America has never been richer, but it once was much more optimistic - even utopian - about its future.

In 1956, Fortune magazine published \"The Fabulous Future,\" a book of essays by luminaries forecasting a nation of technological and economic wonders by 1980. Adlai Stevenson spoke of \"the most extraordinary growth any nation or civilization has ever experienced.\" George Meany predicted \"ever-rising\" living standards. And David Sarnoff gushed, \"There is no element of material progress we know today that will not seem from the vantage point of 1980 a fumbling prelude.\"

That same year, that wild utopian, Richard Nixon, then vice president in the Eisenhower administration, heralded a 30-hour, four-day workweek \"in the not too distant future.\" Gallup polls found that only 3% of the population questioned whether the nation was enjoying \"good times,\" and just 8% doubted that the good times would keep getting better indefinitely.

From the end of the Korean War to the peak of the Vietnam War, American media trumpeted a utopian future. A 1953 issue of Time predicted that a newborn would be twice as wealthy by her high school graduation and that a worker 100 years in the future would produce in seven hours what he now produced in 40. In 1954, Life magazine predicted a technotopia of jets, computers, color TVs, superhighways and doubled living standards by 1976. In 1959, Newsweek predicted that the 1960s would bring short workweeks, automatic highways and self-operating lawnmowers.

Most Americans and their leaders, from the Eisenhower administration to John Kennedy\'s top advisors to the chattering classes, which wrote such books as \"The Challenge of Abundance,\" believed in a land of milk and honey from New York to L.A. JFK, who challenged us to land on the moon, also declared in his inaugural address that \"man holds in his hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.\"

According to the National Opinion Research Center, American happiness peaked between the mid-1960s and 1973. Today, nary a politician nor a public intellectual - not even the cybergeeks - dares predict soaring incomes, limitless leisure or technologies to make our lives pure bliss.

Studies show that happiness rises with incomes - up to the point at which basic needs are met, after which it stagnates as aspirations also rise with income. The recent Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this a \"hedonic treadmill.\" Like the proverbial rats, we run faster and faster - and so do our aspirations - but the bottom line is the old cliche: Money can\'t buy happiness.

Of course, Western Europeans and Japanese are gloomier than we are. But some of that starry-eyed optimism of late 1950s America can be seen today - on the streets of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Americans find more happiness in marriages, relationships and children. But that fails to explain why we, as a nation, have lost the capacity to dream big. Why does no one talk about doubling living standards, 20-hour workweeks or silly but delightful gadgetry like the personal helicopters envisioned in the 1950s? Why have the Jetsons been succeeded by Homer Simpson?

Of course, one reason is that utopia has not come to pass. Many Americans have a harder time making ends meet; working hours are longer, reversing a 50-year decline; the cool new gadgets come with neuralgic 300-page manuals. But the other reason is the lack of what George Bush pere so eloquently referred to as \"the vision thing\" in politicians who are busy with political catfights, tinkering at the policy margins or raising money.

\"Utopianism\" is often used as a pejorative, but our nation was built on - and flourished on - utopian dreams. We need them now more than ever.

Andrew L. Yarrow\'s \"Visions of Abundance\" will be published in 2007.

© 2005 The Los Angeles Times

An on-going investigation series examines the real life \"core story\" of alien contact, shared by a group of intelligence and military government insiders, and the man that best selling author Jon Ronson inquired about in his book, \"The Men Who Stare at Goats.\"

In 1995, the CIA took control of a series of secret government programs from the Defense Intelligence Agency, known collectively as STAR GATE.

Project STAR GATE involved both scientific research and operational intelligence using paranormal phenomena. Although STAR GATE officially ended following CIA declassification of many of the original programs, and despite the release of more than 80,000 pages of previously classified documents, rumors persist that paranormal phenomena are of extreme interest in Washington. Thousands of pages of the original program remain classified to this day.

According to British author and filmmaker Jon Ronson, following the 9/11 attacks, psychic Uri Geller confided that he had been reactivated into the ranks of intelligence agency psychic spies. Ronson claims that Uri told him that the name of the man who reactivated his mental powers for intelligence was called Ron.

More is known about Ron than many of his associates thanks to his brief appearance in the New York Times a few years ago. A MITRE document confirms that Ron is involved with the development of a new kind of radar that uses personal computers. The new radar is a passive system intended to detect unwanted intrusions of stealthy unidentified flying objects.

Ron developed the reputation of being the chief phenomenologist at the CIA: something about a file filled with strangeness called the \"weird desk.\" It is alleged that Ron inherited this assignment from a certain retired CIA officer, who continues as government consultant in the critical area of reviewing advanced technologies with possible military applications. This gentleman holds the distinction of appearing in a photograph in the March, 2006 issue of \"Reader\'s Digest.\"

A Tale of Avian Dreams

Inside the alleged \"weird desk\" is the \"core story\" about visitors not of our world. The extraterrestrial tale has spread with some help from a group of present and former intelligence agents and military types in a loose network popularly known as \"The Aviary.\" Another source with close ties to the alleged members of the Aviary group revealed that the same core story of alien contact had been confirmed by the former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, just prior to his death in 2002. Recently Starstream Research learned that disclosure of an interest in all things alien by members of the DIA sponsored TIGER committee may have provoked a split between some of the key players. TIGER is the \"standing committee on Technology Insight-Gauge Evaluate Review.\"

In 1993 the DIA STAR GATE project initiated a pilot study into the feasibility of using telepathy for command, control and communication for soldiers behind enemy lines, in situations where normal communication wasn\'t possible. If the government is serious about developing mind to mind com links, then they must also be considering the threat of foreign developments. This is known as C^4: Command, Control, Communication, Computers. Telepathy merely takes this to the next level. It provides a command and control signal line for communication. The computer is the biological material inside the human brain. Wiggle this brain here, and that one over there responds. Wiggle hard enough, and perhaps you have created a remote control system.

Combine the ideas behind passive radar with telepathy, and you have a unique C^4 system capable of distinguishing the flow of unconscious information around the planet. The Aviary is concerned not so much with the hardware of an alien civilization, but with a deeper and more sinister dilemma. Take command and control of the flow of the collective unconscious mind, and you have taken control of the human race. A meme is an idea that spreads like a virus: an idea that replicates, evolves and infects like the common cold, moving from host to host. The Aviary\'s \"core story\" has revealed a virus of unearthly intent set upon the leadership of our planet.


The primary conceptual basis for the Space Time Threat Assessment Reports comes from the reports of anomalous information appearing within human perception. Copies of some of original CIA released STAR GATE documents, including \"Project 911\" and predictions of terror attacks using airplanes can been seen at the Starstream Research website:

www.starstreamresearch.com

In a letter released Monday, 18 House Democrats told Bush that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should appoint a special counsel. They said the surveillance of terrorists must be done within the bounds of U.S. law, but complained that their efforts to get answers to legal and factual questions about the program have been stymied - \"generally based on the feeblest of excuses.\"

\"If the effort to prevent vigorous and appropriate investigation succeeds, we fear the inexorable conclusion will be that these executive branch agencies hold themselves above the law and accountable to no one,\" wrote the lawmakers, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a member of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees.

The lawmakers initially asked the independent watchdogs at the Justice and Defense departments to open inquiries. Both declined.

Justice\'s inspector general Glenn Fine said he lacked authority, and deferred to the department\'s Office of Professional Responsibility. That office has said it is investigating the conduct of the department\'s lawyers, but not the program\'s lawfulness.

Congress\' investigative arm, the General Accountability Office, similarly declined to open a review, noting the administration would be expected to designate the necessary documents as foreign intelligence materials and limit access to them.

The Democrats see \"ample precedent\" for a special counsel, citing the Justice Department\'s appointment of U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

After 22 months of investigation, Fitzgerald indicted the vice president\'s chief of staff, I. Lewis \"Scooter\" Libby, for allegedly lying about his role in the disclosure.

\"Indeed, the allegation of a secret NSA spying program conducting warrantless domestic surveillance of U.S. persons is at least as serious\" as the matter Fitzgerald investigated, the Democrats wrote.

In their six-page letter, the Democrats said the special counsel should investigate any possible violation of federal criminal law, noting that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act says the monitoring of U.S. citizens and residents - without a warrant - is punishable by imprisonment.

Bush administration officials have argued the program does not fall within that law. They say Bush was exercising his constitutional authority as commander in chief when he allowed the National Security Agency to monitor - without court approval - the international calls and e-mails of people inside the U.S. when one party may be linked to terrorism.

The administration also maintains the president had the power to order the surveillance under a broad 2001 authorization to use military force in the war on terror.

The 18 lawmakers also want the special counsel to consider any crimes that may be committed to interfere with the investigation, including perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and witness intimidation.

The request harkens back to Libby, who was not indicted specifically for leaking Plame\'s name, but for an alleged cover-up that included five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements to FBI agents.

© 2006 The Associated Press.

While the US has a history of imperialism, deep cruelty, and mass murder, including slaughtering one million civilians in the conquest of the Philippines, legalizing the institution of slavery, and committing the Native American genocide, by World War II America had arguably begun to demonstrate a reasonable level of commitment to humanitarian ideals. While it was a long, painful process, Abolitionists, Women Suffragists, Populists, Labor Activists, Civil Rights Protestors, and the like forced the United States to strive for truly noble causes. From the end of World War II up until the 1960\'s, one could reasonably conclude that the nation primarily responsible for the defeat of militaristic fascism in both Europe and Asia had earned a degree of moral authority, in spite of its remaining flaws.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

Vietnam marked the beginning of America\'s descent into a fetid moral sewer, high-lighted (or more appropriately low-lighted) by the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese civilians and the devastating after effects of Agent Orange (compliments of Monsanto). America\'s light as a beacon of hope for humanity was rapidly extinguished. Ignoring Eisenhower\'s prescient warning, his successors chose the sword over the plowshare repeatedly. Funneling outrageous percentages of our precious resources into the coffers of the bloated and malevolent military industrial complex, they carried out murderous agendas through direct military intervention, covert CIA operations, and proxies like the Shah of Iran. Sadly, under the last 7-8 presidencies, Democrat and Republican alike, the United States government has evolved into the most powerful terrorist organization on the planet.

Bush and his criminal cohorts have assured US victory in its race to the bottom. Dropping the cloak of altruism, they have come out of the closet and revealed their wicked proclivities. In openly murdering innocent civilians and torturing suspected terrorists under the pretenses of \"pre-emptive\" military action and the nebulous "War on Terror", Israel's Neocon operatives have secured America\'s place in the pantheon of egregious violators of human rights. Despite having stolen the last two elections, these depraved war criminals continue to act in the name of the American people as they repeatedly urinate and defecate on virtually everything that was truly virtuous in our nation.

Perhaps torture and murder are the values of this "Christian nation"…

Human Rights First recently released a particularly damning and extremely well-researched report entitled Command\'s Responsibility. I spent several hours perusing this disturbing analysis of homicides committed by our own government (to further the cause of "spreading freedom and democracy"). A shocking number of alleged enemy combatants have been murdered by the US military and the CIA. Apparently justice vanishes without a trace if one is of Middle Eastern descent and suspected of terrorism.

According to the report, 100 such individuals have died since August of 2002. By the US military's own admission, 34 of those cases were \"suspected or confirmed homicides\". Human Rights First determined that the \"facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention\" in 11 additional cases. The report also reveals that 8 US detainees \"were tortured to death\".

How is the \"bastion of human rights\" policing itself? \"Only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for a US official.\" Human Rights First also uncovered the facts that \"while the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge\". The harshest sentence issued for those responsible for torture-related deaths? An unbelievable slap on the wrist: five months in jail for homicide! Meanwhile, America\'s \"justice system\" eagerly metes out the death penalty for murder, mostly to our poor and/or black citizens. Just ask California's "Terminator".

Israeli peace of mind and oil are worth the annihilation of millions of human beings, aren't they?

Still high enough on hubris to believe the Bush Regime is righteous in passing judgment and proclaiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea form an \"Axis of Evil\"? While you are grabbing stones to cast at this trio for their deplorable records on human rights, consider the acts of barbarism, terrorism, and deceit the United States has committed against the first member of the so-called \"Axis\" over the last two decades. Since Reagan swaggered into office, America has been committing genocide against the Iraqi people in multiple ways. Bear in mind that these \"evil\" Iraqis never attacked the United States or its citizens. Their crime? Ostensibly it was that their tyrannical leader, Saddam Hussein, needed to be deposed, they possessed weapons of mass destruction, they were a threat to the United States, and eventually were complicit in 9/11. But for those who live in reality, the Iraqis' true \"sins\" were possessing vast quantities of oil, daring to sell their oil for Euros instead of the almighty Dollar, and posing a \"threat\" to poor little Israel, a nation bristling with military firepower and enjoying the unflinching support of the most powerful military in the history of humanity.

As an aside, if the "infinitely benevolent" United States bore the responsibility of removing Hussein to "liberate the Iraqis", a question naturally arises. Which nation will liberate the world from Bush and his team of despicable Neocons?

A Little Duplicity, a little hypocrisy…whatever it takes, right?

In 1982, the Reagan Regime removed Iraq from the State Department\'s list of nations sponsoring terrorism. This enabled US corporations, including members of the military industrial complex, to capitalize on the abundant profits to be had in the Iraqi marketplace. In 1983, Ronald Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with US ally Saddam Hussein to \"normalize relations\" which had been terminated during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Despite full knowledge that Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and on the Kurds of his own nation, the United States continued its cozy relationship with Saddam. The United States and its allies in Western Europe provided Hussein with military helicopters and the precursor agents necessary to manufacture the very weapons of mass destruction which later became one of the pretexts for the Neocon invasion of Iraq.

Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch said this about American support of Hussein:

\"No one had any doubts about the Iraqis\' continued involvement in terrorism....The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran.\"

Confirming the initial US acts of genocide against the Iraqi people through its support of Hussein are some quick facts provided by the US State Department. Bear in mind that Hussein was an American ally when these atrocities occurred:

-- Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.

-- Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam\'s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds.

-- The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths.

-- 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.

Leave it to American ingenuity to find a better way…

Ongoing US support of Hussein became virtually impossible when he invaded Kuwait, a US ally which had slant-drilled $14 billion worth of oil from Iraq (using equipment supplied by a United States corporation). Despite United States Ambassador April Glaspie\'s assurances to Hussein that the US \"takes no position\" in the conflict (just days before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), Bush the elder unleashed the US military beast on Hussein. The US war machine defeated Iraq by burying thousands of Iraqi troops alive, employing depleted uranium, and murdering thousands of retreating Iraqis during the Basra Road Massacre.

Research by Beth Osborne Daponte, who ran afoul of \"straight shooter\" and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney for \"inflating\" body counts related to the Gulf War, and who has since been exonerated, published by two scholarly journals, and awarded a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrates that 205,500 Iraqis died as a result of the Gulf War. Perhaps the rulers of the American Empire tired of committing genocide through their proxy, Hussein. Recasting him as an enemy certainly increased their capacity to eliminate the Iraqi people.

Keeping our hands clean while "killing them softly"

Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (on August 6, 1990), the United Nations, under intense pressure from the US, imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq. A year later, with Iraq defeated, the sanctions continued. From the initial implementation of these draconian measures, the United States utilized its powerful influence within the UN to ensure that the sanctions remained in place. The alleged targets of the sanctions were Saddam Hussein and his government. However, the people of Iraq were the ones brutally victimized by this twelve year campaign of economic terror.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, by late 1995, over a million Iraqis (including 567,000 children) had died as a direct result of the economic sanctions. Based on UNICEF\'s research, 4,500 children were dying each month and 825,000 Iraqi children were at risk of suffering acute malnutrition.

Demonstrating the Clinton Regime's complicity in the Iraqi genocide, Secretary of State Madeline Albright appeared on 60 Minutes in May of 1996. When asked about reports of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the sanctions, she stated:

\"We think the price is worth it.\"

Even the Oil for Food Program (implemented in 1996 to enable Iraq to exchange its oil on the world market for food and humanitarian supplies) failed to stem the tide of suffering and death. Supporters of the American Empire claim that corruption, inefficiency and abuse caused the failure of this \"noble rescue effort\". However, despite the fact that the program did not end the misery for Iraqi civilians (regardless of the reasons), the US saw to it that the sanctions remained in place until Bush II launched his illegal invasion. To protest the ongoing sanctions, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Dennis Halliday ended his 34 year career with the UN in 1998.

Noam Chomsky has postulated that the ultimate goal of US foreign policy in Iraq is to reduce it to a sparsely populated nation, providing the American Empire with a readily attainable, strategically located piece of real estate sitting atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Evidence does exist to support Chomsky\'s speculations. Slow Motion Holocaust by Stephanie Reich and The Secret Behind the Sanctions by Thomas Nagy both reference DIA documents which expose US intent with respect to the economic sanctions:

Reich: A series of recently revealed Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports show that the US attack on Iraq\'s civilian population was deliberate and calculated. A DIA report of January 1991 stated that sanctions would prevent the import of chemicals and equipment required for the provision of safe drinking water, resulting in epidemics. A second DIA report listed as likely causes of epidemics in urban areas the fact that US bombing had destroyed water, electrical and waste disposal systems, and had largely ended distribution of preventive medicines. The report itemized the predicted disease outbreaks, highlighting those that strike children. A third DIA report dated March 1991 explicitly connected outbreaks of gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases to the war, stated that children in particular were affected, and noted that potable water had been reduced to 5% of prewar supplies.

Nagy: Over the last two years, I\'ve discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country\'s water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.

Patience is not a Neocon virtue

Once the Bush Regime seized power, the \"slow motion holocaust\" was no longer satisfactory. In enabling or causing 9/11, they had the Pearl Harbor they needed to launch "full speed genocide\". Spinning incredibly absurd yarns linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden while \"proving\" that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (and the means to unleash them), the nefarious ones whipped the American public into a \"patriotic\" fervor. Driven by fear of the \"terrorists\" and the lies of the mainstream media, the American public zealously supported the \"Shock and Awe\" campaign.

Conveniently, the Neocons and their media handmaidens neglected to inform the American public that as a former ally, the US had a degree of complicity in Saddam\'s crimes against humanity. They also failed to mention that our government had committed similar offenses during the Gulf War and had engaged in the passive mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by strong-arming the UN into maintaining the economic sanctions for 12 years. Or perhaps by Neocon moral reckoning, two wrongs do make a right and they decided it would be frivolous to rehash America\'s \"heroic efforts\" to end Hussein\'s tyranny.

In December 2005, George Bush himself publicly admitted that his Regime bears responsibility for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the illegal Occupation in 2003. The Lancet Journal released a study in October 2004 which concluded that the number was closer to 100,000 at that time. A more recent study referenced in an article in The Canadian places the number closer to 250,000. The Neocons certainly have accelerated the pace of the Iraqi genocide.

"Collateral Damage" in the Homeland

Iraqis are not the only victims of the Empire\'s most recent efforts to exterminate them. Americans are reaping the wages of Bush\'s sins against the Iraqi people. Over 2300 Americans have died carrying out the twisted bidding of Rumsfeld and company. Hundreds of billions of wasted US taxpayer dollars, virtually certain federal bankruptcy, and the steady asphyxiation of domestic programs which benefit the poor, the sick, the elderly, the working people, and most importantly, our children, closely parallel the passive mass murder perpetrated through the US-driven UN economic sanctions against Iraq. Want evidence? Look to New Orleans.

In light of the Downing Street Memo, which clearly demonstrates that Bush constructed a false case to justify the invasion of a country that posed no real threat to the United States, based on the accompanying needless deaths of American soldiers, and considering the resulting economic sanctions placed upon the American people, Congress has a sacred obligation to truly represent the interests of its constituents and remove Bush and his fellow criminals from office. It is time to impeach Bush and Cheney. Once removed from office, these two and the rest of the cabal need to face trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

We the People and the Iraqis deserve better

Click the link below to take action:

\"Congressman John Conyers has introduced three new pieces of legislation aimed at censuring President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at creating a fact-finding committee that could be a first step toward impeachment.\"

Americans are not an evil lot, but we are culpable for having allowed a string of truly despicable human beings to perpetrate the Iraqi genocide that has been taking place since the Reagan Regime. The monstrous psychopaths now infesting the White House have taken malevolence to a whole new level. Let us remind ourselves that The White House belongs to us and that Bush serves us.

Bush and his rotten associates are guests in our home and ultimately, mere public servants. One simple step that you can take toward evicting and firing them is to click on the linked paragraph above to email your Congress Member with a demand that they support Conyers' courageous initiatives. Remember, removal from the White House will put these scoundrels one step closer to the Big House and to suffering the consequences they so richly deserve.

Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine\'s Corner.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.

Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross - who are prohibited by their own rules from disclosing what they find - and lawyers for the prisoners.

I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our American gulag.

On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log sheet and submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of the prison camp.

We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo, one of several camps where prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square and divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table where the prisoner would sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam mattress and a gray cotton blanket.

The Pentagon's files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none was captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the U.S. The prisoners claim that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and turned over to the U.S. for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 - a claim confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. forces promising rewards - "enough to feed your family for life" - for any "Arab terrorist" handed over.

The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never stand up in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two suspected Al Qaeda members on the same day - at places thousands of miles apart. The primary "evidence" against another was that he was captured wearing a particular Casio watch, "which many terrorists wear." Oddly, the same watch was being worn by the U.S. military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families for more than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become a father since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen sunlight for months - an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom." Other than the Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have been given books.

Every prisoner I've interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S. captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing," he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard U.S. congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies," Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

We asked for Fawzi's medical records so we could monitor his weight and his health. Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month, which we did. When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds to 98 pounds. Specialists in enteral feeding advised us that the continued drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was being conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital. Again, the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110 pounds. The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by medical personnel rather than by guards.

When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said, "They tortured us to make us stop." At first, he said, they punished him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto "the chair." The officer warned that recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. "We're going to break this hunger strike," the officer told him.

Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next door screaming and warning him to give up the strike. He decided that he wasn't "on strike to be tortured." He said those who continued on the hunger strike not only were strapped in "the chair" but were left there for hours; he believes that guards fed them not only nutrients but also diuretics and laxatives to force them to defecate and urinate on themselves in the chair.

After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more than 80 strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled water.

Fawzi said eating was the only aspect of life at Guantanamo he could control; forcing him to end the hunger strike stripped him of his last means of protesting his unjust imprisonment. Now, he said, he feels "hopeless."

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I know the truth.

Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

"While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges."

That is the opening line of a front-page article in Sunday's New York Times detailing the US-run prison at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. The Times reports that some of the detainees at Bagram have been held for as long as two or three years. Unlike those at Guantanamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants." One Pentagon official told the Times the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.

The numbers of detainees at the base had risen from about 100 at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year. The paper says the increase is in part the result of a decision by the U.S. government to shut off the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.

While Guantanamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

Citing unnamed military officials and former detainees, the Times reports that prisoners at Bagram are held by the dozen in wire cages, sleep on the floor on foam mats and are often made to use plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, detainees rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard. The U.S. military on Sunday defended Bagram air base saying detainees there are treated humanely and provided "the best possible living conditions."

But evidence of abuse of prisoners at Bagram has emerged over the years. In December 2002, two Afghan prisoners were found dead, hanging by their shackled wrists in isolation cells at the prison. An Army investigation showed they were treated harshly by interrogators, deprived of sleep for days, and struck so often in the legs by guards that a coroner compared the injuries to being run over by a bus. No one has been prosecuted for the deaths, though both were ruled homicides and the Army claims the men were beaten to death inside the jail.

We are joined on the line by Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of the charity Reprieve. We are also joined by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

* Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of the charity Reprieve.
* Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined on the phone right now from London by Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through the Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of the charity, Reprieve. He joins us on the phone from London. Welcome to Democracy Now!

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Can you tell us what you know of Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yes, and, of course, a lot of it is laid out in the New York Times, but there are some things that are considerably worse than represented there. For example, there is an area of Bagram that is not open to the Red Cross, as one of our clients, Mamdou Habib said. The most frightening moment he had in Bagram was when the Red Cross came and he didn't get to see them. And there's a cellar area in Bagram, a dark -- a place that's kept perpetually dark, which is where a number of prisoners are kept away from the Red Cross itself. And, of course, if you think about being a prisoner in those circumstances, your natural assumption is if the military doesn't want the Red Cross to know you exist, then your fate is probably not going to be a very pleasant one, and naturally a number of those people have been moved off and rendered to other countries, where they have been abused. And some of them we've caught up with again in Guantanamo, but many haven't. They've disappeared.

AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined in our studio by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Does the Center represent people at Bagram?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, like Clive, the Center has many of the similar clients who have been through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo. And Moazzam Begg is another one whose story has just come out, how he was taken to Bagram, beaten, etc., and then went to Guantanamo. We are in contact with people who have family members, who have people in Guantanamo, and as Clive said, a lot of this has been known for a couple – more than two or three years. I mean, the people who were hung and tortured and killed. The underground prison has been known, and what's really incredibly frustrating – you feel like Sisyphus, rolling the stone up the hill, when you think about finally getting some rights for people and visits to Guantanamo, and then what happens is the administration really goes and continues its illegality in other prisons around the world. So what it really says is that, yes, the struggle is around one prison like Guantanamo, but we have to really root out completely what this administration is doing around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, can you, though, explain? I mean, it sounds like the reason Bagram is growing is because of all of the international outcry around Guantanamo, but also Guantanamo's legal relationship with the United States on a U.S. air base in Cuba. Can you explain the legality of Afghanistan, where Bagram is and Guantanamo, these two detention camps?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, both Clive and I were in the early case about Guantanamo, in which the U.S. tried to say Guantanamo was like Bagram, that there were no legal rights there. You couldn't go to court for people in Guantanamo. They had no constitutional rights, and the U.S. said it could do what it wanted to people at Guantanamo. We won a big case in the Supreme Court, the Rasul case in June of 2004, that opened the courts to people at Guantanamo and opened them so people like Clive and Center lawyers could go to Guantanamo.

Even with that, those set of rights, the administration, in the Graham-Levin Bill and the Detainee Treatment Act, is trying to eliminate even those rights we won in the Supreme Court. But as far as Bagram is concerned, the legal position of the administration is similar to what it was about Guantanamo. There are no legal rights, but they have the additional argument, that they would make, that because it's not on a U.S. permanent military base like the one in Cuba, that there's even fewer rights.

I don't think they're correct. I think that any person detained anywhere in the world has a right to go into a court, has a right to be visited by an attorney, but the administration's view is whatever Guantanamo rights are, the rights at Bagram are nil, absolutely none, and so what they did, according to the Times report, was a few months after we won the Rasul case, they said they stopped sending people to Guantanamo and started to send them to other places – Bagram is the one that we know the most about at this point – because the administration's view is that no court, no lawyer, no one, has any right to visit anyone in Guantanamo -- anyone in Bagram, and that nobody --and that the people at Bagram have no legal rights at all. An extraordinary statement in today's world.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, your response, and also what is the role, if any, of Britain in Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, my response is that I think, as Michael and I and many others have said for a long time, Guantanamo is something of a distraction. That people -- if you think people have been badly treated in Guantanamo, you should see what's happened to them in other places, and what's of real concern, arising out of the New York Times article, is this: The Times mentioned one flight. It was actually September 19, 2004 where ten people were brought to Guantanamo. I represent a couple of those. Of those ten, all of them are extraordinary cases where people were taken and abused horribly in other places.

One of my clients is Binyam Mohammed. He was rendered to Morocco. We've got the flight logs. We know the very names of the soldiers who were on the flight, and he was taken there, and he was tortured for 18 months, a razor blade taken to his penis, for goodness sake, and now the U.S. military is putting him on trial in Guantanamo. Hassin bin Attash, a 17 year-old juvenile who was taken to Jordan and tortured there for 16 months. There is a series of these people.

Now, what that prompts is this question, that the people who have been most mistreated in Guantanamo were mistreated elsewhere, and then the administration took a very small number of them to Guantanamo, but the vast majority of them are either in Bagram or in these secret prisons around the world. And most recently, we heard of Poland. We've heard of Morocco. We've heard of various places.

What I'm afraid is the truth is that the most shocking abuses have yet to come to light, that these people are in Bagram and have yet to talk to anybody, and what the administration is doing is hiding these ghastly secrets. Now, the question is: What are they going to do about that? What are they going to do when it becomes necessary at some point for these prisoners to be given lawyers? There's a lot of horror stories, and the administration is just not going to want those horror stories to come out. So where are these prisoners going to be sent? Are they going to vanish forever?

And unfortunately, the U.S. administration has shown that it is willing to send people to Egypt, where they may disappear, to Morocco, where they get razor blades taken to them, and we've got to find out the names of these people first, because the government won't tell us, and then we've got to prevent them from being rendered to some country where they effectively die after a bit of torture.

I'll be glad to go on to the British part, but I know I have talked too much. I don't want to rant on forever.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, I wanted to ask you about a piece that appeared in a paper in your country in the Guardian by Suzanne Goldenberg and James Meek. It says, "New evidence has emerged that U.S. forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking trophy photographs of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation. Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that such abuse took place in the main detention center at Bagram, near the capital, Kabul, as well at a smaller U.S. installation near the southern city of Kandahar. A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. Army investigations released to the ACLU after a long battle, made available to the Guardian."

And then inside, it says, "The latest allegations from Afghanistan fit a pattern of claims of brutal treatment made by former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and Afghans held by the U.S. In December, the U.S. said eight prisoners had died in custody in Afghanistan," and this is according to you, "A Palestinian says he was sodomized by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Another former prisoner of U.S. forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days. Hussein Abdelkader Youssef Mustafa, a Palestinian living in Jordan, told Clive Stafford Smith he was sodomized by U.S. soldiers during detention at Bagram in 2002. He said, 'They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum – excruciatingly painful. Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream, but I could not stop screaming when this happened.'"

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, you know, Hussein Mustafa, I met with him in Jordan, and he was an incredibly credible person. He is a dignified older gentleman, about now 50 years old, and he wanted to talk about what had happened to him, but he really didn't want to talk about that sexual stuff, and in the end, you know, I said to him, "Look, you don't have to, but it's very important if things happened, that the story get out, so they don't happen to other people," and in the end he did, and it was in front of half a dozen people who were just transfixed as he described how four soldiers took him, one on each shoulder, one bent down his head and then the fourth of them took this broomstick and shoved it up his rectum.

Now there was no one in that room -- and they were from a variety of places -- who didn't believe that what this man was saying was true, but I am afraid, I've got to tell you, that that's far from the worst that's happened. When you talk about Bagram, when you talk about Kandahar, those aren't the worst places the U.S. has run in Afghanistan. The dark prison, sometimes called "Salt Pit," in Kabul itself, which is separate from Bagram, has been far worse than that, and I can tell you stories from there that just make your skin crawl.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you tell us something about this place?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, I'll tell you some of the ones, for example, that Binyam Mohammed told me. He was the man who had the razor blade taken to him. He was then taken, and again, we can prove it. We've got the flight logs. He was taken on January 25, 2004, to Kabul, where he was put in this dark prison for five months, and he was shackled. You just get this vision of the Middle Ages, where he's shackled on the wall with his hands up, so he can't quite sit down. It's totally dark in that place.

When the U.S. says that people are being treated nicely in Bagram, you've got to be kidding me. It's the middle of winter, and they're freezing to death, and this man was in this cell, no heating, absolutely freezing, no clothing, except for his shorts, totally dark for 24 hours a day with this howling noise around him. They began with Eminem music, interestingly enough; they played him Eminem music for 24 hours a day for 20 days. Seems to me Eminem ought to be suing them for royalties over that, but then it got worse and they started doing these screeching noises, and this is going on 24 hours a day, and in the mean time they would bring him out very briefly just to beat him, and this is to try to get this man to confess to stories that they now want him to repeat in military commissions in Guantanamo, and they want to say, "Oh, everything's nice now."

And what he went through, he said, was far worse than the physical torture, this psychological torture that some pervert was running in the dark prison in Kabul was worse to him, and he still suffers from it day in, day out, because of what it has done to his mind, and this is the – what we have to remember is there is someone out there who is thinking this stuff up and who is then saying that we need to do it, and this isn't some lowly guard who loses control and does something terrible that's physical. I mean, that's awful. But you've got someone out there who is thinking through how we're going to torture these people with this excruciating noise and these other things, and they're doing this very, very consciously, and the story has a long way before it's going to be out fully.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Ratner, what oversight is there?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, as Clive is saying, there isn't, and I think, you know, we're putting this huge effort into closing down Guantanamo, which is crucial, obviously, to do. It will be a major victory, but what we're running is these so-called "black sites," torture chambers all around the world, and there isn't any oversight. Our Congress is just sitting on its hands, not doing anything. The most they ask is they say, "Give us a report on black sites." Even that isn't getting through. We have nothing.

This country is running torture chambers around the world right now, and Clive's stories, our clients' stories, are incredibly dramatic, and his point about the psychological torture is crucial. It's what Clive is saying, people have thought about this, but this is something that has been U.S. policy for 40 years of how to really deal with people, not just physically, but with psychological torture, and one of your former guests, I think Al McCoy, had this on in A Question of Torture, saying, this is what really affects people. Physically, yes, hurts them, but the psychological marks of torture, and when you see the pictures from Bagram to Guantanamo, you know that this is stuff that is not just chance or random. This is going by the book.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about this article in the New Yorker that Jane Mayer had written about Colonel Louie Morgan Banks, a senior Army psychologist who played a significant advisory role in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Asked to provide details of his consulting work, he said, quote, "I just don't remember any particular cases. I just consulted generally on what approaches to take. It was about what human behavior in captivity is like." Banks has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. A biographical statement for an American Psychological Association Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which Banks serves on, mentions that he, quote, "provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support." It also notes that starting in November of 2001, Banks was detailed to Afghanistan where he spent four months at Bagram Air Field, quote, "supporting combat operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters."

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, what's remarkable about Banks is he also consulted on Guantanamo. So here you have this guy who is a psychologist, consulting really on how to break people through psychological -- psychological torture is what I would call it, and then he goes from Guantanamo to Bagram. This is not chance. This is not a few bad apples. This is high-level military people working with our military, our C.I.A., in how to break people through torture.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: When you're talking "break people," and I think that's a very important word. You know, people bang on about whether it's torture or whether it's coercion. Well our highest officials have said that the purpose of all of this is to, quote, "break" somebody, and we get people to confess to stuff that's absolute drivel. You take, for example, Binyam Mohammed, again. You have a razor blade taken to you, you have the psychological stuff, you're going to say anything.

They got Binyam Mohammed to confess that he had dinner with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsey bin al-Shaid, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libbi, and Jose Padilla all together on April 3, 2002, in Pakistan. Well, you know, quite apart from anything else, two of them, Abu Zubaydah and Sheikh al-Libbi were in U.S. custody at the time when he confessed to that and at the time that he was meant to be having dinner, and you know, this is a guy that didn't speak Arabic who was meant to be hobnobbing with half of al-Qaeda. You get this total drivel out of this breaking of people, and yet, for some reason, the people who are designing Guantanamo think we should carry on breaking them, as did the Spanish Inquisition. It's very odd.

MICHAEL RATNER: That's correct. I mean, it's – they break them; they get drivel; they get false stories, and so what's going on? What's going on, I think, in part, is an attempt to terrorize people, terrorize the Muslim world and say, "You come into U.S. hands, and we will terrorize you." And that's what they're doing.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Don't you think though, Michael – I tell you, I think there's a slightly bigger danger here, which is the people who are doing this abuse believe the stuff they get. This is what's frightening to me, that we end up making decisions based on this nonsense.

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, it's true. They do believe it. I think, when you talk to your clients or we talk to ours, the people who are interrogating them actually believe what they're telling them, even though it's utterly and complete drivel.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. Joining us next is Maher Arar. He is a Canadian citizen who was -- well, the U.S. government calls it "extraordinary rendition," others call it "kidnapped" -- when he was transiting through Kennedy Airport from a family vacation to Canada and sent to Syria, was tortured there and held for almost a year. We have been speaking with Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights lawyer. Michael Ratner will stay with us, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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The congressional elections this coming November are the last chance for for Americans to reaffirm the separation of powers that is the basis of their civil liberties. Unless the voters correct their mistake of putting both the executive and legislative branches in the hands of the same party and deliver the House or the Senate to the Democrats, there is nothing on the domestic scene to stand in the way of more power, and less accountability, being accumulated in the executive.

The Democrats have been a totally ineffective opposition and might not inspire any voter response other than apathy. Rather than vote for a cowardly party that is afraid to defend the Constitution, voters might simply not vote at all.

In this unfortunate event, the only check on the Bush regime is its own hubris.

Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq has set in motion forces beyond his control. On February 23 the Asia Times reported that America's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is "losing his grip." Some Pakistani provinces are already beyond Musharraf's control, and the remainder are rioting against "Busharraf" as Musharraf is now known. The infantile American press misrepresents the riots as responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, but in fact the target of the riots is the American puppet.

By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by threatening Syria and Iran, Bush has taught Muslims everywhere that they owe their humiliation to the Western controlled secular governments that suppress their aspirations. They are realizing that their power resides in Islam and that this power is suppressed by secular governments. Busharraf is probably dead meat, and when he goes so does the US military adventure in Afghanistan.

When Bush attacks Iran, the US army will be caught between the Iraqi Shia and the Iranian Shia and will be decimated in fourth generation conflict, so aptly described by William S. Lind. If a few thousand Sunni insurgents can tie down 10 US divisions, imagine the fate of US forces trapped in a Shia crescent.

The collapsing power of the US hegemon is everywhere evident. It is evident in the inability to successfully occupy Iraq or even Baghdad. It is evident in the growing military cooperation between North and South Korea, and it is evident it the revolt in the Indian government against Prime Minister Singh's nuclear agreement with the US. Indians say this agreement subjects India to US hegemony and represents America's attempt to block India's pioneering research on thorium as a nuclear fuel. Opposition parties have told Singh that if he signs the agreement, they will bring down his government.

The entire world now recognizes that America has lost its economic power and is dependent on the rest of the world to finance its budget and trade deficits. The US no longer holds the cards. American real incomes are falling, except for the rich. Jobs for university graduates are scarce, and advanced technology products must be imported from China. The US is a rapidly declining power and may soon end up as nothing but a tinhorn dictatorship.

Dr. Roberts is Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

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