As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.

The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.

In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.

Most of the pictures have the formal look of photos taken at presidential receptions. The images of Bush, Abramoff and one of his sons appear to be the rapid-fire shots--known in White House parlance as clicks-- that the President snaps with top supporters before taking the podium at fund-raising receptions. Over five years, Bush has posed for tens of thousands of such shots--many with people he does not know. Last month 9,500 people attended holiday receptions at the White House, and most went two by two through a line for a photo with the President and the First Lady. The White House is generous about providing copies--in some cases, signed by the President--that become centerpieces for "walls of fame" throughout status-conscious Washington.

Abramoff knew the game. In a 2001 e-mail to a lawyer for tribal leader Lovelin Poncho, he crows about an upcoming meeting at the White House that he had arranged for Poncho and says it should be a priceless asset in his client's upcoming re-election campaign as chief of Louisiana's Coushatta Indians. "By all means mention [in the tribal newsletter] that the Chief is being asked to confer with the President and is coming to Washington for this purpose in May," Abramoff writes. "We'll definitely have a photo from the opportunity, which he can use." The lawyer had asked about attire, and Abramoff advises, "As to dress, probably suit and tie would work best."

The e-mail, now part of a wide-ranging federal investigation into lobbying practices and lobbyists' relationships with members of Congress, offers a window into Abramoff's willingness to trade on ties to the White House and to invoke Bush's name to impress clients who were spending tens of millions of dollars on Abramoff's advice.

Abramoff was once in better graces at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, having raised at least $100,000 for the President's re-election campaign. During 2001 and 2002, his support for Republicans and connections to the White House won him invitations to Hanukkah receptions, each attended by 400 to 500 people. McClellan has said Abramoff may have been present at "other widely attended" events. He was also admitted to the White House complex for meetings with several staff members, including one with presidential senior adviser Karl Rove, one of the most coveted invitations in Washington.

Michael Scanlon, who is Abramoff's former partner and has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a Congressman, in 2001 told the New Times of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that Abramoff had "a relationship" with the President. "He doesn't have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one," Scanlon said. Nonsense, say others. A former White House official familiar with some Abramoff requests to the White House said Abramoff had some meetings with Administration officials in 2001 and 2002, but he was later frozen out because aides became suspicious of his funding sources and annoyed that the issues he raised did not mesh with their agenda. A top Republican official said it was clear to him that Abramoff couldn't pick up the phone and reach Bush aides because Abramoff had asked the official to serve as an intermediary.

The White House describes the number of Abramoff's meetings with staff members only as "a few," even though senior Bush aides have precise data about them. McClellan will not give details, saying he doesn't "get into discussing staff-level meetings." During a televised briefing, he added, "We're not going to engage in a fishing expedition." Pressed for particulars about Abramoff's White House contacts, McClellan said with brio, "People are insinuating things based on no evidence whatsoever." But he said he cannot "say with absolute certainty that [Abramoff] did not have any other visits" apart from those disclosed. Another White House official said, "The decision was made don't put out any additional information." That reticence has been eagerly seized upon by some Democrats. Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada wrote to Bush last week to demand details, saying Abramoff "may have had undue and improper influence within your Administration."

Garza, the bolo-wearing former chairman of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, has fond memories of his session with Bush, which he said was held in 2001 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. According to e-mails in the hands of investigators, the meeting was arranged with the help of Abramoff and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. In an April 18, 2001, e-mail to Abramoff, Norquist wrote that he would be "honored" if Abramoff "could come to the White House meeting."

Garza--known in his native Kickapoo language as Makateonenodua, or black buffalo--is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling more than $300,000 from his tribe. Through his spokesman, Garza said that during the session, Bush talked about policy matters and thanked those present for supporting his agenda, then took questions from the audience of about two dozen people. Garza told TIME, "We were very happy that Jack Abramoff helped us to be with the President. Bush was in a very good mood--very upbeat and positive." No evidence has emerged that the Bush Administration has done anything for the Kickapoo at Abramoff's behest.

Three attendees who spoke to TIME recall that Abramoff was present, and three of them say that's where the picture of Bush, Abramoff and the former Kickapoo chairman was taken. The White House has a different description of the event Garza attended. "The President stopped by a meeting with 21 state legislators and two tribal leaders," spokeswoman Erin Healy said. "Available records show that Mr. Abramoff was not in attendance."

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him."

Over the past few months, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been questioning witnesses in the CIA leak case about the origins of the disputed Niger documents referenced in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, according to several current and former State Department officials who have testified in the case.

The State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because some of the information they discussed is still classified, indicated that the White House had substantial motive for revealing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

They said the questions Fitzgerald asked them about the Niger documents suggested to them that the special prosecutor was putting together a timeline. They said they believe Fitzgerald wants to show the grand jury how some people in the Bush administration may have conspired to retaliate against former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

The officials said Fitzgerald's interest is not in the the war's validity. Instead, Fitzgerald is trying to find out if Wilson's public questions about the administration's intelligence and its use of the Niger documents led members of a little known committee called the White House Iraq Group to leak Plame's name and CIA status to reporters.

The officials have provided the first in-depth look at how the administration came to rely upon the Niger documents in the fall of 2002, and how it played a direct role in the Plame leak, which ultimately forced the White House to acknowledge that it shouldn't have allowed President Bush to cite the uranium claims in his State of the Union address - a move the White House had hoped it could avoid.

Wilson was chosen by the CIA in February 2002 to travel to Niger to check on questions Vice President Dick Cheney had about Iraq's interest in buying yellowcake uranium from the African country. Uranium is the key component used to build an atomic bomb. The State Department had first expressed doubts about the vice president's inquiries. Officials at the State Department, including Colin Powell, according to sources, told Cheney the intelligence was suspect.

"We already expressed our opinion about the intelligence the vice president was asking about. We thought it had no merit," one former senior State Department official said. "We resented that they didn't trust what we said."

Indeed, earlier that month, Carlton Fulford Jr., a four-star Marine general, was sent to Niger to check on the security of Niger's uranium. He returned to the United States convinced that the supply was secure. Fulford informed Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about his findings. It's unclear whether Myers ever shared the information with White House officials. A spokesperson for Myers said the general would not respond to questions for this story.

Later that same month, the State Department official said, Wilson traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA. That's the trip the State Department had initially protested because Fulford had already looked into it. But Wilson confirmed that there was no truth to the allegations.

"We felt vindicated," the State Department official said because there had long been animosity between the White House and State over disagreements concerning intelligence on the Iraqi threat.

However, seven months later, the British government prepared a "white paper" giving validity to the claims that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger which the State Department and Wilson had already proved false.

"Some very senior people in the vice president's office saw that as an opportunity," an official who currently works at the State Department in a senior capacity said. "They took it and ran with it, and it was wrong."

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five-counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame leak - National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and Cheney had embraced the uranium claims cited in the"white paper," according to the State Department sources, and they had all pushed for its inclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

"I have no idea how or why [the Niger uranium claim] got in there," one of the current State Department sources said. "To this day I don't know. Secretary Powell knew that we disagreed with the intelligence. It wasn't that we disagreed with the White House per se. It's that we disagreed with the intelligence regarding Niger. We were the only people in the intelligence community who thought the documents were bogus."

Numerous messages were left at the offices of Hadley, Cheney and Powell, and there was no response.

Iraq's interest in the yellowcake caught the attention of Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Association. ElBaradei had read a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate and had personally contacted the State Department and the National Security Council, where Hadley was then deputy advisor, to obtain the evidence so his agency could look into it.

ElBaradei sent a letter to the White House and the National Security Council in December 2002, warning senior officials he thought the documents were forgeries and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs. ElBaradei said he never received a written response to his letter, despite repeated follow-up calls he made to the White House, the NSC and the State Department.

The State Department officials said they did not know whether Powell ever saw ElBaradei's letter, but they were unaware that ElBaradei had inquired about the allegations made in the Niger documents.

In a second letter sent to Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, in March 2003, after the Iraq had war started, ElBaradei laid out the details of his attempts to get to the bottom of the Niger uranium story.

ElBaradei said that when the Niger claims were included in the State Department fact sheet on the Iraqi threat in December 2002, "the IAEA asked the U.S. Government, through its Mission in Vienna, to provide any actionable information that would allow it to follow up with the countries involved, viz Niger and Iraq."

ElBaradei said he was assured that his letter was forwarded to the White House and to the National Security Council. He added that he and his staff were suspicious about the Niger documents because it had long been rumored that documents pertaining to Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger had been doctored.

In conversations and correspondence with Waxman in March 2003, ElBaradei said White House officials pledged to cooperate with United Nations inspectors but repeatedly withheld evidence from them.

Cheney, who made the rounds on the cable news shows that month, tried to discredit ElBaradei's conclusion that the documents were forged.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Two months earlier, Wilson re-emerged. It was one day after President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, in which the president said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson said he met with a friend who worked at the State Department and asked why the president cited the British intelligence report about Iraq's attempt to buy uranium, when he had debunked the allegation a year earlier.

"I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case," Wilson wrote in his infamous July 6, 2003, op-ed in the New York Times, which preceded his wife's identity being leaked to reporters by about a week.

Many career State Department officials were also livid that the so-called "16 words" made its way into the State of the Union address, the current and former department officials who commented for this story said.

"To me it showed a total disregard for the truth, plain and simple," said one former State Department official who had worked closely with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, referring to the administration's use of the flawed intelligence.

"I refuse to believe that the findings of a four-star general and an envoy the CIA sent to Niger to personally investigate the accuracy of the intelligence, as well as our own research at the State Department, never got into the hands of President Bush or Vice President Cheney. I don't buy it. Saying that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was all it took, as far as I'm concerned, to convince the House to support the war. The American people too. I believe removing Saddam Hussein was right and just. But the intelligence that was used to state the case wasn't."

The officials said Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley had pressured Powell to reference the Niger documents in his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, but Powell did not believe the intelligence was solid and refused. The officials said there was a verbal confrontation between the men over the issue. Other sources close to Powell confirmed this as well.

Although there were suspicions that the Niger documents were forgeries, the White House went to great lengths to defend its use of the report in Bush's State of the Union address, saying the CIA signed off on it.

At this time, Wilson was also unconvinced that the White House did not see his report. In private conversations with a State Department official and a few reporters, he accused the White House of twisting the intelligence to fuel the administration's war machine. He let it be known that he had personally investigated the allegations on behalf of the CIA.

By May 2003, Wilson had made enough noise in Washington, DC, political circles about the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence to attract the attention of Libby and Hadley. Wilson had been a source for Nicholas Kristoff's New York Times column that suggested the administration knowingly used the phony Niger documents to win support for the war.

"You have to understand," the former State Department official said, "this was two months after the invasion, and here was a person contradicting what the administration felt strongly about. The administration put so much stock into the fact that WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) were there. But it was clear that in May 2003 there was no evidence of WMDs. Anyone bringing it up, calling the administration out, so to speak, became a target."

All of the officials said that after Kristoff's column was published, they received phone calls from from Libby and Hadley inquiring about the unnamed official in Kristoff's column, who turned out to be Wilson. For the first time, the public learned that the US had sent an American envoy to personally check on the accuracy of the Niger claims.

This was in stark contrast to what the administration had been saying publicly up until this point: that they only cited the Niger documents because they had been confirmed by British intelligence. But the column raised new questions about what the administration knew and when they knew it. The revelation in Kristoff's report threatened to expose how senior White House officials ignored Wilson and all the other warnings they had received about the veracity of the documents.

Cheney found out who Wilson was in May 2003, according to the indictment handed up against Libby in late October. Cheney found out that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. He shared the information with Libby, although Libby had been snooping around on his own and found out the same information, too.

In fact, according to sources knowledgeable about the discussions that took place during this time, only a handful of Cheney's very close aides knew the identity of the person trashing the administration's pre-war intelligence. Karl Rove wasn't even in the know yet, the sources said.

White House officials' decision to retaliate against Wilson by blowing his CIA wife's cover to reporters would come less than a month later - in early June 2003.

The Wilson story had legs. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post started poking around. He called the CIA to check on Wilson's story. He called other people at the White House, too. Reporters were becoming very interested in the fact that the Bush administration failed to inform Congress or the public that Cheney asked the CIA to look into the Niger uranium allegations a year before, and that Wilson was chosen for the mission. It started to appear as if the administration had manipulated the intelligence and duped Congress into backing the war.

Marc Grossman, then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, read about the Niger story, and the unnamed special envoy that was sent to check out the bogus claims, in Kristoff's column.

"He got a request from someone at the White House to look into it, the Niger issues that is, and he asked INR about it," the current State Department official said.

Grossman was scheduled to meet with Cheney and Libby and other senior officials who were members of the White House Iraq Group to discuss the war and the negative stories that were flooding the media about the absence of WMDs in Iraq.

There is no indication that Fitzgerald is investigating Cheney.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 by Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff, to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG operated out of the Vice President's office.

The group's members included Rove, Bush advisor Karen Hughes, Senior Advisor to the Vice President Mary Matalin, Deputy Director of Communications James Wilkinson, Assistant to the President and Legislative Liaison Nicholas Calio, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Last week, this State Department official said that a meeting took place in the office of the Vice President after Libby read the memo, to decide how they would respond to Wilson's increasing public criticism about the administration.

"There was a major, major concern about the polls, the public response, that Mr. Wilson could cause enormous damage," the retired senior State Department official said.

Grossman asked Carl Ford, then the head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to prepare what is known as an INR report about the Niger claims to shed additional light on what Wilson had been referring to in news reports.

The four-page memo indicated that the State Department long had doubts about the veracity of the administration's claims about Iraq's attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. The memo made scant reference to Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame.

"We had real qualms that the intel was not true. When the report was prepared, we were actually happy, because it was an opportunity to talk about Niger again and why we thought there was absolutely no truth to the intelligence," one senior State Department official who saw the report said. "It was not intended to be a report about Mr. Wilson or Ms. Plame."

A retired State Department official who was a source for a July 20, 2005, Associated Press story told the AP that the memo was drafted to respond to specific questions about Wilson's debunking of the Niger uranium claims.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," the State Department official told the AP. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement with the White House."

The retired official was tracked down and interviewed by this reporter. This person said some senior members of Cheney's staff wanted the memo "toned down" after they read it.

"Try to understand their concern," the retired State Department official said. "This was the very first time there was written evidence - not notes, but a request for a report - from the State Department that documented why the Niger intel was bullshit. It was the only thing in writing, and it had a certain value because it didn't come from the IAEA. It came from State. It scared the heck out of a lot of people because it proved that this guy Wilson's story was credible. I don't think anybody wanted the media to know that the State Department disagreed with the intelligence used by the White House. That's why Wilson had to be shut down."

The current State Department official said the INR memo was discussed at length during the meeting Grossman attended at the White House. That meeting may have been the first time other White House officials, including Karl Rove, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and other unknown administration officials learned that Valerie Plame was Wilson's wife and that she worked at the CIA in a covert capacity.

All of the sources interviewed separately for this story said they were told that Karl Rove was the person who first suggested using the media to "turn the tables on Wilson." The officials wouldn't identify the person who told them this. The decision, however, was made during a meeting that took place between the White House Iraq Group.

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him. They were going to show that Wilson and his wife were Democrats. Can you imagine? They were going to say 'don't listen to them, they're partisan.' It was a coordinated effort to turn him into the story. Much to my surprise, it worked."

One of the officials interviewed for this story was also cited in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story about the motivation to leak Wilson's wife's identity to the media. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the State Department official told the Post. The Post did not name the official.

Lawyers close to the leak case said Fitzgerald seems to be pursuing conspiracy charges against some of the higher-profile suspects in the leak, such as Rove.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return numerous messages left at Patton Boggs, the law offices where he works in Washington, DC.

The State Department officials said they were asked by Fitzgerald how important they thought the Niger uranium claims were in making a case for war. He also asked them why they doubted the authenticity of the Niger documents, why the reports appeared to be dubious, if they knew how Wilson was picked to investigate it, whether they heard about his verbal report upon his return, how and why the INR memo was prepared, and whether it was done in response to Wilson's claims about the Niger intelligence or so officials could find out how Wilson was chosen for the trip, and why any reference to his wife was made in the memo.

Ironically, a day after Wilson's July 6, 2003, op-ed titled "What I didn't Find in Niger" was published in the New York Times, Hadley accepted responsibility for allowing the infamous "16 words" to be included in Bush's State of the Union address. Hadley was sent two separate letters from the CIA, warning him not to allow Bush to cite the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address. Hadley said he forgot about the letters.

Exactly one week later, Valerie Plame Wilson's cover was blown in a column written by conservative journalist Robert Novak.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

As well, leading progressive voices (e.g., Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington, Moveon.org, The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon, and others) refuse to acknowledge that the Democratic candidate actually won the presidency in the 2004 election. Americans have grown accustomed to the lies perpetrated by the media on behalf of the Bush administration, but it's tough to accept denial from those on the left who appear otherwise dialed in. One can only assume an anti-Bush environment is more profitable for them. A few notable exceptions include Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis and Greg Palast, all of whom continue to be ridiculed for exposing the truth about rigged elections and voter suppression.

Just as BushCo will stop at nothing now because they have the elections ‘in the bag,’ the Democrats don't have to put forth much effort to challenge them because they know voters have no other viable option. Democratic leadership can sit back and wait it out until power in all its glory is once again bestowed upon them. This is where two-party politics and corporate representation in Congress have taken American democracy.

The truth is voters turned out in record numbers in 2004 to remove the Republican candidate from power, and they succeeded. Had not voting machines been rigged to favor Bush over his opponents, or had not a disproportionate number of Democratic, mainly urban voters been disenfranchised, the outcome of the election would have reflected the true intent and will of the majority of Americans. Kerry did win. The proof is in the numbers. It took former President Jimmy Carter five years to acknowledge that Al Gore was the candidate of the people in Florida in the 2000 election. Evidently, a widely held belief that in America the people’s choice on Election Day is what matters is nothing more than a myth.

The system is now set up for a transfer of power that no longer requires or is reflective of the will of the people. The privatization of what ought to remain a public election system in the United States has led to the widespread acceptance of simulated democracy. With the “fix” now in place, those responsible for the largest suppression of votes in history have become cheerleaders for greater voter turnout in all-electronic voting machine states and counties. Their intent is disingenuous.

In this regard, of great concern are new requirements outlined in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) effective this month involving the centralization of the voter registration rolls. Other than a few, most states have turned to private vendors to manage their centralized voter registration databases rather than manage them in-house, and most states have chosen one, maybe two vendors to perform the work, except for Ohio. The scheme to centralize the voter rolls there is as concerning as Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is partisan and a GOP candidate for governor.

While Congress (HAVA) allocated $3 billion taxpayer dollars to update voting equipment as a result of the Florida coup, what continues to not be managed well is communicating important information to the voters at the local level. Registration concerns and lack of information on precinct locations were issues that voters had the most difficulty with on November 2, 2004. Local election officials are finding it difficult to accept blame, and practically nobody is looking in the direction of the private vendors who primarily manage the elections process from registration to central tabulation.

Not only will vendors continue to control the counting of votes by electronic voting systems, these private companies will also ultimately control who is allowed to vote especially in precincts where public elections officials who maintain some oversight of county lists are asleep on the job. Unless a problem is identified, elections clerks are bound to not go looking for one, but the reality is elections can be won or lost by wrongful purges of the voter rolls, as in Florida in 2000.

Additionally, given the cozy relationship between industry and all branches of government, other agencies may gain easier access to the centralized databases without public knowledge, which could lead to even further wrongful harassment and purges of voters suspected or accused of being 'illegally' registered. Primary information listed in the databases includes name, address and political party affiliation of the voter.

The largest purges of voter rolls occur just prior to federal elections, especially in presidential elections. Therefore, it may not be until the 2008 presidential election campaign that the full effect of the centralized voter registration databases is realized.

George W. Bush claimed a 3.5 million popular vote victory over John Kerry, but it is impossible to know how many voters were turned away at the polls in 2004 because their names were mysteriously purged off the rolls or their registrations were never processed, which they discovered only when they showed up to vote in what they believed to be their assigned community precincts. It is, however, estimated that millions of voters were denied the right to vote on Election Day in 2004.

The never-ending problems with voter registration has led to a greater dependence on provisional ballots, which are merely a placebo to treat the problem, as are voter verified paper trails if votes continue to be cast and counted electronically. As was apparent in Ohio, elections officials can change the voting precincts at the last minute and shuffle voters around, or just close them prior to Election Day in an effort to make provisional ballots worthless.

Another more common practice nationwide has been to move voters who have not voted in the last two elections to an "inactive" status so that local governments are able to pass tax levies in elections. While this may seem a harmless course of action in order to keep public schools and fire departments operational, the practice is now easily exploited to suppress votes in elections where every vote matters.

One way to verify election results is by conducting scientific exit polling, which has provided the nation with at least one such reliable check and balance against final vote tallies for decades, but in Bush era elections, an attempt to discredit the reliability of exit polling has so far succeeded.

Even though various politicos and national editors have denounced GOP voter suppression tactics, they fail to examine the full effect this form of cheating has had on voter morale. They also fail to discuss a fair remedy. Make no mistake about it: denying a legally registered voter the right to vote is cheating. In mean-spirited fashion, Republican mouthpieces continue to make the case that it is the voters and partisans at the local level who are to blame for unfair elections ignoring voter suppression and disenfranchisement altogether. Power-hungry Republicans will continue to get away with wholesale election fraud in 2006 unless the American people put up the biggest fight of their lives to stop them.

Those intent on stealing elections can hide the ballots and the vote counting, but if Americans turn out in large numbers to vote on Election Day they will be unable to hide the bodies, the proof required to contest the phony numbers spit out by the machines programmed by voting equipment vendors. It is time to put all public officials promoting or using unsafe voting systems on notice that they are breaking the law and that must stop.

Over the next nine months, it is important for people to check their registration status often especially in those states that rely solely on electronic voting machines to conduct elections. If possible, voters should obtain proof of registration prior to Election Day from the Boards of Elections offices. Do not wait until September or October to do so, although it is imperative to make one final check prior to the close of registration before the November election.

For groups involved in voter registration drives, the entire process must be thoroughly documented so that registration forms are processed accurately and in a timely manner. Follow through with the processing of registration applications if possible. Don't become the scapegoat the voter antagonists look for to divert attention from their unscrupulous actions.

If voters discover they have been moved to an “inactive” list, they must request to be returned to an "active" voting status at the Boards of Elections. If direct-record electronic voting machines (DREs) are the only option to cast a ballot, request an absentee ballot, which may be turned into the Boards of Elections offices on Election Day, as long as it is legal to do so. Volunteer on Election Day or at a minimum stop by and observe the process.

Encourage communities to work together to pressure local election officials to make precinct information readily available to voters prior to the election, and hold them accountable if they’re not doing their jobs well. Do not allow the voting process on Election Day to fade away. Make it a point to show up and exercise the right to vote with family, friends and neighbors.

The public must dig deep in order to find the collective willpower required to stop election fraud and end privatization of public elections even as politicians and the media continue to lie about it or deny the truth while staring a criminal administration straight in the face.

KAT L'ESTRANGE has been involved in the movement for fair elections and legitimate government since the 2000 election immediately following the controversial Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore on 12/12/00. She became actively involved in the fight against continued voter suppression and disenfranchisement in Ohio after the 2004 election. She has organized national and regional book tours for Greg Palast and Dr. Bob Fitrakis, and produced The BRAD SHOW with host Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com. She currently works as a production assistant for Dorothy Fadiman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Kat is a veteran of the United States Armed Forces having served honorably in both the United States Air Force and California Air National Guard from 1978 to 1985. She received a B.A. in Media Communication from California State University, Sacramento. She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon and can be reached via e-mail at kinc@efn.org

You call yourself a born-again evangelical Christian, but you draw the line at the word fundamentalist. Can you define those terms?

I define fundamentalism as a group of invariably male leaders who consider themselves superior to other believers. The fundamentalists believe they have a special relationship with God. Therefore their beliefs are inherently correct, being those of God, and anyone who disagrees with them are first of all wrong, and second inferior, and in extreme cases even subhuman. Also, fundamentalists don’t relish any challenge to their positions. They believe any deviation from their own God-ordained truth is a derogation of their own responsibility. So compromise or negotiating with others, or considering the opinion of others that might be different, is a violation of their faith. It makes a great exhibition of rigidity and superiority and exclusion.

It seems that the more devout a person becomes in their faith and their Bible and their church, the more difficult it would be not to feel that way.

Paul established three little churches in Galatia on a supple but profound belief that we are saved by the grace of God through our faith in Jesus Christ. That was his basic message, and Peter and other disciples did the same thing. What Paul condemned in the strongest letters is that believers in the little churches began to embellish that fundamental with other requirements, saying that you had to become a Jew first, you had to be circumcised to be a Christian, you can’t eat the meat that’s been sacrificed to idols and be a Christian, you have to worship on a particular holy day to be a Christian, you have to accept a certain apostle as the best representative of Christ to be a Christian. So they began to embellish the basic foundation of Christian faith by human-created additional requirements. And that was the origin of fundamentalism.

So you would define fundamentalists as embellishers.

Absolutely—and creating definitions of Christianity: If you don’t agree with my embellishment, then you can’t be one of us.

What about things that do seem to be in the fundamentals? For example, I know you’ve grappled with abortion.

I’ve never believed that if Jesus was confronted with the question, that he would approve abortion. There are millions of people who disagree with me on both sides. They believe that abortion begins when the male sperm is ejaculated. Others believe that abortion is okay up until the end of the first three months of the pregnancy. Others believe that a woman should have full rights to control her own body. I presume that those who believe in the different nuances concerning abortion can all be faithful and devout Christians. I don’t have any objection to that. But my own belief is that Christ would not approve abortion unless the woman’s life was in danger.

If the problem with fundamentalists is that they impose their rules on others, you might also ask yourself, What rules do I impose? For example, you opposed federal funding of abortion.

I did everything I possibly could to minimize abortion and to discourage abortion while still complying with the law as ordained by the Supreme Court.

But it seems like this is one of those areas where it’s difficult to draw the line. You believe you know the will of God.

If I were a purist in my faith, I couldn’t hold public office and preside over a nation that honored abortion. But when I went into politics and I ran for office, I was willing as a state senator and as a governor and as a president to take an oath before God that I would uphold the laws of the districts that I served. There were times when I was able to change the laws. But until they were changed, I had to comply with them. So when people have asked me about this, I always tell them that this was the most difficult issue I had to face, because I was inherently against abortion, but I was required to impose the law.

If you had the power to change that law, would you?

I can live with Roe v. Wade. Late-term abortion is something I would have vetoed. I don’t believe that late-term abortion is appropriate. That’s obnoxious to me.

If abortion is against the will of God as you understand it, shouldn’t you oppose it at the most the elementary stage of development?

Well, I have my personal beliefs, and in fact my own personal belief is to do away with the death penalty as well. But our Constitution so far permits the states to be autonomous in imposing the death penalty, and the Supreme Court has gone back and forward on it. My wife and I interceded through the court as strong as we could a year ago, with public statements and letters to human rights organizations, to do away with the ruling that permitted the execution of juveniles. So we have tried to intervene that way.

But not on abortion.

That’s correct.

You’ve also been able to blend your scientific background with your spiritual beliefs. Has it ever been difficult to reconcile the training of science, which demands evidence, with faith, which is in many ways the opposite?

No. Faith is believing in something that cannot be proven. You can’t prove the existence of God. You can’t prove that Jesus Christ is the son of God. You can’t prove many things in the Bible, so for someone to have confidence in that, you have to have faith.

Do you think that if you had been raised in an Islamic culture, you would been comfortable in that faith?

I would surmise that I would.

But based on what you believe now, you would have been wrong.

That may be true. But Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” It’s not for me to say that an ignorant Ethiopian who lives around a lake at the origin of the Blue Nile, where I was four days ago, and has never heard of Christ is condemned. I can’t believe that. And I can’t say that a child as you just described, that grew up with Islamic teachings and that believes in Mohammed and Allah, would be condemned. It’s not my role to condemn people. That’s a role to be played by God almighty.

But this would be about a sense of loss on your own part.

There would be. To know what I know now, I would be aggrieved if I had never known about Jesus Christ, because I have tried to apply, in a faltering way, the teachings of Jesus Christ. It’s been an inspiration to me, it’s been a guide to me, it’s been a stabilizing factor in my life. It has permeated my consciousness.

This will sound like the same question, but if you had been raised by atheists, do you think you would have had an inner feeling of faith?

I think so.

Wouldn’t it be hard without the guidance of others?

I believe that when I approached adulthood, I would have been exploring the authenticity or the veracity or the applicability of the Christian faith. If I had been raised as an atheist and I had gone into the outside world and all of a sudden I realized that I was living in a nation where the majority of people profess faith in Christ, I would have wanted to explore the beliefs of others to see if it was applicable to me.

It seems difficult to imagine someone coming into the vast realm of religious offerings and having any idea where to begin. With so many options, they could very well all be wrong.

I accept the fact that some of my beliefs could be wrong. There may be some fallibilities in my own personal beliefs, sure. I can’t change my mind just because I think I might be wrong. My present beliefs have been evolved over seventy-five years of thought and study, analysis, teaching.

One of the other aspects of your life that struck me as a conflict between your experience and your scientific training was that you saw a UFO.

I saw an unidentified flying object. I’ve never believed that it came from Mars. I know enough physics to know that you can’t have vehicles that are tangible in nature flying from Mars, looking around, and then flying back. But I saw an object one night when I was preparing to give a speech to a Lions Club. There were about twenty-five of us men standing around. It was almost time for the Lions Club supper to start, which I would eat and then I would give a speech. I was in charge of fifty-six Lions Clubs in southwest Georgia back in the late ’60s. And all of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, “Look, over in the west!” And there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don’t know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance. I had a tape recorder—because as I met with members of Lions Clubs, I would dictate their names on the tapes so I could remember them—and I dictated my observations. And when I got home, I wrote them down. So that’s an accurate description of what I saw. It was a flying object that was unidentified. But I have never thought that it was from outer space.

One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the reports from Roswell and see if there had been any cover-ups. Did you look into that?

Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I’ll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twin-engine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

That must have been surreal for you. You’re the president of the United States, and you’re getting intelligence information from a woman in a trance in California.

That’s exactly right.

How did your scientific mind process that?

With skepticism. Whether it was just a gross coincidence or…I don’t know. But that’s one thing that I couldn’t explain. As far as covering up possible flights from distant satellites or distant heavenly bodies, I don’t believe in that, and there’s no evidence that it was ever covered up. Or extraterrestrial people coming to earth, I don’t think that’s ever happened.

In a way, just the fact that you promised the American people you would look into it is reflective of how much of an outsider you were to Washington.

That’s true.

Looking back, do you think that you could have been elected if not for the hunger for honesty after Watergate?

No, I don’t think so. I didn’t have any money, and I was almost completely unknown outside of Georgia, and I had never served in Washington. I had only spent a few days there in my entire life. But it was a propitious time for me. Fortune smiled on me. People were looking for some breath of fresh air, some outsider. I told the first ten people who I could get to come and hear me that if I ever made a misleading statement, they shouldn’t vote for me. I said, “I’ll never lie to you.” And that resonated.

Once you got to Washington, even though you had a Democratic Congress, it wasn’t easy.

My main problem was with the liberal Democrats. I was conservative on defense. I had spent eleven years of my life in the navy, and I wanted a strong defense. And I believed in a balanced budget. They thought that was anathema to the basic Democratic faith. After a few months, Ted Kennedy challenged me and told everybody to oppose what I was doing.

It sounds like there was a social component, too, with all the glad-handing that goes on in Washington and the drinks after tennis and things like that. You didn’t like the politicking.

That’s true, and that was a mistake I made. I would have been better off if I had entwined myself into the social life of Washington with the Washington Post leaders and the evening-cocktail-party circuit. I would have made some alliances there that could have been quite valuable to me, but it was anathema to me. It was not my way of life. It was a political mistake.

It must have been a real slap in the face when Kennedy ran against you.

Well, we’ve gotten over it now. He and I are basically compatible on overall political philosophy. So I don’t have any hard feelings. But when I got the nomination at the convention, Kennedy came on the stand and ostentatiously refused to shake hands with me. I went up and stuck out my hand, he stood there for a while and turned around. Wouldn’t shake my hand. In front of 6,000 or whatever it was Democratic delegates. And he never gave me any support.

Have you ever discussed that with Kennedy?

We had one discussion in the White House as we were approaching the general election, but it was not a successful discussion. I tried to get Ted Kennedy to make a public endorsement of me and to urge his supporters to support me, but he was very, very cool. And never did do it. But that’s beside the point. Of course, I hated to be defeated in 1980, but the way it’s turned out, this has been by far the best time of my life.

Someone said that you were the only person in history who used the presidency as a stepping-stone to greatness.

I’ve heard that.

I wanted to talk briefly about the prospects in the Middle East. What are your feelings about the prospects for this Gaza pullout?

Well, at the moment, I’m not hopeful. I have been recently, but I think now the prospects are not good, because Sharon has announced that if any representatives of Hamas run for parliament, he is not going to permit the Palestinians to cross the checkpoints. There are hundreds of checkpoints, in some places every few hundred yards.

This has been one of the big issues with the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East, too: who to deal with and who not to deal with. I wonder if you could comment on the decision not to deal with Arafat.

I think that was a mistake. They — Sharon and Bush together — castrated Arafat as far as any sort of political effectiveness. And then they condemned Arafat because he couldn’t control the Palestinians. He was confined, as you know, to two or three rooms.

But the Bush administration points to that and says, “We may have lost four years, but we got Abu Mazen.”

Well, at this moment, I don’t see any prospects for progress.

Probably your most famous speech was the “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, and a critical element was the idea that we have to make sacrifices. Today we have a very different policy espoused, with Dick Cheney saying that conservation is a personal virtue and not a basis for policy. I wonder how you react.

America is not at war. We’re not really at war with terrorists. There is no commitment of the American people to make a sacrifice to deal with the threat of terrorism. We’re not sacrificing our beliefs to accommodate those of France or Russia or others who might have participated in the Iraqi war. And you can’t find an American, except for a half of 1 percent who are in Iraq or who have loved ones in Iraq, who’ve made any sacrifice in the last three or four years. You haven’t. I haven’t. In fact, I make a lot of money, and my taxes have gone down. So there’s been a policy here that is incredible, of enriching people in a time of war and putting the burden on poor people and future generations in order to make sure we don’t make sacrifices in order to meet the exigencies of threats to our country.

And whose failure is that?

The leaders in Washington, from the White House to the majority in the House and Senate.

It’s got to be hard for you as an ex-President, with the customary code of conduct that you’re not supposed to be too critical. Is that a tough balancing act for you?

Yes. Yes. There are some seminal changes that are being made in the basic policy of my country with which I disagree. There are some people that really believe that to remove taxation from the rich is the right way for this country to go. There are people who really believe that preemptive war is the right way for America to exert its foreign-policy influence. There are people who really believe that endangered species ought not to be protected because it might inhibit economic development. There are people who really believe that a minimum wage of half as much as it is in most developed countries is the right way for our country to be. But the American people have not yet decided which direction the country should go.

You feel like you can’t afford, at this point, to be —

Silent. Yes.

"We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended," Belafonte said in a speech to the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference.

"You can be arrested and not charged. You can be arrested and have no right to counsel," said Belafonte.

Belafonte's remarks on Saturday _ part of a 45-minute speech on the role of the arts in a politically changing world _ were greeted with a roaring standing ovation from an audience which included singer Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and members of the arts community from several dozen countries.

Messages seeking comments from Homeland Security and White House officials were not immediately returned.

He had called President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" during a trip to Venezuela two weeks ago. Belafonte, 78, made that comment after a meeting with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

The Harlem-born Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica, said his activism was inspired by an impoverished mother "who imbued in me that we should never capitulate to oppression."

He acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks demanded a reaction by the United States, but said the policies of the Bush administration were not the right response.

"Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression," said Belafonte, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Bush, he said, rose to power "somewhat dubiously and ... then lies to the people of this nation, misleads them, misinstructs, and then sends off hundreds of thousands of our own boys and girls to a foreign land that has not aggressed against us."

During the Sunday talk shows, lawmakers were responding to efforts by White House aide Karl Rove to make national security the top partisan issue in the November midterm elections. Rove made the comments about the time that new audiotape warnings by Osama bin Laden were released, threatening an upcoming attack on the U.S.

"I think Karl Rove made a big mistake last Friday to use this issue as his opening salvo to Republican operatives," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.

"The terrorists aren't going to check our party registration before they blow us up. ...We're under attack as America," she said on ABC's "This Week."

"The NSA's terrorist surveillance program is targeted at al-Qaida communications coming into or going out of the United States," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in a statement later Sunday. "It is a limited, hot pursuit effort by our intelligence community to detect and prevent attacks."

He accused Democrats of making "misleading and outlandish charges about this vital tool that helps us do exactly what the 9/11 Commission said we needed to do connect the dots."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., appearing on "Fox News Sunday," said the new threats emphasize a greater need for Bush to fully consult with lawmakers from both parties on the best strategy for spy programs within the confines of the law.

"Do I think that the president's leadership has been worthy of support of our party and our leadership? Yes," McCain said.

But McCain questioned efforts to paint Democrats as weak on national security.

"There's too many good Democrats over there who are as concerned about national security and work just as hard as I do," McCain said.

On Friday, Rove outlined a blueprint for Republicans to prevail in the midterm elections, suggesting that Democrats have undermined anti-terror efforts by questioning Bush's authority to allow wiretapping without getting court approval first.

Bush has cited a congressional resolution passed after Sept. 11, 2001 that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program. The program allows eavesdropping of international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed a terror risk.

Several lawmakers from both parties, including McCain and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, have questioned the program's legality because Bush did not get court approval nor fully consult with Congress. Specter's committee will hold a hearing Feb. 6.

On Sunday, some Republicans echoed Rove's anti-terror themes, arguing that Bush should have broad power even if the 2001 congressional resolution did not expressly authorize or otherwise notify lawmakers of the domestic spying.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who is considered a possible 2008 presidential contender, said there are many security measures he doesn't know _ and shouldn't know _ because it could risk alerting the enemy.

"Neither did I know what sort of intercepts or communications of financial assistance or other things that I don't know about," he said.

Allen cited in particular the new bin Laden tape which surfaced last week as evidence that the terror cells might exist in the U.S. and might be preparing to attack should law enforcement officials let their guard down.

"I find nothing wrong with having a hearing. This maybe ought to be something that you would ratify _ yes, the president has this authority," Allen said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. said Rove is being divisive by seeking to exploit the terror threat for political gain. Wartime should not give a president unchecked authority, he said on ABC's "This Week."

"You know, Osama bin Laden is going to die of kidney failure before he's killed by Karl Rove and his crowd," Kerry said. "We're prepared to eavesdrop wherever and whenever necessary in order to make America safer. But we need to put a procedure in place to protect the constitutional rights of Americans."

© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue

Polls suggest that Americans are divided over whether Mr. Bush has the authority to order the searches without warrants that critics say violate the law and that the president says are legal and critical to the nation's security.

But as the White House and Democrats are well aware, the issue can draw very different reactions depending on how it is presented. These next few days could prove critical, as both Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats move aggressively to define what is at stake.

Americans may be willing to support extraordinary measures - perhaps extralegal ones - if they are posed in the starkest terms of protecting the nation from another calamitous attack. They are less likely to be supportive, members of both parties say, if the question is presented as a president breaking the law to spy on the nation's own citizens.

Viewed from the perspective of the battles over the Homeland Security Act or the USA Patriot Act, this White House holds a tactical edge; it has repeatedly proved highly effective in defining complicated debates against the Democratic Party. Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Rove's speech on Friday to the Republican National Committee was a classic example. "Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," Mr. Rove said. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Democrats - and, though Mr. Rove made no mention of this Friday, some Republicans, too - have indeed challenged the administration for eavesdropping without obtaining warrants. They argue, among other points, that the White House is bypassing legal mechanisms established in 1978 that already allow law enforcement agencies to move rapidly to monitor communications that might involve terrorists. Yet it is difficult to think of a Democrat who has actually argued that it is not "in our national security interest" to track Qaeda calls to the United States, as Mr. Rove contested; he did not offer any examples of whom he had in mind.

Beyond that tactical edge, the White House enjoys the advantage of its platform. The sheer crush of news media attention to a rare public speech by Mr. Rove could not have been lost on Democrats.

By contrast, there is no single Democrat who stands as the voice of opposition. That difference is likely to become particularly glaring this week, with a speech on Monday by Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency; a legal defense of the spying program on Tuesday by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and a visit by Mr. Bush to N.S.A. headquarters on Wednesday. This orchestrated campaign is the work of the same White House that initially offered a crouched, guarded response to the disclosure of the eavesdropping program last month.

Still, in many significant ways the task the White House faces now may prove more daunting than the battles it has waged on this terrain before.

A number of Republicans have joined Democrats in challenging the surveillance program, pointedly reminding the administration that precedents established today will be in place whenever a Democrat returns to power.

"A lot of Democrats?" said one prominent Republican supporter of Mr. Bush, who did not want to be identified while being critical of a White House that famously does not brook criticism. "Democrats, Karl? Republicans, too."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "A lot of conservatives are very skeptical about it. It is not as clean-cut a political win as the administration thinks that it is."

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is planning hearings on the surveillance program. And in an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said he did not think the president had the legal authority for this operation, adding that the White House should seek Congressional approval to alter the 1978 provisions if it thinks they are not working now.

Mr. McCain also came to the defense of Democrats in response to Mr. Rove's suggestion that they were not committed to the nation's security. "Do I think that the president's leadership has been worthy of support of our party and our leadership?" he said. "Yes. But there's too many good Democrats over there who are as concerned about national security and work just as hard as I do."

Beyond that, one Republican analyst who is skeptical about the White House strategy said Mr. Bush's position was hardly helped by the fact that his credibility numbers have dropped along with his popularity since his re-election. Mr. Bush may find that, as some Democrats have suggested, the invocations of Sept. 11 do not have the force they once had.

For their part, Democrats said they have learned from their repeated defeats by this White House. The Democratic presidential candidate of 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Rove and the White House were willfully distorting the Democratic position.

"He's playing an old game," Mr. Kerry said. "Every time they have a problem, they play the 9/11 card."

"We all support surveillance - that's where they are playing word games again," Mr. Kerry said. "You can protect the safety of the American people and you can protect the Constitution."

The political complexity of the issue was reflected in remarks by Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, who, like Mr. Kerry, is considering a run for president. Speaking by telephone on a trip to Iowa, Mr. Romney at first offered full support for the president's surveillance program.

"The eavesdropping is a big matter on the coasts for people who are inclined to dislike the president," Mr. Romney said. "The great majority of Americans think it is the president's first responsibility to protect the lives of the American citizens in an urgent setting where there is a threat of terrorism."

But Mr. Romney called back a few moments later to make clear that he would have a different view if the program were found to be unlawful.

"I would never suggest that the president should break the law," he said. "My guess is, my assumption is, he did not break the law. The president has a responsibility to follow the law, which I believe is likely to be found, but he also has a primary responsibility to protect the American people."

"Agents rummaged through the trash, snooped into e-mails, packed Web sites and listened in on phone conversations," Hersh charged. "We know that address books and activist meeting lists have disappeared."

The Truth Project gained national attention when NBC News reported last month that it was described as a "credible threat" in a database of suspicious activity compiled by the Pentagon's Talon program. The listing cited the group's gathering a year ago at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, Fla., to talk about ways to counter military recruitment at high schools.

Talon is separate from the controversial domestic-surveillance program conducted by the National Security Agency. Bush has acknowledged signing orders that allow the NSA to eavesdrop without the usual court warrants, prompting an outcry from many in Congress.

Bush plans to tour the NSA on Wednesday as part of a campaign to defend his handling of the program.

"This is a critical tool that helps us save lives and prevent attacks," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Friday. "It is limited and targeted to al-Qaida communications, with the focus being on detection and prevention."

The Defense Department's Talon program collects data from a wide variety of sources, including military personnel and private citizens, Pentagon spokesman Greg Hicks said.

"They are unfiltered dots of information about perceived threats," Hicks said. "An analyst will look at that information. And what we are trying to do is connect the dots before the next major attack."

To Hersh and some members of Congress, the warrant-less surveillance and Talon are all a part of domestic-spying operations that threaten civil liberties of average Americans and put dissenters under a cloud of suspicion.

"Neither you nor anybody in that (Quaker) church had anything to do with terrorism," said Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla. "The fact is, the Truth Project may have a philosophy that is adverse to the political philosophy and goals of the president of the United States. And as a result of that different philosophy, the president and the secretary of defense ordered that your group be spied upon.

"There should not be a single American who today remains confident that it couldn't happen to them."

So happy to be able to change the topic away from illegal, impeachable domestic wiretapping, overly-excited, fumbling Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez held a Press Conference Friday and called the indictees a "terrorist cell." The equally-pleased with himself, FBI Director Robert Mueller claimed those arrested called themselves "The Family." (The Manson card?)

Eleven are indicted and eight are now in custody. They range from folks completely unknown within enviro circles to the well-known Jonathan Paul, brother of vegan activist and Baywatch actress Alexandra Paul. He and his other sister, ironically, are firefighters. Jonathan Paul has been very visible in many of the environmental issues of the past decade; from "Salvage" logging opposition to the Seattle WTO protests to efforts to protect whales from the famous Makah Whale Hunt.

The acts of eco-sabotage laid at their feet vary from the arson at the Detroit and Oakridge Ranger Stations I wrote about; the prominent Vail Ski Resort expansion arson; destruction of a genetically-engineered tree nursery; torching of timber company offices and under-construction trophy homes; to destruction of a Belgian-owned wild horse meat packing plant.

Another Disturbing In-Custody Death

William Rodgers, an Arizona bookstore owner, is listed as a twelfth unindicted co-conspirator on most of the counts. Unindicted; as he died mysteriously while in custody in an Arizona jail. The implausible claim is he committed suicide using a small plastic bag to suffocate himself.

Agent Provocateurs

Kirk Engdall, an Oregon federal prosecutor proudly admits, "We gathered information from our confidential witness regarding Vail."

As David Lane, a Denver defense attorney familiar with the Vail case told the Denver Post, "The government makes a living off tapes and snitches. It's absolutely standard operating procedure."

In every single count of the indictment, the state notes the acts were carried out with the help of, "another person(s) known to the grand Jury." The government admits its case is based upon "confidential informants" and upon arrestee Stanislaus Meyerhoff who has turned State's Witness and has not been charged with ALL of the arsons he admits to have been involved with.

One of the government's key "confidential witnesses" is Jacob Ferguson, according to Craig Weinerman, the attorney of Chelsea Gerlach, one of those indicted. Ferguson admits to setting many of these fires, but has not himself been indicted. Others, still unnamed, are known to have "worn a wire" for the feds at various activist gatherings.

The Northwest's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, is providing extensive coverage. The paper notes, "The arsons began in October 1996, when the Earth Liberation Front torched a pickup at the Detroit ranger station in the Willamette National Forest and left a plastic jug rigged as an incendiary on the rooftop. Spray painted graffiti read, 'Leave the forests alone, and no one gets hurt'" Other graffiti read, 'Stop Raping the Forest.' "

This begs the question: who would attempt to burn down a building, yet write graffiti on the very same building that, if the "rigged jug" was successful, would be reduced to ashes? And, it should be noted that the "incendiary device" on the roof went undetected, though it was a cordoned off major crime scene, for 48 hours after the fire, which certainly suggests, at minimum, incompetence. ELF supposedly claimed responsibility.

Not a bit of graffiti "evidence" was found at the Oakridge Ranger Station fire that followed the Detroit one by two days. And, ELF which proudly takes credit for its sabotage, even posting to a website has never claimed the Oakridge arson.

One competing theory is that the Ranger Station fire was actually lit by disgruntled local loggers in response to the feds just completed decision to NOT "salvage" log Warner Creek, an old growth forest that itself was a victim of arson and a cause celebre complete with two years of Earth First! blockades. In fact, Spotted Owl research that proved the protesters' claims went up in smoke.

Here Come the Feds

One of my American Indian Movement contacts tells me that rumor has it that the feds are seriously engaged in a "mop-up operation" against numerous activists who have gone toe-to-toe with the Beast in the last few decades. If so, get ready for a spate of "confidential informant-based" arrests across a spectrum of movements as the crackdown on dissent accelerates.

MICHAEL DONNELLY has been active in the efforts to protect our last Ancient Forests. Committed to non-violent Civil Disobedience, if necessary; he and allies have never advocated arson and consider it not only counterproductive to their efforts to protect ecosystems, but likely government and/or industry efforts to discredit legitimate environmental dissent.

He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com

It was hard to know which story yesterday was scarier: Osama bin Laden, still alive and taunting the U.S., or the Justice Department's trying to force Google to turn over a suspiciously broad array of information on millions of users' searches and Web addresses, supposedly to investigate online crime involving pornography.

The Internet is full of vile diversions, but prying without justification is just as vile. Innocent Americans - not just lonely guys in their boxers - could be swept up in the fishnet dragnet. Who decides what is porn? Will those who Google to find out-of-print copies of Lynne Cheney's juicy, cheesy lesbian Old West novel, "Sisters," be suspect? (The cheapest copy at Alibris.com is $195.)

When Fox News asked him about the fresh Osama audiotape, Mr. Cheney sounded like Mr. Moviefone. "Probably low production values," he said.

Osama may not have graduated to DVD's, but he has stayed alive, despite W.'s threat way back in the era of dial-up connections to smoke him out and hunt him down.

Officials first indicated that the U.S. had killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in a bombing in Pakistan last week - or at least his son-in-law or a friend of his son-in-law, or maybe the guy who delivered a kabob to him. Yesterday, Al Qaeda released a tape of Zawahiri's greatest verse hits - poetry for jihadists - like "Tears in the Eyes of Time." What rhymes with mujahedeen? Antihistamine?

None of the Bushies' actions in defiance of law and convention, none of the money or blood spilled in Iraq, have helped these so-called tough guys get the one guy they really need to get. That is truly galling.

W. and Vice don't even act upset about Osama's still being on the loose. Having played down his significance after they missed their chance to get him in Tora Bora, they continue to act as if it's no big deal when he hurls more threats.

Torquemada Cheney was torturing logic again in a speech to a conservative think tank in New York. "Some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornets' nest," he said. "They overlook a fundamental fact: we were not in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway."

Yeah, Dick, because they weren't in Iraq, either.

The fact that federal snoopers are all over reporters, monitoring their phone calls, shows the sorry state of our intelligence. Even F.B.I. agents feel as if they have been wasting their time rummaging through library cards and tracing numbers that turn out to be Pizza Huts.

Maybe they could make an argument that it's worth bending the Constitution into a balloon elephant if we were getting Osama's area code and smashing his connections. We don't even bother to raise the terror alarm anymore when the Qaeda mass murderer releases a tape. The scare-level color code was a more useful tool before the 2004 election.

I just don't get why it's so hard to find Osama. So what if he's in what is often described as "the impossibly rugged mountain terrain" of Pakistan? We send people to the Moon, and W. wants to send someone to Mars. What's more impossibly rugged terrain than that?

If we can brave Big Brother, we could probably find Osama's lair on Google Earth (but not Dick Cheney's - it's censored).

The White House has always seemed less compelled to capture Osama than to use him as a pretext for invading Iraq and as a political selling point. Karl Rove, coming out of his "please don't indict me" crouch, tried to chase away the taint of the Abramoff scandal with a new round of terror-mongering for 2006: "We need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of this moment. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for many Democrats."

So why did the White House set aside the gravest threat of all?

My focus will be familiar to Unitarians, who root their community not in a single theological system but the insights common to a variety of philosophical and theological systems. As we search the wisdom of the ages, it becomes clear that a few principles are at the foundation of almost all these systems. These can be succinctly expressed, I think, in the realm of the ethical, emotional, and intellectual.

First is the ethic of reciprocity, which we typically call the Golden Rule. Some version of that concept appears in every major tradition. The most common articulation of it in the culture in which I was raised is in the Christian Bible, Matthew 7:12: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

Another recurring theme in so many systems of thought is the centrality of love and a call to expand both the scope and depth of our love. From our connections to those close to us, to our relationship with all of creation, the command is simply to love, and when we follow that we find within ourselves deep capacities for empathy, compassion, and solidarity.

Also embedded in all these traditions is an understanding of the need for humility, the imperative to recognize that what we know amounts to painfully little in the face of what there is to know that is beyond our capacity. As a result, our own survival depends on acting on our knowledge, which is impressive, but also remembering our ignorance, which is far deeper.

Do we actually believe in these principles? Do we believe in them enough to make them real in the world?

I think these ethical, emotional, and intellectual values lead inexorably to a certain kind of political project, what I would call a radical humanist democracy. And I think that project is at odds with the current political project called the United States of America.

In this country, we ask people to be decent within institutions that are indecent. We expect people to act ethically, lovingly, and wisely within systems that reject our deepest collective wisdom. We accept a society that is increasingly built on four dangerous fundamentalisms -- religious, national, economic, and technological -- each based on a rejection of some combination of those foundational ethical, emotional, and intellectual insights. We expect that somehow magically we will be better than the systems in which we live. This is a recipe for disaster.

So, it is with that collective wisdom of the ages at our backs -- the wisdom one finds across cultures, through time, in many different places -- that we can, and must, begin to call for the death of America. Or, to be more accurate, we can recognize that in some sense America is already dead.

By this, I don’t mean that there in nothing in the United States of value, nothing worth saving, nothing noble or just.

But just as important, I don’t just mean that we have some problems. I mean that the United States in 2006 is a dead society, that the basic systems on which the United States is based are bankrupt -- ecologically unsustainable and morally indefensible. The problem is that, while this seems clear enough to me and many others, the United States has not yet recognized its own death, which makes it a particularly dangerous nation.

To say that this state of affairs is a recipe for disaster is actually too optimistic; it is a disaster, unfolding before us. It is the disaster of a white-supremacist society in which black infant mortality is twice that of whites. It is the disaster of a male-supremacist society in which one of three women will be raped in her lifetime. It is the disaster of a society that prides itself on being “a nation of laws, not men” and then pursues an unlawful invasion in defiance of all the civilized world, with predictably horrific results. It is the disaster of a capitalist society in which the privileged segment of the population engages in orgiastic binges of meaningless consumption while stepping over homeless people in the streets of every major city. It is the disaster of a society whose contempt for the non-human world has dug us into an ecological hole so deep that there may be no way we can pull ourselves out at this late date. And it is the disaster of a society that seems to believe that no matter what problems its own cleverness creates, it can rescue itself with more cleverness.

In this disaster, most of us in the United States are insulated by privilege from the most brutal consequences of these fundamentalisms. While this disaster unfolds in the so-called First World, centered in the United States, others bear the most crushing burdens. Such as the 500 children who die in Africa from poverty-related diseases that could be largely eliminated with minimal investment. If those 500 children lived in a world that wasn’t structured on imperial domination and a rapacious global capitalism, they would have a chance to live. Those 500 children who die -- not every month, nor every week, nor every day. Those 500 children who die every hour. Those 500 children who died in the course of this service. Those 500 children who, if we believe our own principles, have exactly the same value as our own children.

This hyper-religious, pathologically nationalistic, brutally capitalist, inhumanly high-energy/high-technology society in which we live is a dead-end. There is no rescuing it. All that is left to do is say a few words over the grave, toss in a handful of dirt, and walk away as we often do at funerals of people about whom we had mixed feelings -- remembering that there were some good things about the deceased, but secretly being glad they’re gone.

America is dead. Thank God. Thank the gods. Thank the goddesses.

But there is much work to do to make sure that we bury the beast as quickly as possible, before it does more damage, before the damage is beyond repair. And there is even more work to do to imagine what the world will be when the beast is buried.

Many will say this is not a call for imagination, but an expression of insanity. Many will say that whatever the flaws of the systems in which we live, we have no choice but to find our place in them and try to mitigate the worst effects.

I recognize that it’s possible I’m wrong about all this. I could be stone-cold crazy. I try to retain humility about the limits of my ability to understand a complex world. We all go forward with imperfect information and limited capacities. In the end, we all decide what to believe -- and how to act on that belief -- not solely on evidence and logic but on something in our gut. Here’s what I can say with clarity:

When I look around at the world we have created, at the systems on which that world is based, I get a bad feeling in my gut. When I let the enormity of it flow over me -- when I let myself really see the state of the world -- I get scared. And I have a feeling that time is running out. If I sound harsh and impatient, it is because that feeling in my gut grows deeper each day, and each day I know we have lost more of the time we desperately need to imagine a new kind of society -- a society that taps into that collective wisdom rather than ignores it, a society in which we uphold the principles we claim to hold and have a fighting chance to be the people we say we want to be.

I do not know the origins of this creation -- intelligent or not, designed or not -- of which we are a part. But I know that we have both the capacity to destroy that creation, and the capacity to find our place within it. I know we have the capacity for arrogance that will lead us to that destruction, but I also know we all have within us a love that goes deep enough to create a new world within that larger creation.

It may turn out that we are a failed experiment. It may turn out that the human with the big brain is an evolutionary dead-end. It may be that we will struggle and fight, and in the end fail. It may be. There are no guarantees in this fragile world, for each of us personally or all of us collectively.

But there is always the struggle, and the joy of the struggle to honor what we know deep within us, individually and collectively. It is a struggle we can all join, a struggle we must join if we are to be the people we say we are.

Does that seem difficult? Yes, of course, it is. Of course it will be. It will be difficult for as long as we must struggle, which is the rest of our lives. How could it be otherwise?

Jesus was clear about this. In Matthew 7:12-14, he told his followers, “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

If one prefers a secular version, consider this line from “Bread and Circuses,” a hauntingly beautiful song by Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant about the hypocrisy of so much of modern religion: “The gates of hell stand open wide, but the path of glory you walk single file.”

I like Bragg and Merchant’s vision of the path of glory. To walk that path is in many ways a solitary choice, one we must make when we are alone with our conscience. But when we walk the path, we do not walk alone; we walk single file. That means that when we step onto that path, there will be someone ahead of us, someone who can reach back when we stumble with a hand to pull us forward. And it means that there will be walking behind us someone who will need us to extend to them a hand.

Yes, there are solitary choices, hard choices, to be made. But no matter how easy the gates of hell appear to us, no matter how narrow and hard it seems it is to enter the gate that leads to life, we have the capacity to turn from destruction and toward life. We can hold onto that image of a hand extended, one to one, brother to sister, in a chain of life, anchoring us in the values we claim to hold: reciprocity, love, and humility.

It is that hand that holds the fate of the world. It is my hand. It is yours.

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/index.html

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

The disease is not in the two major political parties, which are, in fact a single entity. The disease lies in the system itself; and that is why it cannot be reformed. It must be torn down and built anew; and the sooner the better.

There are some good people working within the system who are making valiant efforts for just causes; but who are themselves victims of a system that eventually overwhelms and consumes them.

A system that treats the large majority of its citizens as property does not serve those people. It does not deserve their support. The people should not be servants to wealth and power. Power belongs to the people; the system must serve the people, not the other way round.

The system exploits the masses, treats them with contempt, and uses them as cannon fodder in wars the people do not sanction. It is in the interest of this system to keep the multitudes servile to the wealthy and powerful. We are a solid majority that is without voice in a system that operates on vast sums of capital. That is why they call it capitalism. We are at best never more than a fringe element of this system. We are given just enough to keep us participating in a system that cruelly and inhumanely dangles the American dream before our eyes, deceives us into believing that with a little more hard work and personal sacrifice the dream is attainable—then pulls the dream away, leaving us to grasp at air.

Capitalism allows the small minority to rule and to control the large majority. It is a corrupt process that is incapable of producing justice for the large majority of its citizens. It allows the small minority to wage wars in which the large majority are forced to fight and die, without giving them a voice in the decision making process. When have the people ever been consulted when it comes to war? It is not for them to question why; it is for them to serve and to die. The large majority has no interest in war because it serves the interest of wealth and power, of empire—not their own. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is a trenchant case in point. How many plutocrats do you see over there taking enemy fire? How many plutocrats do you see at home profiting from the spoils of war?

Every time we cast a vote within a corrupt system, thinking we are doing our duty as citizens in a democratic society, we are in fact driving another nail into our own coffin. Each vote cast in such a system makes revolutionary change more difficult and unlikely. We are participants in a system that is rigged to assure our defeat and our continued subservience to wealth and power. It is absurd to call this system a democracy. It is a system of control designed to deceive the silent majority into participation, even as it bilks them of everything they have.

It is clear to me that we must form a new political party that is not founded upon money and wealth. It must be a party that is of and for the people, as well as by the people. Some have proposed that we call it the Constitution Party, the Liberty Party, or the Peace Party. Whatever we chose to call it, it must be a party that genuinely represents and empowers the large majority, the average American, the worker. It must not, it cannot, operate within the current system; or it will be corrupted by it and fail. The new party should have an objective of overhauling the existing system and replacing it with genuine participatory democracy.

The new party must work across the often divisive boundaries of race, sex, class and creed. It must build bridges to like minds and kindred spirits of every ilk in every nation on earth.

We must expect that our efforts will be met with derision and hatred, perhaps even violence. Expect our names to be sullied by the commercial media, as revolutionaries always are. We might even be rounded up by the thought police and imprisoned, as happened to Eugene Debs and others early in the twentieth century. Those in power have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The large majority of us, however, have an interest in social justice and peace. Not until real political power rests in the hands of the common people, the large silent majority, rather than plutocrats and corporatists, can our dreams of a free, peaceful and just society be realized.

The plutocrats who are running the country are free to prey upon us, to treat us with contempt, because they have no fear of us. They are protected by a system that assures their rule. We must make them both fear and respect us. When we evoke a powerful response from our political adversaries we will know that we are on the right track. As long as we remain separate, disjointed, and immobile and disorganized our enemies can afford to ignore us. When we organize and mobilize that will surely change.

Several South American countries have already taken this direction. They have rejected the coercive agenda of empire and charted a course toward equality and peace. We would be wise to follow their example. To be sure, the capitalists in Washington and abroad hope to obliterate them both economically and militarily but their power appears to be growing, not diminishing. Populist movements always trouble plutocracy.

Whatever pretensions they may make, no political party operating within the existing system of capitalism represent the large majority of its citizens. Casting our vote for any party within that system only further stacks the deck against us; it assures our defeat through continued servitude to wealth and power. It gives the appearance of legitimacy to illegitimate power. When we chose to withdraw our support from a corrupt system, we reveal it for the fraud that it is.

The defect does not lie in the political parties themselves, as it would appear, but in the system that spawned them. Giving a dying person a transfusion of blood tainted with a lethal virus will not save that patient. It will only prolong his suffering and hasten her decay. We need new blood, new visions, and a new political party. That which is tainted only poisons us and prolongs our agony and suffering.

We must have the courage of our convictions, as well as the strength of character to swim against a swift and powerful current. We must be willing to cut against the grain of deeply entrenched paradigms. The struggle, while difficult and sometimes demoralizing, will make us stronger and better human beings. It is our best hope.

Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer residing in the eastern panhandle of West Virgina. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net

He also was prompted by what he described as Pombo's close ties to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a growing corruption scandal.

"Winning isn't the issue. The issue is forcing a debate on which way the Republican Party goes," McCloskey said. "This guy Pombo, he wants to privatize the remaining public lands in California and he has the power to do it. He's the chairman of the House Resources Committee. He's up to his neck with Abramoff."

Wayne Johnson, a campaign spokesman for Pombo, said McCloskey is out of touch and has no chance of winning the nomination — at least as a Republican.

"We don't take him seriously as a Republican candidate," Johnson said. "He's a stalking horse for the Democratic Party. This is a man who endorsed
John Kerry, his campaign staff comes from (Rep.) George Miller," a Northern California Democrat.

McCloskey, a lawyer in Redwood City, helped write the Endangered Species Act while he was in congress, and he ran for the Republican presidential nomination against
Richard Nixon in 1972 on an anti-Vietnam War platform.

He said Saturday that he spent months trying to find a candidate to run against Pombo, also a Republican, who is in his seventh term.

"I'm going to run against him because nobody else will," McCloskey said. He said he planned to formally announce his candidacy Monday.

However, YOU can put a stop to the destruction of the very foundations of our democracy but speaking out to your senators and demanding they stand up for us at

http://www.emailtocongress.com

There you will find a one click for that will send your personal message to all your members of Congress at once, and you can make it a letter to the editor of your nearest daily newspaper all at the same time.

Be ye not deceived by the corporate media talking heads who have taken over our airwaves. They speak of "done deals" to try to discourage some from taking action, like zombies in a horror movie.

But more and more of us are suddenly waking up now and realizing that we not only DO have the power to put a stop to a reactionary takeover our highest court, we have a DUTY as citizens to do so by telling our senators that they must take a stand and will support them if they do so.

Alito's problem is that he is NOT a judge. He is an advocate. He has a lifelong commitment to being an advocate, and here is the important part, his supporters are pushing him precisely because THEY believe he will be their advocate. They drop kicked their own Miers because she did not have enough proven fealty to the agenda of the extremist Federalist society or the doctrine of a particular religious group. He is just like Roberts, a stealth nominee who promised to be fair in his confirmation hearing, and then lurched to the far right to cast his first vote on the Supreme Court to try down to strike the TWICE expressed will of the people by voter initiative in Oregon.

In 1985 Alito stated categorically his belief that a woman's right to privacy is not constitutional.At his hearing he refused to say if he still holds this view, the equivalent of taking the Fifth Amendment. But Robert Bork said the other day that HE believes without a doubt that Alito is still that same guy. His supporters are only interested in installing a lock down vote who will rule as THEY want every time, without regard to the facts, the law or prior precedent. They want our country to be ruled by the kingly decree of their presidential signing statements, one of Alito's own personal brainstorms. And just like Frist, they will admit it even if Alito himself will not. In fact, they are bragging about it.

What Alito's advocates fear the most is that the American people will suddenly come to their senses, that more and more will speak out as they are doing now, and that our representatives will listen and obey the will of the people. That is why they've been in such a hurry to try to push this thing though. But thousands and thousands and thousands ARE speaking up. Please add your voice to the growing chorus and the people will surely prevail. Together we will dispel the dark cloud over our Supreme Court. Because for people like Bill Frist real participatory democracy would be the worst nightmare of all. That would be a nightmare on Frist Street.

Alito’s theory of the “unitary executive” holds that Bush can cite his “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief to ignore laws he doesn’t like, spy on citizens without warrants, imprison citizens without charges, authorize torture, order assassinations, and invade other countries at his own discretion.

“Can it be true that any President really has such powers under our Constitution?” asked former Vice President Al Gore in a Jan. 16 speech. “If the answer is ‘yes,’ then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?”

The answer to Gore’s final rhetorical question would seem to be no, there is nothing prohibited to Bush. The “unitary executive” can assert authoritarian – even dictatorial – powers for the indefinite future.

Under this government envisioned by Alito and Bush, Americans would no longer have freedoms based on the Constitution and the law, but on Bush’s tolerance and charity. Americans would, in essence, become Bush’s subjects dependent on his good graces, rather than citizens possessing inalienable rights. He would be a modern-day king.

Resistance

In the face of such an unprecedented power grab, Americans might expect senators from both parties to filibuster Alito and resist Bush’s consolidation of power. But Republicans seem more interested in proving their loyalty to Bush, and Democrats so far are signaling only a token fight for fear of suffering political reprisals.

A meeting of the Democratic caucus on Jan. 18 to discuss Alito drew only about two dozen senators out of a total of 45. The caucus consensus reportedly was to cast a “strategic” – or a symbolic – vote against Alito so they could say “we-told-you-so” when he makes bad rulings in the future. [See NYT, Jan.19, 2006]

But it’s unclear why voters would want to reward Democrats for making only a meaningless gesture against Alito, rather than fighting hard to keep him off the court. An extended battle also would give them a chance to make their case about why they see Alito as a threat to the U.S. Constitution.

A filibuster could give voters time, too, to learn what Alito and Bush have in mind for the country under the theory of the “unitary executive.” If after a tough fight the Democrats lose, they could then say they did their best and the voters would know what was at stake.

Losing, however, might not be the end result. A swing in public opinion is certainly possible if even one senator takes the floor to wage an old-fashioned, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster in defense of the most fundamental principles of the American democratic experiment.

A filibuster could touch a public nerve if it concentrates on protecting the Founding Fathers’ framework of checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law – all designed specifically to prevent an abusive Executive from gaining dictatorial powers.

Secondarily, the filibuster could explain to the American people the need for courage in the face of danger, especially at a time when some political leaders are exploiting fear to stampede the public into trading freedom for security.

Rallying the Nation

If an elder statesman, like Robert Byrd, or a younger senator, like Russell Feingold, started speaking with a determination not to leave until Bush withdraws the Alito nomination, the filibuster could be a riveting moment in modern American politics, a last line of defense for the Republic.

In effect, the filibustering senators would be saying that the future of democracy is worth an all-out congressional battle – and that Alito’s theory of a “unitary executive” is an “extraordinary circumstance” deserving of a filibuster.

A filibuster also could force other senators to face up to the threat now emanating from an all-powerful Executive.

Democrats would have to decide if they’re willing to stand up to the pressure that Bush and his many allies would surely bring down on them. Republicans would have to choose between loyalty to the President and to the nation’s founding principles.

For some senators, the choice might define how they are remembered in U.S. history.

Republican John McCain, whose law against torture was approved in December but was essentially eviscerated when Bush pronounced that it would not be binding on him, would have the opportunity to either demand that the torture ban means something or accept Bush’s repudiation of its requirements.

Democrats who think they have the makings of a national leader – the likes of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden – could either demonstrate a toughness for meaningful political battles or confirm their reputations for ineffectual gestures.

The American people also would have a chance to rise to the occasion, showing that they are not the frightened sheep as some critics say, but truly care about democracy as a treasured principle of governance, not just a pleasing word of self-congratulations.

An Alito filibuster could be a galvanizing moment for today’s generation like the Army-McCarthy hearings were in the 1950s when red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy finally went too far and was recognized as a dangerous demagogue.

Dangers

On the other hand, there are reasons to suspect that the Senate will recoil from a battle of such constitutional magnitude.

Democratic consultants already are saying that the Senate Democrats should finesse the Alito confirmation – letting it proceed without a big fight – and then focus instead on corruption as an issue with more “traction.”

This advice parallels the party’s strategy in 2002 when Democratic consultants urged congressional leaders to give Bush what he wanted in terms of authority to invade Iraq so the debate could be refocused on the Democrats’ domestic agenda. That approach turned out to be disastrous, both on Election Day and in the Iraq invasion that followed.

Nevertheless, a similar approach was pressed on Democratic presidential nominee Kerry in 2004. The goal was to neutralize the national security issue by citing Kerry’s Vietnam War record and then shifting the campaign to domestic issues.

So, instead of hammering Bush on his recklessness in the Iraq War, Kerry softened his tone in the days before the election, turned to domestic issues, and failed to nail down a clear victory, allowing Bush to slip back in by claiming the pivotal state of Ohio.

The strategists are back to the same thinking now, urging Democratic leaders to withdraw from a battle over Alito and to keep their heads down over what to do in Iraq, so they can supposedly gain some ground on the corruption issue.

There is, however, no guarantee that corruption will trump national security in November 2006 anymore than domestic issues did in 2002 and 2004.

Even if the Democrats do filibuster, they could still botch it by muddying the waters with appeals about abortion rights. A longstanding Democratic Party tendency is to pander to liberal interest groups even when doing so will hurt the overall cause.

As strongly as many people feel about Roe v. Wade, it would detract from what is of even greater importance in the Alito confirmation, that he would help consolidate the precedent of an American strongman Executive with virtually no limits on his powers.

A disciplined filibuster focused on protecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would have a chance of attracting traditional conservatives as well as moderates and liberals in a cause larger than any political grouping.

Indeed, the filibuster could be the start of a grand coalition built around what many Americans hold as dear as life itself, the principles of a democratic Republic where no man is above the law, where no man is king.


Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'