As for the president and vice president, they could be housed in a modest home purchased on the market. I suspect you can get some good real-estate buys in Fargo. It's not one of those places being besieged by tourists and retirees.

In Fargo, free from the temptations of Imperial Washington – with all of its plush accommodations, fancy restaurants and hordes of sycophants and lobbyists – Congress might actually settle down and do some work. It never, by the way, completes its work on time in Washington.

It would also be satisfying just to see the politicians, the vast majority of whom are chicken hawks who avoided military service like the plague, live in conditions at least somewhat similar to those they force upon the military around the world. Moreover, Fargo, which is on the border of Minnesota, is a solid blue-collar city of 75,000 people used to hard work. They would be a far better influence on our public legislators than the rich lawyers and lobbyists who inhabit Washington.

As for communication, well, don't we have Bill Gates' word for it that in this new era of high-tech, people can communicate from anywhere to anywhere?

No need to worry about the Library of Congress, because the politicians don't use it anyway. There is a university in Fargo, so if some politician's mind was suddenly pricked by curiosity, he could snowshoe over to the university and ask a professor.

While I'm sure the relocation would benefit America as a whole, I'm not sure the people of Fargo would welcome the riffraff we have elected to the House, the Senate and the White House. I believe, however, it is the patriotic duty of Americans to share the burden of living with the political riffraff. If things didn't work out in Fargo, we could move them to Butte, Mont. I believe that is the place J. Edgar Hoover used to exile FBI agents who had incurred his disfavor.

Washington has come to resemble Rome – not the Rome of the Republic, which the Founding Fathers admired, but the Imperial Rome, the Rome of Caesars – full of perpetual wars, inflation, circuses, money-changers, lies and corruption. Consequently, too many of our federal officials have lost contact with the real America they are supposed to represent.

In all seriousness, it would be beneficial to get the government out of Washington. Anywhere would do as long as it's isolated, very cold and Walden Pondish in its attractions. I suspect some of our federal politicians have never even seen grass that wasn't on a lawn or a golf course. Brisk, clean air might even clear their heads. Bitterly cold winter nights are very conducive to contemplation.

Who knows? Such isolation and relative hardships might even produce a statesman or two. Now, that would be an accomplishment. We haven't had one of those in several generations.

These experts suggest these events may have been orchestrated by elements within the administration to manipulate Americans into supporting policies at home and abroad they would never have condoned absent "another Pearl Harbor."

They believe that this White House is incapable of investigating itself and hope the possibility that Congress might hold an unaccountable administration accountable is not merely naive or wishful thinking.

They are encouraging news services around the world to secure scientific advice by taking advantage of university resources to verify or to falsify their discoveries. Extraordinary situations, they believe, require extraordinary measures.

If this were done, they contend, one of the great hoaxes of history would stand naked before the eyes of the world and its perpetrators would be clearly exposed, which may be the only hope for saving this nation from ever greater abuse.

They hope this might include The New York Times, which, in their opinion, has repeatedly failed to exercise the leadership expecedt from our nation's newspaper of record by a series of inexplicable lapses. It has failed to vigorously investigate tainted elections, lies leading to the war in Iraq, or illegal NSA spying on the American people, major unconstitutional events. In their view, The Times might compensate for its loss of stature by helping to reveal the truth about one of the great turning-point events of modern history.

Stunning as it may be to acknowledge, they observe, the government has brought but one indictment against anyone and, to the best of their knowledge, has not even reprimanded anyone for incompetence or dereliction of duty. The official conspiracy theory--that nineteen Arab hijackers under control of one man in the wilds of Afghanistan brought this about--is unsupportable by the evidential data, which they have studied. They even believe there are good reasons for suspecting that video tapes officially attributed to Osama bin Laden are not genuine.

They have found the government's own investigiation to be severely flawed. The 9/11 Commission, designated to investigate the attack, was directed by Philip Zelikow, part of the Bush transition team in the NSA sector and the co-author of a book with Condoleezza Rice. A Bush supporter and director of national security affairs, he could hardly be expected to conduct an objective and impartial investigation.

They have discovered that The 9/11 Commission Report is replete with omissions, distortions, and factual errors, which David Ray Griffin has documented in his book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. The official report, for example, entirely ignores the collapse of WTC7, a 47-story building, which was hit by no airplanes, was only damaged by a few small fires, and fell seven hours after the attack.

Here are some of the kinds of considerations that these experts and scholar find profoundly troubling:

* In the history of structural engineering, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been brought down due to fires either before or since 9/11, so how can fires have brought down three in one day? How is this possible?

* The BBC has reported that at least five of the nineteen alleged "hijackers" have turned up alive and well living in Saudi Arabia, yet according to the FBI, they were among those killed in the attacks. How is this possible?

* Frank DeMartini, a project manager for the WTC, said the buildings were designed with load redistribution capabilities to withstand the impact of airliners, whose effects would be like "puncturing mosquito netting with a pencil." Yet they completely collapsed. How is this possible?

* Since the melting point of steel is about 2,700*F, the temperature of jet fuel fires does not exceed 1,800*F under optimal conditions, and UL certified the steel used to 2,000*F for six hours, the buildings cannot have collapsed due to heat from the fires. How is this possible?

* Flight 77, which allegedly hit the building, left the radar screen in the vicinity of the Ohio/Kentucky border, only to "reappear" in very close proximity to the Pentagon shortly before impact. How is this possible?

* Foreign "terrorists" who were clever enough to coordinate hijacking four commercial airliners seemingly did not know that the least damage to the Pentagon would be done by hitting its west wing. How is this possible?

* Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, in an underground bunker at the White House, watched Vice President Cheney castigate a young officer for asking, as the plane drew closer and closer to the Pentagon, "Do the orders still stand?" The order cannot have been to shoot it down, but must have been the opposite. How is this possible?

* A former Inspector General for the Air Force has observed that Flight 93, which allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, should have left debris scattered over an area less than the size of a city block; but it is scattered over an area of about eight square miles. How is this possible?

* A tape recording of interviews with air traffic controllers on duty on 9/11 was deliberately crushed, cut into very small pieces, and distributed in assorted places to insure its total destruction. How is this possible?

* The Pentagon conducted a training exercise called "MASCAL" simulating the crash of a Boeing 757 into the building on 24 October 2000, and yet Condoleezza Rice, among others, has repeatedly asserted that "no one ever imagined" a domestic airplane could be used as a weapon. How is this possible?

Their own physics research has established that only controlled demolitions are consistent with the near-gravity speed of fall and virtually symmetrical collapse of all three of the WTC buildings. While turning concrete into very fine dust, they fell straight-down into their own footprints.

These experts and scholars have found themselves obliged to conclude that the 9/11 atrocity represents an instance of the approach--which has been identified by Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser--of "creating our own reality."

"There was a stay issued by the Supreme Court until after they have heard the Clarence Hill case," said a spokesman for Florida State Department of Corrections, referring to another convict whose execution was stopped last week.

Rutherford, 56, had been scheduled to die at 6:00 pm (2300 GMT) for the 1985 murder of a woman he beat and drowned in a bathtub.

"We were prepared to proceed" when the stay arrived, the prisons spokesman, Robby Cunningham, told AFP.

Rutherford's lawyer, Linda McDermott, said the Supreme Court called about two minutes after the execution was scheduled to take place to announce its decision.

One week earlier, Hill had been strapped to a gurney with an intravenous tube in his arm when the Supreme Court stopped his execution.

Hill, 47, has argued that the chemicals Florida uses in lethal injections cause pain and therefore constitute cruel and unusual punishment forbidden by the US Constitution.

The Supreme Court will not rule on the legality of the chemicals, just on whether Hill can challenge their legality.

The Supreme Court spokesman in Washington said the stay had been ordered because of the Hill appeal.

The stay was ordered by the whole court and not a single justice, said the spokesman, who added that newly sworn justice Samuel Alito did not participate in the decision.

Rutherford had exhausted all his options of appeal in Florida courts. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia rejected his latest appeal late Monday.

Florida Roman Catholic bishops had called on Governor Jeb Bush to suspend Hill's and Rutherford's executions.

"We, the Catholic bishops of Florida, are disheartened about the scheduling of two executions in one month, and together we implore Governor Bush to reconsider the state-sanctioned killing of Clarence Hill and Arthur Dennis Rutherford," they said in an open letter this month.

Another convict who had contested the legality of lethal injections was executed Friday in Indiana after the Supreme Court refused to reconsider his case.

Marvin Bieghler, 58, was executed for the 1981 murder of a man and his pregnant wife.

The Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor were among the most barbaric actions of the late 20th century. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Indonesian President Suharto in Jakarta the day before the invasion and gave U.S. approval. The primary concern of U.S. officials seemed to be to get back to Washington before the bloodbath began. Kissinger told Suharto, “We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.” Kissinger, doing his best imitation of Lady Macbeth, urged Suharto, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”

Indonesia used U.S. military weapons to bombard East Timor and to crush resistance. The Indonesian military finally left East Timor in 1999, inflicting one more orgy of burning and killing on the island in the final days before its exit.

More people died as a result of the U.S.-backed invasion of East Timor than were killed by international terrorists in the subsequent 30 years. According to the U.S. State Department, between 1980 and 2005 fewer than 25,000 people were killed in international terrorist incidents around the globe.

The Bush administration, in its war on terror, stresses that anyone who aids and abets a terrorist is as guilty as the terrorist. By this standard, the U.S. government was guilty of enabling the Indonesian government to terrorize the Timorese people. The Timorese victims of U.S.-backed aggression received far less than 1 percent of the attention than have American victims of terrorist attacks.

The U.S. government currently bankrolls and arms many foreign regimes that terrorize their own people, including Colombia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute noted that the State Department’s 2002 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices “lists 52 countries that are currently receiving U.S. military training or weapons as having ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ human-rights records.”

President Bush declared in 2002, “Our mission is to make the world free from terror.” But the only way that Bush’s pledge makes any sense is by relying on a myopic – if not absurd – definition of terrorism.

The United States has long insisted that government agents cannot be terrorists. The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Since government action is almost always lawful – or at least not considered criminal by the government itself – governments almost never qualify as terrorists under the U.S. definitions.

A far sounder definition was offered by Israeli National Security Council chairman Major General Uzi Dayan, who defined as terrorist in a December 2001 speech “any organization that systematically harms civilians, irrespective of its motives.” This definition catches all types of terrorism – not just actions that lack political blessings or official sanctions.

If a government systematically attacks civilians, the government is no less culpable than private cabals that blow up planes, buses, or cafés. By this standard, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was as much a terrorist action as the bombings of Bali nightclubs in October 2002 that killed hundreds of civilians.

The U.S. terrorism definition is the key to the Bush administration claim that the war on terrorism is automatically a war for freedom. Without the “state-exempt” concept of terrorism, fighting terrorism would, in most parts of the world, have little or nothing to do with defending freedom. With an honest definition of terrorism, many governments in the Bush “freedom-loving coalition” are guilty of inflicting more terrorism than they prevent.

Having a “state action” exemption to the concept of terrorism is like having a “mass murder exemption” in the homicide statute. Any action carried out by private citizens that would be considered terrorism should also be considered terrorism if carried out by government agents. The United States should recognize that its bankrolling and support of governments that terrorize their own people make a mockery of Bush's promise to rid the world of evil.

James Bovard is the author of the just-released Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. He serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Copyright © 2006 The Future of Freedom Foundation

But beneath the bunting and the applause, this president is in trouble. His war of choice in Iraq has gone bad. Our military is near "snapping," according to a report commissioned by the Pentagon. Iraq has become a training ground for international terrorists. The elections have produced a Shiite plurality, led by religious parties that have formed a mutual defense pact with Iran. The Iranian president has called for the destruction of Israel, and the Iraqi leaders that our soldiers are dying to defend stand by his side.

The reconstruction of Iraq is a joke, with literally billions wasted or stolen, while citizens still have no stable source of electricity. We can't leave because a civil war, already started on the ground, will flare up. We can't stay because our presence simply feeds the terror and destabilization. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz now projects the actual cost of the Iraq war at $1 trillion.

Iraq has undermined the war on terror. Osama bin Laden is still alive, but that matters little. What matters is that the U.S. is more despised across the Muslim world.

The administration has done nothing to move us toward energy independence. And by simply being in denial on global warming, it has isolated us in the world on a clear and increasingly present danger.

At home, it's the same sorry record of catastrophic failure. The administration's trade policies are hollowing out our manufacturing and high-tech sectors. Bush has run up the largest trade deficits in the history of man, while leaving us increasingly dependent on the willingness of the Chinese to finance our spending.

The administration's top-end tax cuts have failed to produce. Take away the jobs produced by government at all levels and by the military buildup, and the United States has lost an estimated 1 million private sector jobs since Bush came into office. Yet those same tax cuts have helped rack up record deficits and staggering national debt.

The prescription drug program confounds seniors and will end up costing many of them more for drugs, even as it prohibits Medicare from negotiating a better price and shovels billions to HMOs. The effort to cut and privatize Social Security was blocked, but that debate blocked any sensible response to the growing crisis of pensions.

The minimum wage has been frozen, while CEO salaries have soared. The administration does nothing to help labor under corporate assault, even as wages stagnate. African Americans and Latinos suffer disproportionately, even as the administration retreats from the commitment to equal opportunity.

And the ticket to the American Dream -- a college education -- is being priced out of reach for more and more working families. The administration and the Republican Congress are about to raise interest rates on student loans, adding to burdens that are already a stretch for most families.

Katrina exposed the administration's incompetence. But the catastrophic failure to reconstruct the Gulf Region is adding to the suffering of those who survived the storm.

And on homeland security, the independent and bipartisan 9/11 commission gives the administration failing grades in area after area.

The president will no doubt condemn corruption and partisanship. But the head of procurement of his budget office has been taken out of office in handcuffs. Vice President Cheney's chief of staff is under indictment for misleading prosecutors in the case concerning the leaking of a CIA agent's name. The president is pretending that he never knew Enron chief Ken Lay, one of his leading donors, or conservative activist Jack Abramoff, a major contributor who partied at the White House.

The list can go on. It is to no one's advantage. This isn't about an election that is nearly a year away. It is about governing. It's not about Republicans and Democrats. It's about the country. This president has three more years in office, and we will all pay dearly if the failures continue.

This afternoon at the People's State of the Union Address in DC, where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh, Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union address. At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2245 Dead. How many more?

After the PSOTU press conference, I was having second thoughts about going to the SOTU at the Capitol. I didn't feel comfortable going. I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me, and I knew that I couldn't disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket, and I didn't want to be disruptive out of respect for her. I, in fact, had given the ticket to John Bruhns, who is in Iraq Veterans Against the War. However, Lynn's office had already called the media, and everyone knew I was going to be there, so I sucked it up and went.

I got the ticket back from John, and I met one of Congresswoman Barbara Lee's staffers in the Longworth Congressional Office building and we went to the Capitol via the underground tunnel. I went through security once, then had to use the rest room and went through security again.

My ticket was in the 5th gallery, front row, fourth seat in. The person who in a few minutes was to arrest me, helped me to my seat.

I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled, "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat, and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I'm going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.

The officer ran with me to the elevators, yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That's Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said, "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn't care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That's because you were protesting." Wow, I got hauled out of the People's House because I was "Protesting."

I was never told that I couldn't wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things ... I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2245, huh? I just got back from there."

I told him that my son died there. That's when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm's way for still? For this? I can't even wear a shirt that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.

I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there, and I thought every once in awhile they would show me, and I would have the shirt on. I did not wear it to be disruptive, or I would have unzipped my jacket during George's speech. If I had any idea what happens to people who wear shirts that make the neocons uncomfortable, that I would be arrested ... maybe I would have, but I didn't.

There have already been many wild stories out there.

I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.

I don't want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether or not he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That's why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That's why I am not going to let BushCo take anything else away from me ... or you.

I am so appreciative of the couple of hundred of protesters who came to the jail while I was locked up to show their support. We have so much potential for good. There is so much good in so many people.

Four hours and 2 jails after I was arrested, I was let out. Again, I am so upset and sore it is hard to think straight.

Keep up the struggle ... I promise you, I will too.