Dinh starts out by citing none other than Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who, at his press conference announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby, explained why he did not prosecute under the terms of the Espionage Act. The context is in response to a question about Valerie Plame's covert status:
"And all I'll say is that if national defense information which is involved because her affiliation with the CIA, whether or not she was covert, was classified, if that was intentionally transmitted, that would violate the statute known as Section 793, which is the Espionage Act.
"That is a difficult statute to interpret. It's a statute you ought to carefully apply.
"I think there are people out there who would argue that you would never use that to prosecute the transmission of classified information, because they think that would convert that statute into what is in England the Official Secrets Act.
"Let me back up. The average American may not appreciate that there's no law that's specifically just says, 'If you give classified information to somebody else, it is a crime.' There may be an Official Secrets Act in England. There are some narrow statutes, and there is this one statute that has some flexibility in it.
"So there are people who should argue that you should never use that statute because it would become like the Official Secrets Act. I don't buy that theory, but I do know you should be very careful in applying that law because there are a lot of interests that could be implicated in making sure that you picked the right case to charge that statute."
I have bolded the portions omitted by Dinh, in hopes of underscoring what are really Fitzgerald's key points. The important phrase here, of course, is "I don't buy that theory" – and neither, we hope, will the jury in the AIPAC case. Dinh's brief in favor of dismissing all charges against the AIPAC defendants is basically an argument calling for the abolition of the relevant sections of the Espionage Act. In which case it would be perfectly legal to release documents or hearsay "respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation," as the language of the Act puts it.
Furthermore, the presentation of the citation in its complete context ought to make clear that Dinh is distorting and even reversing not only the true significance of what Fitzgerald said, but also what the special counsel's investigation portends. For clearly Fitzgerald was and perhaps still is gunning to get the vice president's chief of staff – and others in the administration – on violating the same provisions of the Espionage Act of which Rosen and Weissman stand accused. The problem for Fitzgerald is that, as he put it, what Libby and his cohorts have done is throw sand in the umpire's eyes, preventing investigators from ascertaining the facts in the case and establishing a conspiracy to "out" Plame. No such problem exists for the prosecutors in the AIPAC spy case.
As revealed in the indictment of the AIPAC defendants – Steve Rosen, the lobby's longtime director, and Keith Weissman, a top policy analyst – the FBI was watching their every move as they milked Pentagon Iran specialist Larry Franklin for every drop of classified information to which he had access, including top-secret intelligence relating to al-Qaeda as well as Iran. The FBI's counterintelligence unit listened as the conspirators arranged assignations and watched as they engaged in furtive meetings: "On or about March 10, 2003," the indictment informs us,
"Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman met at Union Station early in the morning. In the course of the meeting, the three men moved from one restaurant to another restaurant and then finished the meeting in an empty restaurant."
Hardly the sort of behavior one might expect from a group supposedly engaged in, as Dinh puts it, "a core First Amendment activity" – unless spying is now constitutionally protected. Dinh's brief characterizes the accused as a couple of public-spirited guys whose only crime is exercising the "public's right to associate, advocate, and speak in an effort to shape foreign policy." What this fanciful version of events conveniently ignores is the central role played by Israeli "diplomats," including Naor Gilon, the Washington embassy's chief political officer. Franklin repeatedly met with Gilon and others and handed over classified information, in addition to indirectly transmitting U.S. secrets via the Rosen-Weissman tag team. Neither Gilon, nor any reference to specific foreign officials as described in the indictment, is so much as mentioned in Dinh's brief.
Dinh goes so far as to cite Attorney General Clark, who, when the relevant sections of the Espionage Act were amended, declared:
"Nobody other than a spy, saboteur, or other person who would weaken the internal security of the nation need have any fear of prosecution."
Rosen and Weissman have been charged with espionage because they are spies and were acting on behalf of a foreign power, just like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss before them. They cultivated Franklin, who, convinced that U.S. policy in the Middle East is insufficiently pro-Israel, approached Rosen and Weissman, who put them in touch with Israeli agents. The pair then proceeded to act as a conduit for top-secret information gleaned from Franklin, which was passed directly to the Israelis.
How is it that someone who had a hand in drafting legislation – the PATRIOT Act – that permits the indefinite detention of American citizens, the surveillance of phone calls, e-mail, and other communications on an unprecedented scale, and otherwise represents the most invasive incursion into our civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts, is now posing as a champion of the First Amendment rights of these two spies caught red-handed?
This will have to remain one of the murkiest mysteries of recent times, one that defies all explanation but this one: that this former assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft and head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy believes that there ought to be one standard for lobbyists on behalf of a foreign country – in this case, Israel – and another for us hoi polloi who owe no foreign country our allegiance or bias. There is to be one standard for AIPAC and another for the rest of us.
Now, this imputation may seem like an unfair stretch of the facts, but ask yourself this: what if, instead of Rosen and Weissman, the two accused were named Abdullah and Mohammed? And what if the organization they worked for was, say, the Muslim American Political Action Council (MAPAC), and the two of them had been caught handing over sensitive intelligence to employees of the Iranian embassy? One has the right to wonder if Dinh – author of legislation that empowers the government to conduct surveillance of mosques and detain thousands of individuals of Middle Eastern descent, including American citizens – would be quite so forthcoming in his call for dismissing all charges.
Somehow, I doubt it.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
An interesting side note: The Franklin-AIPAC indictment dates the time-span of the AIPAC spy conspiracy as being "Between in or about April 1999 and continuing until on or about August 27, 2004." At around this time, in 1998, the U.S. rejected Israeli demands that their citizens be included in the visa waiver program: they would now have to undergo an interview and be fingerprinted. Why the change in policy, coming from the most ostensibly pro-Israel administration in memory? The AIPAC spy case is just the tip of the iceberg, as this UPI dispatch by Richard Sale makes all too clear.

The effectiveness of the corporate propaganda campaign in accomplishing this end is demonstrated by the following example. Millions of viewers refuse to believe that the US engages in a world wide campaign of torture and prisoner abuse. These viewers summarily reject the documented evidence to the contrary, and the graphic testimony of the gulag survivors themselves. This is news that CBS does not report.

Propaganda appeals to the emotional side of the human brain, while circumventing the side that evokes critical thinking. Therefore, the systematic torture of captives is a non-event for the consumers of the corporate news, whose minds have been deftly manipulated to reach this conclusion without their knowledge. This is only one of many incidents that explain the appalling ignorance that characterizes the American public. It is this kind of ignorance that allows the public to believe the most horrendous lies, while coaxing them to act against their own self interest. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who think they are free.

If we are to understand the current media crisis, it is necessary to comprehend who the commercial media serves. The corporate media exists to serve the status quo, not to inform the people, as is widely assumed by its consumers. It serves the private sector, the bottom line, not the public interest, or the Commonwealth. The commercial media cooperates with those in power to program the public mind by creating propaganda that in essence engenders specific emotional responses, and creates a belief system favorable to the status quo. In essence, the consumer’s mind is programmed to accept the ‘official version’ of events, without consideration of any and all contradictory evidence. Well crafted propaganda compels the people to act in the corporate interest, even as they operate in ways harmful to themselves and the public interest.

Rather ingeniously, the corporate media furtively programs the American mind to consume goods and services, while simultaneously dumbing them down by withholding relevant information. If this information were presented in context it might induce the people to act in ways that are public spirited, rather than selfish. An ignorant citizenry is easily controlled and manipulated, while a well informed citizenry is not. The result is that we have evolved into an intellectually lazy and spiritually shallow culture of mindless consumers—mere automatons who cannot think critically, or act to save ourselves.

This explains why the multitudes appear to be in a state of perpetual somnolence, while the world is collapsing around them. Their capacity for critical thinking and self examination has been utterly subverted through prolonged exposure to commercial television and radio. Their minds remain receptive to the message of capitalism and empire—programmed to believe whatever they are told; and to consume goods and services in abundance.

It can be exasperating to those of us still in possession of our mental faculties to witness the zombie-like state of indifference that afflicts our fellow citizens, even while the sky is falling upon them. Their minds truly are not their own.

During the height of revolutionary unionism early in the previous century, Eugene Debs and other prominent organizers had the astonishing ability to turn out hundreds of thousands of people to protect workers from the tyranny of their employers. This was done without sophisticated electronic media. Large scale work stoppages were quickly organized to disrupt the flow of goods and services, which in turn affected corporate profits. The bottom line is the soft underbelly of capitalism that leaves it vulnerable to economic disruption through the general strike.

Now we are blessed with an immense and sophisticated electronic media that is capable of informing and organizing billions of people in ways that Eugene Debs could only have dreamed of. Yet the people remain in a state of stupor and somnolence. Far from being a tool used for the public good, commercial media exists solely to promote corporate interests, even as it usurps the public owned airwaves for the masked purposes of accumulating privatized wealth. The commercial media thus persuades the multitudes to behave in ways that are self destructive; that foster ignorance while spreading fear as a method of mind control, and promote the copious consumption of goods and services.

Like public lands, the air waves are the property of the people and they should be used to serve the public, not to program our minds. However, corporate influence over the political process has resulted in a massive giveaway of the airwaves to a homogenized and concentrated media conglomerate that does not serve the people. We must take them back.

Accomplishing this will require that we think about the public airwaves differently. We must think in terms of the public good rather than privatized wealth. Contrary to popular belief, most private wealth was not earned; it was stolen from the public domain without providing any benefit to the public in return. So it is with the public airwaves. Massive corporate profits are being realized, while doing great and irreparable harm to the public that owns them. Thinking in terms of the Commonwealth, rather than privatized wealth, will be a major step toward ending Plutocratic rule while simultaneously implementing democracy.

By now it should be clear that the corporate media serves empire by turning truth on its head. It provides those who control the government the means by which to coerce and to deceive the masses by creating its own fictionalized version of reality. Thus if George Bush says that up is down, up becomes down. If Bush says that global warming is not real, it is not real, even as the planet warms beyond the tipping point. This is relativism in its purest form; and it does not serve truth. Under relativism, the familiar points of reference such as up and down, black and white lose their traditional, reality-based meaning. They become whatever the emperor proclaims them to be. If we allow this to occur we will lose our ability to make sense of the world.

The atmosphere of indifference and apathy that prevails so widely in America is no accident. It is the result of well designed and deliberately ambiguous messages crafted by psychologists employed by the commercial media industry. Thus, public perception is as far removed from truth and reality as the miasma induced by powerful mind altering drugs. Because of the effectiveness of this subtle brain washing, the people are unable to think critically, and thus are unable to act to save themselves from the emerging Gestapo state that is enveloping the nation. Their only hope for salvation is to withdraw from the reality altering drugs of commercial television and radio, to which they do not even know they are addicted.

A great awakening must precede revolution.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He can be reached at earthdog@highstream.net

To find out whether gossip spreads through groups of people better than other information about them, UK-based researchers Alex Mesoudi and Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews and Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool used a method akin to "Chinese whispers".

They gave 10 people four different passages to read and then asked them to write down what they could remember. Their efforts were passed to another set of volunteers as passages for them to learn, and the process was repeated four times.

The researchers then tried to tally the original passages with the final results. They found that gossip-like information involving deception and infidelity, and details involving general information about the interactions of third parties, were remembered and transmitted in greater quantity and with greater accuracy than purely descriptive information about individuals or their environment.

"Humans are an intensely social species, and other people are a highly salient aspect of the environment in which we live and grow up," Mesoudi says. This makes the behaviours of others vitally important, which may explain why we are particularly adept at recalling such social information, he suggests.

The researchers say their findings, to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, also lend support to the idea that primate intelligence, especially human intelligence, originally evolved in response to social pressures rather than non-social demands such as finding food or using tools.

"If primate intelligence originally evolved to solve complex social problems, such as keeping track of shifting coalitions or countering against deception, then it's possible that present-day human intelligence carries a legacy of this selection history, here expressed as a bias in memory for social information," says Mesoudi.

Nick Emler of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, suggests the groups would have been even more adept at recalling the gossip had the experiment involved information about real people that the participants knew.

The panel voted eight to seven to recommend adopting the most serious type of health warning that can be used in the labelling of a prescription medicine. In an unusual move, the FDA then held a press conference and argued that the current labelling is adequate.

Yet the panel heard that the stimulants might be as dangerous as other drugs that the FDA last year ruled should carry the most prominent safety warnings. "There's an inconsistency here," says Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers in New York and a member of the advisory committee.

The treatment could help revolutionise how children in Australia - where Mr Dore now lives - and millions of others worldwide are treated for chronic learning difficulties.

Children with ADHD are thought to have problems with the cerebellum, a part of the brain that controls the organisation and direction of thought and behaviour. Mr Dore's new theory gives rise to hopes that stimulating the dormant parts of the cerebellum, using a series of balance and eye exercises, could expand it and encourage it to work better without needing to use chemical treatment.

Mr Dore, who originally made his money selling fire-resistant paint, said that the new findings were discovered by accident.

"These are wonderful, incredible results and yet we didn't even try and do this," he said at a press conference in Sydney. "By accident, we stumbled on something that could have the most dramatic effect on individuals' lives."

The battle against ADHD became something of a personal crusade for Mr Dore after his daughter tried to commit suicide because of her chronic learning difficulties. But the new treatment does not come cheap. The therapy costs £1,700 and takes up to 15 months to complete.

As many as one in every 20 children suffers from some form of attention disorder and the problem, scientists believe, has dramatically increased over the past 50 years.

Statistically, boys are three times more likely to suffer from the condition. ADHD is usually treated by a group of drugs known as psychostimulants which, while effective, can have unpleasant side effects.

SO MUCH to do, so little time. Between a hectic work schedule and a thriving social life, Yves (not his real name), a 31- year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one. "If I take a dose just before I go to bed, I can wake up after 4 or 5 hours and feel refreshed," he says. "The alarm goes off and I'm like, let's go!"

Yves is talking about modafinil, a stimulant that since its launch seven years ago has acquired a near-mythical reputation for wiring you awake without the jitters, euphoria and eventual crash that come after caffeine or amphetamines. Yves has been popping modafinil on and off for the past three years and says it is "tremendously useful". "I find I can be very productive at work," he says. "I'm more organised and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning."

Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep. In the near future, we will, for the first time, be able to significantly structure the way we sleep to suit our lifestyles.

"The more we understand about the body's 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it," says Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. "In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening." Foster envisages a world where it's possible, or even routine, for people to be active for 22 hours a day and sleep for two. It is not a world that everyone likes the sound of. "I think that would be the most hideous thing to happen to society," says Neil Stanley, head of sleep research at the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit in the University of Surrey, UK. But most sleep researchers agree that it is inevitable.

If that sounds unlikely, think about what is already here. Modafinil has made it possible to have 48 hours of continuous wakefulness with few, if any, ill effects. New classes of sleeping pills are on the horizon that promise to deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing. Further down the line are even more radical interventions - wakefulness promoters that can safely abolish sleep for several days at a stretch, and sleeping pills that deliver what feels like 8 hours of sleep in half the time. Nor is it all about drugs: one research team even talks about developing a wearable electrical device that can wake your brain up at the flick of a switch.

To some degree, we are already adept at controlling sleep. Most people in full-time work deprive themselves of sleep during the week, deliberately or otherwise, and catch up at the weekend. We often augment our sleep-suppressing powers with caffeine, nicotine or illegal stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines. We are also highly dependent on substances that help us sleep. According to some estimates, 75 per cent of adults suffer at least one symptom of a sleep problem a few nights a week or more. In 1998, a team from the Henry Ford Health Sciences Research Institute in Detroit, Michigan, published a study revealing that 13 per cent of adult Americans had used alcohol to help them get to sleep in the previous year, and 18 per cent had used sleeping pills (Sleep, vol 21, p 178).

Despite the enormous resources that we pour into getting good sleep and wakefulness when we want them, most of the drugs at our disposal are crude instruments at best. The vast majority of sleeping pills - known in the business as hypnotics - are simply "knockout drops" that put you in a state almost like sleep but without its full restorative properties. "Hypnotic-induced sleep is better than no sleep, but it isn't natural sleep," says Stanley. With their addictive nature, the drugs we use to keep us awake, such as coffee and amphetamines, are even worse. In combination with our clock-watching lifestyles, these sleep and wake aids are driving ever more people into what Foster calls the "stimulant-sedative loop" where they need nightly help getting to sleep and daily help staying awake.

Modafinil has changed the rules of the game. The drug is what's known as a eugeroic, meaning "good arousal" in Greek. It delivers natural-feeling alertness and wakefulness without the powerful physical and mental jolt that earlier stimulants delivered. "There are no amphetamine-like feelings," says Yves. And as Yves' way of taking it shows, being on modafinil doesn't stop you from falling asleep if you want to.

In fact, its effects are so subtle that many users say they don't notice anything at all - until they need to. "I wouldn't say it makes me feel more alert or less sleepy. It's just that thoughts of tiredness don't occur to me," says Yves. "If there's a job at hand that I should be doing, I'm focused, but if I'm watching a movie or something, there is no effect."

People who take modafinil for medical reasons usually take just enough of the drug in the morning to see them through the day, but it also seems to be able to deliver sustained wakefulness - for a couple of days at least. "The military has tested sequential dosing," says Jeffrey Vaught, president of R&D at Cephalon, modafinil's Pennsylvania-based manufacturer. "It works for 48 hours or so, but eventually you need to sleep."

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about modafinil is that users don't seem to have to pay back any "sleep debt". Normally, if you stayed awake for 48 hours straight you would have to sleep for about 16 hours to catch up. Modafinil somehow allows you to catch up with only 8 hours or so. Well before Cephalon took an interest in the drug, French researchers discovered this effect in cats back in the early 1990s (Brain Research, vol 591, p 319), and it has since been found to apply to humans too.

So how does modafinil work? "No one really knows," admits Vaught. He says that Cephalon thinks it understands the drug, but is keeping the details under wraps. What is clear is that, like other stimulant drugs, modafinil prevents nerve cells from reabsorbing the excitatory neurotransmitter dopamine once they release it into the brain. The difference is that it somehow does so without producing the addictive highs and painful crashes associated with most stimulants. A number of independent studies suggest that this might be because it also interferes with the reuptake of another neurotransmitter, noradrenalin.

However it works, modafinil is proving hugely successful. Since it hit the market in 1998, sales have been climbing steadily - from $25 million in 1999 to around $575 million in 2005. Cephalon insists that the drug is for treating "medical" sleepiness caused by diseases such as narcolepsy and sleep apnoea.

Even so, it's clear that modafinil is becoming a lifestyle drug for people like Yves who want off-the-peg wakefulness. "At first I got it from a friend, and then I got diagnosed as a narcoleptic online," says Yves.

All the indications are that modafinil is extremely safe. The drug can have side effects, most commonly headaches, but up to now there have been no severe reactions, says Vaught. In fact, it is hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about modafinil, except that there may be unseen problems down the line as the drug becomes more widely used. "I think it's unlikely that there can be an arousal drug with no consequences," says Foster. In the long run, it is possible that casual users might have to keep upping their dose to get the same effect. Stanley has similar worries. "Is it a potential drug of abuse?" he asks. "Will it get street value? We'll see."

Cephalon does not seem to be worried. Modafinil's success has spurred it to develop a successor, armodafinil. The company is also developing other eugeroics - one experimental drug called CEP-16795 switches off the H3 histamine receptor, which appears to be one of the molecular switches that controls the sleep-wake cycle. However, Vaught claims that the original will be a tough act to follow. "Modafinil is very effective and very safe," he says. "How do you beat it?"

There are ideas as to how. Last year, Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, reported the results of an experiment with a drug called CX717. The findings suggest that modafinil won't have the field to itself forever.

Deadwyler kept 11 rhesus monkeys awake for 36 hours, throughout which they performed short-term memory and general alertness tests (Public Library of Sciences Biology, vol 3, p 299). At that level of sleep deprivation, a monkey's performance would normally drop to the point where it could barely function at all, but Deadwyler found that CX717 had remarkable restorative powers. Monkeys on the drug were doing better after 36 hours of continual wakefulness than undrugged monkeys after normal sleep. When Deadwyler imaged their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging, (fMRI), he found that the drug maintained normal activity even in severely sleep-deprived individuals. The results build on those of an earlier, small-scale trial on 16 men that found CX717 could largely reverse the cognitive decline that comes with 24 hours of sleep deprivation (New Scientist, 14 May 2005, p 6).
Soldiers get high

CX717 belongs to a class of drugs called ampakines, which subtly ramp up brain activity by enhancing the action of its main excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate. Cortex Pharmaceuticals of Irvine, California, which developed CX717, originally saw the drug as a cognitive booster for people with Alzheimer's, but it is its potential to counter the effects of sleep deprivation that is attracting the most attention.

Later this year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, will put CX717 through its paces as a wakefulness promoter for combat. In an experiment designed to mimic the harsh demands of special ops, investigators will push 48 volunteers to the limit - four consecutive nights of hard work with only 4 hours of recovery sleep in between. "They'll go from being tired to exhausted to crashing," says Roger Stoll, Cortex's chief executive. For some of them, however, the ordeal will be softened by regular doses of CX717. DARPA hopes the drug will counteract the sleep deprivation.

The trial should help answer some outstanding questions about CX717's potential. "We don't know yet if it eliminates feelings of sleepiness," says Stoll. "The early signs are that people function better, their brain is a little more hyped. But we haven't tested sleepiness directly." As with modafinil, the evidence suggests that people struggle to tell if they're on the drug or not, and that hasn't turned out to be much of a problem for modafinil.

Whatever the outcome of the DARPA trial, CX717 won't be the last word on eugeroics. Stoll says Cortex has similar but more powerful molecules up its sleeve. Thought they are being developed mainly as memory enhancers, some may turn out to be powerful wakefulness promoters too. Industry giants GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly have ampakine programmes of their own, and at least one other company, Arena Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, California, has declared an interest in wakefulness promoters, though it hasn't released any details of its research.

When and if those drugs come through, the US military is sure to be interested. DARPA is one of the most active players in the drive to conquer sleep, setting up and funding much of the basic research on wakefulness. The army and air force have research programmes too.

It's easy to see why DARPA is interested. "We make the assumption that soldiers are going to be sleep-deprived," says DARPA neuroscientist Amy Kruse, who runs the agency's sleep-deprivation research programme. "We want to know what we can do to bring them back up to the level they would be at if they had a good night's sleep."

When DARPA talks about sleep deprivation, it really means it. Soldiers on special ops sometimes have to be awake, alert and active for 72 hours at a stretch with only minimal rest. That's like starting work on Monday morning and not stopping until Thursday. "Three days, that's when they really start hurting," says Kruse.

The military has a long history of using caffeine and amphetamines to get its people through. It has now added modafinil to the list, and is clearly interested in CX717. And Kruse says she is confident that there is lots of room for further improvement.

Last year, a DARPA-funded team led by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin Madison discovered a strain of fruit flies that gets by on just a third the normal amount of sleep. The "minisleep" mutant carries a change to a single gene, encoding a protein involved in potassium transport across cell membranes. Intriguingly, defects in potassium channels are associated with reduced sleep in humans, particularly in the autoimmune disease Morvan's syndrome, one symptom of which is chronic sleeplessness. What that suggests, says Kruse, is that new drugs designed to latch onto potassium channels in the brain could radically alter the need for sleep. There are also likely to be other molecular targets in the brain just waiting to be exploited, she says.

DARPA is meanwhile pursuing other strategies to conquer sleep deprivation. At Yaakov Stern's lab at Columbia University in New York, DARPA-funded neuroscientists have used fMRI to image the brains of sleep-deprived people, to find out which regions are affected when you are very tired. Then they used a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) machine - routinely used to switch localised brain regions on and off - to switch off those areas and see if that reversed the effects.

"This is all proof of concept," says Stern. "It's hard to imagine a sleep deprived pilot using TMS," not least because the machines are too bulky to fit in a cockpit. "The next step is to apply TMS before or during sleep deprivation to see if it blunts the effect. That has more of a shot at a lasting effect." Stern says his team is also looking into a new technique called DC brain polarisation, which has similar brain-boosting effects to TMS but uses DC current instead of magnetism. The beauty of this "poor man's TMS" is that the equipment is significantly smaller and cheaper - it could even be incorporated into headgear that gives you a jolt of wakefulness at the flick of a switch. And then there's always neurofeedback - training people to activate the brain regions that get hit by sleep deprivation, effectively willing themselves awake.

The military isn't just interested in wakefulness. It also has a keen interest in the other side of the coin. John Caldwell works at the US Air Force Research Laboratory in San Antonio, Texas. He has spent most of his career testing the effects of stimulants, including modafinil, on pilots. "I'm the guy who puts sleep-deprived pilots in a plane, gives them drugs and says, did it work?" he says. He has also done a handful of studies on sleep aids - testing the best way to help night pilots sleep well during the day, for example. In recent months Caldwell has become aware that there is a quiet revolution going on in sleep medicine. "There's a new idea out there," he says. "Drugs that change sleep architecture."

Sleep researchers have known for over 50 years that sleep isn't merely a lengthy period of unconsciousness, but consists of several different brain states (see Diagram). How those states are put together to build a full night's sleep is called sleep architecture.
Catching the slow waves

In the past, says Caldwell, sleeping pills were designed not to mess with sleep architecture, although they generally do, suppressing the deepest and most restorative "slow-wave" sleep in favour of shallower stage 2 sleep. Now, though, modifying sleep architecture is seen as the way forward. There are two new drugs in the offing that significantly increase the amount of slow-wave sleep. One of them, gaboxadol, made by Merck, is in phase III clinical trials and could be on the market next year. To Caldwell these drugs hold out the promise of a power nap par excellence. "Maybe you can make a short period of sleep more restorative by filling it with up with slow-wave sleep," he says.

Much like modafinil, gaboxadol and the other slow-wave sleep promoter - Arena Pharmaceuticals' APD125, currently in phase II - are the start of something bigger. For more than 35 years, sleeping pills have been a one-trick pony. If you wanted to send someone to the land of nod, there was only one way of doing so - targeting the neurotransmitter GABA, which is the brain's all-purpose dimmer switch. Old-fashioned hypnotics such as barbiturates and benzodiazepines work by making neurons more sensitive to the soporific effects of GABA. It's also why alcohol makes you sleepy. Even the newer, cleaner sleeping pills, such as the market leader Ambien, work through the GABA system.

Manipulating the GABA system is a sure-fire way of putting people to sleep, but it has its problems. One is that the brain adapts to the drugs, which means that most cannot be taken for more than a few days without losing their potency. The effects often linger well into the morning, making people feel groggy and hung over. Many are also addictive.

What's more, sleep quality has rarely been considered. "In the past we would take a hypnotic and say, does it put you to sleep?," says Stanley. "That's a pretty inexact way of dealing with it. In that respect, alcohol is a good hypnotic." Now, however, there is a recognition that there is much more to sleep than the GABA system. Last year the first non-GABA sleeping pill came onto the market - the first new class of hypnotic for 35 years. Rozerem, made by Japanese firm Takeda, mimics the effects of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin. Nor is it the only one. There are at least three other new classes of hypnotic that don't go anywhere near the GABA system. And though gaboxadol works through GABA, it hits a type of receptor that has never been targeted by drugs before.

According to Stanley, there is even more scope for improvement. "It is possible that pharmaceuticals will allow you a condensed dose of sleep," he says, "and we are not that far away from having drugs that put you to sleep for a certain length of time." He predicts you could soon have tablet combining a hypnotic with an antidote or wakefulness promoter designed to give you a precise number of hours' sleep. "A 4, 5 or 6-hour pill."

We seem to be moving inescapably towards a society where sleep and wakefulness are available if not on demand then at least on request. It's not surprising, then, that many sleep researchers have nagging worries about the long-term impact of millions of us using drugs to override the natural sleep-wake cycle.

Stanley believes that drugs like modafinil and CX717 will tempt people to overdose on wakefulness at the expense of sleep. "Being awake is seen to be attractive," he says. "It's not cool to be asleep." Foster has similar worries. "It seems like that technology will help us cope with 24/7, but is coping really living?" he asks. Others point out that there are likely to be hidden health costs to overriding our natural sleep-wake cycles. "Pharmaceuticals cannot substitute for normal sleep," says Vaught.

Still, even the doubters admit that to all intents and purposes we are already too far down the road of the 24-hour society to turn back. For millions of people, good sleep and productive wakefulness are already elusive, night work or nightlife a reality, and the "stimulant-sedative" loop all too familiar. As Vaught puts it, "We're already there." So why not make it as clean and safe as possible?

The warning follows experiments in rats that were simultaneously exposed to loud noise and MDMA, aka ecstasy. The noise both intensified and prolonged the effects of the drug on the animals' brains.

Michelangelo Iannone of Italy's Institute of Neurological Science in Catanzaro and his colleagues gave rats varying doses of MDMA while bombarding them with white noise for 3 hours at the maximum volume permitted in Italian nightclubs.

Those given the highest dose of ecstasy, equivalent to the average amount taken by a partygoer on a night out, experienced a slump in electrical power of the cerebral cortex for up to five days after the noise was switched off. Previous studies suggest that such loss of power is related to brain hyperactivity and can ultimately lead to depression.

Rats on high doses that were not exposed to noise, and those exposed to noise but given lower doses of MDMA, experienced equally large slumps in brain power, but these only lasted for about one day (BMC Neuroscience, DOI :10.1186/1471-2202-7-13).

Since the experiments were in rats, it is hard to work out what the results mean for humans, but they do suggest that we need to know more about how ecstasy users are affected by their environment. "The most important finding is that the effects of MDMA can be strengthened by common environmental factors, such as noise in discotheques," says Iannone.

His findings echo previous research by Jenny Morton of the University of Cambridge, who discovered that a combination of methamphetamine (or speed) and loud, pulsing music is much more damaging to mice than either stimulus alone (New Scientist, 3 November 2001, p 17). White noise had no effect on the mice in her experiments. "If Iannone's team had used loud, pulsing noise, their effects would probably have been even stronger," she says.

She agrees that more research into the combined effect of music and drugs on humans is needed. "It would be tragic to find that taking ecstasy in clubs as a teenager significantly increased the risk of mental illness in later life," she says.

Andy Parrott at the University of Wales in Swansea, UK, has carried out an analysis of the combined effects of ecstasy and environmental factors, which is expected to be published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in April. "From the long-term health perspective, dances and raves may well be the worst venues in which to take MDMA," he says. "Dancing, heat and noise may all boost the acute effects of MDMA, but these same factors will also exacerbate the long-term adverse effects."

Smoking is still allowed in numerous indoor spaces in the Capitol, most noticeably in the gilded reception area where lawmakers crowd together during the long yeas and nays. Standing ashtrays, usually partly filled with cigar and cigarette butts, are strategically placed in the corridors. In a time when the "smoke-filled room" is more metaphor than fixture, its literal incarnation in Congress can seem almost quaint.

Members are uncharacteristically shy about discussing their smoking habits in a public domain where smoking is supposedly taboo. Not one smoker-lawmaker contacted for this article returned the call. Photographs of lawmakers smoking are virtually impossible to come by (as the blog Wonkette discovered last week when it put out a public call for photographs of Mr. Boehner smoking).

Yet in private, some lawmakers have shown little desire to tamp down the addiction. In some corners, the right to smoke in Congress is seen as a last stand against political correctness, a bulwark against the antismoking fervor that swept the political universe during the Clinton years. (The Clintons famously banned smoking from the White House, reportedly to the annoyance of smokers from the other party who had to attend long meetings there.)

"What will happen is someone will come along and ruin this last bit of fun," said Christopher Buckley, whose satiric novel, "Thank You for Smoking," has been made into a movie.

"As sure as night will follow day, now some aging senator or Congressional page will come down with lung cancer and sue the United States government because of this very room," Mr. Buckley said. "And that last bit of fun will be foreclosed."

Except it's not the last, as it turns out. Against a tide of frantic smoking-ban legislation from coast to coast, the industry has fought to keep smoking permissible everywhere, succeeding mostly in casinos and airport lounges, particularly in the South, and the like. Gambling interests even have their own smoking lobby, and some of the airport lounges were paid for by Philip Morris. Some factory assembly lines, including those at General Motors, allow workers to smoke on the job, partly because of old agreements with labor unions that wanted to keep workers comfortable. Newer union agreements have focused on worker health, and are beginning to phase smoking out.

And even in states that ban smoking altogether in public places, there have been tobacco tussles around statehouses, which are mostly subject to the lawmakers and not the laws. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California put up a tent outside the smokefree capitol in Sacramento so he could conduct business over cigars.

In Mr. Buckley's novel, the protagonist is a publicist for the tobacco industry who nicknames friends in the alcohol and firearms industries merchants of death. Antismoking advocates are all too willing to attribute the tobacco zone in Washington to similarly sinister forces, arguing that the Republican leadership is in the pocket of tobacco behemoths.

Cigarette companies, after all, have poured more than $55 million into campaigns over the last 15 or so years. Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the former majority leader, borrowed the corporate planes of R.J. Reynolds at least nine times in the last seven years. One of Mr. Boehner's most famous acts — handing out checks to lawmaker colleagues on the House floor in 1995 — involved donations from tobacco lobbyists.

But if the tobacco lobby was at work in keeping Congress a nicotine refuge, it probably could have saved itself the trouble. A confluence of more potent cultural and demographic forces seems to be at play on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers indulging in a familiar hubris.

"Congress generally has rules for us and rules for them, and the rules for them are very often more pleasant than the rules for us," Mr. Buckley said.

"They exist on their own island," said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for the district's mayor, Anthony A. Williams, who declined to veto the new city council ban on smoking in restaurants and bars. "We would not be able to enforce the smoking ban in the speaker's lobby," Mr. Morris said, referring to the reception area. The Congress, he said, "is kind of old school in that sense."

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, a nonsmoker who has written letters urging the House leadership to revise the internal rules, said, "I think some Republicans in the leadership smoke and feel they have a right to smoke wherever they want to smoke."

"If I want to sit in the speaker's lobby outside the House chambers I have to breathe in tobacco smoke, from cigarettes and cigars," Mr. Waxman said. "And it's sometimes unbearable."

But Washington's antismoking advocates seem resigned. "We recognize Congress does what it wants and has always done what it wants," said Angela Bradbery, a founder of Smokefree DC. "We don't have the capacity to do anything about it. And we're not going to try to get them to change their ways."