly and restrictive.

Mr. Lauffs said the new rules would give unions collective-bargaining power and control over certain factory rules, and they would also make it difficult to fire employees for poor performance.

“You could hire a sales manager, give him a quota and he doesn’t sell anything, and you couldn’t get rid of him,” Mr. Lauffs said. “It’s not easy to get rid of someone now, but under these rules it would be impossible.”

It is not clear what the final law will look like, and only an updated draft is expected soon. But specialists say the trend suggests that there may be new challenges ahead for foreign companies doing business in this country.

Under China’s “iron rice bowl” system of the 1950’s and 60’s, all workers were protected by the government or by state-owned companies, which often supplied housing and local health coverage.

But by the 1980’s, when the old Maoist model had given way to economic restructuring and the beginning of an emphasis on market forces, China began eliminating many of those protections — giving rise to mass layoffs, unemployment, huge gaps in income and pervasive labor abuse.

The worst off have been migrant workers, most of them exiles from the poorest provinces who travel far from home to live in cramped company dormitories while working long hours under poor conditions.

Migrant workers in virtually every city complain about abuses like having their pay withheld or being forced to work without a contract.

“I don’t know about the labor law,” said Zhang Yin, an 18-year-old migrant who washes dishes in Shanghai. “During the three months I’ve been here, my boss has delayed the salary payment twice. I want to quit.”

Having grown increasingly concerned about the nation’s widening income gap and fearing social unrest, officials in Beijing now seem determined to improve worker protection. In recent years, more and more factory workers have gone to court or taken to the streets to protest poor working conditions and overdue pay.

“The government is concerned because social turmoil can happen at any moment,” says Liu Cheng, a professor of law at Shanghai Normal University and an adviser to the authorities on drafting the proposed law. “The government stresses social stability, so it needs to solve existing problems in the society.”

In a surprisingly democratic move, China asked for public comment on the draft law last spring and received more than 190,000 responses, mostly from labor activists. The American Chamber of Commerce sent in a lengthy response with objections to the proposals. The European Chamber of Commerce also responded.

The law would impose heavy fines on companies that do not comply. And the state-controlled union — the only legal union in China — would gain greater power through new collective-bargaining rights or pursuing worker grievances and establishing work rules. One provision in the proposed law reads, “Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc.”

If approved and strictly enforced, specialists say the new laws would strikingly alter the country’s vast labor market and significantly push up the wages of everyday workers.

“If you really abide by the Chinese labor laws,” said Anita Chan, an expert on labor issues in this country and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, “migrant-worker wages would go up by 50 percent or more.”

Until now, though, existing Chinese labor laws have gone largely unenforced, which has further complicated the debate here. Opponents of the proposed law argue that enforcing existing labor laws would be enough to solve the country’s nagging problems. Advocates respond that adopting new laws would set the stage for stricter enforcement.

Even lawyers working for multinational corporations seem to agree that there is an epidemic of cheating.

Mr. Liu, the Shanghai lawyer who advised the government on the draft proposal, says many companies avoid existing laws by using employment agencies to hire workers. He says the new law will do more to protect workers from such abuse by holding companies accountable.

“The principle is not to raise the labor standard dramatically,” he said, “but to raise the cost of violating the law. The current labor law is a paper tiger and is a disadvantage to those who obey it. If you don’t obey the law, you won’t be punished.”

I have long believed that the U.S. government is spying on peaceful protesters in this country notwithstanding laws to the contrary. Much attention is been paid to revelations that the government is wiretapping phone calls without a warrant in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What made that story less than spectacular -- in the minds of conservatives and others who like to take a neutral stand on things -- was that the government maintains that these surveillance efforts only involve phone calls where at least one participant is a terrorist.

The history of the American protest movement is the history of surveillance of activists. The urge to resist this kind of spying is too great to resist. The stereotype that anti-war activists are violent does not go away, even when it's clear that 99 percent of them do nothing but paint signs and march in a straight line.

Simply type the word "cointelpro" into Google and see how the "counter intelligence program" lasted for decades before Congress shut it down in the 1970's amid relevations that the FBI and CIA were harassing and even killing off leftist activists in the name of "national security." From time to time we read about new cointelpros against environmental and anti-war groups, but very little has surfaced on this issue since 9/11.

Until now. The New York Times last week reported on efforts by the ACLU to obtain documents which show once again that the U.S. government has been spying on American citizens who oppose the Iraq War. These surveillance efforts can be as far-reaching as the government wants them to be. There is very little oversight into these activities. Who's watching the watchers?

For an interactive web site by the ACLU featuring some smoking gun documents on this issue, click here. For a short blog entry on this issue, click here. The news articles covering this issue only hint that this activity is widespread. I tend to follow the "cockroach theory" of corruption. A few violations probably means that there are millions and millions of cockroaches behind the refrigerator and in the walls. It always works that way.

The Miami Herald was also on the story. Here are some excerpts.

The Pentagon kept tabs on nonviolent protesters of the Iraq war -- including a Broward County group that planned a protest for the annual Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show -- by collecting information and storing it in a military antiterrorism database, according to documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The documents, which the ACLU posted today at its website, http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spyfiles/index.html, were obtained from the Department of Defense under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the civil-liberties group said.

The documents indicate that the Miami-Dade Police Department sent information to the Pentagon in April 2005, reporting on a planned protest by the Broward Anti-War Coalition.

''The Broward Anti-War Coalition (BAWC), with support from other local groups . . . is planning to conduct a large-scale protest at the Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show,'' says the report, dated April 12, 2005. One section of the document says, ``Incident type: suspicious activities/incidents.''

'BAWC plans to counter military recruitment and the `pro-war' message with guerrilla theater and other forms of subversive propaganda,'' the report says.

The report was made part of the Department of Defense's Threat and Local Observation Notice database, or TALON, the ACLU said.

. . .

The ACLU said that the documents it had obtained from the Pentagon show that the TALON database, which was intended to track groups or individuals with links to terrorism, was being used to store information on antiwar protesters gleaned by the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

. . .

The ACLU's news release cites other examples of information gathering on antiwar groups from around the country:

• One document, labeled ''potential terrorist activity,'' lists events such as a ''Stop the War NOW!'' rally in Akron, Ohio on March 19, 2005 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The source of the report notes that the rally ''will have a March and Reading of Names of War Dead'' and that marchers would pass a military recruitment station and the local FBI office along the way.

• Other documents contain information on a series of protests mistakenly identified as taking place in Springfield, Ill., when they really occurred in Springfield, Mass.

• In a document listing upcoming Atlanta area protests by the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, the Pentagon -- citing the Department of Homeland Security as its source -- states that the Students for Peace and Justice network poses a threat to DOD personnel.

To support that claim, the TALON report cites previous acts of civil disobedience in California and Texas, including sit-ins, disruptions at recruitment offices and street theater. Describing one protest in Austin, Texas, the document notes: 'The protesters blocked the entrance to the recruitment office with two coffins, one draped with an American flag and the other covered with an Iraqi flag, taped posters on the window of the office and chanted, `No more war and occupation. You don't have to die for an education.' ''

Here's the New York Times article:

October 13, 2006 Documents Reveal Scope of U.S. Database on Antiwar Protests

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — Internal military documents released Thursday provided new details about the Defense Department’s collection of information on demonstrations nationwide last year by students, Quakers and others opposed to the Iraq war.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show, for instance, that military officials labeled as “potential terrorist activity” events like a “Stop the War Now” rally in Akron, Ohio, in March 2005.

The Defense Department acknowledged last year that its analysts had maintained records on war protests in an internal database past the 90 days its guidelines allowed, and even after it was determined there was no threat.

A department spokesman said Thursday that the “questionable data collection” had led to a tightening of military procedures to ensure that only information relevant to terrorism and other threats was collected. The spokesman, Maj. Patrick Ryder, said in response to the release of the documents that the department “views with great concern any potential violation” of the policy.

. . .

A document first disclosed last December by NBC News showed that the military had maintained a database, known as Talon, containing information about more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” around the country in 2004 and 2005. Dozens of alerts on antiwar meetings and peaceful protests appear to have remained in the database even after analysts had decided that they posed no threat to military bases or personnel.

Some documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. referred to the potential for disruption to military recruiting and the threat posed to military personnel as a result.

An internal report produced in May 2005, for instance, discussed antiwar protests at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was issued “to clarify why the Students for Peace and Justice represent a potential threat to D.O.D. personnel.”

The memorandum noted that several hundred students had recently protested the presence of military recruiters at a career fair and demanded that they leave.

“The clear purpose of these civil disobedience actions was to disrupt the recruiting mission of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command by blocking the entrance to the recruiting station and causing the stations to shut down early,” it said.

But the document also noted that “to date, no reported incidents have occurred at these protests.”

The documents indicated that intelligence reports and tips about antiwar protests, including mundane details like the schedule for weekly planning meetings, were widely shared among analysts from the military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.

Last night Keith Olbermann, news anchor for MSNBC, ripped into President Bush again, this time over the death of habeas corpus and the administration's lies over this monumental law on military tribunals for suspected terrorists. Click here for the video. It's time for the other talking heads on the news to tell it like it is. Olbermann's lone wolf attacks are leaving some people worried that he won't be around much longer.

And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived… as people in fear.

And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.

We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans…

While his man-in-charge…

General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen — he is still a Japanese."

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did — but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and…

…one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900-thousand votes… though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely… from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.

The most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been, only human.

We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."

We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute… the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always… wrong.

"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly — of course — the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously… was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" — exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."

'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies, that imperil us all.

"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," …you told us yesterday… "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas Corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush… they would be "the beginning of the end of America."

And did it even occur to you once sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 — that with only a little further shift in this world we now know — just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died —

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for… and convene a Military Commission to try… not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, sir, all of them — as always — wrong.

Impeachment is a solution to a national crisis the way that suicide is the answer to your problems. We tell ourselves that suicide is not the answer under any circumstances, but then we read about terminally ill people who want to die with dignity and on their own terms. Impeachment is available under the Constitution, but it's rarely attempted, and that's a good thing.

I am no fan of anyone who has served as president in my lifetime, and the best that I can say about any president since 1960 is that Lyndon Johnson had some good domestic policies and signed a lot of excellent civil rights bills into law. He also appointed some good federal judges, as did Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. I have nothing else positive to say about any of our presidents over the past 50 years except that it's a good thing that none of them dropped the atomic bomb on anyone and, so far as I know, none of them ever held up a liquor store.

Placing blame

The best place to start in placing blame for the terrible political and social environment created by George W. Bush is the American people for electing a subliterate clown who relies on dangerous people for advice and remains plainly unqualified for this position. Say what you want about the disputed elections in 2000 and 2004; the elections never should have been so close that the Republican sleaze machine would find a way to grab it away from us. The greatest tragedy is that this pathetic clown can get re-elected in 2004 when it was clear that his policies were disasterous and the country was plainly heading in the wrong direction. Somehow the public relations experts that managed W's re-election campaign found a way to portray him as a firm leader and cast bogus aspersions on the opposition.

But blaming the American people can only take us so far. We have no idea, really, what is happening in the Bush White House. The Internet and a few excellent investigative reporters have continuously shed light on the outrageous incompetence and mendacity that characterizes nearly every policy initiative advanced by this administration. There is no consent of the governed. The American people have not supported the Iraq War in quite some time, and Bush's public approval ratings is in the sewer, and for good reason. What to do?

What does it take?

The Constitution outlines a procedure for impeachment. Maybe impeachment should be more common. Members of Congress resign with some frequency, usually the result of sex scandals, financial corruption and other shenanigans. In the private sector, CEO's are asked to leave and/or resign in the face of misconduct, criminal charges, incompetence and other foul-ups. Why is the President held to a higher standard?

What does it take to impeach the president? As Wikipedia tells us, "For the executive branch, only those who have allegedly committed 'treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors' may be impeached. Although treason and bribery are obvious, the Constitution is silent on what constitutes a 'high crime or misdemeanor.'"

So we look to precedent in determining what's impeachable. Again, Wikipedia:

In 1998, President Clinton "Bill Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998 by the House of Representatives on grounds of perjury to a grand jury (by a 228–206 vote) and obstruction of justice (by a 221–212 vote). Two other articles of impeachment failed — a second count of perjury in the Jones case (by a 205–229 vote), and one accusing Clinton of abuse of power (by a 148–285 vote). He was acquitted by the Senate."

Richard Nixon was not impeached as he resigned before the Congress put his head on the chopping block. The below cut and paste is quite long, but I urge you to read it, especially if you did not live through the Watergate crisis. It is alarming to see how corrupt President Nixon really was, and how stark parallels between then and now are not being discussed at all. The articles of impeachment against Nixon were based on the following factual allegations:

ARTICLE 1

On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.

ARTICLE II

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.

He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavoured to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive, judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as Attorney General of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division, and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, of the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

ARTICLE III

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.

The Nixon stuff was quite serious. The Clinton impeachment was political as the Republicans went after him as soon as he took the oath of office in 1993, hitting paydirt five years later in the Monica Lewinski scandal. Anyone with a decent knowledge of American history knows that Clinton's crimes in the Monica scandal were nothing compared with presidential misconduct over the years.

What about Bush?

What's the case against Bush? Putting aside his general incompetence and delusional personality, a good summary is found here. The shenanigans of the Bush regime are too numerous to mention. Just go the library and browse through the books which have been published over the past few years to learn more about the pretext for the Iraq War, warrantless spying, torture, the creeping loss of constitutional rights and manifest incompetence. David Swanson writes:

For all the reasons Nixon was nearly impeached, George W. Bush could be impeached too. He has openly engaged in illegal, unconstitutional, warrantless spying, and -- while Congress has not yet used subpoenas -- Bush has obstructed its investigations, refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, and broken a variety of laws in the course of exacting retribution against whistleblowers, producing false reports, and establishing a regime of secrecy of a sort that Nixon could only dream about.

Bush has lied to the public about the warrantless spying program at the National Security Agency (NSA), the war in Iraq, the kinds of warnings he was given before hurricane Katrina arrived, and numerous other issues. While Nixon made secret audio tapes in the White House which, when discovered, doubled as evidence, this time there is video -- of Bush being warned prior to Katrina and claiming he was not warned, of Bush assuring us he was not engaged in warrantless spying and brazenly asserting that he will continue to spy without warrants, of Bush warning us about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as Saddam's supposed ties to the 9/11 attacks and of Bush claiming he did no such thing, of Bush claiming the U.S. does not condone torture and of the torture victims.

Bush's administration has even bribed journalists and manufactured phony news stories at home as well as in Iraq in order to deceive the public. Congressman John Conyers has introduced bills to censure both the President and Vice President Cheney for their refusal to turn over information, while Senator Russ Feingold has introduced a bill to censure Bush for his illegal spying programs.

Swanson then summarizes the various crimes and misdemeanors over the past five years as set forth in various books focusing on impeachment. This is a long cut and paste, but, hey, nothing worthwhile ever came easy:

Every list of impeachable offenses includes tangential references to other impeachable offenses. The list seems inexhaustible, but here's a quick run-down of the main possible charges:

The illegal war in Iraq is at or near the top of everyone's list. Sometimes, the emphasis is on the illegality of an aggressive war; sometimes, on the fraud used to sell the war to Congress and the public; sometimes, on the absence of a proper Congressional declaration of war.

Lying to Congress is a felony. Lying to the public is an impeachable offense -- and one brought against Nixon. Initiating an aggressive war is the highest crime under treaties that are part of international and U.S. law. Launching a war without proper Congressional approval is a violation of the War Powers Act of 1973. Misusing government funds to launch a war is a separate crime, committed by Bush when he ordered troops moved to Iraq and began bombing raids prior to Congress's dubious authorization to use force.

On some lists are the various war crimes that have accompanied the war, including the targeting of civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, the use of antipersonnel weapons in densely settled urban areas, and the use of illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new version of napalm used in Mark 77 firebombs.

High on most lists are also unlawful detentions and torture. The arbitrary detention of Americans, of legal residents, and of non-Americans without due process, without charge, and without access to counsel is illegal under U.S. and international law, and unconstitutional as well. In case anyone doubted this fact, the Supreme Court recently ruled on it. The highest body in our judicial branch of government has essentially declared Bush a criminal, and yet Congress recently acted, through the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to provide the President with retroactive immunity for some of his acts in these areas.

Bush has authorized the torture of thousands of captives, resulting in some cases in death, and sought to evade responsibility by redefining acts commonly considered torture out of the category of torture. He has agreed to let suspects be kidnapped off the streets of cities in other countries, allowed prisoners to be hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross, shipped people under U.S. control to third nations or a network of secret U.S. prisons to be tortured. The Constitution, international treaties that are part of U.S. law, and other U.S. laws ban torture. When, in the McCain Amendment to a Department of Defense bill last January, Congress redundantly re-banned torture, the President signed the bill but added a signing statement explaining that he would not obey it.

On every impeachment list as well is the illegal National Security Agency spying to which Bush has publicly (and proudly) confessed, and which a federal court has ruled criminal. Yet, to this day, it goes on unchecked. Bush lied to the public and Congress about his illegal spying programs for years. Congress has passed bills cutting off funding for the programs, but Bush countermanded these with signing statements.

The spying, done without recourse to the secret FISA court set up in 1978 for exactly this purpose, is also in blatant violation of the FISA Act of 1978, of the Fourth Amendment, and -- according to Congressman John Conyers' report, George W. Bush versus the U.S. Constitution -- of the Stored Communications Act of 1986 and the Communications Act of 1934. Congressman Conyers also cites Bush for violating the National Security Act and for failing to keep all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees "fully and currently informed" of intelligence activities, such as the warrantless surveillance programs.

On nearly every list of impeachable offenses is the President's failure to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Over a period of years, the administration undermined the city's protection. In the days prior to the storm's arrival, Bush was warned about just what might happen. Yet prior to the storm -- and for days after it hit -- he did nothing; the unqualified cronies he had put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency did nothing; and the National Guard members from Louisiana, Mississippi and other states of the southeast whom he had dispatched to Iraq could not be called upon to help. Thousands of Americans died preventable deaths and a city was ruined, not so much by a storm as by the non-response to it. Even now, people who lost their homes in the Katrina debacle are being told there are no funds available to help them.

The Constitution requires that the President "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Former Congresswoman and Judiciary Committee Member Elizabeth Holtzman in her new book, The Impeachment of George W. Bush, argues that Bush's neglect of New Orleans (and other presidential duties) violated this responsibility and so constitute high crimes and misdemeanors. Holtzman puts into this category as well the administration's failure to provide U.S. troops in Iraq with proper body armor, and the failure of the President and his top officials to plan for the occupation of Iraq.

In their book, The Case for Impeachment, Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky make a similar argument about Bush's failure to attempt to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001 and his obstruction of investigations into those crimes (as do Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips in their book Impeach the President).

The same two books, along with the Bush Crimes Commission in its "verdict," also suggest that, by denying the existence of, enacting policies that increase, and failing to work to decrease global warming, Bush has committed perhaps the most serious offense possible -- in the words of Loo and Phillips, "placing oil-industry profits over the long-term survival of the human race and the viability of the planet."

The Bush Crimes Commission finds the President's imposition of abstinence-only policies on countries being ravaged by AIDS to be a serious crime against humanity. Loo and Phillips charge Bush with "violating the constitutional principle of separation of church and state through the interlinking of theocratic ideologies in the decision-making process of the U.S. government."

Three of the recent books on impeachment include as an impeachable offense Bush's use of signing statements to announce his refusal to obey hundreds of laws passed by Congress. The American Bar Association has found the practice unconstitutional. It is, in fact, an open threat to the rule of law.

An official censure by Congress would do nothing to compel the President to obey laws he chooses not to obey. Impeachment would do nothing. Only impeachment followed by removal from office will cure this cancer on the American political system. The current situation is exactly what the authors of the Constitution had in mind when they made impeachment and removal from office the means of protection against tyranny.

Holtzman includes in her roster of impeachable offenses the selective and misleading leaking of classified information, especially on supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (which Bush himself was directly involved in) to advance a dishonest case for war. Lindorff and Olshansky also include the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

Conyers cites violations of the following related laws: 1) Federal requirements concerning the leaking and misuse of intelligence, including failing to enforce an executive order that requires the disciplining of those who leak classified information, whether intentionally or not; 2) Federal laws forbidding retaliation against whistle-blowers of various sorts, an example being the demotion of Bunnatine Greenhouse, the chief contracting officer at the Army Corps of Engineers, who exposed secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton; 3) Federal regulations and ethical requirements governing conflicts of interest, including the briefing of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on an FBI investigation of possible misconduct by Karl Rove, even though Mr. Rove had previously received nearly $750,000 in fees for political work on Mr. Ashcroft's campaigns.

Loo and Phillips -- rightly I think -- bring up a number of offenses not found on most lists, including:

*"Usurping the American people's right to know the truth about governmental actions through the systematic use of propaganda and disinformation";

*"Overthrowing Haiti's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and installing a highly repressive regime" in his place;

*Hiding government decisions from public and congressional view "by a willful subversion of the Freedom of Information Act."

I would add one item not yet found on anybody's list: the passage by Congress of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that retroactively and unconstitutionally legalizes various Bush administration acts involving torture and illegal detention, and the passage of other bills doing the same on a number of the crimes listed above. Impeachment is not a criminal process. Legalizing impeachable offenses does not make them less impeachable. But proposing and lobbying to legalize illegal impeachable offenses are themselves additional impeachable offenses.

Global warming inaction

Another crime in the Bush arsenal is global warming. It's not illegal to mortgage our future. Nor is it against the law or contrary to constitutional values to let the environment go to hell. But we know what history would say about our failure to deal with global warming at a time when decisive action would still garner results. Imagine how historians would judge Abraham Lincoln for allowing the southern states to secede from the union. Or if Frankin Delano Roosevelt did not declare war against Japan after Pearl Harbor. Historians would wonder why these presidents were not impeached. It's fair to say that Bush could have been impeached if he did not go to war against Afghanistan after September 11.

The news about global warming is growing more dour all the time. There is no greater threat to our survival. Only the loonies think global warming is not a problem. And our grandchildren are going to wonder why we stood by and did nothing. According to Reuters,

Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down, a study said on Friday.

But acting now will avoid some of the massive damage and cost relatively little, said the study commissioned by Friends of the Earth from the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in the United States.

"The climate system has enormous momentum, as does the economic system," said co-author Frank Ackerman. "We have to start turning off greenhouse gas emissions now in order to avoid catastrophe in decades to come."

The study said the cost of inaction by governments and individuals could hit 11 trillion pounds a year by 2100, or six to eight percent of global economic output then.

Most scientists now agree average temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, driven by so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

Already at two degrees they predict a massive upsurge in species loss and extreme weather events like storms, droughts and floods, threatening millions of lives. Polar icecaps will melt, raising sea levels by several metres.

Beyond that, the world enters into the unknown with the possible shutdown of the life-giving Gulf Stream and possibly catastrophic runaway change due to so-called climate feedback.

By contrast, spending just 1.6 trillion pounds a year now to limit temperature rises to two degrees could avoid annual economic damage of around 6.4 trillion pounds, the Tufts report said.

Bush's adamant refusal to do anything constructive about global warming is far, far worse than Bill Clinton lying under oath about oral sex. It's also worse than Richard Nixon's Watergate cover-up. A real Congress would tell Bush: Do something now about climate change or you can forget about serving out the rest of your term.

The future

Impeachment cannot happen as long as the Republicans control Congress. That may change, particularly in the wake of the Mark Foley sex scandal. The public is fed up with a political party wwhich protects its own even in the face of Congressman Foley's sexual overtures to teenage government interns. Bush's popularity is also sinking again. If the Democrats take control of Congress and do not take impeachment seriously, then they do not deserve to win. If they do take impeachment seriously and go after Bush, no one except the most rabid partisans will say it was a frivolous exercise. These were the same people who impeached President Clinton for lying under oath about oral sex. Aren't lies about war and peace more important?

The Republicans have launched a new television advertisement that uses Osama bin Ladin's words and image to convince the viewer that only the Republicans can keep America safe. See the advertisement here.

There is no voice-over for the advertisement. You only hear a ticking sound and see Osama's image with his threatening quotations on the screen about his desire to attack the United States again. Transcript of the silent advertisement follows:

“What is yet to come will be even greater”-Osama Bin Laden, Al Jazeera, 12/26/01

“With God’s permission we call on everyone who believes in God…to comply with His will to kill the Americans.”

-Osama Bin Laden (The World Islamic Front, Fatwa, 2/23/98)

[Text Fades: “kill the Americans”]

“They will not come to their senses unless the attacks fall on their heads and…until the battle has moved inside America.” -Osama Bin Laden (Interview, Al-Jazeera, 10/21/01)

[Text Fades: “inside America.”]

“We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states, and they negotiated. And we purchased some suitcase bombs.” -Ayman Al-Zawahiri (“Al Qaeda: We Bought Nuke Cases,” [New York] Daily News, 3/22/04)

[Text Fades: “suitcase bombs.”]

“Our message is clear—what you saw in New York and Washington and what you are seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq, all these are nothing compared to what you will see next.” -Ayman Al-Zawahiri (“Al Qaeda Threatens More UK, U.S. Attacks,” CNN.com, 8/4/05)

[Text Fades: “nothing compared to what you will see next.”]

“What is yet to come will be even greater”

These Are The Stakes. Vote November 7th.

www.GOP.com

Paid For By The Republican National Committee. Not Authorized By Any Candidate Or Candidate Committee.

In many ways, this is pretty sick, but understandable. Fear works as a campaign tactic. With the Republicans lagging in the polls leading up to the mid-term elections, it's anything goes. Problem is that the advertisement overlooks one important fact: George W. Bush was President when September 11 happened. Former Bush administration officials have reported that Bush was not focused on the bin Ladin threat prior to 9/11 and cared more about finding a Saddam Hussein link to the World Trade Center, and when Bush was presented with a briefing on an imminent al Qaeda attack in August 2001, he shrugged it off and told the CIA briefer that "all right, you've covered your ass, now." Evidence also shows that the war in Iraq has worsened the terror climate and made us less safe. And didn't Bush once say in public that he was not concerned about bin Ladin? I don't think the Democrats have the guts to turn these unpleasant facts into an advertisement campaign. But the Republicans would, and have.

Keith Olbermann is the new hero of the left. It's easy to see why. He is blasting the Bush administration's "gutter politics" several times per week with tight critiques on the President's incompetence and fear-mongering. Yesterday, I wrote about the Republican National Committee's disgraceful television advertisement that uses images of bin Ladin and his terroristic quotes as a means to get out the Republican vote in November.

I have not seen much media commentary on this advertisement, but last night Olbermann handled it. See it here. He throws in a few other jabs at the Department of Homeland Security and its fear-mongering and tactics. This is must-see TV.

In a rational world, someone would fired over this advertisement. But we don't live in a rational world. We instead watch in horror as the administration tried to scare the shit out of the American public by telling them that they will die in a nuclear blast if they do not vote Republican.

Habeas corpus is Latin for "you have the body." We hear "habeas corpus" used from time to time but few people actually know what it means. It's a legal concept dating to pre-revolutionary America which allows prisoners to challenge the legality of their confinement.

Habeas corpus is one of those rights that Americans are referencing when they brag to their foreign friends that we live in a "free country." You hear this swagger all the time: "our troops are fighting to keep us free." Or, "unlike Communist Cuba, the government can't treat us like animals." At some level, this is all true: the government cannot just pick you off the street and lock you away for no reason. Habeas Corpus is the remedy for this repressive tactic. A judge will review your detention and decide whether it's legal. Habeas Corpus, then, is the last resort against an authoritarian government.

Here's the bad news: in the fear surrounding Bush's war on terror, Habeas Corpus has been cut out of existence, at least for any number of people who are unfortunate enough to run afoul of the war on terror and the Bush administration's concept of an aider and abettor of terrorism. I will deal with the specifics of that in Part II. For now, let's take a look at the history of criminal law in this country and how the rights that protect us slowly creep away, sometimes right under our noses.

Criminal law: not just for criminals

There are many ways to criticize the U.S. Constitution, and scholars have written about its many omissions and limitations. But one thing that we can be sure of: this written document does protect us from certain governmental abuses. The Bill of Rights is Exhibit A in this analysis. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution contain the rights to free speech, freedom of religion and due process. But what people don't realize is that much of the Bill of Rights is devoted to the rights of people accused of criminal activity. That's right: the Bill of Rights is soft on crime, as a right wing politician might phrase it. These provisions require the government to use extreme care in prosecuting people because the loss of liberty (jail time) is too important. So the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury, the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination ("I'm taking the Fifth"), the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Eighth Amendment protection against excessive and unusual punishments, represent protections that would probably not survive a majority vote. But since they're in the Constitution, they'll always be there.

The reason why the Bill of Rights focuses on the rights of the accused is that the Constitutional framers were leery of unchecked monarchy but impressed by European protections against arbitrary detentions. Habeas Corpus goes back to the Thirteenth Century and, and once the United States was founded, Congress enacted a law that required the Federal courts to entertain Habeas petitions. The Constitution itself has a provision governing Habeas Corpus, stating that it cannot be suspended except "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

People who ask why criminal defendants are let free on "technicalities" are really attacking the notion that everyone has constitutional rights. Technicalities may seem petty, but the government has to follow the rules in convicting people and taking away their liberty. As the old saying goes, it is better to let 10 criminals go free than to wrongly imprison one person. That adage has informed American criminal law for centuries. As I will discuss below, that notion is now changing.

The Great Writ

The concept of Habeas Corpus was so important to our constitutional structure that judges called it the "Great Writ." A writ is a court order. In 1963, Justice William Brennan said of Habeas Corpus: "Although in form the Great Writ is simply a mode of procedure, its history is inextricably intertwined with the growth of fundamental rights of personal liberty. For its function has been to provide a prompt and efficacious remedy for whatever society deems to be intolerable restraints. Its root principle is that in a civilized society, government must always be accountable to the judiciary for a man's imprisonment: if the imprisonment cannot be shown to conform with the fundamental requirements of law, the individual is entitled to his immediate release."

The problem is that in American political culture, no one gets elected on a platform to protect the rights of the criminal defendants. They get elected by promising to lock them away and throw away the key. These politicians forget that the criminal process is fallable because humans are fallable. Some people really do get locked up in violation of the Constitution. Take a look at how many people are walking away from death row because they did not commit the crime that they were convicted of. Without DNA testing, you could fill a small graveyard with people who were buried alive.

When politicians take advantage of an ignorant public, the rights of criminal defendants are the first to go. So are the rights of people who were actually convicted of committing crimes, those who file Habeas petitions. In 1994, the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in Congress and got President Clinton to sign into law a measure which significantly restricted the rights of Habeas Corpus applicants. I do not see any mention of this law in the current debate over the recent changes in Habeas Corpus, but in retrospect this was a sign of things to come.

The 1996 Habeas law was actually quite disturbing. Prior to 1996, anyone convicted of a crime could petition the Federal courts under the Habeas Corpus law, claiming that the conviction violated the Constitution. This would happen in any number of ways, for example, the defendant was denied the right to counsel or was forced to confess against his will or there was something wrong with the trial leading to his conviction. The right to petition the Federal courts in a Habeas proceeding to challenge a conviction in State court (where most criminal defendants are tried) is unique in American law. Civil litigants (people who bring lawsuits) do not get a second bite at the apple if they lose in State court. Again, the idea that people cannot be imprisoned in violation of the Constitution permitted an exception against the rule that you cannot have a second chance in the court system. The fact that the Federal courts did, in fact, grant Habeas petitions on the basis that some State courts violated the Constitution only confirmed that it was not a bad idea to let criminals file a Habeas petition, even if most of them were denied on the basis that the State court in question did not violate the criminal's rights.

Politicians are always looking for ways to scapegoat their way to office. What happened in 1996 was disturbing to any fair-minded person who cared to notice. The new Habeas law that year said that Federal courts have to deny Habeas petitions unless they find that State courts violated clear constitutional mandates. So, the Federal court could actually find that someone was convicted in violation of the Constitution as understood by Federal judges who make their living interpreting and analyzing the Constitution each and every day. But the inmate stays in jail and cannot be released on a Habeas petition unless the Federal court finds that the conviction in State court was clearly in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The theory was that State courts need leeway to manage their own affairs and interpret the Constitution as they see fit, even if in retrospect the State courts were wrong in finding that someone's conviction was constitutional. State courts would get the benefit of the doubt in interpreting the Constitution and would only be on the losing end of a Habeas petition if they truly screwed up.

What this means is that we now have a two-tier system of constitutional law: different legal standards interpreting the same constitutional provisions in State and Federal court. The idea behind this ridiculous duality is that States have rights, too, and they can do without Federal courts constantly second-guessing them. That notion is OK as far as it goes, but it's an outrage that, at the end of the day, when the Habeas process is over, someone stays locked in jail even though experienced Federal judges found that the conviction was in violation of the constitutional right to a fair trial, so long as the State courts didn't really blow it. A mere constitutional violation of the right to fair trial is OK in State court.

The relevance of all this is that for the first time, we have a two constitutional standards in our system of justice. A Federal standard and a State standard. It boggles the mind to imagine how this could have happened, but it happened because the public hates criminals and President Clinton signed this into law figuring that he had to throw a bone to the Republicans who probably would vote down the Bill of Rights if it came up for a majority vote.

The current crisis

That all brings us to the current crisis. When the public is afraid, the rights of criminal defendants and people that we hate are the first to go. Habeas Corpus is the pinata that politicans will attack again and again because there is little public opposition to these repressive "solutions" to a national crisis and, as I said earlier, no politician ever got elected by promising to protect the rights of the criminally accused. What happened last week when President Bush revised the Habeas rules is monumental and sad, but it was foreseeable. More on that in Part II.

Part I of this series looked at the history of Habeas Corpus and how this protection ensures that people are not falsely convicted or thrown into the dungeon without fair procedures. It's a last gasp effort to protect the constitutional rights that so many politicians give lip service to. Even if one out of every 10 Habeas Corpus petitions are granted, that's a worthy ratio if that one person was truly innocent and was convicted by way of a trial that violated his constitutional rights.

Looking back

"It can't happen here," they said about fascism in America. But history already tells us what can happen when people are afraid. During World War II, President Roosevelt interned Japanese citizens in a concentration camps in California. This happened because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the country thought that Japanese citizens would side with Japan in the war. Some people call this a stain on American history. But that's like saying a forest fire was really a campfire where we toasted marshmellows. The Japanese internment program was disgraceful, but the Supreme Court actually said it was legal on the basis that the President had certain powers during wartime that the Courts did not want to second-guess. The Korematsu case was decided in 1944. Technically, it has not been overturned because nationality-based internments have not happened since, and therefore no one was in a position to ask the Supreme Court to repudiate that decision.

When World War II ended, the United States entered into a high-stakes pissing match with the Soviet Union. It's called the Cold War, which ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fear during the Cold War was that the world's superpowers would engage in nuclear war and that the Soviets would try to take over the United States and spread communist ideology to North America. Somehow, during those difficult times, no one played with the cherished right to Habeas Corpus.

Habeas Corpus for some, not others

This is changing. Last week, President Bush signed into law the Militiary Commissions Act. Every law is subject to interpretation, and there is dispute whether these draconian provisions even apply to American citizens, but commentators seem to agree on the following: for the first time, some people under the military's supervision cannot bring a Habeas Corpus petition in the Federal courts to challenge their detention. Robert Parry, the former Associated Press reporter who uncovered some of the Reagan scandals in the 1980's and now runs a website of independent news and analysis, tells us that the new law:

Creates a parallel “star chamber” system of criminal justice for anyone, including an American citizen, who is suspected of engaging in, contributing to or acting in support of violent acts directed against the U.S. government or its allies anywhere on earth.

The law strips “unlawful combatants” and their alleged fellow-travelers of the fundamental right of habeas corpus, meaning that they can’t challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, at least not until after they are brought before a military tribunal, tried under special secrecy rules and then sentenced.

One of the catches, however, is that with habeas corpus suspended these suspects have no guarantee of a swift trial and can theoretically be jailed indefinitely at the President’s discretion. Given the endless nature of the “global war on terror,” suspects could disappear forever into the dark hole of unlimited executive authority, their fate hidden even from their families.

While incarcerated, the “unlawful combatants” and their cohorts can be subjected to coercive interrogations with their words used against them if and when they are brought to trial as long as a military judge approves.

The military tribunals also could use secret evidence to prosecute a wide range of “disloyal” American citizens as well as anti-American non-citizens. The procedures are similar to “star chambers,” which have been employed historically by absolute monarchs and totalitarian states.

Even after the prosecutions are completed, the President could keep details secret. While an annual report must be made to Congress about the military tribunals, the President can conceal whatever information he chooses in a classified annex.

Similarly, Amnesty International summarises the law as follows, noting that it will:

Strip the US courts of jurisdiction to hear or consider habeas corpus appeals challenging the lawfulness or conditions of detention of anyone held in US custody as an "enemy combatant". Judicial review of cases would be severely limited. The law would apply retroactively, and thus could result in more than 200 pending appeals filed on behalf of Guantánamo detainees being thrown out of court.

Prohibit any person from invoking the Geneva Conventions or their protocols as a source of rights in any action in any US court.

Permit the executive to convene military commissions to try "alien unlawful enemy combatants", as determined by the executive under a dangerously broad definition, in trials that would provide foreign nationals so labeled with a lower standard of justice than US citizens accused of the same crimes. This would violate the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights.

Permit civilians captured far from any battlefield to be tried by military commission rather than civilian courts, contradicting international standards and case law.

Establish military commissions whose impartiality, independence and competence would be in doubt, due to the overarching role that the executive, primarily the Secretary of Defense, would play in their procedures and in the appointments of military judges and military officers to sit on the commissions.

Permit, in violation of international law, the use of evidence extracted under cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or as a result of "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating or degrading treatment", as defined under international law.

Permit the use of classified evidence against a defendant, without the defendant necessarily being able effectively to challenge the "sources, methods or activities" by which the government acquired the evidence. This is of particular concern in light of the high level of secrecy and resort to national security arguments employed by the administration in the "war on terror", which have been widely criticized, including by the UN Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee. Amnesty International is concerned that the administration appears on occasion to have resorted to classification to prevent independent scrutiny of human rights violations.

Give the military commissions the power to hand down death sentences, in contravention of international standards which only permit capital punishment after trials affording "all possible safeguards to ensure a fair trial". The clemency authority would be the President. President Bush has led a pattern of official public commentary on the presumed guilt of the detainees, and has overseen a system that has systematically denied the rights of detainees.

Limit the right of charged detainees to be represented by counsel of their choosing.

Fail to provide any guarantee that trials will be conducted within a reasonable time.
Permit the executive to determine who is an "enemy combatant" under any "competent tribunal" established by the executive, and endorse the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), the wholly inadequate administrative procedure that has been employed in Guantánamo to review individual detentions.

Narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act by not expressly criminalizing acts that constitute "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment" banned under Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions. Amnesty International believes that the USA has routinely failed to respect the human dignity of detainees in the "war on terror".

Prohibit the US courts from using "foreign or international law" to inform their decisions in relation to the War Crimes Act. The President has the authority to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions". Under President Bush, the USA has shown a selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the absolute prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment.

Endorse the administration’s "war paradigm" – under which the USA has selectively applied the laws of war and rejected international human rights law. The legislation would backdate the "war on terror" to before the 11 September 2001 in order to be able to try individuals in front of military commissions for "war crimes" committed before that date.

Another good summary is found at Jurist.com, a website where law professors banter and dissect the issues over glasses of wine:

Pursuant to the habeas-stripping provision, any non-U.S. citizen who has been or will be swept up by the military, the CIA, or our allies and transferred to a secret black-site or Guantanamo Bay, or rendered to another country where they are held and interrogated at the behest of the U.S. government, may no longer have any recourse to a U.S. court. As a result, the administration will have no obligation to put forward to an independent branch of government even a minimal explanation of the basis for a potentially indefinite detention. Nor will there exist any mechanism to check military or CIA abuses, including torture, of detainees. Whatever rights to humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions that remain following the “compromise” between the White House and the Republican Senators (and there is serious question as to whether this was indeed a compromise or a capitulation to the White House) will be meaningless since the habeas-stripping provision unquestionably ensures that those rights will find no day in court and no remedy.

The above summary, written by a Habeas scholar who used to work for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, explains the consequences of this new law. I quote it here because it summarizes much of the critical commentary lodged in recent weeks about the Military Commissions Act.

This change works a significant destruction of our constitutional heritage for at least two reasons. First, the U.S. Constitution establishes as a fundamental structural premise that there will be three independent branches of government that serve as checks and balances upon each other. Removing entirely the independent judiciary from any role in checking the conduct of the Executive and Congress is a substantial alteration to that structural premise. Second, the writ of habeas corpus has, since this country’s founding, served as a particularly important guardian of liberty. Throughout our history, when the government has captured and detained individuals, the “Great Writ” has served the basic function of guarding against arbitrary government in the form of unjustified and secret detention. Here is how Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 84 (quoting Blackstone) powerfully described the critical importance of the writ of habeas corpus:

To bereave a man of life …without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.

Moreover, these objections to the removal of habeas corpus are not merely academic debating points. We now know with certainty that the U.S. has detained for years innocent men at Guantanamo Bay, such as the five ethnic Uighurs who arrived there after being sold by Pakistani tribesmen for a bounty and the U.S. labeled them enemy combatants with no evidence supporting that designation. It was in part because of the existence of habeas corpus jurisdiction and the pressure of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Rasul v. Bush case, which held that non-citizens detained at Guantanamo had a right to file habeas petitions, that these men gained their freedom. The habeas-stripping legislation will overrule Rasul v. Bush, making future challenges to wrongful and indefinite detention impossible. We also know that innocent men such as Maher Arar and Khaled El-Masri have been tortured in the process of secret detention and extraordinary rendition either by or at the behest of the U.S. government. The habeas-stripping provision will eliminate any opportunity for the judiciary to ensure that existing and future detentions are not grounded on torture or other abuse.

Asking questions

Bottom line: if the Department of Defense declares you to be an enemy combatant, you lose all the rights necessary to prove that you were swept up without any basis. Do you trust the Department of Defense to make these decisions fairly? Is the Department of Defense fallable? Do you like the way the Department of Defense has prosecuted the Iraq War, sending in troops without enough body armour, and without any plan to deal with the insurgency, resulting in the death and injuries of thousands of American soldiers? To ask these questions is to answer them.

The new law assumes that governmental officials will act in good faith in rounding people up and placing them in detention. Do you trust the government? Most people do not. Except for the radical centrists who think that public servants always act in the best interests of their constituents, you cannot rest easy knowing that a few decisionmakers can round people up and throw away the key without any judicial oversight. True, many genuine terrorists will be punished under the new rules. But not everyone who is arrested is guilty, and not everyone at Guantanamo is a terrorist. Oversight is to the criminal justice system what sunlight is to open government. Once you close the door, anything can happen. Under the new rules, the lack of oversight means that we may never know whether the detention was improper.

Signing a bill into law makes these policies permanent. Who knows where the war on terror will lead us? What kind of people will replace Bush in 2009 after the next presidential election? Will they be benevolent, or will they make Bush look benevolent? What if there is another terror attack on U.S. soil? Who will get swept up by the government after the next terror attack?

These important questions are made quite worrysome in light of exposes on how the government is actually fighting the terror war. In addition to the botched conflict in Iraq, investigative journalists are raising serious questions about the war on terror. Again, here's Robert Parry:

Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone. He interviewed nearly a dozen former high-ranking counterterrorism officials about Bush's approach to the war on terrorism. In his article, "The Phony War," (Rolling Stone, 9/21/06) Dreyfuss says these officials conclude:

· The war on terror is bogus. Terrorism shouldn't be treated as if it were a nation to be battled with the military, but should instead be fought with police work and intelligence agencies.

· Terrorism is not an enemy, but a method. Even if the United States were to wipe out every terrorist cell in the world today, terrorism would be back tomorrow.

· Bush lacks a clear understanding of the nature of the "enemy" and has no real strategy for dealing with them.

· The Bush administration confuses the issue by grouping "Al Qaeda" with everything from Iraq's resistance movement to states such as Syria and Iran.

· Today, there's virtually no real "Al Qaeda threat" to Americans.

· Bush's policies have spawned a new generation of "amateur terrorists," but there are few of them, and they're not likely to pose a major threat to the U.S.

· Though Bush has said he will fight his "war" until every last terrorist is eliminated, terrorism can never be defeated, merely "contained and reduced."

Dreyfuss says, "In the short term, the cops and spies can continue to do their best to watch for terrorist threats as they emerge, and occasionally, as in London, they will succeed. But they are the first to admit that stopping a plot before it can unfold involved, more than anything, plain dumb luck."

The future

Some people think the suspension of Habeas Corpus violates the Constitution which says that it can only be suspended in the face of rebellions and the invasion of public safety. But relying on the courts to second-guess the President at times of war is always tricky. Judges do not want to intrude on foreign policy.

The future does not look good for those who care about constitutional rights and preserving democratic rule. Fear will always win out over optimism. The Republican Party has campaigned on fear ever since the mid-term elections in 2002. This time around it's no different. These people are now using Omama bin Ladin in their campaign ads. Anything to win re-election and demomize the opposition. According to CNN:

The advertisement, which is available on the Republican National Committee Web site, is scheduled to run on national news networks Sunday. Republicans are emphasizing national security and terrorism issues in their bid to maintain control of Congress with about two weeks before the November midterms.

The ad features al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, speaking, but the only sound is a ticking clock in the background. The terror leaders' quotes are posted on the screen and key phrases in the quotes stand alone as the rest of the quote fades out.

In one instance, bin Laden is quoted as saying, "With God's permission we call on everyone who believes in God ... to comply with His will to kill the Americans." As the text of the quote fades out, "kill the Americans" remains on the screen.

Another bin Laden quote: "They will not come to their senses unless the attacks fall on their heads and ... until the battle has moved inside America" -- fades out, leaving only "inside America" on the screen.

Meanwhile, footage of terrorists engaged in martial arts and weapons training rolls in the background. One scene shows terrorists traversing monkey bars over fire.

The ticking clock morphs into a heartbeat as the ad comes to a close, and the only spoken words on the commercial announce, "The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising."

The people behind this despicable advertisement are the caretakers of our constitutional rights. They will do anything to win, even if means scaring the shit out of television viewers who tuned into watch the opera or a situation comedy of the movie of the week. Feel any safer?

The country cannot undo the damage inflicted by the Bush administration. But it can contain the damage. The best way to do that is to vote for any candidate that will render Bush a lame duck for the next two years. With reduced authority to further ruin the country or foul up the war in Iraq or mishandle any number of things, a lame duck president has to cater to the wishes of the opposition party at least some of the time.

One way of looking that things is to recall the last time that Republican presidents had to respect the needs and concerns of the opposition Democratic Party. Let's look at this in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose members outlive every presidential administration that appointed them and issue rulings which affect our lives in so many ways.

By 1986, President Reagan had been fumbling along for five years, doing his best to roll back the New Deal policies that had governed this country for decades. Reagan affably had attacked unions, welfare mothers, civil rights and basically everything decent and good that our country had to offer. The conservatives had waited a long time for someone to carry the right wing mantle and when Reagan took the oath of office in 1981 it was time to expend whatever political capital they had amassed.

Books upon books have been written about Reagan over the years but some angles do not get the attention they deserve. Reagan presided over a divided government during both his terms as the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1981 through the rest of the decade and they seized control of the equally powerful U.S. Senate in 1986. One result of Democratic control over these branches of government was that the Reagan administration nearly collapsed in the wake of relevations that the President was violating U.S. law in sending money and other assistance to the right-wing Contra army in Nicaragua, a band of terrorists that tried to bring down the only elected government in Central America. Congress was more concerned about the fact that Reagan was violating U.S. law than the fact that he was actively supporting a terrorist army that raped and killed at will. (The public also discovered that Reagan was sending weapons to Iranian terrorists). This relatively limited congressional concern did have it advantages: through the Iran-Contra scandal, Congress forced Reagan administration officals to testify under oath about this policy and the presidency was weakened as the public soured on the actor-turned-President.

At this time, Reagan appointed Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1987, a conservative-moderate, Lewis Powell, resigned from the Court, creating a vacancy. The Court had been divided on many issues, including abortion, affirmative action and the other hot-button issues on which everyone and his brother has an opinion. With Powell gone and Bork replacing him, the Court would be a very different place. Taking advantage of a weakened Reagan administration reeling from public scrutiny into the Iran-Contra scandal, the U.S. Senate rejected Bork's nomination because he was an inflammatory right-winger who cheerfully advocated a limited vision of constitutional rights, scaring everyone including moderate conservatives who did not want the Court to backtrack from its advances in protecting civil rights. Ask anyone who cares about this issue and they will tell you flatly that a Supreme Court without Robert Bork is like a research team without a plagiarist. Bork's subsequent autobiography and his scholarly books about his cramped constitutional vision only confirm that Congress made the right choice in forcing Reagan to find another nominee.

Here's a flavor of Bork's views which thankfully have not made their way into Court rulings:

Bork . . . advocates a modification to the Constitution which would allow Congressional supermajorities to override Supreme Court decisions.

. . .

In December 2005, Bork wrote an article in the periodical National Review calling for government censorship of popular culture, including television, film and music. Bork claimed that "[l]iberty in America can be enhanced by reinstating, legislatively, restraints upon the direction of our culture and morality".

Read the first statement carefully. A super-majority can override Supreme Court decisions? That means the First Amendment is up for a majority vote. A super-majority can easily trample the rights of dissenters. If the Constitution is supposed to protect the rights of the political and social majority, how can you justify allowing Congress to overrule civil rights decisions this way?

A few years after Bork was rejected, the first President Bush also had to deal with Democrats in Congress when he had to appoint a replacement to the Supreme Court in 1990. The Bork debacle was still fresh in everyone's mind, and no one wanted to defend another ideologue. So Bush did one of the few decent things of his career and appointed the brilliant but little-known David Souter to the Supreme Court, plucking him from his hideaway in New Hampshire. Souter was an unknown quantity but good enough for the Democrats who satisfied themselves that he was not a sheep in Bork's clothing. Souter has gone on to become one of the most liberal members of the Court, and his intelligence makes him indispensable in the current days of a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. He's one of the few Justices that we can count on for expansive civil rights. Today conservatives refer to this appointment derisively, saying there can be "no more Souters."

Supreme Court Justices serve into their 70's and 80's. They get the best health care possible and take care of themselves, allowing them to serve 20-30 years. Having already inflicted significant damage by appointing two right-wingers to the Supreme Court recently, Bush may have the opportunity to appoint yet another before he leaves office. The oldest Justice, John Paul Stevens, was appointed to the Court in 1975 and is 86 years old. He could leave the Court at any time. Although Stevens was appointed by a Republican president, he is one of the most liberal and intelligent people on the Court. His loss would be incalculable if Bush replaces him with a rightist conservative. That will happen if the Republican flunkies in the U.S. Senate remain in control of that branch of government. It won't happen if Democrats take over the Senate and fight Bush in this critical area.

For some reason, the left does not make an issue of Supreme Court and Federal judgship nominations in national elections. Then we wonder why our civil rights are being eroded. Most of our civil rights actually derive from progressive Supreme Court decisions, but it's the Republicans who make the Court an issue, as shown by this link.

The moral of the story is this: if you live in a State where a close Senate race is brewing, get your ass out of the house and vote on Election Day. If you care about abortion rights, freedom of speech, limits on presidential war powers, the right to privacy and other civil rights that we take for granted, get your ass out of the house and vote. And bring a friend with you.

It's tough campaigning when your public approval rating is in the 30's. The war is unpopular and U.S. casualties in Iraq are on the increase. Not to mention news that the Iraq war is making the terror threat worse and that over 600,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. So when President Bush goes out on the campaign trail to convince voters to keep the Republicans in Congress on November 7, he knows that one tactic that will get him applause and rally the faithful is to bash the gays.

Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court split the baby and said that the State must grant equal rights to gays and lesbians. The Court said that State legislators must decide whether to recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions. Either way, same-sex couples cannot be deprived of the financial and administrative benefits of marriage because of their sexual orientation.

The gay rights movement is helped by the fact that most of us know someone who is gay or lesbian. This is how the civil rights movement advanced in the 1950's and 1960's. School desegregation and other social policies acquainted the white population with the black population. It's harder to hate other races when you know racial minorities personally. That's what's happening with same-sex couples. Many of them are like married couples, and more and more people realize that it's not fair to deny them the many advantages that married people enjoy solely because of their sexual orientation.

Of course, Bush could care less about this line of thinking. His party's in trouble! As shown in the below article from Associated Press, he flies to the deep south and throws his spitball, hoping the umpire doesn't notice. Changing his stump speech to bash gays may work in the south, but it ain't going to work here. That's probably one reason why Bush for the most part has avoided the northeast. Even the Republicans up here tend to be socially liberal.

(AP) President Bush has for months cast the midterm elections as a choice about just two issues: taxes and terrorism. Now, with polls predicting bleak results for Republicans, he is trying to fire up his party by decrying gay marriage.

"For decades, activist judges have tried to redefine America by court order," Bush said Monday. "Just this last week in New Jersey, another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and should be defended."

The line earned Bush by far his most sustained applause at a rally of 5,000 people aimed at boosting former GOP Rep. Max Burns' effort to unseat a Democratic incumbent. In this conservative rural corner of eastern Georgia, even children jumped to their feet alongside their parents to cheer and clap for nearly 30 seconds - a near-eternity in political speechmaking.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples must be given all the benefits of married couples, leaving it up to the state Legislature to decide whether to extend those rights under the structure of marriage or something else.

One alternative, civil unions, is an idea Bush supports. But he ignored that on the way to portraying the New Jersey decision as the kind of thing America should do without