He cited the Cold War-era initiatives of the U.S. Information Agency and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, widely viewed outside the United States as sophisticated propaganda outlets, as a model for the new offensive.

If similar efforts over the past five years are any example, the campaign is likely to take place in two main areas -- the U.S. media and the press in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where Washington sees its strategic influence as pivotal.

On Tuesday, Rumsfeld also said that the Pentagon is "reviewing" its practice of paying to plant good news stories in the Iraqi news media, contradicting a previous assertion that the controversial propaganda programme had been halted.

Critics here say the new media blitz joins a long list of decisions by the George W. Bush administration, such as ordering the National Security Agency to spy on U.S. citizens without warrants, monitoring library records, and compiling databases on U.S. citizens who disagree with the administration's policies, that are leading the country down an authoritarian path -- ironically, one that is not far from those Middle Eastern regimes that have long clamped down on freedom of expression and independent journalism.

And they note that the U.S. mainstream media already tends towards a conservative interpretation of events, with scant regard for opposing views.

According to a study released this month by the U.S.-based media organisation Media Matters for America, conservative voices have considerably outnumbered liberal voices for the past nine years on the Sunday morning television news shows, considered among the pinnacles of U.S. journalism.

The report analysed the content of influential shows such as NBC's Meet the Press, CBS' Face the Nation, and ABC's This Week. It classified each of the nearly 7,000 guests who appeared during the 1997-2005 period as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral.

It found that guests opposing the Bush administration's policies, during both terms, were given only enough space to maintain a veneer of fairness and accuracy. Congressional opponents of the Iraq war, for example, were mostly missing from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began in March 2003.

"If conservative dominance in this major arena of (U.S.) public opinion-making continues as it has in the past nine years, it may have serious consequences for future policy debates and elections," said David Brock, president of the Washington-based NGO Media Matters for America.

"This study should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks they are seeing balanced discourse on Sunday mornings -- and to those responsible for producing this imbalanced programming," he said.

Rumsfeld's plan would almost certainly seek to bolster such sympathetic reporting. In his speech, the U.S. military chief used war terminology to refer to the media.

He said that "some of the most critical battles may not be in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq, but in newsrooms -- in places like New York, London, Cairo, and elsewhere."

According to Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, a magazine put out by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), "They see the mutilation of information that reaches the public as a key part of their war strategy, and I think that is a very dangerous way for the military to be looking at their job in a democracy."

"When people talk about the 'home front' they do not realise what sinister implications that has. The public is seen as another front that the military is fighting out."

Rumsfeld recommended that the media be part of every move in the so-called war on terror, including an increase in Internet operations, the establishment of 24-hour press operations centres, and training military personnel in other channels of communication.

He said the government would work to hire more media experts from the private sector and that there will be less emphasis on the print press.

The State Department, under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is also stepping up its propaganda efforts. Last week, Rice asked for 74 million dollars to expand broadcasting and internet campaigns in Iran, as well as to promote student exchanges, in order to destabilise the regime there.

But to many independent media analysts, the Bush administration has too often confused propaganda with facts and information.

"I think that in the Pentagon world view, facts become instrumentalised," Naureckas said. "The point of putting out information is to achieve your military objectives. It's not to serve truth in some kind of abstract sense. And once you start looking at it this way, the difference between a true statement and false statement really becomes very little."

The Bush administration has had some success in influencing the media at home in the United States, a country with generally sophisticated and discerning media operations.

Last week, U.S. lawmaker Henry Waxman and other senior Democratic leaders released a new study by the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional oversight body, which found that the Bush administration spent a whopping 1.6 billion dollars in public relations and media over the last two and a half years to sway public opinion.

"The government is spending over a billion dollars per year on PR and advertising," said Congressman Waxman. "Careful oversight of this spending is essential given the track record of the Bush administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to fund covert propaganda within the United States."

The opposition Democrats had asked the GAO to conduct that study after evidence emerged last year that the Bush administration had commissioned "covert propaganda" from public relations firms that pushed video news releases that appeared to regular viewers as independent newscasts.

The report found that the administration's public relations and advertising contracts spanned a wide range of issues, including message development presenting "the Army's strategic perspective in the Global War on Terrorism".

The study found that the Pentagon spent the most on media contracts, with contracts worth 1.1 billion dollars. And all that money was before the new Rumsfeld plan. (END/2006)

An official inquiry into the program by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk has been completed but its results have not been publicly released.

In his speech, Rumsfeld raised the issue as an example of the U.S. military command in Baghdad seeking "nontraditional means" to get its message to the Iraqi people in the face of a disinformation campaign by the insurgents.

"Yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate - for example, the allegations of someone in the military hiring a contractor and the contractor allegedly paying someone to print a story - a true story - but paying to print a story," he said during his speech.

"The resulting explosion of critical press stories then causes everything - all activity, all initiative - to stop, just frozen," he added.

In an appearance Friday on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show," Rumsfeld said he had not known about the practice of paying for news stories before it became a subject of critical publicity in the United States.

"When we heard about it we said, `Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing,' and told the people down there," he said.

Although "it wasn't anything terrible that happened," Pentagon officials ordered a halt to the practice and "they stopped doing it," he added, according to a transcript provided by the show.

After a flurry of nervous commentary February 16, the day following the Australian broadcast, the Abu Ghraib horrors have for all intents and purposes been dropped by the American media. A few pious editorials appeared over the weekend (for example, in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun), none of which carried much weight or conviction.

The Times editors commented that the pictures "are a reminder that the Bush administration has yet to account for what happened at Abu Ghraib. No political appointee has been punished for the policies that led to the atrocities. Indeed, most have been rewarded." The newspaper concludes on a pathetic note, urging Republican Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and one of those leading the effort over the past two years to hide the images from the American public, to "keep his promise to dig out the truth about Abu Ghraib."

Of course publications like the Times, the Inquirer and the Sun are hopelessly compromised in raising the Abu Ghraib issue by the fact that they defend the occupation and subjugation of Iraq. Their position is self-contradictory and untenable: they support the crime, but object to certain of the criminal methods. This explains the unconvincing and half-hearted nature of their criticism. They will editorialize limply once, perhaps twice, then go silent again.

The US military responded to the appearance of the new images as any powerful and thoroughly guilty party would: it denied, stonewalled, dismissed the images or blamed the abuses on subordinates. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "There aren't new allegations; they're old allegations. These aren't new photos; they're old photos." Whitman claimed that the original Abu Ghraib photos, published in April 2004, had provided the impetus for the US military "to take a look at our detention operations in a very broad and deep fashion. And these abuses that have occurred have been thoroughly investigated."

Last Friday, before Congress, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeated the claim that the new images of abuse and torture were 'old news.' He declared, "I'm told that these photographs that are coming out now are nothing more than the same things that came out before, if not identical of the same type of behavior. That behavior has been punished. The Department of Defense, from the beginning of this conflict, has had a policy that prohibits torture. It is not permitted, and we do not today. The people are trained to avoid it. And there's no question, but that there was conduct that was improper, and people were court-martialed, and people have been sent to prison, and people have been reduced dramatically in rank, officers have, and punished for the behavior that was unacceptable."

This statement is simply one lie or half-truth piled upon another. First of all, no one in the media will challenge the very framework of Rumsfeld's comments. He and a select group of the political elite have seen the images, while deliberately preventing the rest of the American population from viewing them. He is speaking about suppressed, banned material. It is not for Whitman and Rumsfeld to rule on their content. Decisions to conceal proof of their own crimes-and then declare their conduct irreproachable, without any independent party able to make an evaluation-are made by police-state regimes, not democratic ones.

In any event, the claim that the guards at Abu Ghraib acted against Defense Department orders is a lie and everyone knows it. Torture and abuse of prisoners have become official US policy under the Bush administration.

In December 2002 Rumsfeld personally approved of a list of techniques for the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that included putting prisoners in "stress positions" for four hours, hooding them and subjecting them to 20-hour interrogations, "fear of dogs" and "mild, non-injurious physical contact." The list was so severe that military officers complained and the defense secretary was obliged to order a high-level review of interrogation policy. In April 2003 Rumsfeld approved a new list, which included the use of at least six techniques-including the use of dogs.

In August and September 2003, General Geoffrey Miller, the officer in charge at the Guantánamo camp, was sent by Rumsfeld to Iraq with orders to increase the brutality of the military's treatment of prisoners there, to "Gitmo-ize" conditions. On one of these visits, Rumsfeld accompanied Miller. On September 14, 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, at the time the top military commander in Iraq, issued an order authorizing a number of techniques, including "presence of military working dogs" which will "exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."

"The use of dogs, however," as we noted recently on the WSWS, "was only one of a number of new methods introduced into Iraq, some explicitly approved and some implicitly condoned by Sanchez, Rumsfeld and Miller. Stripping prisoners naked and forcing them to wear women's underwear-part of a general policy of deliberate sexual humiliation-were both practiced in Guantánamo Bay before being transferred to Iraq. Miller was specifically cleared of responsibility for the use of these methods in a probe into abuse at Guantánamo Bay, on the grounds that they were approved military practice." (See "Miller takes the Fifth: US general withholds testimony in Abu Ghraib abuse trial")

The interrogators and guards were simply unleashed on the Iraqi prisoners (most of whom were guilty of nothing whatsoever) and encouraged to 'break' them by any means necessary. If some of the guards 'improvised,' it was improvisation from a script written by Rumsfeld, Miller and Sanchez.

The Abu Ghraib images are documentary proof of US government policy. Here is the policy made manifest, in the form of humiliated, bruised, tortured and dead human bodies.

The very fact that thousands of images were recorded of the mistreatment and torture, complete with grinning or nonchalant guards, is one proof of the official character of the conduct at Abu Ghraib. No one thought he or she was breaking the rules; on the contrary, the personnel had been instructed in these techniques.

As for the claims by Whitman and Rumsfeld that the crimes have been investigated and the guilty parties have been punished ... a handful of wretched, backward prison guards have been jailed. Neither Rumsfeld, Miller or Sanchez has ever been the subject of an investigation, much less a criminal charge. As Amnesty International notes, zero is the "[n]umber of high-level military or civilian leaders held accountable for policies or practices that lead to abuse of detainees and deaths in custody."

The practices in the Iraqi detention centers and elsewhere no doubt continue. The occupation hasn't changed its character. The US forces are hated more than ever by the Iraqis. Former army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, for example, in a segment of PBS's "Frontline" program broadcast last October, described his experiences in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005, well after the first Abu Ghraib photos appeared and the military promised to mend its ways. He commented, "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff."

Amnesty International in April 2005 reported that it continued to receive reports of abuse of detained Iraqis. According to testimony received by the group, "US interrogators have participated in questioning prisoners held at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a location at which detainees have repeatedly alleged torture and ill-treatment."

In any event, if the photographs and videos are 'more of the same,' then why is the US government so ferociously resisting their release? Defeated in court numerous times over the issue, the Bush administration continues to appeal a federal judge's decision last September ordering their release. The government and military are fearful because the images expose the actual, ugly and brutal face of the US occupation of Iraq, the face that the administration, in coordination with the media, is attempting to keep as much as possible from the American public.

The US government claims that it opposes the images' release because, in the words of State Department legal advisor, John Bellinger, they will fan "the flames at a time that sentiments on these issues are raw around the world." No doubt Arab and Muslim public opinion is an issue, although the US could hardly be viewed less favorably than it is at present. Probably of more concern to the administration is preventing the reality of the war from making its way to the population in the US. Why else so assiduously suppress battlefront images and photographs of coffins containing the American dead returning home?

Moreover, even the claim by Rumsfeld and Whitman that these are simply 'old photos' is false. As Mike Carey, executive producer of the "Dateline" television program in Australia that exposed the new images, told the media, "Well, it seems to us that there's a quantum leap in the abuse, in the potential abuse: corpses, really despicable sexual humiliation. As far as I understand, these have not been investigated." One of the corpses is a man who died during a CIA interrogation; no CIA employee have ever been charged in relation to crimes at Abu Ghraib.

Olivia Rousset, reporter for "Dateline," told Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now! radio program: "Obviously, a lot of it [the new imagery] is the same as what was released before, from the same series of events, the same torture and abuse, but there are new cases of abuse that haven't been seen before and some corpses of people who have been either killed in riots or killed from mortars going over the wall into the prison. But, to me, it sort of shows that there was pretty widespread abuse going on."

The lack of outrage in the American media about the Abu Ghraib torture and murder, and the concealment of the images, is entirely predictable, but nonetheless revealing. (Of course, the right-wing media is up in arms-that the material surfaced at all. The thugs at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the ultra-right talk shows, web sites and so forth believe that the American military should be allowed to carry out its crimes unobserved and undisturbed.)

What would be the response if the shoe were on the other foot, and hundreds or thousands of US military personnel or civilians had been systematically abused, tortured and, in some cases, murdered? One can only imagine the blood-curdling headlines for days, weeks and months, backed up by threats and plans for war! Sadism, blood and death in an Iraqi prison, however, counts for very little in the US media, which is a wholehearted accomplice in the invasion and occupation.

As a footnote, it almost goes without saying that leading figures in the Democratic Party have had nothing to say about the new revelations of crimes at Abu Ghraib. A search of the Democratic Party National Committee's official web site returns the revealing result: "No pages were found containing 'Abu Ghraib photos.'" No press release was issued by the Democrats. No statement can be found by John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean's "Democracy for America." These too are accomplices.

Nor does the press corps tie Bush's remarkable abrogation of both U.S. and international law together in any coherent way for the American people. At best, disparate elements of Bush's authoritarian powers are dealt with individually as if they are not part of some larger, more frightening whole.

What's even odder is that the facts of this historic power grab are no longer in serious dispute. The Bush administration virtually spelled out its grandiose vision of Bush's powers during the debates over such issues as Jose Padilla's detention, Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination and the disclosure of warrantless wiretaps.

For instance, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has defended the wiretapping program in part by citing the inherent powers of the President to override laws during war time, an argument that the administration also has applied to detentions without trial, abuse of prisoners, launching foreign military operations and committing extra-judicial assassinations.

All Bush has to do, it seems, is deem someone an "enemy combatant" or an "affiliate" of some terrorist group and that person's life and liberty are delivered into Bush's hands, without any impartial evaluation of the evidence.

Unique Authority

But what makes Bush's assertion of authority uniquely dangerous in U.S. history is that his claim of "plenary" – or unlimited – powers as the Commander in Chief are not made in the short-term context of a national crisis or a war with a definable end.

Rather these presidential powers have been asserted during what administration officials are calling the Long War against terrorism, a conflict that could well last for decades and quite possibly forever. Instead of the Long War, it could really become the Endless War.

In other words, the American system of government as the world has known it for two-plus centuries – with its "unalienable rights" and its "checks and balances" – has effectively come to an end.

Yet this earth-shaking development is barely a news story in the United States. Even when prominent Democrats and some Republicans draw troubling conclusions about Bush's megalomania, the major news media barely mentions the protests.

For instance, Sen. Russ Feingold observed in

a Feb. 7 speech to the Senate about Bush's warrantless surveillance, "this administration reacts to anyone who questions this illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and stand up for our rights and freedoms have a pre-9/11 view of the world. In fact, the President has a pre-1776 view of the world."

But Feingold's declaration, implicitly comparing Bush to King George III, got far more attention on Internet blogs than in the mainstream news media.

Another of the few political leaders who has sounded the alarm is former Vice President Al Gore, who addressed the issue of presidential power in a largely ignored speech on Jan. 16, the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

"An Executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful Executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free," Gore said.

"As the Executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws." [See Consortiumnews.com's "End of Unalienable Rights."]

Info War

The Bush administration's obsession with controlling the flow of information also carries a foreboding sense of doom to anyone who believes in a vibrant democracy. It now appears that Bush's concept of a terrorist "affiliate" is sliding inexorably toward covering people who present facts that undermine Bush's "information warfare" goals.

On Feb. 17, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that the battle over information will be a decisive front in the War on Terror and juxtaposed "the enemy" and "news informers" as part of the problem.

"We are fighting a battle where the survival of our free way of life is at stake and the center of gravity of that struggle is not simply on the battlefield overseas; it's a test of wills, and it will be won or lost with our publics, and with the publics of other nations," Rumsfeld said.

"We'll need to do all we can to attract supporters to our efforts and to correct the lies that are being told, which so damage our country, and which are repeated and repeated and repeated. …

"Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place."

Already, Bush's allies in the right-wing news media have taken to accusing "news informers" and other critics of Bush's policies of "aiding and abetting" the enemy and of committing "treason."

At times, the White House has coordinated these right-wing media attacks with government leaks to target critics, such as the disclosure of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, challenged Bush's case for war in Iraq.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

So, in big ways and small, the Bush administration has thrown down the gauntlet to Americans who want to protect individual liberties and preserve the democratic Republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

But a major obstacle to any unified resistance to Bush's authoritarian model is the failure of the news media to explain these historic developments to the public. More often, the big newspapers and networks have bowed to the administration's news management.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and other key U.S. news outlets only grudgingly admitted that they let the country down before the Iraq War by swallowing Bush administration claims on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

But little has really changed in the past three years, either in the media's structure or in the pecking order of elite columnists. With only a few exceptions, the commentators who bungled Iraq's WMD have survived and are still shaping – or misshaping – public opinion.

Indeed, most elite columnists are still acting as if all is normal – that it's not so strange that Bush is saying that he or his successors can do whatever they want to anyone in the world for the duration of the so-called Long War.

Even after the WMD debacle, most of these editorial writers and commentators continued to behave as Bush's cheerleaders, for instance, praising his Second Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 2005, for its endless invocation of the words "freedom" and "liberty."

The pundits also have kept spotting glimmers of hope in the Middle East, even as the U.S. position has grown grimmer and grimmer. A year ago, these commentators were hailing Bush for unleashing the cleansing winds of democracy across the Middle East.

But the pundits missed the fact that many of those regional developments were unrelated to Bush's invasion of Iraq. They also didn't catch the possibility that elections might not bring the blessings of peace and moderation that Bush promised.

Like many of his U.S. press colleagues, New York Times foreign policy columnist Thomas L. Friedman pronounced himself "unreservedly happy" about the Iraqi election of Jan. 30, 2005, adding: "you should be, too."

But there was always a dark potential to the pleasing images of Iraqis voting with stained fingers. Rather than pointing toward an exit for the United States from Iraq, the election actually was a way for the Shiite majority to consolidate its sectarian control of Iraq, further isolating and alienating the rival Sunni minority.

However, this sobering possibility was banished mostly to the Internet and other fringes of American media.

At Consortiumnews.com, we wrote that "if the Sunni-based insurgency doesn't give up in the months ahead, American soldiers could find themselves enmeshed in a long and brutal civil war helping the Shiite majority crush the resistance of the Sunni minority. The Sunnis, who have long dominated Iraq, find themselves in a tight corner and may see little choice but to fight on." [See "Sinking in Deeper."]

But the big media was busy waving its pom-poms.

'Tipping Points'

After those Iraqi elections and several other regional developments, Friedman was perceiving historical "tipping points" that foreshadowed "incredible," positive changes in the Middle East. [NYT, Feb. 27, 2005]

To Friedman, this expected transformation of the Arab world would also be a personal vindication for his endorsement of the bloody Iraq War, which has now killed nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

"The last couple of years have not been easy for anyone, myself included, who hoped that the Iraq war would produce a decent, democratizing outcome," Friedman wrote. [NYT, March 3, 2005]

A lead editorial in the New York Times struck a similar tone, crediting Bush for supposedly inspiring democratic changes in Lebanon and Palestine, not to mention Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances," the editorial said. [NYT, March 1, 2005]

Over at the Washington Post's Op-Ed page, there was similar applause for Bush and the neoconservative vision of imposing "democracy" on Arab nations by force.

"Could it be that the neocons were right and that the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Hussein and the holding of elections will trigger a political chain reaction throughout the Arab world?" marveled Post columnist Richard Cohen. [Washington Post, March 1, 2005]

Another influential Post columnist, David Ignatius, also was swept up in the excitement.

"The old system (in the Middle East) that had looked so stable is ripping apart, with each beam pulling another down as it falls," Ignatius wrote. Crediting the U.S. invasion of Iraq for the "sudden stress" that started the collapse, Ignatius wrote, "It's hard not to feel giddy, watching the dominoes fall."

Ignatius hailed what he called "the Middle East's glorious catastrophe" and urged the United States to do what it could to accelerate the process.

"We are careening around the curve of history, and it's useful to remember a basic rule for navigating slippery roads: Once you're in the curve, you can't hit the brakes. The only way for America to keep this car on the road is to keep its foot on the accelerator," Ignatius wrote. [Washington Post, March 2, 2005]

(It's not clear where this Post columnist went to driving school, but few instructors would tell their pupils, who find themselves sliding into an icy curve, to step on the gas.)

Another Washington Post columnist, neoconservative Charles Krauthammer, sounded like a modern-day Trotsky and Robespierre, urging an escalation of Bush's radical strategies. "Revolutions do not stand still," Krauthammer wrote. "They either move forward or die." [Washington Post, March 4, 2005]

This conventional wisdom of Bush bringing democratic enlightenment to the Arab world also permeated the news pages.

"A powerful confluence of events in the Middle East in recent weeks has infused President Bush's drive to spread democracy with a burst of momentum, according to supporters and critics alike," reported the Washington Post in an awestruck page-one article. [March 8, 2005]

Failed Promise

Just a year later, however, it is clear how off-the-mark these columns were. Many of the developments – viewed by the pundits as interrelated and inspired by the Iraq War – were actually reactions to distinct local conditions.

The Lebanese protests against Syrian occupation were not influenced by Bush's invasion of Iraq or his "freedom" Inaugural Address, but rather by growing impatience with the longtime Syrian presence. Those tensions were brought to a head by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and suspicions of Syrian complicity.

A year ago, a brief revival of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was sparked by the death of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the desire of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to leave behind a more positive legacy. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocon Amorality" or "Bush's Neocons Unbridled."

Another giant hole in the conventional wisdom was that elections – which would likely reflect the angry mood of Muslims at this time – could well take the region in the opposite direction, toward greater religious fundamentalism and extremism.

Contrary to Bush's happy rhetoric about how "history has proven that democracies yield the peace," the reality can be the opposite. Historically, voters in democratic societies often have responded to fear, hate, religious fervor or some other irrational stimuli in supporting political demagogues who provoke unnecessary wars.

Historians can trace this pattern from Ancient Athens to the war fever that Bush released in the United States in 2002 before invading Iraq. While democracies have many admirable qualities, moderation and peacefulness are not always among them.

Anyone with a sense of history and an awareness of the animosities in the Islamic world should not have been surprised that some recent elections served to exacerbate sectarian tensions and bring religious fundamentalists to power.

In Iraq, elections indeed did solidify the power of the Shiite majority over the Sunnis. The pro-Iranian Shiite parties and their Kurdish allies also have consolidated their control of the nation's oil riches, leaving the Sunnis without either political power or oil wealth – and thus creating new incentives for them to fight on.

The year-ago optimism about Palestine also proved to be misplaced. Not only have prospects for peace talks foundered, but a stroke removed Sharon from power and a new crisis has emerged after Islamic militants in Hamas defeated the more secular Fatah movement in a Palestinian election.

Now, rather than hailing those blessings of democracy, Israel and the United States are considering ways to isolate, bankrupt and destroy the elected Hamas government.

Blind Media

So, instead of democracy ushering in a new era of peace and moderation in the Middle East, the opposite appears to be occurring.

By pushing for elections while simultaneously stirring up Islamic fury over Iraq and other issues, Bush is opening the door to more violence, more extremism and more anti-Americanism.

All of these possibilities were logical outgrowths of what was occurring a year ago. Indeed, it should have been obvious to U.S. analysts that elections represented a huge risk amid Muslim animosity over the Iraq occupation, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and long-term U.S. support for Israel and corrupt Arab leaders.

But many leading U.S. columnists were caught off-guard by these developments, much as they were duped by Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD. Yet these error-prone columnists haven't been fired or replaced.

Now, the danger is the media's failure to react to Bush's unprecedented assertion of power inside the United States.

Just as the nation's elite editorial pages misunderstood the reality in the Middle East, most columnists are missing the extraordinary transformation now underway toward a system of American authoritarianism.

The pundits would rather bathe in the feel-good rhetoric about Bush spreading freedom and democracy around the world than face the harsh reality of Bush eradicating constitutional safeguards at home.

[For more on Consortiumnews.com's reporting on the media crisis and the Middle East, see "Politics of Preemption," "Giving War a Chance," "The Bush Rule of Journalism," "Washington's Ricky Proehl Syndrome," "LMSM – the Lying Mainstream Media," "Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal," "Explaining the Bush Cocoon," "Alito & the Point of No Return," and "Alito & the Media Mess."]

Last August, the two men were accused of receiving classified information during conversations they had with government officials, one of whom warned Weissman that "the information he was about to receive was highly classified 'Agency stuff,' " according to the government's indictment. That official was Lawrence A. Franklin, who worked at the Pentagon. He recently pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

One argument made in the defendants' motion was that the two pro-Israeli lobbyists were doing what reporters, think-tank experts and members of congressional staffs "do perhaps hundreds of times every day" in receiving leaked classified information and passing it on to others.

In its Jan. 30 response unsealed this week, the government said Rosen and Weissman, as lobbyists, "have no First Amendment right to willfully disclose national defense information." The government went on to say: "Stating this, we recognize that a prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing classified information leaked to it by a government source, would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly, indeed, the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who first disclosed the government filing on his Web site, http://www.fas.org/sgp , said yesterday, "The idea that the government can penalize the receipt of proscribed information, and not just its unauthorized disclosure, is one that characterizes authoritarian societies, not mature democracies."

Recently I published the results of an experiment in which we looked at the regions of the brain that became active when people chose between competing products in supermarkets. Major companies, ranging from Coca-Cola to BMW, are starting to image the brains of potential customers to study how they respond to new designs or brands. They are beginning to speak of 'neuromarketing' and 'neuroeconomics.'

Such trends may be relatively innocuous, but the increasing state interest in what the images might reveal is less so. Specifically, what if brain imaging could predict future behaviour, or indicate guilt or innocence of a crime? There are claims, for example, that it could reveal potential 'psychopathy', that the brains of men convicted of brutal murders show significantly abnormal patterns.

In the current legislative climate, where there have been attempts to introduce pre-emptive detention for 'psychopaths' who have not yet been convicted of any crime, such claims need to be addressed critically. They are and will be resisted by the judiciary, but recent developments suggest that this may be a frail defence against an increasingly authoritarian state.

More seriously, there is increasing military interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies, or enhance the potential of one's own troops. There is nothing new about such an interest. In the US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims that the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA and the Defence Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own programmes. Early experiments included the clandestine feeding of LSD to their own operatives and attempts at 'brain-washing'. These were the forerunners of the hoods and white noise used by the British in Northern Ireland - until judged illegal - and more recently in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where they inhabit an uncertain borderline between what the US government regards as an acceptable level of violence and the torture that it denies committing.

By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almost all US research into 'artificial intelligence', in order to develop methods and technologies for the 'automated battlefield' and the 'intelligent soldier'. Contracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to 'read their minds'.

These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called 'war on terror'. One US company claims to have developed a technique called 'brain- fingerprinting', which can 'determine the truth regarding a crime, terrorist activities or terrorist training by detecting information stored in the brain'. The stress of lying under interrogation is supposed to result in a specific wave form which electrodes measuring the brain's fluctuating electrical signals can detect. We may be sceptical about the validity of such methods, but they indicate the direction in which research is heading. The company claims its procedures have been accepted in evidence in court in the US.

The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them directly. A new technique - transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - has begun to generate interest. This focuses an intense magnetic field on specific brain regions, and has been shown to affect thoughts, perceptions and behaviour. There are suggestions it could be used to control obsessive-compulsive behaviour, while some even take seriously the scenario envisaged in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which TMS was used to erase unwanted memories of a love affair gone wrong. Currently only possible if a subject's head is put inside the relevant machine, TMS at a distance is now under active military investigation. So is chip technology, which might provide implanted prostheses to overcome sensory deficits or control behaviour, and whose potential bioethics committees around Europe have been scrutinising.

It is tempting to dismiss all these as technological fantasies and their proponents as sellers of snake oil, but the fact that a technology is faulty doesn't mean it won't be used. One only has to think of the tens of thousands of lobotomies carried out on schizophrenic patients in the past century. Britain is one of the world's leading examples of a surveillance society, observing its citizens through CCTV cameras and controlling their behaviour with Asbos and Ritalin. The potential for surveillance of citizen's thoughts has moved far beyond the visions of 1984.

Science cannot happen without major public or private expenditure but its goals are set at least as much by the market and the military as by the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This is why neuroscientists have a responsibility to make their subject and its potentials as transparent as possible, and why the voices of concerned citizens should be heard not 'downstream' when the technologies are already fully formed, but 'upstream' while the science is still in progress. We have to find ways of ensuring that such voices are listened through the cacophony of slogans about 'better brains' - and the power of the military and the market.

- This is an edited extract from Better Humans? The Politics of Human Enhancement and Life Extension, a collection of essays to be published by Demos and the Wellcome Trust on Wednesday. Steven Rose is Professor of Biology at the Open University.

Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said she and fellow Democrats on the panel sought a briefing from deputy U.S. intelligence chief, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, soon after Bush confirmed the existence of the surveillance program.

"Gen. Hayden said he was prepared to brief the full committee but our request was disapproved by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card," Harman said in a statement issued by her office.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said she was not aware of any conversations about a possible intelligence briefing in December. A spokeswoman for Hayden declined to comment.

But Harman's remarks could suggest a previously undisclosed readiness by top intelligence officials to speak about the secret program with a broader audience of lawmakers.

The administration has fully briefed only eight lawmakers in the House and Senate about the program's operations up to now, saying wider disclosure could pose security risks.

Bush acknowledged publicly on December 17 that he authorized the National Security Agency after the September 11 attacks to eavesdrop without a court warrant on international telephone calls and e-mails between Americans and others suspected of ties with al Qaeda.

The program has raised concerns among Democrats and some Republicans that Bush may have overstepped his constitutional authority and even violated federal law by not briefing the full House and Senate intelligence panels about the operation.

Two weeks ago, the White House bowed to mounting pressure in Congress and provided some details of the eavesdropping program to the full House and Senate intelligence committees.

But the White House has also pressed Republican lawmakers to stave off calls for full congressional investigations.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has put off until March 7 a vote sought by Democrats that would authorize such an inquiry. House Republicans have also clashed over the need for Congress to undertake a full-scale probe.

Perino said the White House was open to ideas in Congress, particularly a proposal by Republican Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record) of Ohio to create special House and Senate intelligence subcommittees to oversee the program's operations.

"The administration has signaled that it is now shifting course. A senior White House official told me this weekend that it is important to put the program on solid legal footing and improve congressional oversight," Harman said.

"This is welcome news, but it is not a substitute for fully briefing the committees on the operations of the program."

In a frank interview with The Times, Dr Pace says photos and forensic records have proved that torture was rife inside detention centres. Though the process of release has been speeded up, there are an estimated 23,000 people in detention, of whom 80 to 90 per cent are innocent.

He says the Baghdad morgue received 1,100 bodies in July alone, about 900 of whom bore evidence of torture or summary execution. That continued throughout the year and last December there were 780 bodies, including 400 having gunshot wounds or wounds as those caused by electric drills.

Dr Pace expresses deep concern over the progress of the Saddam Hussein trial, saying he would have preferred to see the former dictator tried internationally.

After two years serving in Iraq, Dr Pace says that the non-existence of law and order has left society without any protection, clearly reflecting that the US invasion was not properly planned.

With more than 2,200 dead and 16,700 wounded, and a large percentage of Americans disapproving of the war in Iraq, the US military is struggling to meet its recruiting goals. With little fanfare, the Army has eased enlistment restrictions, allowing soldiers previously considered too heavy, too old, too sickly, or too uneducated to head off to basic training.

In January, the enlistment age for active-duty Army recruits was raised from 35 to 40. Late last year, a key drug test for recent use of marijuana was softened. Last fall, a high school equivalency program was put in place for high school dropouts. And last spring, a ban on childhood asthmatics was removed.

But in a country where the rate of teenage obesity climbed from 5 percent to 16 percent over the last 30 years, perhaps the most significant revision is a loophole that allows recruits who are too heavy to meet weight or body fat limits to take the fitness test anyway.

"There's just a lot of kids sitting around playing Xbox and eating junk food," said Lieutenant Commander Renee J. Squier, who oversees the fitness test in Chicopee. "We lose a fair amount of people because they're really out of shape."

Kimball and Michael Hawkins, 23, of Malden, both said they undertook tough workouts before heading to Westover. The fitness assessment they took was a variation on the half-century-old Harvard Step Test. Subjects march up and down on a platform - 18 inches high for men, 12 inches for women - and keep pace with a metronome that ticks off a brisk 30 steps per minute. After 5 minutes, they sit and rest for 60 seconds. To pass, their pulse needs to be under 180 - and that's not saying much, according to Gary Skrinar, a professor of exercise physiology at Boston University. "Even if you're at 170, you're in pretty bad shape," he said.

After the step test, male recruits have to do 15 pushups in a minute. Women must do four.

Earlier this month, with his childhood dream on the line, Kimball walked into a sparsely furnished room on the Chicopee base, wearing black sweatpants, a gray T-shirt, and white running shoes. "Five minutes," he told himself. "I can do this." The soldier in charge gave him the signal and he started stepping.

The Army began administering the fitness tests for overweight recruits in six cities last year as a hedge against the increasing number of recruits failing to make weight. To date, more than 800 potential recruits who surpassed the Army's body weight standards have passed the conditioning test and gone on to basic training.

At the beginning of the month, with preliminary results in from those six cities - 73 percent passed - the test was extended to eight additional recruitment centers, including Westover, the first in New England.

The test is not open to everybody. Overweight men must measure below 30 percent body fat. Female recruits must have a body fat measurement of between 32 percent and 36 percent.

"These aren't guys from 'The Biggest Loser,' " said Lieutenant Colonel Dan Weaver, who is overseeing the testing, referring to the reality show where obese people compete to lose the most weight. "These aren't morbidly obese people, and this test isn't a free ticket. It's going to wind you and challenge motivation."

Captain Mark Spear of the North Shore Army Recruiting Company said he has sent about a half-dozen recruits to Westover since the test became available the first week of February.

"There's definitely a lot of out-of-shape people who come in here that are interested in the Army," said Spear, whose offices have two doctor's scales. "Pretty much the first thing we do is weigh them and measure them to see if there's going to be a problem."

The increased age limit, which was put in place on Jan. 6, allows active-duty Army enlistees to ship to basic training until the day before their 40th birthday. A more substantial impact on recruiting, Spear said, has been the GED course. Starting last October, high school dropouts have been able to enroll in an Army-sponsored program to help them earn their equivalency degree. The program has yielded between 20 and 30 new recruits at the North Shore recruiting center, Spear said. Last month, his quota was 42 active-duty recruits and 18 reservists.

Also helpful in recruiting has been the more lenient drug-testing policy. Before last year, a recruit who tested positive for marijuana had to wait six months to retake the test. Last year, that waiting time was knocked down to 45 days, Spear said.

None of those issues were at stake for Kimball, who graduated from Haverhill High School last year and was a sergeant in the Marine ROTC program. For him, the issue was weight.

During his sophomore year, Kimball wrestled at 171 pounds. Then he quit the team - and his training diet - and started lifting weights. Last week, eight months after graduation, a recruiter measured his neck at 17 1/2 inches and his abdomen at 43 inches. Though he said he can bench-press 285 pounds, running 3 miles is a substantial exertion.

After he realized the Marines were out of the question, an Army recruiter showed up at his door and told him about the new conditioning test not available in any other branch of the military.

"I told him, 'Let's do it, I'm ready,'" Kimball said.

An 18-year-old male like Kimball must be able to run 2 miles in 15 minutes, 54 seconds. He also must be able to bang out 53 situps and 42 pushups in 2 minutes each.

The step test measures fitness and assesses whether a recruit has the determination to meet those goals, said Squier, the Chicopee test overseer. A few hours after Kimball took the test, Squier, who is 36 and gave birth 15 months ago, barely broke a sweat while she was doing it. A minute after she stopped, her pulse had dropped to a leisurely 118. Minutes later, she knocked off 41 pushups in 60 seconds, stood up, and announced, "No problem."

Not so for Kimball. Two minutes into the step test, he could no longer keep pace with the metronome. The instructor told him to stop, take a few seconds, and try to match the pace again. After twice failing to keep up, he was out.

"It's horrible," Kimball said after he had a chance to digest the news. "But you can't quit."

Hawkins also failed to finish. At 5-foot-10 and 240 pounds, Hawkins considers himself "big-boned" and not in great shape.

"But I can get there," he said. "I know I can lose the weight."

Kimball said he hopes to take the test again on Sunday. Hawkins plans to retake it next month.

"I'm going to hit the gym even harder," Kimball said. "Whatever it takes, I'll do it."

"We haven't had many problems, but we've gotten a few snide comments from staff," said Frank, a longtime peace activist from Chicago. "Each time I come to Prospect [High School in Mt. Prospect], there is one kid who walks by and flips me off. He never says anything, just walks by and gives me the finger."

Despite an occasional chilly reception, Frank and other "counter-recruiters" opposed to the war in Iraq are trying to persuade one potential soldier at a time to pursue other career options. In recent months, activists say, they have visited 25 high schools in the Chicago area as they expand efforts to preach their message that life in the armed forces isn't what recruiters make it out to be.

Some counter-recruiters complain that the Chicago Public Schools system has been slow to implement a 1984 federal court ruling that gives opponents of the military equal access to students. One peace group, Code Pink, joined anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan outside Amundsen High School in Chicago on Friday to raise awareness about the equal-access provision and call on schools to allow counter-recruiters on campus.

Mike Vaughn, a Chicago schools spokesman, said that administrators were reminded about the equal access provision last spring and that counter-recruiters are allowed to visit schools when they request it. As recently as Tuesday, Senn High School let some activists talk to students in the cafeteria.

The local effort mirrors a national movement to stymie military recruitment in a period when American support for the war has plunged and as the U.S. military comes off a year when it failed to meet recruiting goals.

In San Francisco, voters in November approved a non-binding resolution that called on city officials to create scholarships and training programs that would reduce the military's appeal to young adults. And about 5,000 students in Massachusetts public schools "opted out," or had their names and phone numbers removed from lists that public schools are required to pass on to military recruiters.

In several cities throughout the country, including Chicago, activists have targeted young Hispanic men to educate them about the pitfalls of joining the military.

Bill Kelo, a spokesman for the U.S. Army recruiting efforts in Chicago, suggested that counter-recruiting activity has had no effect locally. In the first quarter of fiscal 2006, Kelo said the number of U.S. Army enlistees in the area has risen by 46 percent compared with the same period the previous year.

The Army has increased signing bonuses and other incentives as well as putting more recruiters on the street and allocating more money to advertising after a difficult recruiting year in 2005.

"We say our piece, and the [counter-recruiters] have a right to say theirs," Kelo said.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that promotes non-violence, prints literature for counter-recruiters to distribute to young people who may be thinking about enlisting.

The activists warn students to read any contract carefully and to be wary of promises from recruiters that they can join the armed services but avoid combat. Their literature also suggests alternative ways for young people to serve their country such as joining the Peace Corps or running for office.

Earlier this year, two other high schools in Township High School District 214 -- Wheeling and Buffalo Grove -- agreed to allow Frank to talk to students in the commons once a month.

At Wheeling, the school picks the day she can visit, but at Buffalo Grove and Prospect, Frank says she tries to pick a day that comes on the heels of an appearance by a military recruiter, so the topic is still fresh in the minds of students.

A recent visit to Wheeling happened to fall on the same day that a Marines recruiter stopped by.

"I had a nice chat with the guy, but he was a bit defensive," said Frank, who lives in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood.

During a counter-recruiting session last week at Prospect, most of the students who stopped by Frank's table quickly passed over the literature and seemed more interested in the hard candy she had placed in a basket.

A few teachers and staff members stopped by to say hello to Frank, 57, whose two children graduated from Prospect.

In a different category were the two boys in khakis and button-down shirts who checked out the literature. One of the teens told her that his attitude on Iraq is that "we should kill them all."

A little later a young man with a lip ring told Frank that he hoped to join the Army and become a sniper. Frank suggested that he talk to Rick Davis, 58, a Vietnam War veteran who was manning the table with her that day, about what life at war is like.

With each young person he talks to, Davis suggests that they ask themselves a series of questions: Are you willing to give up all that is near and dear to you for an undetermined period of time? Is this a cause for which you are willing to die? Is it a cause for which you are willing to kill?

"It's the 'Are you willing to kill' question that stops a lot of the kids in their tracks," said Davis, a former Marine sergeant. "If you are not able to answer yes to all three questions, I don't think the military is the place for you."

When Frank arrived for her first counter-recruiting session at Buffalo Grove High School last month, some students were surprised to see a peace activist given the chance to offer an opposing view to the military.

"It was good to hear from someone who wasn't sugar-coating everything," said Paul Thornton, 17, a senior.

Danielle Levin, a senior member of the school's JROTC program, said that initially she was wary of seeing a peace activist in the school. But Levin, 17, concluded that Frank was offering a "fact-based" presentation.

"The decision of whether to enlist is something you need to be well informed about," said Levin. "But I think they need to be careful about how they present their information. Anybody can interpret facts and statistics to make them say what they want. It's really simple for recruiters to put it one way and the [peace activists] to put it another."

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual head of Iraq's Shia Muslims, has called for a week of mourning.

Shias in Baghdad attacked at least five Sunni mosques in reprisal raids, with disturbances reported in other cities.

The BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says the attack was almost certainly designed to raise the existing tensions between the majority Shia and minority Sunni populations.

Shias distraught

The shrine is one of two tombs in Samarra for revered Shia imams, which attract pilgrims from around the world.

It was attacked one day after at least 22 people died when a car bomb exploded in a market in a Shia neighbourhood of southern Baghdad.

Large crowds quickly gathered outside the shrine to vent their anger.

Angry crowds also gathered in Baghdad, while many in the Shia holy city of Najaf called for revenge.

There were reports of disturbances in the Shia-dominated city of Karbala and in the southern city of Basra.

However, Ayatollah Sistani, who has consistently preached a moderate tone throughout the Iraqi conflict, urged Shias not to attack Sunni Muslims or their holy places.

Firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr cut short a visit to Lebanon on hearing news of the attack.

Speaking in London, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called the attack a "criminal and sacrilegious act", but urged all Iraqis to show restraint and avoid retaliation.

Holy site

The golden dome had dominated the Samarra skyline
Samarra is mainly a Sunni Muslim stronghold and has been a focus of the armed insurgency against US troops and the Shia-dominated Iraqi administration.

The al-Askari shrine, part of the Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum, is one of Shia Islam's holiest sites.

The compound contains the remains of the 10th and 11th imams, reputed to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

Imam Ali al-Hadi died in 868 AD and his son, Hassan al-Askari, died in 874 AD. The golden dome topping the al-Askari shrine was finally completed in 1905.

The spiral minaret on top of one of the city's other holy sites, the Sunni Great Mosque of Samarra, was damaged in April 2003.

Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shia, appeared live on television to declare three days of mourning.

He called on Iraqis to "close the road to those who want to undermine national unity".

National security adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie, another Shia, blamed Sunni Muslim militants for the attack.

"They will fail to draw the Iraqi people into civil war as they have failed in the past," Reuters news agency reported him saying.

Bush's invasion of Iraq turned a country with a secular government that suppressed terrorism over to Shia Islamists allied with Iran.

Bush's invasion of Afghanistan turned the country back to warlordism from the unified polity that the Taliban were achieving and revitalized the drug trade that helps to finance terrorism. Bush's interference in the Palestinian election brought Hamas to office. Bush's interference in Egyptian elections achieved gains for the Muslim Brotherhood. Bush's interference in the Pakistani elections put half the country into Islamic hands.

Now secretary of state Condi Rice wants to spend $85 million interfering in the internal affairs of Iran and $5 million "to accelerate the work of reformers in Syria."

What better way to solidify the Iranian and Syrian governments? Both countries are under threat of attack by the Bush regime. Any Iranian or Syrian who accepted American money to work against their own government would be guilty of high treason. With her announcements, Condi Rice has destroyed any opposition that might have existed in either country.

If terrorism is the threat to America that Bush says, why is Bush working so hard to enlarge the power and influence of terrorists and of Islamic politicians hostile to US hegemony in the Middle East?

The terrorist problem arises from the US government's long-term interference in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries. In the past the US has overthrown elected leaders, who were considered too radical for Washington's tastes, and replaced them with authoritarian secular strongmen backed by American money.

To avoid answering to mullahs, the strongmen operate secular governments that are not many steps removed from American puppets.

Being secular, these governments lack the authority of Islam. They are further weakened by not being perceived as representative of the aspirations of Muslims. They have held on to power by suppressing Islamic-based political opposition. Fair elections in these countries would bring Islamic leaders to power.

Muslim terrorists are not secular. Their chosen base is Islam, which puts them closer to the people than are the secular rulers.

Terrorist influence has grown primarily because of US actions in the Middle East. The Bush regime hasn't even a pretext of even-handedness in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a human rights disaster, with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed, the country's infrastructure in ruins, and graphic photographic evidence of Muslims tortured and humiliated by US troops broadcast throughout the world. Undeterred by its accumulated crimes, the Bush regime now threatens more Muslim countries with sanctions, invasion and destruction.

The Bush regime has shown the Muslim world that the US takes for granted that it possesses the right of hegemony over the Middle East. The Bush regime has reaffirmed Washington's right to remove governments, select new ones, interfere in elections, and bomb and invade every country whose rulers Washington can demonize.

By its words and deeds, the Bush regime has confirmed everything that Osama bin Laden has ever said about the "Great Satan." Consequently, the terrorists have grown in influence and organization.

The US invasion of Iraq was a boon for terrorism. The ignorant and incompetent Bush regime expected a "cakewalk" war and an American puppet to do Washington's bidding. The reality is a powerful Iraqi insurgency that has tied down a dozen US divisions and created a training ground and recruits for terrorism and insurgency. Muslims have learned how to violently resist the superior military technology of the invader.

Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni, was disastrous for American hegemony. Hussein ruthlessly stamped out Islamic-based political opposition and terrorist activity, which he rightly recognized as a threat to himself. With Hussein in power, Iran was isolated as the only Islamic-based government in the Middle East.
Iran was further isolated as Iran is Persian and not Arab, Shia and not Sunni.

The American invasion of Iraq has changed the correlation of forces dramatically in Iran's favor. Thanks to Bush, Iraq is now in the hands of the Shia majority. The Iraqi Shia are allied with Iran, as is Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, giving rise to the Shia crescent from Iran to Israel.

Iran is the beneficiary of the thousands of American lives and the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Bush regime has squandered in Iraq. The White House Moron turned Iraq from an Iranian enemy into an Iranian ally. Iran could not overthrow Saddam Hussein, but the White House Moron, using American blood and treasure, did it for the Iranian clerics.

With Hizbullah as Lebanon's most powerful faction, nothing can happen in Lebanon without Iran's approval. Bush's invasion of Iraq has served two purposes--Iran's and bin Laden's--at the expense of his own.

Bush cannot learn from his mistakes. Bush lacks the intelligence and education to recognize a mistake. His government is filled with ignorant ideologues who believe their own propaganda. The fools are now proceeding to compound their strategic blunders with plans to attack Iran and Syria.

Washington is accustomed to buying what it wants. Whenever Washington wants a country to do its bidding it buys the country's leaders. This used to work in the Middle East, but no longer. Do you remember the much maligned Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement?
Arafat was on the American payroll, which made him ineffectual in effectively opposing Israel's illegal dispossession of the West Bank Palestinians. With Arafat's death, Washington found an even more compliant Fatah leader to finance. But the Palestinians themselves had had enough. Israel had forced Palestinians into ghettos while the Bush regime cheered on the right-wing Likud Party. In the Palestinian elections, which the Bush regime thought it had bought, the Palestinians gave a resounding victory to Hamas.

The Bush regime's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have made it impossible for anyone in the Muslim world to take Washington's side.
Our puppet governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the tiny oil emirates are shaking in their boots. In all of these lands the Shia are oppressed, and the Shia are now emboldened. All of these lands are vulnerable to Osama bin Laden's claim that the governments represent American interests, not the interests of Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Pakistanis. And certainly the American puppets cannot appeal to the prophet Mohammed.

The ignorance and hubris of Americans is extraordinary. The US, a country with a hollowed out industrial and manufacturing base, a country that no longer can produce jobs for university graduates, a country that is dependent on foreigners to finance its consumption and its wars, a country that cannot recruit troops for its wars of aggression, this same weak, collapsing country is enraging the Muslim World, inspiring hatred of America and Israel throughout the Middle East, creating massive openings for China and Russia, against whom US military might is feeble.

Europe is dependent on Russia for energy. War in the MIddle East makes Europe more dependent on Russia.

The US "superpower" is dependent on China for the advanced technology products that the US is no longer able to produce. China is America's second most important banker after Japan. China can destroy the US in a few minutes just by dumping its holdings of US dollar-denominated assets.

China is presently concluding a $100 billion investment in the development of an Iranian oil field. In its insane determination to attack Iran and seize the Iranian oil fields, the Bush regime is going against the interests of China. China holds all the cards, not the Moron in the White House.

As the US has established the precedent for interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and uses organizations such as the International Republican Institute to buy electoral outcomes, how could Washington complain if some other country were to help the American people by financing an American political party that represents American values and civil liberties. It would be wonderful for America to have a party committed to diplomacy, peace, financial soundness, and the best interests of the American people, as opposed to a Jacobin ideology of death that represents the neoconservative agenda of the Bush regime.

To combat the Republican lock on electronic voting machines, the US is in desperate need of the UN to oversee our elections to prevent Republicans with low approval ratings from winning elections that exit polls show they lost.

The Bush regime is wasting huge borrowed sums at a time when job growth in America has collapsed, when tens of millions of Americans are losing their health care, their pensions, and their middle class status. America cannot afford such a moronic regime. Someone, somewhere please rescue us from the ignorant, tyrannical, and war criminal government that has seized America.