On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are surrounded by the green of a northern California winter, though the temperature is pushing 70 degrees. An almost perfectly full moon, faded to a tattered white, sits overhead. Suddenly, I take a turn and start straight up, as if into the heavens, but in fact towards Grizzly Peak before turning yet again into a small street and pulling up in front of a wooden gate. You swing it open and proceed down a picturesque stone path through the world's tiniest grove of redwoods toward the yellow stucco cottage that was only recently the home of Nobel-Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, but is now the home -- as yet almost furniture-less -- of journalist Mark Danner, who has said that, as a young writer in search of "a kind of moral clarity," he gravitated toward countries where "massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil."

Danner greets me at the door which, thrown open, reveals a bay window with a dazzling vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay and through which the sun blazes goldenly. In a rumpled dark shirt and slacks, he ushers me out onto a small stone patio. "This is where the deer hang out," he says and points to a small area just beyond our chairs where the grass is slightly pressed down. "They lie there contemplating me as I pace on the other side of the bay window. I feel like their ping pong game."

Facing this peaceable kingdom, Danner has a slightly distracted, out-of-the-washer-but-not-the-drier look to him, except for his face, strangely unmarked, which would qualify as lighting up (even without the sun). He beams in such a welcoming way and there is in him something -- in this setting at least -- that makes it almost impossible to believe he has reported from some of the least hospitable, most dangerous spots on the planet over the last decades: Haiti in the 1980s, war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq, which he's visited three times in recent years, among other spots. He has covered the world for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and especially the New York Review of Books (whose editors have been kind enough to let a number of his pieces be posted at Tomdispatch.com).

Danner is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA, and the Bush administration (and his primer on the subject, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, is a must for any bookshelf). A professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, his cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume, The Massacre at El Mozote, in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where over 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S. trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, The Secret Way to War, is due out in April.

We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.

Tomdispatch: I wanted to start with an area of expertise for you, torture policy. For me, the Bush administration's decision to enter this arena so quickly after 9/11 was a reach for power. If you can torture, you can do anything.

Mark Danner: When you look at the record, the phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off." We hear this again and again. The interesting thing about that phrase is the implication that before we had the gloves on, that the laws and principles that constitute our belief not only in democracy but in human rights left the country vulnerable. The U.S. adherence to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. record of treating prisoners humanely that goes back to George Washington, laws like the FISA law passed to restrict the government's power to surveil its citizens -- all of these constitute the gloves on American power and 9/11 signaled to those in power that the system with "the gloves on" was insufficient to protect Americans. That seems to be their belief.

As you know, very shortly after 9/11, the then-White House counsel [Alberto Gonzales] proposed to President Bush that provisions of the Geneva Conventions had been rendered obsolete, even quaint, by this quote "new paradigm." The Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the federal statutes against torture -- these undertakings by the U.S. -- represented restrictions that would unduly hobble the country in fighting the war on terror and, by extension, threaten[ed] the existence of the United States. And I think that's where torture -- "extreme interrogation" is the euphemism -- goes to the heart of the reaction against the way this country has observed human rights in the past, a reaction in a way against law itself. What we have here is a conflict between legality and power.

Torture is a very direct route from human rights, which is to say, restricted power, to unleashed power. We see a movement here backwards from ideals that were at the root of this country's founding during the enlightenment: the restriction of government power and the conviction that human beings had certain inherent rights, one of which was the freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment. Under this way of looking at the matter, those enlightenment ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were given to Americans, were extended through the Geneva Conventions, through the Convention against Torture, to all people -- and the administration, in pushing extreme interrogation, in going from a secret abuse of power to a public one…

TD: Wasn't it really less an abuse of power than a proclamation of power?

Danner: Exactly. In what I've started to call Bush's state of exception, we've now reached the second stage. Many of these steps, including extreme interrogation, eavesdropping, arresting aliens -- one could go down a list -- were taken in relative or complete secrecy. Gradually, they have come into the light, becoming matters of political disputation; and, insofar as the administration's political antagonists have failed to overturn them, they have also become matters of accepted practice, which is where I think we are now. As we sit here, we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It would have been the very unusual observer, on seeing those photographs in April 2004, who would have predicted two years later that extreme interrogation would, in effect, have become accepted within the CIA. And though the Senate passed an amendment that forbade it, the President replied with a signing statement that essentially reserved his right to violate that amendment according to his supposed powers as commander-in-chief.

In effect, the President claims to believe that his wartime powers give him carte blanche to break the law in any sphere where he decides national security is involved. An added element is the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The only countervailing power we've seen since 9/11 really lay in the June 2004 Supreme Court detention decisions. In one of them, Justice O'Connor declared that the President's power in wartime was not a blank check. Now, she's been replaced by an admitted believer in a "unitary executive." It was Alito when he was at the Justice Department who strongly pushed the strategy of presidential signing statements as a way to mitigate congressional assertions of power.

TD: Weren't you struck by the fact that, of all the things top Bush officials did, their urge toward torture, toward taking the gloves off, was first and fastest? It was an impulse at the top.

Danner: I think that's an interesting way to put it, an impulse at the top. The President and the Vice President have said that, after 9/11, they asked the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies to come to them with proposals. What should the U.S. do? Look, it's time to take the gloves off and every one of you has to show me the way to do it. General [Michael] Hayden said in an interview just the other night that, with the NSA eavesdropping program, he was responding to a request from the White House.

TD: Wasn't it Rumsfeld, when they were "interviewing" John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in Afghanistan, who actually told the interrogators to take the gloves off?

Danner: According to a Newsweek report, Rumsfeld had someone essentially telephone the interrogators: Do what you have to do. Go as far as you have to go.

Creating Reality

TD: Torture hasn't exactly been absent from U.S. government policy in our lifetimes, but one difference, it seems to me, is the degree to which our leaders have been involved. I think Rumsfeld was getting reports on the Lindh interrogation by the hour.

Danner: When we look at the techniques used by the CIA, these things go back a ways. Alfred McCoy and others have written about this. These techniques of torture, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, are reappearing. There is one very important difference: the explicit official approval and the determination to defend these techniques in the case of public exposure and public controversy. And torture has survived its exposure -- a critical difference. The clear evidence of intent at the very top of the government is also striking. At a certain point, of course, you have to get into the realm of the psycho-political, which is a very mushy realm.

TD: Let's do it anyway.

Danner: The central question here is: Why did we have the kind of response we did after 9/11? The Bush administration, which professed itself so strong on national security, had let the United States suffer the most catastrophic attack on its territory in history. We have to remind ourselves of the effect of this. Remember, their major security programs were the Strategic Defense Initiative and confronting China. They thought that terrorism, which they didn't care about, was a matter for sissies. Like humanitarian intervention, the threat posed by non-state actors -- and many other concerns of the previous administration -- all this stuff was, as they saw it, a kid's view of national security, so they ignored it. And afterwards they knew very well that reports existed showing how they had ignored it, most notably the PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was famously entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US." This was a very human thing. Having proclaimed how strong they were on national security, they were attacked. I think that accounted, to some degree, for the ferocity of the counterattack. You don't need to get too deep to see that. When you look at this idea of the gloves coming off, the implication is very much exculpatory. They're saying, in effect: Before the gloves were on, so we weren't able to detect and prevent this attack.

General Hayden has explicitly said, had this [NSA warrantless eavesdropping] program been in place, we would have prevented 9/11. There's no evidence of that, but when you talk about the psycho-political roots of this stuff, I think it's very revealing. It also dovetails with the concerns of several prominent officials, especially Rumsfeld and Cheney, that the government had been unduly hobbled during the late Vietnam War era. Cheney has said this explicitly. We're talking about the War Powers Resolution, which was passed in 1973. FISA is out of the same complex of political concerns, though it was passed under Carter.

TD: They chafed under FISA in the Reagan era.

Danner: Oh, indeed they did. Then there were the Church and Pike hearings of the mid-1970s, which, in their view, disabled the CIA. So part of this has to do with righting wrongs that they believe were committed in an earlier and very traumatic time in their lives. Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense just after the Vietnam War. Cheney was chief of staff in a White House that was under siege. So history is coming back to haunt this era in a personal and vivid way.

TD: You've often quoted a piece in which reporter Ron Suskind is told by an unidentified senior administration official that he's in the "reality-based community," after which that official says something striking: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality." Care to comment?

Danner: I think that quote is immensely revealing. It underlines their policies in all kinds of areas, their belief that the overwhelming or preponderant power of the United States can simply change fact, can change truth. It is quite indicative of their policy of public information inside the United States. They don't care about people who read the New York Times, for instance. I use that as a shorthand. They don't care about people concerned with facts. They care about the broader arc of the story. We sit here constantly citing facts -- that they've broken this or that law, that what they originally said turns out not to be true. None of this particularly interests them.

What interests them is the larger reality believed by the 50.1% that they need to govern. Kenneth Duberstein said this recently -- he was chief of staff to Ronald Reagan -- that this administration is unique in that they govern with 50.1%. He was referring not to elections but to popularity while governing. His notion was that Reagan would want to get 60-65% backing him, while the Bush people want a bare majority, which means they have a much more extremist policy because they're appealing to the base. It makes them very hard-knuckle when approaching politics, simply wanting the base plus one.

On empire, what's unusual about this administration isn't only its focus on power, but on unilateralism. It's the flip side of isolationism. The notion that alliances, economic or political, and international law inevitably hinder the most powerful nation. You know, the image of the strings around Gulliver. They said in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2005 version, that rivals will continue to challenge us using the strategies of the weak including "international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." They're associating terror and asymmetric warfare with international law as similar ways to blunt the overwhelming power of the United States. That represents an attitude toward international law and institutions that, I think, is a real and dramatic break from past practice in the United States. In our history, certainly recently, there's just no comparison to them -- no government anywhere near as radical.

TD: They're really extreme American nationalists, though you can't use that word in this country.

Danner: That's true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That's the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism –- that is, weapons of the weak

TD: Weapons of mass interference.

Danner: I should add that, in my view, the era of neocon leadership is clearly coming to an end. The impression that they were ever entirely in control is wrong in any event and the vanguard of the neocons has obviously been blunted by the great failure of Iraq -- because their assumption of preponderant American power turned out not to be true. Napoleon had this wonderful line that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. Military power is good for blowing things up; it's good for destroying things. It's not good for building a new order. It takes a great deal more power, skill, and patience to construct an enduring order in Iraq. The United States doesn't have sufficient power; it doesn't have the skill; and we know it doesn't have the patience. One part of the Axis of Evil has been occupied -- you can think of it as the part of the Axis that has sacrificed itself to make way for the greater freedom (freedom from attack, freedom perhaps to build nuclear weapons) of North Korea and Iran. Although I think the U.S. has dealt with Iran rather cleverly in the last few months, they're playing a very weak hand. After all, the use of military force against Iran is now out of the question in large part because of the disaster next door in Iraq and the way Iran's hand has been strengthened by that disaster.

TD: Here's my hesitation: If these people are pushed to the wall, I could construct a scenario for you, I believe, in which Iran, crazy as it might seem, could be hit.

Danner: The difference we have on this just has to do with how willing we are to imagine the utter irrationality of the administration. When I look at Iran now, the upside of a military strike of a kind that they could do, with aerial bombardment, and the downside of such a step seems obviously to be so wildly out of proportion, I can't believe even they would take that step.

The Age of Frozen Scandal

TD: You've talked about our current American world as one of "frozen scandal," an interesting phrase. When you first used it, we were in the Downing Street Memo scandal and nothing was happening. Now, we're immersed in the NSA and other scandals and nothing is happening…

Danner: The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as step one, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step two would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and others. And finally, step three would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, look we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.

TD: You get revelation and repetition.

Danner: Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished…

TD: …minor figures…

Danner: …who were silly enough to get themselves caught -- for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they're still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.

TD: You've interviewed some interrogators, haven't you?

Danner: Indeed, and I've had from them accounts of some of the things that were done. The great problem in the Age of Frozen Scandal is that it's as if we're this spinning wheel, constantly confirming facts that we already knew, so the revelations become less and less effective in causing public outrage. The public begins to become inured to it, corrupted in its turn.

TD: I'm going to suggest something grimmer. In what's likely to be the dirtiest election any of us has experienced, if the Democrats actually took one house of Congress in November 2006 and begin to investigate, I think you'd enter the era of frozen investigation. The administration will claim commander-in-chief rights.

Danner: That's a good prediction. The Bush administration is already stonewalling extremely timid Republican-led committees when it comes to the response to Hurricane Katrina or NSA eavesdropping. If the Democrats do take control of a house of Congress and mount real investigations, on the one hand, they'll be very circumspect because they'll be concerned about jeopardizing their chances in the elections of 2008. On the other hand, you'll have the overwhelming claim of commander-in-chief power which could completely handcuff investigations.

TD: I came across this sentence today in a piece on the Plame case. "A spokesman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak was ongoing. The spokesman refused to give her name."

Danner: (laughs) A secret spokesman.

TD: So you've got secrecy, lying, and a third thing you've brought up before, a bizarre kind of frankness. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Danner: There's been an interesting ambivalence in the administration when it comes to all these actions they've taken in the name of national security -- between the impulse to deny and stonewall and the impulse to come forward and very boldly assert that they took such actions in the name of national security. You see it in eavesdropping, where Karl Rove has clearly indicated a preference for declaring, in a very clever response to the NSA revelation, "If al-Qaeda is talking to someone in the United States we want to know about it. Apparently some Democrats don't." Which is basically to say: If you're concerned about this, you're weakening the United States. All this human rights, Fourth Amendment stuff is so much hooey.

In essence, this is an assault on the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is in the Constitution because the framers understood that a lot of these rights, especially when under pressure in wartime, are not particularly popular. So they were put in permanently, so as not to be subject to majority control or majority abnegation. It's politics of the most savagely bare-knuckle and dangerous kind when you use that gap between the country's precepts as embodied in the Constitution and the fact that many of these become unpopular in time of war to destroy your political opponents, which is what this administration does.

There are many in the administration who want to come out four-square for these things. You saw that impulse also with interrogation. They could have come out after Abu Ghraib -- there were hints of this -- and said, "Yes, there are a few bad apples, but yes, we use extreme interrogation, we do it to defend the country." And if they'd done this, they might have pumped up a majority who would, for example, have supported waterboarding.

When I talk about these matters, there's an ambivalence on my part as well because one becomes extremely upset that they're lying in public and doing these things in secret and denying them; but, on the other hand, I fear the kind of populist technique they could use if they declared these policies openly to rally support for themselves.

All this, of course, begs the question of a second attack. It's the assumption of many people that a second attack would punch through everything, that there'd be a much more explicit assumption of powers.

TD: And do you believe this?

Danner: It's quite possible, sure. If it had happened a year after 9/11, I think that's exactly what would have occurred. Now that time has passed, I'm not so sure. They're in a much more defensive political position. It depends on what kind of attack it was, whether it was an attack of a kind that they should have anticipated –- that is, one where it was at least conceivable that they should have prevented it.

It's Not the Information, It's the Politics

TD: It's always dangerous to predict the future, but can you imagine, in quite another direction, this administration imploding or unraveling?

Danner: Well, as in so many things, Yogi Berra had it right: I never make predictions, especially about the future. When it comes to raw political power, the ramrod backbone of the administration is clearly national security. 9/11 restored to the Republican Party what they had lost with the end of the Cold War -- this persistent advantage in national security. If there is one thing this administration has done brilliantly, ruthlessly, efficiently, it's making political use of its war on terror. It remains to be seen whether they can go to that well one more time in the 2006 election. There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party, exactly because Americans, after four years of it, are tired of this rhetoric and they've been enlightened by the Iraq war, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the Medicare debacle among other things to the general incompetence of the administration and to its corruption.

Could the administration unravel? The notion many people on the left are putting forward about a move toward impeachment -- it's hard for me to imagine that. First of all, we're coming to a point in the political calendar where Democrats, as at the time of Iran-Contra, are not going to want impeachment to get in the way of retaking the White House in 2008. Democrats also saw what impeachment did to the Republican Party in 1998. For the first time in memory in an off-year election in a President's second term, the Republicans lost seats -- leading, as you'll remember, to the abrupt fall of Newt Gingrich. On the other hand, if the Democrats did take one house of Congress this November, I think there are a number of areas where an investigation could hurt this administration severely, and it's hard to predict what the Bush people's reaction would be if they found themselves the target of aggressive congressional committees actually investigating officials who faced being charged, convicted, and sent to jail. Even with Congress actually doing its job, we would confront the central political reality of our time: Terrorism has embedded itself in our political system, which is to say that fear has become the most lucrative political emotion and the administration would retain a considerable power to promote fear. It has the power to suggest that an attack on the national security bureaucracy is an attack on the safety of the people.

TD: I'd like to turn to Iraq now by backing up to an earlier moment in your career, a terrible massacre in El Salvador in the 1980s, whose aftermath you reported on, a massacre by Salvadoran troops trained and backed by the United States. Could you compare that early age of Reagan moment to today, given that so much of the cast of characters has turned out to be the same, including…

Danner: …Elliott Abrams…

TD: …and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte, and any number of others. I'd also like you to consider a more general question: How does the U.S. get up to its elbows in blood so regularly?

Danner: Oh boy… When I look back at the massacre at El Mozote, which happened at the beginning of the Reagan administration, what sticks out is the way it served to signal the renewed determination -- of the incoming Reagan officials and the newly defiant Salvadoran military -- to draw a line at Salvador and not let that so-called advance of communist interests within the hemisphere continue.

When I compare now and then, I think of the power of a determined government to deny the facts and, if it is ruthless, to make its denials stick. Because what reverberates now about El Mozote is that two reporters, Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, got to that massacre site within a few weeks and filed stories. These were published on the front pages of the two most powerful newspapers in the country…

TD: …far more so then than now.

Danner: Exactly. At a time of real dominance by the Times and Post, and the administration came forward, denied the massacres took place, and was able to make its views stick. And remember we knew that the death squads were being run out of the Salvadoran government; that the American embassy knew all about this; that it was the public policy of the American government that this shouldn't be happening and that aid would be cut off if it was. But every time a new outrage took place, the press obligingly reported the denial of the administration, the denial of the embassy in San Salvador that, in fact, they knew anything about the connection of the death squads and the government the United States was supporting.

That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the President declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return.

The Yawning Gap

TD: Apply this to Iraq. You've been to Iraq three times. It must be startling to arrive in this described land and see the actual country.

Danner: One of the striking things about going to Iraq is the extraordinarily large chasm between what people know about the story here and what the story actually is. First of all, the lurid, security-imposed landscape of the country is very hard to convey to people here: the miles of concrete blast walls, the miles of barbed wire, the constant fear in driving around and trying to report, and the absolute, constant accompaniment of death. Most of the killings in Iraq are not reported here and yet American viewers think that they're seeing the war when what they're seeing is a television reporter doing a stand-up on the roof of a heavily guarded hotel, behind blast walls and barbed wire and countless armed guards, who may or may not have exited that hotel that day. Many reporters are doing extraordinary jobs under horrific conditions, but those conditions make adequate reporting, as we know it, nearly impossible.

The result is that the Iraq we see is a tiny, tiny sliver of a very complex, very violent reality, and the constant repetition of the bad news, of the continual deaths there, has been absorbed by the news system of the United States. By that I mean, whereas ten deaths might have made the front page of the paper or been not quote "a tell" but an actual filmed report on a network newscast, now it takes more death than that. The country and the news media are gradually absorbing how badly the war has gone so that the normal pace of death there which, had we predicted it before the war, would have been a horrible outcome -- an outcome that, had we known, no one would have supported the war in the first place -- this horrible outcome has become the baseline that we take for granted.

For the story to occupy the news space, a particularly catastrophic attack is necessary. Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on p. A12 of the New York Times. It wasn't even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you're an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans. In fact, the story has generally been migrating off the front pages and becoming a small version of Orwell's famed distant and never-ending war between East Asia and Oceania.

I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaeda and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.

TD: You've written, "I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning distance between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable." Now, that yawning gap is available to everybody. And we're in a strangely demobilized moment, it seems to me. I was wondering: If you're a reporter, what's the story now? Remind me?

Danner: Thank you, Tom, for putting a deeply depressing point in such a deeply depressing way. I congratulate you on that, and indeed that yawning gap is now available to everyone and it's debilitating, partly because one is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn't matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 60s -- in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.

TD: Are we in a kind of Brezhnev moment?

Danner: I'm not sure I would go so far as that because a Brezhnev moment means we're talking about a system that has reached its geriatric debility. I'm by no means saying that the U.S. now is equivalent to Eastern Europe back then, but there is a similarity in this gap between what you know is true and officially recognized reality -- and in the fact that that gap cannot be breached. On the other hand, the fall in Bush's approval ratings, and especially the catastrophic decline in the all-important do-you-think-the-country-is-on-the-right-track question shows that this has had a broad effect among a lot of people. And I take some comfort from that.

The Democrats are doing very well in a generic poll about who you would want to run the country. This doesn't mean the mid-term elections will turn out that way, of course. It does mean people have not been so dulled by fear as not to see that the war has been a mistake and that the administration has done a very bad job when it comes to, say, Katrina or the Medicare program. At the end of the day, the problem is that there needs to be a political alternative that is in some way viable and believable -- and the political elite that opposes this administration has been unable to formulate a believable program in opposition to it.

At the heart of this is the problem of national security. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in poll after poll the American people say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to protect them. This is a cliché of polling. At this particular time, it's been made worse by a paradox. If, with great skill, the Democrats attack the Republican handling not just of the Iraq war but of the more general war on terror -- and the Bush administration has been brilliant in connecting those two -- if the Democrats succeed in doing this, they are, in effect, igniting the overwhelming political emotion of fear. And the Republicans have been very successful in using fear; fear, whatever its cause, seems to benefit the Republicans and the self-described strong leadership they offer. Their basic strategy in the 2004 election was to say: Elect this guy Kerry with his surfboard, and he's going to get you killed. Enough people were willing to believe that then. It's unclear whether that old snake oil will still have as many willing buyers. I tend to doubt it.

TD: As dusk settles in, let me end this way: You've reported on some countries in horrific situations over the years. You wrote somewhere that in State Department parlance they are called TFN, totally f--ked up nations. Your mother, when you come home, has a tendency to say, "Can't you go someplace nice for a change?" So here we are on this patio, the sun going down, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. This looks nice. My question is: Is it nice, or are you now reporting from and teaching in a TFN?

Danner: [laughs heartily] Oh, you mean, this just a mask, a sunny, picturesque mask over what is, in reality, a totally f--ked up nation? Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN, I think we have a long way to go. We're at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I've certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I've seen nothing like it in my lifetime.

It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.

There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal -- this, I think, is very tempting… very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.

You asked a little while ago what reporters should do in a time like this. I think it's immensely important that people continue, with great determination, to report what is true, to investigate things like the NSA story, to make a record of all of this. Because, at the end of the day, that is what reporters do, and that is why their work is so valuable -- so, if you'll forgive this word, sacred. They try to tell what actually happened.

As I leave him at the now dark doorway and head up the stone steps to my car, he calls, "Watch out for the deer! They tend to be up there at this time of night!"

As early as September of 2002, John Ashcroft discussed internment of even American citizens who were deemed "enemy combatants" [2a] and Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said that he "could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country." If there's a future terrorist attack in America ''and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights." [2 b]

"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." [3]

Now we are beginning to see this mentioned by a number of sources [4] to [10] but it is still not front page news, although it is not only Muslims and Arabs who are concerned about what sort of emergency might require detention centers, [11] and what are these mysterious "new programs"? [12] and [13].

I believe that all Americans should be very concerned. It might be "someone else" they come for first, but if this is the direction our nation is going, who knows where it will end.

NOTES:

[1] KBR Awarded Project http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060124/20060124005819.html?.v=1
[2] Ashcroft's Detention Camps http://www.prisonplanet.com/090402camps.html , Civil Rights Panelist Foresees Internment Push
http://www.prisonplanet.com/rights_panelist_forsees_internment_push.html
[3] Preparing for Martial Law http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_22660.shtml
[4] - Homeland Security to Build Detention Camps in the U.S.
http://www.gnn.tv/headlines/7254/Homeland_Security_To_Build_Detention_Camps_In_The_United_States [5] http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12077.htm
[6] Customs Camps Cause for Concern http://www.presstelegram.com/search/ci_3470080
[7] Will Bush's War on Terror Bring Back Internment Camps http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=de9dd9fbbbbd59388d802c3f4e0e1288
[8] Detention Centers By Any Other Name http://vivirlatino.com/2006/02/07/detention-centers-by-any-other-name.php
[9] Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Centers http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SC20060206&articleId=1897
[10] Detention Camp Jitters http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/06/02/far06003.html
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
[11] What Sort of Emergency Requires Detention Centers http://www.blackcommentator.com/171/171_freedom_rider_halliburton_detention_centers.html [12] Bush's Mysterious New Programs http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html
[13] 10 Year U.S. Strategic Plan for Detention Centers Revives Proposals from Oliver North http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9c2d6a5e75201d7e3936ddc65cdd56a9

Sheila Musaji is the Editor of The American Muslim at http://www.theamericanmuslim.org

The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.

Supercomputer companies looking for commercial markets have used the practice for decades. Now intelligence agencies, hardly newcomers to data mining, are using new technologies to take the practice to another level.

But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.

"The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law," said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But "anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy."

When asked for comment about the meetings in Silicon Valley, Jane Hudgins, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, said, "We have no information to provide."

Data mining is already being used in a diverse array of commercial applications - whether by credit card companies detecting and stopping fraud as it happens, or by insurance companies that predict health risks. As a result, millions of Americans have become enmeshed in a vast and growing data web that is constantly being examined by a legion of Internet-era software snoops.

Technology industry executives and government officials said that the intelligence agency systems take such techniques further, applying software analysis tools now routinely used by law enforcement agencies to identify criminal activities and political terrorist organizations that would otherwise be missed by human eavesdroppers.

One such tool is Analyst's Notebook, a crime investigation "spreadsheet" and visualization tool developed by i2 Inc., a software firm based in McLean, Va.

The software, which ranges in price from as little as $3,000 for a sheriff's department to millions of dollars for a large government agency like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, allows investigators to organize and view telephone and financial transaction records. It was used in 2001 by Joyce Knowlton, an investigator at the Stillwater State Correctional Facility in Minnesota, to detect a prison drug-smuggling ring that ultimately implicated 30 offenders who were linked to Supreme White Power, a gang active in the prison.

Ms. Knowlton began her investigation by importing telephone call records into her software and was immediately led to a pattern of calls between prisoners and a recent parolee. She overlaid the calling data with records of prisoners' financial accounts, and based on patterns that emerged, she began monitoring phone calls of particular inmates. That led her to coded messages being exchanged in the calls that revealed that seemingly innocuous wood blocks were being used to smuggle drugs into the prison.

"Once we added the money and saw how it was flowing from addresses that were connected to phone numbers, it created a very clear picture of the smuggling ring," she said.

Privacy, of course, is hardly an expectation for prisoners. And credit card customers and insurance policyholders give up a certain amount of privacy to the issuers and carriers. It is the power of such software tools applied to broad, covert governmental uses that has led to the deepening controversy over data mining.

In the wake of 9/11, the potential for mining immense databases of digital information gave rise to a program called Total Information Awareness, developed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser, while he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although Congress abruptly canceled the program in October 2003, the legislation provided a specific exemption for "processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence."

At the time, Admiral Poindexter, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he said he had knowledge of current classified intelligence activities, argued that his program had achieved a tenfold increase in the speed of the searching databases for foreign threats.

While agreeing that data mining has a tremendous power for fighting a new kind of warfare, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that intelligence agencies had missed an opportunity by misapplying the technologies.

"In many respects, we're fighting the last intelligence war," Mr. Arquilla said. "We have not pursued data mining in the way we should."

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.



He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database - whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena - sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

Much of the recent work on data mining has been aimed at even more sophisticated applications. The National Security Agency has invested billions in computerized tools for monitoring phone calls around the world - not only logging them, but also determining content - and more recently in trying to design digital vacuum cleaners to sweep up information from the Internet.

Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address - another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.

An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.

As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.

In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well.

And several Silicon Valley executives say one side effect of the 2003 decision to cancel the Total Information Awareness project was that it killed funds for a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox, exploring technologies that could protect privacy while permitting data mining.

The aim was to allow an intelligence analyst to conduct extensive data mining without getting access to identifying information about individuals. If the results suggested that, for instance, someone might be a terrorist, the intelligence agency could seek a court warrant authorizing it to penetrate the privacy technology and identify the person involved.

With Xerox funds, the Palo Alto researchers are continuing to explore the technology.

Syrian and Canadian officials have cleared Mr. Arar, 35, of any terrorist connections, but United States officials maintain that "clear and unequivocal" but classified evidence shows that he is a Qaeda member. They are seeking dismissal of his lawsuit, in part through the rare assertion of a "state secrets" privilege.

The case is the first civil suit to challenge the practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects have been transferred for questioning to countries known for torture.

After considering legal briefs, Judge David G. Trager of United States District Court prepared several written questions for lawyers on both sides to address further, including one that focused pointedly on Mr. Arar's accusations of illegal treatment in New York. He says he was deprived of sleep and food and was coercively interrogated for days at the airport and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn when he was not allowed to call a lawyer, his family or the Canadian consul.

"Would not such treatment of a detainee - in any context, criminal, civil, immigration or otherwise - violate both the Constitution and clearly established case law?" Judge Trager asked.

The reply by Mary Mason, a senior trial lawyer for the government, was that it would not. Legally, she said, anyone who presents a foreign passport at an American airport, even to make a connecting flight to another country, is seeking admission to the United States. If the government decides that the passenger is an "inadmissible alien," he remains legally outside the United States - and outside the reach of the Constitution - even if he is being held in a Brooklyn jail.

Even if they are wrongly or illegally designated inadmissible, the government's papers say, such aliens have at most a right against "gross physical abuse."

Under immigration law, Ms. Mason asserted, Mr. Arar was afforded "ample" due process when he was given five days to challenge an order finding him inadmissible.

"The burden of proof is on the alien to demonstrate his admissibility," Ms. Mason said, "and he did not do that."

"Do you do this to all people on a connecting flight?" Judge Trager asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Yes, all have to show admissibility," Ms. Mason replied. In some ways, she asserted, Mr. Arar had more rights than a United States citizen, because he could have challenged his deportation to Syria, which he had left as a teenager, under the Convention Against Torture. He also had 30 days to challenge his removal, she said.

But David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who argued on behalf of Mr. Arar and the Center for Constitutional Rights, contended that the government had denied Mr. Arar a meaningful chance to be heard, first by refusing to let him call a lawyer, and later by lying to the lawyer about his whereabouts.

Mr. Arar, who had been told he would be deported to Canada, was not handed a final order sending him to Syria until he was in handcuffs on the private jet that took him away, Mr. Cole said, while his lawyer was told he had been sent to a jail in New Jersey.

"We can't take a citizen, pick him up at J.F.K. and send him to Syria to be tortured," he said. "We can't hold against Mr. Arar the failure to file a motion for review when he's locked up in a gravelike cell in Syria."

Dennis Barghaan, who represents former Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the federal officials being sued for damages in the case, argued that Congress and recent judicial decisions tell federal courts "keep your nose out" of foreign affairs and national security questions, like those in this case.

At several points the judge seemed to echo such concerns. He said he had refused to read a letter from the plaintiffs detailing testimony before a Canadian board of inquiry into Mr. Arar's case because he did not know how to deal with questions that might require the government to confirm or deny classified information.

"How am I going to handle that?" he asked, rubbing his forehead and furrowing his brow before adjourning the hearing.

This is a good article about the procedure of force feeding, and the docter-patient relationship as it affects these prisoners, and a lot of other interesting things.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

Is it humane to be forcing these prisoners to remain in our custody without charges, and to expect them NOT to be upset about it?  Hunger strike is one of the LAST things we can do to attract attention to our plight.

What situation does this sort of desperation put our docters in?

1. The doctor treating hunger strikers is faced with the following conflicting values:
   
   
   
   
   1. There is a moral obligation on every human being to respect the sanctity of life. This is especially evident in the case of a doctor, who exercises his skills to save life and also acts in the best interests of his patients (Beneficence).
   
   
   2. It is the duty of the doctor to respect the autonomy which the patient has over his person. A doctor requires informed consent from his patients before applying any of his skills to assist them, unless emergency circumstances have arisen in which case the doctor has to act in what is perceived to be the patient's best interests.
   
   
   
   


2. This conflict is apparent where a hunger striker who has issued clear instructions not to be resuscitated lapses into a coma and is about to die. Moral obligation urges the doctor to resuscitate the patient even though it is against the patient's wishes. On the other hand, duty urges the doctor to respect the autonomy of the patient.
   
   
   
   
   1. Ruling in favour of intervention may undermine the autonomy which the patient has over himself.
   
   
   2. Ruling in favour of non-intervention may result in a doctor having to face the tragedy of an avoidable death.
   
   
   
   
   


3. A doctor/patient relationship is said to be in existence whenever a doctor is duty bound, by virtue of his obligation to the patient, to apply his skills to any person, be it in the form of advice or treatment.

This relationship can exist in spite of the fact that the patient might not consent to certain forms of treatment or intervention.

 How's this for an experience?

"They press their knuckles into your jaws and press in hard. The way they finally did force feed me was getting forceps and running them up and down my gums," he said.

"I opened my mouth, but I was able to resist after that," said the Sinn Féin man in the interview.

"Then they tried – there's a part of your nose, like a membrane and it's very tender – and they started on that. It's hard to describe the pain. It's like someone pushing a knitting needle into the side of your eye. As soon as I opened my mouth they put in this wooden bit with a hole in the middle for the tube. They rammed it between my teeth and then tied it with cord around my head.

"Then they got paraffin and forced it down the tube. The danger is that every time it happens you think you're going to die. The only things that move are your eyes.

"They get a funnel and put the stuff down."

Affidavits from the prisoners in Guantanamo describe how the torture victims vomited up "substantial amounts of blood" while being fed through their nose.

  These people DESERVE attention, they deserve due process, and the opportunity to get OUT of the situation our government has put them in.  I hope this hunger strike shames the administration enough to give them decent trials and revue.  I doubt it will, but one can always hope.

A similar December requirement was passed by the House (226 to 187) in a nonbinding resolution to urge the House and Senate negotiators to shine a shaft of sunlight on these "dark sites" in the final National Defense Authorization Act for 2006. But secretly, both the Senate and House resolutions were killed by the conference committee.

This February, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International urged the House International Relations Committee to support three new resolutions of inquiry into American use of torture, citing the fact that "there is still a strong perception in many parts of the world that the United States continues to facilitate or willfully ignore torture by rendering individuals to countries where they are likely to be tortured, and by holding detainees in secret locations closed to the International Committee of the Red Cross." (Emphasis added.)

But on February 10, in a party line vote, the House International Relations Committee defeated all three resolutions.

There has been hardly any notice in the press or anywhere else about these congressional setbacks as part of the Bush administration's continued success in suppressing news of what actually goes on in those "black sites" in the name of the United States and its citizens.

As I have noted in previous columns, there has been a debate for more than two years inside the CIA about the legality of these secret prisons and how to eventually dispose of the prisoners. They cannot be tried in American courts because they have been wholly denied due process under our constitution and so are wrongfully held.

Two years ago, FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, who had been the senior agent on the FBI's bin Laden squad in New York and later was in charge of investigating Al Qaeda master planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (now in some CIA "black site"), asked on ABC's Nightline:

"What are we going to do with these people [in the CIA secret cells]? . . . Are they going to disappear? Are they stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to people when they start asking questions about where they are? Are they dead? Are they alive? What oversight does Congress have?"
Passport Art & Culture

The present answer to Jack Cloonan's last question is this: There is no congressional oversight. Congress has been blocked-by its Republican leadership, the president, Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA chief Porter Goss-from having any oversight at all. The constitutional separation of powers has also fallen into a black hole.

There is, however, a quick look into one of those secret prisons in a December 19, 2005, Human Rights Watch report, "U.S. Operated Secret 'Dark Prison' in Kabul."

Eight "detainees" now being held at Guantánamo, another extralegal U.S. prison, have told their attorneys what it was like when they were individually held, at various times between 2002 and 2004, in a secret U.S. facility for more than six weeks before being transferred to Guantánamo. That secret prison was apparently closed after the transfer. This is their story, as told in the HRW report:

"The detainees, who called the facility the 'dark prison' or 'prison of darkness,' said they were. . . shackled to rings bolted into the walls of their cells, deprived of food and drinking water. . . for days at a time . . . and kept in total darkness with load rap, heavy-metal music, or other sounds blaring for weeks at a time. . . . Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep."

One of the prisoners added that he was put in "an underground place," and "during the interrogations, he says, an interrogator threatened him with rape."

Ethiopia-born Benyam Mohammed, who grew up in Britain, told his attorney, in English, "[At one point] I was chained to the rails [of my cell] for a fortnight. . . . The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. . . . Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."

Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. regularly intone, in chorus, that the U.S. does not torture and always acts within the law. But if the fearful facts in the darkness in those CIA prisons are ever documented by an independent prosecutor in a future administration, it will finally be proved that, as Human Rights Watch emphasizes, the CIA is responsible-along with the president who gave it "special powers"-for "serious violations of U.S. criminal law, such as the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Statute. . . . The mistreatment of detainees also violates the [International] Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which the United States has ratified, and the laws of war."

There is a rising focus around the country on this year's midterm elections. During the campaigning, will there be any mention of the screams in the CIA's underground prisons of darkness? And if there is, how many Americans will care enough to be repelled by their own silent, passive complicity in the growing moral darkness of this nation's leadership?