Whenever U.S. officials wish to demonize someone, they inevitably compare him to Adolf Hitler. The message immediately resonates with people because everyone knows that Hitler was a brutal dictator.

But how many people know how Hitler actually became a dictator? My bet is, very few. I’d also bet that more than a few people would be surprised at how he pulled it off, especially given that after World War I Germany had become a democratic republic.

The story of how Hitler became a dictator is set forth in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, on which this article is based.

In the presidential election held on March 13, 1932, there were four candidates: the incumbent, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler, and two minor candidates, Ernst Thaelmann and Theodore Duesterberg. The results were:

Hindenburg 49.6 percent
Hitler 30.1 percent
Thaelmann 13.2 percent
Duesterberg 6.8 percent

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, almost 70 percent of the German people voted against Hitler, causing his supporter Joseph Goebbels, who would later become Hitler’s minister of propaganda, to lament in his journal, “We’re beaten; terrible outlook. Party circles badly depressed and dejected.”

Since Hindenberg had not received a majority of the vote, however, a runoff election had to be held among the top three vote-getters. On April 19, 1932, the runoff results were:

Hindenburg 53.0 percent
Hitler 36.8 percent
Thaelmann 10.2 percent

Thus, even though Hitler’s vote total had risen, he still had been decisively rejected by the German people.

On June 1, 1932, Hindenberg appointed Franz von Papen as chancellor of Germany, whom Shirer described as an “unexpected and ludicrous figure.” Papen immediately dissolved the Reichstag (the national congress) and called for new elections, the third legislative election in five months.

Hitler and his fellow members of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, who were determined to bring down the republic and establish dictatorial rule in Germany, did everything they could to create chaos in the streets, including initiating political violence and murder. The situation got so bad that martial law was proclaimed in Berlin.

Even though Hitler had badly lost the presidential election, he was drawing ever-larger crowds during the congressional election. As Shirer points out,

In one day, July 27, he spoke to 60,000 persons in Brandenburg, to nearly as many in Potsdam, and that evening to 120,000 massed in the giant Grunewald Stadium in Berlin while outside an additional 100,000 heard his voice by loudspeaker.


Hitler’s rise to power

The July 31, 1932, election produced a major victory for Hitler’s National Socialist Party. The party won 230 seats in the Reichstag, making it Germany’s largest political party, but it still fell short of a majority in the 608-member body.

On the basis of that victory, Hitler demanded that President Hindenburg appoint him chancellor and place him in complete control of the state. Otto von Meissner, who worked for Hindenburg, later testified at Nuremberg,

Hindenburg replied that because of the tense situation he could not in good conscience risk transferring the power of government to a new party such as the National Socialists, which did not command a majority and which was intolerant, noisy and undisciplined.

Political deadlocks in the Reichstag soon brought a new election, this one in November 6, 1932. In that election, the Nazis lost two million votes and 34 seats. Thus, even though the National Socialist Party was still the largest political party, it had clearly lost ground among the voters.

Attempting to remedy the chaos and the deadlocks, Hindenburg fired Papen and appointed an army general named Kurt von Schleicher as the new German chancellor. Unable to secure a majority coalition in the Reichstag, however, Schleicher finally tendered his resignation to Hindenburg, 57 days after he had been appointed.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Although the National Socialists never captured more than 37 percent of the national vote, and even though they still held a minority of cabinet posts and fewer than 50 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, Hitler and the Nazis set out to to consolidate their power. With Hitler as chancellor, that proved to be a fairly easy task.

The Reichstag fire

On February 27, Hitler was enjoying supper at the Goebbels home when the telephone rang with an emergency message: “The Reichstag is on fire!” Hitler and Goebbels rushed to the fire, where they encountered Hermann Goering, who would later become Hitler’s air minister. Goering was shouting at the top of his lungs,

This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very day be strung up.

The day after the fire, the Prussian government announced that it had found communist publications stating,

Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down... . Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups.... The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war.... It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.

So how was Goering so certain that the fire had been set by communist terrorists? Arrested on the spot was a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. Most historians now believe that van der Lubbe was actually duped by the Nazis into setting the fire and probably was even assisted by them, without his realizing it.

Why would Hitler and his associates turn a blind eye to an impending terrorist attack on their national congressional building or actually assist with such a horrific deed? Because they knew what government officials have known throughout history — that during extreme national emergencies, people are most scared and thus much more willing to surrender their liberties in return for “security.” And that’s exactly what happened during the Reichstag terrorist crisis.

Suspending civil liberties

The day after the fire, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to issue a decree entitled, “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Justified as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree suspended the constitutional guarantees pertaining to civil liberties:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

Two weeks after the Reichstag fire, Hitler requested the Reichstag to temporarily delegate its powers to him so that he could adequately deal with the crisis. Denouncing opponents to his request, Hitler shouted, “Germany will be free, but not through you!” When the vote was taken, the result was 441 for and 84 against, giving Hitler the two-thirds majority he needed to suspend the German constitution. On March 23, 1933, what has gone down in German history as the “Enabling Act” made Hitler dictator of Germany, freed of all legislative and constitutional constraints.

The judiciary under Hitler

One of the most dramatic consequences was in the judicial arena. Shirer points out,

Under the Weimar Constitution judges were independent, subject only to the law, protected from arbitrary removal and bound at least in theory by Article 109 to safeguard equality before the law.

In fact, in the Reichstag terrorist case, while the court convicted van der Lubbe of the crime (who was executed), three other defendants, all communists, were acquitted, which infuriated Hitler and Goering. Within a month, the Nazis had transferred jurisdiction over treason cases from the Supreme Court to a new People’s Court, which, as Shirer points out,

soon became the most dreaded tribunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five others chosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thus giving the latter a majority vote. There was no appeal from its decisions or sentences and usually its sessions were held in camera. Occasionally, however, for propaganda purposes when relatively light sentences were to be given, the foreign correspondents were invited to attend.

One of the Reichstag terrorist defendants, who had angered Goering during the trial with a severe cross-examination of Goering, did not benefit from his acquittal. Shirer explains:

The German communist leader was immediately taken into “protective custody,” where he remained until his death during the second war.

In addition to the People’s Court, which handled treason cases, the Nazis also set up the Special Court, which handled cases of political crimes or “insidious attacks against the government.” These courts

consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.

Even lenient treatment by the Special Court was no guarantee for the defendant, however, as Pastor Martin Niemoeller discovered when he was acquitted of major political charges and sentenced to time served for minor charges. Leaving the courtroom, Niemoeller was taken into custody by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp.

The Nazis also implemented a legal concept called Schutzhaft or “protective custody” which enabled them to arrest and incarcerate people without charging them with a crime. As Shirer put it,

Protective custody did not protect a man from possible harm, as it did in more civilized countries. It punished him by putting him behind barbed wire.

On August 2, 1934, Hindenburg died, and the title of president was abolished. Hitler’s title became Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. Not surprisingly, he used the initial four-year “temporary” grant of emergency powers that had been given to him by the Enabling Act to consolidate his omnipotent control over the entire country.

Accepting the new order

Oddly enough, even though his dictatorship very quickly became complete, Hitler returned to the Reichstag every four years to renew the “temporary” delegation of emergency powers that it had given him to deal with the Reichstag-arson crisis. Needless to say, the Reichstag rubber-stamped each of his requests.

For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things. Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.

Keep in mind also that, while the Nazis established concentration camps in the 1930s, the number of inmates ranged in the thousands. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s that the death camps and the gas chambers that killed millions would be implemented. Describing how the average German adapted to the new order, Shirer writes,

The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.


Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

This article originally appeared in the March 2004 edition of Freedom Daily.

First - Gonzales "Legalizes" Torture.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly wi th Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security.

A request by Mr. Gonzales produced the Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security. The issue was whether al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan should be accorded the Geneva Conventions' human rights protections.

Gonzales, after reviewing a legal brief from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised Bush verbally on Jan. 18, 2002, that he had authority to exempt the detainees from such protections. Bush agreed, reversing a decades-old policy aimed in part at ensuring equal treatment for U.S. military detainees around the world. Rumsfeld issued an order the next day to command ers that detainees would receive such protections only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."

On January 25, 2002, Gonzales wrote a memo to President Bush arguing that the terrorism fight "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

''My judgment was ... that it would not apply to al-Qaida or others - as they weren't a signatory to the convention,'' he said.

When the text was leaked to the public last summer, it attracted scorn from military lawyers and human rights experts worldwide. Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer who served as the special U.N. reporter on torture and inhumane treatment from 1993 to 2001, remarked that its underlying doctrine "sounds like the discredited legal theories used by Latin American countries" to justify repression."

Second - Gonzales "Legalizes" Repression.

"WASHINGTON (Feb. 6) -- Attorney Gener al Alberto Gonzales insisted Monday that President Bush was "acting with authority" both under the Constitution and federal law in eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. In a statement prepared for the hearing, Gonzales called the monitoring program "reasonable" and "lawful."

Gonzales, who was not sworn in, told the committee, "As the president has explained, the terrorist surveillance program operated by the (electronic-monitoring National Security Agency) requires the maximum in speed and agility, since even a very short delay may make the difference between success and failure in preventing the next attack."

His arguments reiterated those defending President Bush's decision to allow the NSA to eavesdrop, without first obtaining warrants, on people inside the United States whose calls or e-mails may be linked to terrorism.

But in his prepared remarks, Gonzales said he could not discuss how the program works, as skeptics of the program have demanded . "An open discussion of the operational details of this program would put the lives of Americans at risk," he said.

Gonzales argued that Congress did, in fact, authorize the president in September 2001 to use military force in the war on terror.

He noted that the legislation "calls on the president to protect Americans both 'at home and abroad,'" and "to take action to prevent further terrorist attacks 'against the United States.'"

But congressional Democrats have said they did not intend to order domestic surveillance."

And so - as the Chicago Mafia Gangsters used to say - "The Fix Is In" -

The Bush "legal mouthpiece" has produced "Legalized Torture and Repression" - Just like Germany had in 1933.

Alberto Gonzales is a lot like Franz Gurtner, another conservative nationalist lawyer and judge - who was appointed by Hitler to head the Reich Ministry of Justice, and who got along - very well - with the Nazis despite not being a Nazi himself.

How did the German Legal system change as a result of Nazi 'leadership'?

Fear-mongering was the main tool used to change the law, and to undermine civil liberties. So, where the constitution was changed, the code of criminal procedure was also changed, extraordinary powers were vested in the Executive, including extensive police powers; and the powers of an independent judiciary were destroyed.

This was all done based on a "terrorist menace." And exactly what the menace was, shifted from time to time during the Nazi period. It was a matter of opportunism, or convenience.

Judges couldn't be impartial anymore. They used only Nazi interpretations in making their decisions. In the everyday practice of law the ideas of the Fuhrer (Hitler) were silently but loyally followed. People feared the legal system, but nobody could - legally - stop Hitler. And even Nazis no longer had the civil rights once guaranteed by the German constitution.

Hitler was asked - In September 1931: "How do you imagine the setting up of a Third Reich?" His reply was, " We will enter the legal organizations and will make our Party a decisive factor in this way. But when we do possess constitutional rights then we will form the State in the manner which we consider to be the right one." Hitler was asked: "This too by constitutional means ?" Hitler replied: "Yes."

Nazi conspirators participated in German elections, the legal system, and in the Reichstag to undermine the parliamentary and judicial system of the German Republic and to replace it with a dictatorship of their own.

On 30 April 1928, Goebbels wrote in his paper "Der Angriff": "We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, inside the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. We become members of the Reichstag in order to paralyze the liberal Weimar sentiment with its own assistance. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and per diem for the this "blockade" (Barendienst), that is its own affair." Later in the same article he continued: "We do not come as friend nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies: As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come."

Crucially, Gurtner - like Alito and Gonzales - ruled that vital "national interests" - as defined by Hitler as head of state - had precedence over the rule of law. Time and time again, Gurtner supported unlawful measures and even murders, because they had been declared by Hitler as crucial for the "survival of the state." That's what makes the efforts by some American lawyers - like Alito and Gonzales - and most GOP politicians - to argue that the president can and should be above the law - so disturbing.

It appears that the GOP has transformed America into a society where we are ruled by 'special men' - rather than by laws - so we are all subject to the whims of the president and his appointees.

A president or appointee who imagines himself to be above the law is mentally and morally unfit to serve in public office; government lawyers who argue that the president is above the law are apologists for a dictatorship. They are the modern equivalents of Franz Gurtner, justifying the Nazi abuse of power and legal authority in the name of 'national security'.

[L]ike Hitler, the top police officials were open about the fact that they did not see themselves as bound by legal norms. In a speech to the Academy of German Law in October, 1936, Himmler bluntly stated: "Right from the start I took the view that it did not matter in the least if our actions were contrary to some clause in the law; in my work for the Fuhrer and the nation, I do what my conscience and common sense tells me is right."

Disregard for the letter of the law was seen as crucial to the Nazi defense of 'national interests.' The German police styled itself the "domestic army." Just as the German army on the battlefield could not be subject to legal regulat ion, so too, it was claimed, the fight of the German police at home must not be constrained by the rule of law.

American soldiers and government contractors continue to violate the Geneva Conventions and laws against torture to serve the interests of their president and his appointees. They do what their immediate superiors tell them to do - as directed by both implicit and explicit statements from others high up the chain of command. Their actions are wrong, and they justify themselves by the same excuses used by police and military officials in Nazi Germany.

Today domestic surveillance exceeds that which is permitted by US law. Police, FBI, and National Security personnel believe that their attempts to fight terrorism justifies ignoring the law - indeed, they argue that laws which protect the rights of the accused and the innocent simply hamper police investigations and need to be curtailed. Franz Gurtner and Alberto Gonzales certainly agree.

As Himmler explained to German army generals on 21 June 1944, he could not care less whether the actions were legal or not: "What is necessary for Germany will be done, however horrifying it may be."

The legal system, Hitler warned (in a speech to the Reichstag on 26 April 1942), must have only one thought: German Victory. It was high time, he continued, that the legal system realized that it did not exist for its own sake, but for 'national interests'.

Goebbels said, in 1935: "When democracy granted democratic methods for us in the times of opposition, this could only happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used democratic methods only in order to gain the power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries, without any consideration, the means which were granted to us in the times of opposition."

A leading Nazi writer on Constitution al Law, Ernst Rudolf Huber, later wrote of this period: "The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of action."

And today, GOP appointees like Gonzales and Alito and virtually all GOP elected officials think - and act - exactly like Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Franz Gurtner - and no longer have to care whether their actions are legal or not, as they impose the "Rule of Bush" over the stupid US Sheeple.

And they're just as "Legal" as Hitler was in 1933.

We do not make these comparisons lightly, nor do they give us joy.

Dr. Britt named these as the fourteen defining characteristics of fascism:

* Powerful and continuing nationalism
* Disdain for the recognition of human rights
* Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
* Supremacy of the military
* Rampant sexism
* Controlled mass media
* Obsession with national security
* Religion and government intertwined
* Corporate power protected
* Labor power suppressed
* Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
* Obsession with crime and punishment
* Rampant cronyism and corruption
* Fraudulent elections

The talking heads of the radical right like to point out that Hitler belonged to his country’s socialist party, but I ask them to consider this: If you run far enough to the left, you will eventually cross over into the right. The political spectrum is really more of a circle, not a straight line. In addition, using a socialist platform to win the hearts and minds of the people does not make one a socialist. Kind of like how using a platform of “compassionate conservatism” doesn’t automatically make one compassionate or conservative.

Our current government promotes unquestioning patriotism, policies of torture and indefinite detainment without access to counsel, identification of Islamic terrorists as something all US citizens must live in fear of every day, the importance of strengthening our military while cutting funding for other government programs, the abolition of the legal right for a woman to make her own health decisions, and discrimination against homosexuals. Our mainstream mass media is controlled by the right. Our President is obsessed with national security, maintaining the power of corporations to drive policy, pollute the environment, and ship American jobs overseas and south of the border. The American right shows a clear disdain for labor unions and their objectives. Intellectuals are not respected for their knowledge, but mocked. The very word “intellectual” is used as an insult by the right. The conservative-heavy US government is constantly touting its “tough on crime” image while simultaneously languishing in more corruption than the majority of Americans are even aware of. And our elections have become a worldwide joke.

It’s more than a little bit scary.

And what is scarier is the fanaticism with which right-wing commentators support our descent into fascism. In her August 17, 2005 column, conservative radical Ann Coulter (best known of late for her suggestion that someone assassinate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens) had this to say, “America has been under relentless attack from Islamic terrorists for 20 years, culminating in a devastating attack on U.S. soil on 9/11 . It's not going to stop unless we fight back, annihilate Muslim fanatics, destroy their bases, eliminate their sponsors and end all their hope.” She is also well-known for saying, a few years ago, that we should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. Coulter, of course, is widely considered a hack and a radical, so let’s not stop there.

The American right shudders in disgust when a liberal accuses the government or the right-wing media of propagating fascist policies. However, they aren’t so disgusted that they can’t use the same words to describe us:

"In Newton County, Georgia, the ACLU threatened a school board with litigation if it didn't remove the words 'Christmas holiday' from the school calendar. The county caved and removed the words because it couldn't afford to defend the lawsuit. This, ladies and gentlemen, is fascism, that is, using the threat of terror, which a lawsuit is, to promote policy" (Bill O’Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, 1/2/03).

Of course, it is more than appropriate for the President of the United States to use the constant threat of terrorism to justify the illegal torture of detainees, the illegal denial of counsel to detainees, the illegal wiretapping of American citizens, the illegal… No, forget it, I don’t have enough time to write this list.

The truth is, the right wing has taken over all branches of the United States government consistently using the threat of terrorism and the memory of September 11th. This reeks of fascism.

And our government will continue to travel toward becoming a fascist regime if we do not fight for change.

Katherine Brengle is a freelance writer and activist. She is also a member of Military Families Speak Out, and her husband currently serves with the United States Marine Corps in Iraq.

February 6, 2006: “I am going to present here a study of the growing uproar over the “sacrilegious cartoons that has achieved real legs and seriously threatens to start a genuine jihad, or holy war, between Muslims and the rest of the world. I am sending on copies of the Danish cartoons in spite of the hypocritical warnings by our Department of State to the American media not to publish them because the President considers them to be offensive.”

This statement, like almost any other one coming from any government agency controlled by Bush, is a bald-faced lie. Bush, his Jewish advisers and his fanatic evangelical Christian core supporters have been loudely clamoring for a holy war against all Muslims for years now and Bush is in full agreement with their avowed aims.

However, the totally unexpected and very violent reaction who what are really not that offensive satires, has caused him to don the garments of a pious leader and protest out of one side of his lopsided mouth while out of the other, he is trying to find a way to obliterate the Iranians, the Syrians and even the non-Moslim Russians

The days of civilized behavior are long gone, regretfully.

In the 18th century, the generals waited until after the harvest was in to attack and they never attacked cities or made war on civilians as is now the filthy custom.

In earlier times, there were terrible religious wars, Catholics versus Protestants, but as civilization advanced, these were replaced with nationalism.

In my youth, I knew many of the old time aristocracy who, although poor and often dispossessed of their ancestral lands, nevertheless were highly civilized people and a pleasure to know.

What they have now are malicious, crooked Jewish politicians and businessmen, balanced by malicious, crooked Gentile politicians and businessmen, all run by rapacious, vicious and very ill-educated creatures who, in the old days, I personally would never have allowed in my house, and in the eighteenth century, would have had the servants chase off the grounds with sticks on their backs and dogs snapping at their legs.

Democracy, as a relative once said, is government of the mentally misfit by the mentally mediocre, tempered by the saving grace of snobbery. The latter is now a dead issue and we have creatures like George Bush and Tony Blair as beau ideals for the great mass of moral deadbeats that cover the surface of the earth like gnats.

I keep looking for decency and civility but it is sleeping somewhere and cannot be woken.

I told someone recently that the entire issue of anti-American terrorism on the part of the world Muslim community could be instantly ended. The sole cause of this is the blind subservience of all levels of the American government to Israeli interests.

We should follow George Washington's excellent advice when he adjured America to stay out of foreign quarrels, mind its own business and trade with everyone. Both my friends in the American government and the Muslim communities agree with this without reservation but although it is sensible, it will never happen.

The filthy Yahoos are drawing a huge bill on the rest of us and we will have to pay it, soon enough.”

Here is one of many comments from an outraged Muslim: Ed.

"If blasphemy were the problem, the loud voices raised in protest have very successfully disseminated the blasphemy - much more effectively than the misguided Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, that originally published the cartoons. The protests have turned the issue into a full-blown news story, and millions of people who would not otherwise have done so have now seen the cartoons.

"At the same time of course, the protesters' flag-burnings and threats against the various publishers of the cartoons do nothing but harden anti-Muslim attitudes in the West. And this is what it's all about. Poke each other often enough with a stick - or a cartoon, or a fuel-laden airliner - and tolerance wears thin. Forget the "winning hearts and minds" drivel, or at least collapse in hysterical laughter over it. Civilizational war is what the protagonists want, and that's what they're getting."

Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion — which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail — that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under the elder George Bush, FEMA was used as a dumping ground for political cronies, with predictable results. Descriptions of FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 sound just like the response to Katrina: for three days FEMA was nowhere to be found, and when it finally arrived its relief efforts were utterly incompetent.

Bill Clinton changed all that by choosing James Lee Witt, who knew a lot about disaster management, to run FEMA, and encouraging him to run the agency professionally. The result was a spectacular improvement in performance. FEMA, formerly considered one of the worst agencies in the federal government, won praise for its quick and effective responses to events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

But George W. Bush restored the practice of stuffing FEMA with cronies; the ludicrous Michael Brown is gone, but others remain. And the agency has reverted to impotence and incompetence.

As FEMA went, so went government as a whole.

On one side, FEMA's rebirth under Mr. Clinton wasn't unique. For example, a similar tale of miraculous turnaround can be told about the Veterans Health Administration. And I'd argue that there was a broad improvement in the government's professionalism during the Clinton era.

On the other side, what happened to FEMA starting in 2001 is typical: politicization and cronyism have become standard operating procedure throughout the federal government, even when the need for professionalism is obvious. (Recall how unqualified political loyalists were sent to run Iraq during the crucial first year.) That's one main reason President Bush has failed at everything he's tried except cutting taxes — and winning elections.

Which brings me to the political puzzle. Our leaders' bungling hasn't escaped public notice: more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure. Yet it's not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains — because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn't think of Democrats as being effective.

A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: they focus mainly on Washington, and many news organizations — especially the broadcast media — prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority in Congress, shut out of power; they're an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues.

The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual.

Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they'd probably have a lot of public support. You'd never know it from the range of views represented on the Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.'s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal.

And the public's views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position — or, rather, what the Democratic position would probably be if the Democrats could agree on one — even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion.

A Republican staffer on the Senate foreign relations Committee tells CounterPunch the little-known Cambone, who like so many others on the Bush war team skillfully avoided military service, has quietly become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, rivaling even Paul Wolfowitz. "Cambone is a truly dangerous player", the staffer said. "He is Rumsfeld's guard dog, implacably loyal. While Wolfowitz positions himself to step into the top spot should Rumsfeld get axed, Cambone has dug in and gone to war against the insurgents in the Pentagon. Cambone's fingerprints are all over the occupation and the interrogation scandal. For him, there's no turning back".

Cambone has stealthily positioned himself as the most powerful intelligence operator in the Bush administration. On May 8, 2003, Rumsfeld named him Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a new position which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz described thus: "The new office is in charge of all intelligence and intelligence-related oversight and policy guidance functions". In practice, this means that Cambone controls the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Organization, the National Security Agency, the Defense Security Service and Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity. Cambone meets with the heads of these agencies, as well as top officials at the CIA and National Security Council twice a week to give them their marching orders.

One senate staffer tells us he has more operational sway than George Tenet or Condi Rice. His rise to power has been quiet, almost unnoticed until the Abu Ghraib scandal forced him briefly into the spotlight. Indeed, prior to the events of May, Cambone completely evaded detection by Bob Woodward, who in two thick volumes on Bush's wars failed to mention the name Cambone once. Of course, this may reveal more about Woodward than Cambone's skill at bureaucratic camouflage.

Yes, Cambone has neo-con credentials. He got his masters and doctorate at Claremont College in southern California, an elite Straussian enclave. He went on to draft sections of the Project for a New American Century's 2001 Report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, a document notable for recommending that the US develop ethnic and race-based weapons. But more crucial for the speedy trajectory of his career is Cambone's resume as a devout Rumsfeldian. In 1998, Rumsfeld selected Cambone to serve as staff director of the Rumsfeld Commission on Ballistic Missile Defense, the Congressionally-appointed panel which justified implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative on the grounds that the US was vulnerable to strikes from missiles freighting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons launched by rogue nations, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Cambone was no newcomer to the Star Wars scheme. From 1982 through 1986, he toiled at Los Alamos developing policy papers about the need for space-based weapons. In 1990, George Bush, Sr. picked Cambone to head up the Strategic Defense Initiative Office at the Pentagon. After Bush lost, Cambone migrated to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC holding pen for hawks, where he continued to hammer away in essays and speeches about the windows of vulnerability in the skies over America.

Rumsfeld first brought Cambone into his inner circle not as an overlord for intelligence, but as the chief Pentagon strategist for pushing SDI through Congress. Recall that in the early days of the Bush administration, Star Wars and the obliteration of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were the twin obsessions of the Rumsfeld gang at the Pentagon.

After 9/11 Rumsfeld moved Cambone over to work on war planning and intelligence as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he labored under the neo-con luminary Douglas Feith. There's reason to believe that Cambone's real mission was to keep tabs on Feith, a notorious hothead and Cheney loyalist whom Rumsfeld distrusts. Rumsfeld wasn't the only one who loathed Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the Afghan and Iraq wars, told Woodward that Feith was "the stupidest motherfucker on the face of the Earth".

Cambone and Feith reportedly soon developed an equally acrimonious relationship. But as Feith's star fell, Cambone's rose. In July 2002, Rumsfeld moved Cambone to the Office of Analysis and Evaluation, where his mission was to implement Rumsfeld's plan to reorganize the military and trim some of its most highly-prized weapons systems. "Cambone loomed as a huge threat to the generals", a senate staffer told us. "The message was pretty simple. Go along with our war plans or risk losing your big-ticket items and perhaps your command. Cambone was the enforcer". At the Pentagon, the most feared weapon isn't a dirty nuke, but a line item in the budget.

In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name "Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated with the military's reluctance to assassinate suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an understandable reluctance in light of US executive orders restricting the use of assassinations. So Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea, setting up listening posts, conducting acts of sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those things".

However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox. "The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialized skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a military officer told Army Times. "If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them", the official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that".

Aside from guarding Rumsfeld from assaults from within the Pentagon, Cambone's main role seems to be cutting through red tape and bothersome codes of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, to institute legally questionable policies. Take the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) came directly from Cambone's office.

In August 2003, as the occupation of Iraq began to turn bloody, Cambone ordered Brigadier General Geoffrey Miller, former commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo, to go to Iraq along with a team of experienced military interrogators, who had honed their inquisitorial skills with the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees captured in Afghanistan. His instructions were to "Gitmoize" the interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, including the notorious Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad Airport, where the Delta Force conducted abusive interrogations of top level members of Saddam's regime.

Cambone's top deputy inside the military is none other than Lt. General William Boykin, the Christian warrior, whom Cambone and Rumsfeld elevated to the position to the position of intelligence czar for the US Army last fall. Boykin rose to this lofty eminence after he went on a revival tour of evangelical churches in Oregon, where he disclosed the top secret intelligence that the US "had been attacked because we are a Christian nation". Boykin also leaked the news that Bush's war on terrorism was actually "a war against Satan".
Boykin calmed the congregations by saying there was little reason to fear because the Christian god is mightier than Allah. "I know that my god is bigger than his", Boykin preached. "I know that my god is a real God and his an idol". The general also revealed to the faithful that the supreme deity of the Christians had hand-picked Bush to be president during these fraught times. It was obvious, the general reasoned, that Bush didn't win the election. He became president through a kind of preemptive strike by the Almighty.

When word of Boykin's sermons landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in October of 2003, there was outrage in the American Islamic community that this two-star zealot was now directing US military intelligence operations in the Middle East. There were calls for his ouster and the Inspector General of the Army launched an investigation of Boykin. But Rumsfeld and Cambone shrugged off the probe and stood by Boykin.

It now turns out that Boykin, the Islamophobe, played a central role in the torture scandal now gripping the Bush administration. Last summer, Boykin briefed Cambone on a list of no-holds-barred interrogation methods that he thought should be used to extract more information from Iraqi detainees.

These included humiliation, sleep deprivation, restraint, water torture, religious taunting, light deprivation, and other techniques of torture that have since come to light. A few weeks after this crucial meeting in June, Cambone sent General Miller to Iraq with instructions to oversee the implementation of the Boykin interrogation plan in order to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence". According to Lt. General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Miller then instructed the Military Police to become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". The grim trio of Cambone, Boykin and Miller also conspired to put the control of the detention facilities in Iraq under the tactical control of military intelligence. At Abu Ghraib, the job fell to Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that Lt. General Taguba called contrary to established military doctrine.

It now seems likely that Cambone was only the one to invite Israeli advice (and perhaps interrogators) on how to extract information from Iraqi detainees. Before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Cambone freely admitted to the Washington Times that he was taking advice from the Israelis and sharing intelligence with them on the mechanics of occupation and interrogation. "Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information as best they can".

These days advancement through the ranks of the Pentagon often goes hand-in-hand with opportunities to deliver sweetheart deals to corporate allies. Here too Cambone has not disappointed his backers. From 1986 to 1990, Cambone worked as a top lobbyist for SRS, a murky software company with deep roots in the Pentagon and CIA. Although Cambone left SRS for government work, he didn't forget his old employers. With Cambone's approval, the Pentagon awarded SRS a $6 million contract to provide management support for the Missile Defense Agency, the wing of the Defense Department charged with managing the SDI program and the development of space-base weapons.

In addition, SRS benefited from Cambone's transfer to the spying wing of the Pentagon. An SRS subsidiary called Torch Concepts was hired by the Pentagon to conduct a data mining foray into passenger records of JetBlue airlines. Bart Edsall, SRS's vice-president, described the work Torch did this way: "the company got a contract from the Pentagon to work with the Army to ferret information out of data streams [in an effort to detect] abnormal behavior of secretive people". Sound familiar? It should. The scheme was essentially a privatized version of the kind of work that John Poindexter wanted to conduct with his discredited Total Information Awareness operation. No surprise that the contracts for this outsourced form of snooping should fall to SRS. It is already the primary private contractor working with the Information Awareness Office of DARPA, the agency which Poindexter ruled and which continues the nefarious work of prying into the private lives, including travel, health and financial records, of American citizens.

As Rumsfeld's hatchetman, Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon that one general told the Army Times: "If I had one round left in my revolver, I'd take out Stephen Cambone". This raises the concept of fragging to an entirely new level.

This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Grand Theft Pentagon.

George's Half-Step Program to Energy Independence So this was the year that the President of Oil discovered we were "addicted" to the stuff and, worse yet, that it came from "unstable parts of the world" -- hold on a sec, while I fill my gas tank -- but he also came up with a solution! Thanks to his Advanced Energy Initiative, ethanol, essentially a corn product, would power us into the future along with hybrid car engines and the odd nuclear power plant. Twenty years from now, he assured us in his State of the Union Address, we more or less won't know the Middle East exists.

Though our brush-cutting President did mention wood chips and switch grass, ethanol is essentially a corn product; and corn is our petroleum farm crop of choice, since growing it in quantity involves massive infusions of oil-based chemical fertilizer. So maybe we should consider George's ethanol-fix like one of those nicotine patches for cigarette smokers. Throw in some leftover radioactive waste from those nuclear plants his administration would love to hug into existence and it all made perfect sense to me... until the next day when an administration that had never heard of no-backsies took it all back. The President's suggestion about making 75% of Middle Eastern oil imports go away "was purely an example," insisted an embarrassed Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. And anyway, it turned out that none of it really mattered since, as Paul Krugman pointed out: "[T]he National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. ‘A veteran researcher,' reports The New York Times, ‘said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol.'" Of course, the President and his men generated enough wind last week to create a little extra power -- if only we'd put some money into alternative fuels.

By the way, elsewhere in the world -- and yes, in case you didn't notice, there is an elsewhere -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia set off on his first trip outside the Middle East, perfectly timed to the President's desire to ditch the whole region. (And given what's happened to him there, you can't blame the guy, can you?) The Saudi king, in search of reliable allies, boarded his plane and promptly headed for... China. At his blog, The Dreyfuss Report, Robert Dreyfuss sums up administration oil planning in the Middle East thusly:

"America's military effort to secure hegemony over the world's oil deposits in the Gulf looks like this: Iraq, a mess, governed by Iran-linked Shiites; Iran, angry once again at the Great Satan and looking toward Russia and China; and Saudi Arabia, the big enchilada, starting to learn to speak Chinese. Some hegemony."

Encouraging Energy Independence in Iraq: In his State of the Union Address, the President once again invoked victory in discussing the war in Iraq -- "Fellow citizens, we are in this fight to win, and we are winning. (Applause.) The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home." At a taxpayer cost of at least $4.5 billion a month, the price of "victory" in Iraq is now (in case you're curious) an estimated $100,000 a minute. Strangely, though, the President never mentioned how Iraq, with staggering oil reserves, might actually aid his plan for American energy independence from the Middle East. Who remembers those three to five million barrels of oil that Paul Wolfowitz and other administration neocons once knew the Iraqis would be pumping in next to no time at all, giving them the wherewithal to pay for us for occupying them, setting up permanent bases on their territory, and (unlike ET) never going home. After all, as Wolfowitz put it way back in May 2003, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil." ("The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.")

Well, in the years since our "cakewalk" invasion, oil production in Iraq has taken a slightly different turn. At about 2.5 million barrels a day in the final days of Saddam's rule, output nosedived by another 8% last year, reaching 1.5 million barrels a day, and is probably significantly below that now. In fact, it's been dropping faster than the President's polling numbers -- and last week, just as George was touting our coming victory in Iraq, rebels there mortared a major petroleum facility in Kirkuk, setting it ablaze, and hitting an important pipeline to Turkey. An Iraqi executive with the North Oil Co. called it the "most severe attack we have ever faced on an oil installation." So far, thanks to American "reconstruction" and insurgent sabotage, Baghdad has been liberated from all but a few hours a day of electricity. Soon, the whole country (and so the world) may be able to declare its independence from any significant amount of exportable Iraqi oil -- making it a model for energy independence on the planet.

Oh, and while we're talking about Iraq, we Americans are a proud, traditionalist nation and one of our more regular traditions of recent years has been firing missiles into crowded streets, or small villages across those lands long labeled an "arc of instability," knocking off innocent civilians, including women and children. After each such incident, our military announces an investigation that fades into space and out of media memory without any spokesperson ever having to utter the words, "We're sorry." (That's a matter of principle!)

On January 13, a Predator drone shot a Hellfire missile into a house in a Pakistani village near the Afghan border in a botched assassination attempt against al-Qaeda number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Of course, the requisite group of women and children was murdered in the process. Then, last Thursday, a U.S. helicopter, reportedly fired on by gunmen from a rooftop in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in Baghdad, sent one or more missiles into a crowded street, killing a 20 year old woman, Ikhlas Abdul-Hussein, and wounding a two-year old child. Admittedly, we haven't hit a wedding party -- a sub-specialty of our Air Force -- since 2004, but last week American soldiers did their best to make up for that oversight by extending another small tradition, shooting up the cars of diplomats in and around Baghdad. A trigger-happy gunner on an American convoy in that city's Green Zone riddled a vehicle ("with a Maple Leaf flag plastered to the windshield") occupied by a group of Canadian diplomats, including the Acting Ambassador. Miraculously, no one was hit. The Canadians, a sober lot, claimed they were driving slowly and at a careful distance from the convoy. The Americans insisted their car was overtaking the convoy at a rapid speed and that they had ignored warning hand-signals. The obligatory meaningless investigation is now underway, while "the Bush administration voiced regret but, so far, no official apology." (Canada, mind you, has just elected a conservative Prime Minister, friendly to Washington, but never saying sorry is a near-Constitutional matter and allies, after all, are only allies.)

Meanwhile, from the news desk of the future -- but released this week -- the Pentagon has plans to create a new "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron" under the ever-expanding U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Undoubtedly, in the never-ending search for victims, it will be tasked "to go boldly where no drone has gone before."

Money Makes the World Go Boom! Here's a genuine surprise: In his new budget, the President, who last week declared himself boldly determined, as the Washington Post put it, to "constrain the massive entitlement programs for the elderly and the poor," and "carve money from Medicaid," is proposing a 5% rise in funds for the hapless Department of Homeland Confusion (er... Security), and another 5% rise for the Pentagon. The Pentagon's budget is slated to come in at a mere $439.3 billion, but here's the curious thing -- it includes no funds for the Afghan or Iraqi wars, minimally estimated at $120 billion next year. Makes sense, no? Who would put the costs of actual warfare in the budget of what was once the War Department before we spread our military across the globe and renamed it the Department of Defense?

The Pentagon's just released Quadrennial Defense Review puts great weight on fighting the war on terror for eons to come and, in preparation, a series of weapons systems that have nothing to do with that "war" are getting infusions of extra funds. Following the sort of sacrificial behavior for which the Pentagon is well known, not a single major weapons system has even been modestly cut back. In other words, weapons-entitlement programs are alive and well in America. (As the insider Nelson Report pointed out recently: Since 2001, in current dollars, the Pentagon budget has experienced "a 41% increase, exclusive of the supplemental allocations for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the [Global War on Terror].")

To celebrate their prospective good fortune, the six Chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointedly launched... a letter-writing assault on a cartoonist. No kidding. As Paul Woodward of the War in Context website put it, this "24-star letter" was aimed at protesting a Tom Toles cartoon ("beyond tasteless") in the Washington Post that used an armless, legless soldier in a hospital bed to mock Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for "breaking" the Army. You can only hope that the Chiefs are better at fighting a war than (mis)interpreting a cartoon.

A small sartorial suggestion to head Chief, Gen. Peter Pace: I wouldn't put that "beyond tasteless" slogan on a T-shirt and wear it to an official do in Washington, given the endless T-shirt wars the Bush administration has been fighting for years at its campaign events nationwide. These burst out again in the galleries of the House of Representatives the night of the State of the Union. Police roughly arrested, handcuffed, and briefly charged Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq and a guest of Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, for wearing a T-shirt with the treasonous slogan, "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" They also ejected Beverly Young, wife of Republican Representative Bill Young of Florida, Chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, for wearing a T-shirt "bearing words of support for U.S. Troops." (Then again, if I remember my song lyrics correctly, isn't freedom just another word for nothing left to wear?)

While the Joint Chiefs face down a cartoonist and the administration fights its war on T-shirt terror, let me return to the subject of mega-money and entitlements for a moment. Last week, the President reassured Exxon Mobil Corporation, which had just announced record profits of $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter of 2005, that Americans should not expect any price breaks from a genuinely entitled winner while waiting for their future ethanol fix. "I think that basically the price is determined by the marketplace," he told the Associated Press, "and that's the way it should be."

Hi-ho, Hi-ho, It's Off to the Longest War We Go: Language, what would the Bush administration do without it? One of John Wayne's famous lines was, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." And the Bush administration is actively of that linguistic school. Of course, when reality bites you in the you-know-what and you can't do a heck of a lot about it, what are you going to do but re-label your product? In this way, the "war on terror," aka, "the Global War on Terror," aka "GWOT," aka "World War IV," aka "the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism," has just become, by administration fiat, "the Longest War" (a phrase that's been hanging around unloved in Neocon Land for a long time, though it's now being attributed to former Centcom Commander John Abizaid. It's undoubtedly been chosen because the President's lovely global "war" has gone on remarkably... well, long.

The phrase was on the President's lips last Tuesday night. It led off the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released last week. It was mentioned by various administration officials and promoted heavily by Donald Rumsfeld, who was also plugging a world in which, as Lolita Baldor of AP reported, "despite progress in fighting terrorism, the threat today may be greater than ever before because the available weapons are far more dangerous." In a speech at the National Press Club, subtly entitled, "The Long War," the Don touched all the bases. He compared Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, and claimed we were in a "generational conflict" like the Cold War of which Iraq and Afghanistan were merely the "early battles." Meanwhile, across town, our intelligence tsar was assuring Congress that U.S. "intelligence reporting" -- why am I already losing confidence in this statement? -- "indicates that nearly 40 terrorist organizations, insurgencies, or cults have used, possessed, or expressed an interest in chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents or weapons." (Somewhere in all this, I think I can hear Karl Rove conducting a midterm election campaign based on the only card this administration still has in its hand: the fear of terrorism.)

Still, I suspect "the Long War" will soon join the "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" in the dust bin of history. In fact, on naming its terror war, the Bush administration could probably use a little help. How about the Scare-You-to-Death-Struggle-for-Global-Ethanol-Independence-and-Republican-Electoral-Victories War (or SYTDSFGEIAREVW)? If that doesn't work for you, the Nation magazine's Katrina van den Heuvel is ready to lend a hand. Having already published her hilarious The Dictionary of Republicanisms, she's now launching a contest to capture the essence of GWOT-ability (a little like guacamole) in a single, punchy name.

Club Homeland Detention: Halliburton, the first corporation into Iraq, contractually speaking, and the biggest financial winner in the "reconstruction" sweepstakes for that deconstructed country, fortuitously also found itself perched right atop the list of post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction contractors. Now, through its subsidiary KBR, known for building military bases to last, as well as Guantanamo's infamous "cages," Halliburton gets a shot at the real American thing -- actual emergency detention centers for "immigrants" -- or, hey, in a crisis, for whomever. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded it a contract last month -- though the story only oozed out this week -- worth up to $385 million (not including the near-obligatory overcharges) for, according to the New York Times, "an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space." It's those "new programs" that give special pause.

They Fought the Law and the Law Lost: Finally, in the week that just was, our President and his top officials continued their vigorous efforts to rewrite the Constitution. They took up the National Security Agency warrantless spying, evidently had an unannounced constitutional convention in the White House, called on the peerless minds of various White House and justice department lawyers, asked the Attorney General (former White House Counsel, former General Counsel, and friend) Alberto Gonzales for his honest opinion, and then had the good sense to double check with lawyers at the NSA to make sure everything that agency had been doing was genuinely and legally below board and utterly constitutional. Finally, they turned the whole ball of wax over to Karl Rove, who recognized an election issue when he saw one, and next thing you knew, there was the President, at the State of the Union, insisting, as in some Avon ad, that al-Qaeda was calling and it was darn tootin' constitutional as all get out to listen in on what's conveniently been relabeled "a terrorist surveillance program" (no genuine citizens allowed to join!).

I suppose, based on that unbelievably dreary textbook you had to read back in junior high civics class, you thought amending the Constitution took a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and then passage by three-quarters of the states. Silly you! It only takes two-thirds of the President's brain, three-quarters of the Vice President's brain, and 100% of his Chief of Staff David Addington's brain; toss in the odd administration lawyer or two to check the fine print, and, as they say in one province of Canada (don't shoot!), Voilà!

Now, unbuckle those straps, take that helmet off, and relax. It's a new week. Enjoy yourself!

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt