CURRENT VERSION OF TEXT

As introduced.

An Act concerning the posting of certain Internet messages and supplementing chapter 38A of Title 2A of the New Jersey Statutes.

Be It Enacted by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:

1. As used in this act:

"Information content provider" means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

"Interactive computer service" means any information system, service, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides service to the Internet.

"Internet" means the international computer network of both federal and non-federal interoperable packet switched data networks.

"Internet service provider" or "provider" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that provides individuals, corporations, or other entities with the ability to connect to the Internet through equipment that is located in this State.

"Operator" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that operates an interactive computer service.

2. The operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish, maintain and enforce a policy to require any information content provider who posts written messages on a public forum website either to be identified by a legal name and address, or to register a legal name and address with the operator of the interactive computer service or the Internet service provider through which the information content provider gains access to the interactive computer service or Internet, as appropriate.

3. An operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.

4. Any person who is damaged by false or defamatory written messages that originate from an information content provider who posts such messages on a public forum website may file suit in Superior Court against an operator or provider that fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required pursuant to section 2 of P.L. , c. (C.) (pending before the Legislature as this bill), and may recover compensatory and punitive damages and the cost of the suit, including a reasonable attorney's fee, cost of investigation and litigation from such operator or provider.

5. This act shall take effect on the 90th day following enactment.

STATEMENT

This bill would require an operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish, maintain and enforce a policy requiring an information content provider who posts messages on a public forum website either to be identified by legal name and address or to register a legal name and address with the operator or provider prior to posting messages on a public forum website.

The bill requires an operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.

In addition, the bill makes any operator or Internet service provider liable for compensatory and punitive damages as well as costs of a law suit filed by a person damaged by the posting of such messages if the operator or Internet service provider fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required by section 2 of the bill.

Ironically, however, the anger and indignation felt by U.S. officials when someone compares Bush's policies to those of Hitler does not stop U.S. officials from comparing foreign leaders to Hitler.

The most recent example was when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared Venezuela's democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez, to Hitler, saying, "He's a person who was elected legally – just as Hitler was elected legally – and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Morales and others."

When Rumsfeld compares Chavez to Hitler, he's obviously not suggesting that Chavez is setting up deaths camps to commit another Holocaust. He's simply saying that Chavez, like Hitler, is "consolidating power" and working closely with foreign rulers who, like Chavez, refuse to submit to the dictates of the U.S. Empire.

Consider Fidel Castro. The beef that U.S. officials have with Castro is not that he has imposed a communist/socialist order in Cuba. After all, U.S. officials fully support the types of socialist programs that Castro has put into place, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, income taxation, gun control, drug laws, occupational licensure, and equalization of income. U.S. officials even have no problems repatriating Cuban refugees back into Castro's communism. Their primary beef with Castro is that he simply has always refused to become a member of the U.S. Empire and thereby do the bidding of U.S. officials, like his predecessor Fulgencio Batista did. If Castro had done that, U.S. officials would no more complain about what he did inside Cuba than they complain about what their unelected military dictator in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, does inside his country. Musharraf, of course, became a full-fledged, fully paid member of the U.S. Empire after 9/11, eagerly accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid and presumably abandoning his deeply held, pre-9/11 commitment to the Taliban.

It's the same thing with Bolivia's newly elected president Evo Morales, to whom Rumsfeld was referring when he compared Chavez to Hitler. The immediate beef that U.S. officials have with Morales is that he's going "independent" by threatening to end the war on drugs in Bolivia, a war that has torn not only Bolivia apart but also Colombia, Mexico, and many other Latin American nations. The problem, however, is that U.S. federal officials need this war – their budgets depend on it and their jobs depend on it. In fact, for some government officials, both at the state and federal level, their bribes depend on it. Thus, despite the fact that the drug war has totally failed to accomplish its objective – the elimination of drugs and drug abuse in the United States – as a recent official U.S. government report reflects, U.S. officials demand that foreign regimes continue waging it. That's one reason they're upset with Morales – he's not buying into the drug-war nonsense. And so they're expressing their displeasure with Morales by suggesting that he is now associating with "Hitler."

Ironically, even as Rumsfeld calls Chavez "Hitler" for consolidating power, no one can deny that ever since 9/11, Bush has done everything he can to "consolidate power," as evidenced by the USA PATRIOT Act, the unconstitutional assumption of power to declare war, the illegal attack and war of aggression on a country that had never attacked the United States, the illegal spying on Americans by recording their telephone conversations without a judicially issued warrant, the jailing and punishment of Americans without due process of law, illegal kidnapping and "rendition" of prisoners to foreign regimes for the purposes of torture, and of course the illegal torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder of detainees by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, when U.S. officials such as Rumsfeld compare Chavez to Hitler for "consolidating power," their own arrogance and hubris prevent them from seeing that President Bush has been doing the exact same thing ever since 9/11 – and arguably to a much greater extent than Chavez – "consolidating power." While they have no hesitancy in placing the label of "Hitler" on foreign leaders for doing so, U.S. officials scratch their heads in befuddlement when foreigners place the label of "hypocrites" upon them.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," he wrote. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

"In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia," Orwell wrote. Earlier in the essay he had said, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."

Our time and his time remain the same. We invade a sovereign nation based on lies, destroy its infrastructure, depose its government and kill 30,000 of its people, and we call that "spreading democracy" or "defending freedom."

The phrase "war on terror" is a phony metaphor. We are not at war. Ninety-nine and 99/100ths percent of the American people are living the same way they've always lived. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting an insurrection that our invasions of those countries caused. They are at war – a war of their own country's making – but the rest of us are not. Waving a flag or putting a bumper sticker on one's car cannot be called a war effort.

The "war" is being relegated to the inside pages, and it's a safe bet that no matter what happens in Baghdad, the Academy Awards will receive more coverage and notice than the war. In our nutty society, the choice of a comedian to emcee a Hollywood trade show is considered big, national news.

What distinguishes us from other animals is language, and when we use language not to communicate truth as best we can determine it, but to deceive, mislead, obfuscate and obscure the facts, then we are committing the ultimate sin against humanity. We are playing a dangerous game with our own sanity.

Our own journalists sanitize even their skimpy coverage of the war. The American people must not be allowed to see the real face of war, lest they withdraw their support. The real face of war, of course, is broken bodies, blood, splattered brains and innards, horrible burns and other mutilations. There are no pleasant aspects of war. So, Americans are allowed to see soldiers giving candy to children, and occasionally an explosion on the horizon or the wreckage after the bodies have been removed.

In the meantime, the president and his folks blather on in carefully chosen euphemisms and newspeak just as if they were characters in an Orwell novel. At least the American people are at last beginning to catch on, and Bush's approval rating is 34 percent and his vice president's rating is 18 percent. That speaks well of the American people. They do trust their politicians, though that trust is often abused, but eventually they begin to check actions against words, facts against claims. Once they realized they've been bamboozled, then all the fancy words and euphemisms in the world won't restore their trust.

Bush has been in trouble in Iraq and Europe and Asia, and now he appears to be in trouble at home. He has three more years, so it would be a great help if this year one or both of the houses of Congress shifted to Democratic control. That would restore the checks and balances so necessary to preserve liberty, not that Democrats are any prize. That doesn't matter. The genius of our Founding Fathers is that they realized that as long as government fights itself, the liberty of the people is safe.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that i can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder .

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to


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*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.


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Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in


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† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)


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the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases


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*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.


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and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Women Say No to War, which helped organize the news conference and march, said Sheehan and three other women were arrested while trying to deliver a petition to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations with more than 60,000 signatures urging the "withdrawal of all troops and all foreign fighters from Iraq." Police said they were arrested for criminal trespassing and resisting arrest.

Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. diplomat, said in a statement issued by the group that the U.S. Mission refused to send someone to meet with the women "whose lives and families have been shattered by this destructive and immoral war." The protesters refused to leave without delivering the petition, she said.

Richard Grenell, the spokesman for the U.S. Mission, said in response to Sheehan's arrest: "We invited her in to discuss her concerns with a U.S. Mission employee. She chose not to come in but to lay down in front of the building and block the entrance. It was clearly designed to be a media stunt, not aimed at rational discussion," Grenell said.

At the news conference, Sheehan said when her 24-year-old son - a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq - died in April 2004, "the morgues were filled with innocent men, women and children."

Entessa Mohammed, a pharmicist who works at a hospital in Baghdad, became tearful when recalling the deaths and injuries she said she has witnessed daily.

She estimated that 1,600 Iraqis are killed in Baghdad every month, with a greater number injured. "Thanks for the liberation from Saddam" Hussein, Mohammed said, addressing the Bush administration, "now please go out."

Passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the law made it easier for federal agents to secretly tap phones, obtain library and bank records, and search homes of terrorism suspects. Complaints by civil libertarians, librarians and others prompted lawmakers last year to insist on adding safeguards to the act before renewing it.

Some of the revisions affect National Security Letters, which are subpoenas for financial and electronic records that do not require a judge's approval. Libraries functioning "in their traditional capacity" will no longer be subject to such letters. Also modified is "Section 215 subpoenas," which are granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. Recipients now will have the explicit right to challenge the subpoenas' nondisclosure or "gag order" requirements.

Some civil liberties groups, however, say the law is written in a way that will make it very difficult for a targeted individual to prevail in such an appeal.

Less Call for Sweeping Lobbying Reform?

As the Patriot Act battle ends with a whimper, the fight over the rules governing lobbying will begin. But just as the Patriot Act fight started with promises of major changes and ended largely with the status quo, the push for sweeping lobbying reform may be losing steam.

The Senate is scheduled to take up ethics and lobbying legislation this week. But first, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) hopes to merge two bills on the subject passed last week by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Senate aides do not expect much trouble accomplishing the combination. The rules bill deals basically with lawmakers' actions, and the governmental affairs bill involves mostly demands on lobbyists. Together they would represent the Senate's response to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals.

The bills lean heavily toward expanding disclosure requirements on both lawmakers and lobbyists. In addition, one pending proposal would make it harder for lawmakers to pass narrowly targeted spending measures called earmarks. The bill would also double to two years the time that former lawmakers must wait before they can lobby their ex-colleagues on Capitol Hill.

Senators have said they expect debate on a variety of measures on the floor including a plan, once rejected in committee, to establish an independent office of public integrity. Some senators also plan to offer an amendment that would force lawmakers to pay charter fares for their private airplane trips rather than the first-class rates allowed under current law.

Food Bill No Longer Small Potatoes

The biggest rhetorical battle in Congress may be a food fight. Tomorrow or Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote on the National Uniformity for Food Act, a measure to establish a federal system of food warnings that would replace the patchwork regulations of the states.

The measure has bipartisan support and was expected to pass with little controversy. But in recent days, the protests of state government officials and environmental groups have changed the equation. State attorneys general say the legislation will federalize a regulatory issue that has been handled at the state level and could replace some tough state standards with weaker federal rules.

The Natural Resources Defense Council hand-delivered bottles of Pepto-Bismol to House members and their staff with a special label warning that "H.R. 4167 side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, birth defects, cancer and worse." A bipartisan group of attorneys general will protest the measure today at a news conference near the Capitol.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the bill's author, said yesterday that his measure is the victim of a disinformation campaign.

"The uniformity in food warnings under the bill will enhance food safety and public health," he said. "Contrary to the assertions of the attorneys general, H.R. 4167 is sound public policy that provides protection for all citizens of all states."

The inspector general's review was launched in August after bitter and public complaints by the Tillman family that the Pentagon had failed to hold anyone accountable for the April 22, 2004, shooting or to fully explain its circumstances. His mother, Mary Tillman, has expressed deep frustration about what she calls a succession of "lies" she has been told about her son's death.

The Army originally reported that Tillman was killed in a firefight with enemy forces in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, and officials heralded his heroism with a tale of how he was charging a hill against the enemy when he was shot. Weeks later, after a nationally televised memorial service, the Army revealed that he had been gunned down by members of his own unit who rounded a corner in a Humvee and mistook him and a coalition Afghan fighter for the enemy.

Mary Tillman said Saturday that she thinks evidence of a crime has existed all along and that the family's repeated calls for a criminal investigation were ignored until now. "The military has had every opportunity to do the right thing, and they haven't. They knew all along that something was seriously wrong, and they just wanted to cover it up."

Patrick Tillman Sr. expressed skepticism the new investigation will yield answers. "I think it's another step," he said. "But if you send investigators to reinvestigate an investigation that was falsified in the first place, what do you think you're going to get?"

The loss of Tillman - a popular Arizona Cardinals football player before joining the military after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - rattled the Army in part because of the controversy over the nature of his death and the interactions with his family. Army officials have been working to improve the information flow to families of soldiers who die in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This will be the first criminal investigation into the shooting.

"In the [court] motion there is material under seal, which we will rely on in our case," says lawyer Tom Nelson in Portland, who represents an Oregon group tied to a now-defunct Islamic charity in Saudi Arabia and two Washington lawyers who allege they were wiretapped without warrant under the National Security Agency (NSA) program.

"We can't get into what's there," says Mr. Nelson. "But we have very specific information on what happened, when it happened, and what was intercepted. We obviously think it will be helpful in court in proving our contention."

Similar cases have been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Their aim is to stop a controversial domestic-surveillance program that raises questions – in Congress and among the public – about how far national security efforts can impinge on individual privacy.

The EFF, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, has filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the telecommunications giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by helping the NSA engage in what staff attorney Kevin Bankston calls "the biggest fishing expedition ever devised." AT&T officials say they do not discuss national security issues or pending litigation. FBI and US Attorney's Office officials have declined comment as well.

Civil rights lawyers at the CCR in New York represent many Muslim foreign nationals detained after the 9/11 attacks, including some held at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. CCR lawyers frequently communicate with clients and witnesses in Asia and the Middle East. They contend that NSA eavesdropping and e-mail "data-mining" violate constitutional provisions protecting free speech and prohibiting illegal search and seizure. The NSA's activities – which have been conducted by presidential order without the normally required court approval – also impinge on attorney-client protections, the CCR suit alleges. "It's absolutely clear on the face of the law that this program is illegal," says CCR attorney Shayana Kadidal.

Among the plaintiffs in the ACLU case, filed in Detroit, are journalists, scholars, and nonprofit groups such as Greenpeace and the Council on American Islamic Relations. The ACLU suit "challenges the constitutionality of a secret government program to intercept vast quantities of the international telephone and Internet communications of innocent Americans without court approval…."

More court challenges to the NSA program are expected to be filed on behalf of criminal defendants prosecuted under antiterrorism laws. Though they may have acknowledged their guilt in plotting to attack American targets such as the Brooklyn Bridge, they are now expected to challenge their convictions on the grounds that prosecution evidence (phone records and taped conversations) was illegally obtained, attorneys familiar with the cases say.

The Oregon case dates back to 1997 when a chapter of the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, was established in the town of Ashland by Iranian immigrant Perouz Sedaghaty, a longtime arborist and peace activist known here as Pete Seda. Last year, the US government charged the group with laundering $150,000 in donations to help Islamic fighters in Chechnya, a charge Mr. Seda's many friends here (including a local rabbi) find incredible.

Americans have mixed views of the NSA's domestic snooping. Seventy-six percent agree that the government "should use wiretaps to listen to telephone calls and read e-mails between suspected terrorists in other countries and some people in the United States," according to a new poll by Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. And 54 percent believe that such surveillance by the Bush administration has prevented acts of terrorism, while 33 percent do not.

But a majority (55 to 42 percent) says snooping on US citizens communicating with individuals abroad should require a court order first. That's the nub of the debate in Congress. Reflecting such mixed opinions, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee last week widened its investigation of the NSA program.

In fact, the case for the impeachment of President Bush is arguably the strongest in American history. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) makes this amply clear in its recent book, a concise indictment of President Bush that lays out four clear legal arguments that point to impeachment as a necessary remedy for the gross violation of our Constitution. The Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush covers illegal wiretapping, torture, rendition, detention and the Iraq war. An appendix compares the impeachment proceedings of Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton to the comparatively more powerful case against Bush.

Lawyers at the CCR, indeed lawyers throughout the world, have been embroiled in litigation with the administration for years. But the administration has consistently demonstrated disdain for the law, with the president effectively thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court, Congress, and the American people. It is this reality that led Michael Ratner and his fellow lawyers at the CCR to provide a clear argument for impeachment to the American people and Congress.

The piecemeal battles that journalists, lawyers and activists fight every day are a testament to the respect many Americans still have for the rule of law. But arguments against the president's violation of the Constitution have not resulted in any reform or change in behavior. Public shaming and the threat of legal action often work to keep politicians in line. But President Bush is vocally disinterested in the public's approval of his agenda. Furthermore, he views the law, as evidenced by torture and detainee litigation, as mutable suggestion. For such a president, legal recourse is largely ineffectual -- unless Americans and Congress reclaim the power of the law to remove the offending parties.

As Ratner told AlterNet, "While our battles against illegal wiretaps and Guantanamo are critical for trying to get back legality, until we get rid of what I consider a criminal administration, we will not be able to go back to even a semblance of civil liberties and human rights."

The Articles of Impeachment make clear that this is no longer just about President Bush. Rather, it is about preventing the executive branch from obtaining carte blanche to disregard the two other branches of government. This is a paradigm shift that has already gained substantial footing through this administration's steady erosion of legal precedent.

There is no shortage of diligent documentation of this president's violation of laws and misleading of the public -- from the 1,284-page Torture Papers to congressman John Conyers' 273-page compilation [PDF] of the lies leading to the Iraq war. But behind this incredible ongoing compendium of evidence against President Bush lurks the realization that publicly pointing to criminal behavior is not synonymous with bringing it to an end.

It is the ultimate case of missing the forest for the trees. Behind this massive body of evidence, behind each new report of this president's transgressions of the law, is the threat of the one and only story that Americans will read for the rest of this presidency, and presidencies to come: The abuse of power, and the destruction of our Constitution.

As Ratner notes, "We need to be as radical as reality, and reality right now is very, very radical." Indeed, after reading through the Articles of Impeachment, readers will find that the only thing radical about impeaching this president is simply that it has not yet happened.

AlterNet spoke with Michael Ratner to discuss the specifics behind the legal arguments for impeachment, and the need for popular protest to restore the rule of law and force Congress to hold this administration accountable.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Can you briefly describe the articles of impeachment?

Michael Ratner: We've drafted four articles: Article I concerns the warrantless wiretapping of Americans in the U.S. This constitutes a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which prohibits and makes criminal any wiretapping without a warrant. The president has said that he's doing this, and it's a criminal charge that can get you five years in jail for each count. Additionally, it violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unlawful searches and seizures -- this includes electronic surveillance. On a deeper level, these wiretaps deny the efficacy and validity of a congressional act.

Article Two of the impeachment of Richard Nixon is very similar. Nixon went outside of Congressional law and engaged in warrantless wiretapping against domestic dissidents and others who opposed the war in Vietnam. So, this article has a historical relation, obviously solid.

Article II is the falsifications that were used to justify the Iraq war. That's the article that congressman John Conyers has really focused on -- he's written an extensive report that documents this. You reference any particular day and the administration was making statements that Iraq has a relationship to 9/11, al Qaida and Osama bin Laden; that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the one and a half years leading up to the war, the time during which they were making these statements, they knew that they were false.

Lying to Congress and the American people got us into a war that has two serious impeachable issues within it: First, it's an aggressive war contrary to the U.N. charter and contrary to law that doesn't allow war unless it's in self-defense. Secondly, it undermines the authority of Congress and the American people to decide when war is necessary. Through the lies, he got a number of Congress people to believe that war was necessary, thereby undercutting their constitutional obligation to decide on war.

Elizabeth Holtzman, who was part of the Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon, has written a long piece about how this constitutes fraud under criminal law. Of course, you don't need a criminal act to impeach someone, you simply need an act that undermines and subverts the basic constitutional structure of our government, as well as a failure to execute the proper laws.

Article III deals with what the president has done in regard to the issues of torture, arbitrary long-term detentions, disappearances and special trial. Our law is very clear on these things. You can't torture people, you can't commit war crimes, you can't send people to countries where they're tortured and you can't set up special courts for trial. The Geneva Conventions are a part of our law, as is the international covenant of civil and political rights. The president, in authorizing that entire range of activities, has not met with his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute laws.

Congress tried to put some brakes on the president through the McCain amendment, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. But the president, in a signing statement, essentially said he reserved the right to ignore what Congress says. What he did is not just a violation of the law; he is destroying the checks and balances of our Constitution.

Article IV is a general article that puts all of the prior three articles together. If you look at these things together, you see that they are essentially destroying our republic and our democracy. They are destroying the constitutional structure of our government. Therefore, he should be impeached.

OR: Was it your intent for the book to be utilized by members of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings?

MR: Yes, that's definitely one of our intents. We would also like to see some courage given to our members of Congress. John Conyers has begun the process with 26 people now signed onto the inquiry bill, but that's very small compared to the number that should be there. Similarly with the NSA spying, 18 have signed on to a serious inquiry, but we're talking about the same kinds of conduct that were part of Nixon's impeachment proceedings -- illegal use of electronic surveillance. Even Democrats like Al Gore are calling this a government of tyranny because of the utter and complete subverting of the Constitution.

Another intent is to popularize the issue that what the president has done has got to be looked. These aren't just individual issues, but a destruction of democracy on its deepest level. We want to popularize that idea and get it out there, particularly right now. If you look at the polls on warrantless wiretapping and the Iraq War, over 50 percent of Americans think that Bush could be impeached for these activities. But the media aren't picking this up. No one's talking about impeachment from the New York Times, or the Washington Post or anywhere else.

OR: Why do you think that is?

MR: They claim it's because it's not realistic. But that's not at all the case. When they started with the Clinton impeachment, less than 30 percent of the people were willing to impeach him for his actions. Yet, the media carried it widely. It may be that there's a buy-in by some part of this media leader society -- thinking that this could shake up our government too much. Some people think it's too dangerous to do so, but we would argue that it's much too dangerous not to.

OR: What do you say to Americans who think it isn't worth bothering with impeachment with the president currently in his final term?

MR: This administration has gone so far beyond what the requirements of the Constitution and the law. The question is whether this country can ever come back and resemble a democracy again. Unless you hold accountable the people who actually carried out an illegal war with Iraq, warrantless wiretapping and torture, there's nothing to stop the next administration -- whether it's Republican or Democrat -- from continuing with the same. We have to show that what happened in this country in the past four years is an utter subversion of our Constitution and completely unlawful under domestic and international law. Otherwise, I fear that this country may be changed forever in a very negative direction.

OR: What's at stake here?

MR: What's at stake is a presidency that is becoming an imperial presidency -- in which he's no longer responsible to the judiciary or the Congress. This is a president that thinks that, on his own, he can wiretap people, torture people, pick them up anywhere in the world. This has to be beaten back, and it has to be done soon. It is becoming embedded in our society in a way that is very hard to get rid of.

For instance, we just had a loss in the case of Maher Arar. Part of the judge's thinking in his decision was that, while it may not be okay to torture in a criminal case, it may be okay if it's to prevent terrorism. When that kind of thinking is afoot, something has to be done. Otherwise, it will become embedded in our legal and political thinking in the next generations. There has to be accountability for this.

OR:There's a lot of people, especially on the left, who think of George W. Bush as very self-serving president. This characterization may be preventing people from seeing that he is actually thinking well beyond his presidency -- with the intent to expand executive power for future administrations. Is this a fair characterization?

MR: Yes, this is about a particularly bad president -- a president who doesn't care about constitutional rights. But what's really going on here is what Cheney actually came out and stated a month ago when he talked about warrantless wiretapping. He said that they wanted to overcome what happened to the presidency during the '60s and the '70s.

There's an absolute intent here to make the presidency much more powerful, what they call a unitary presidency where they're not just a co-equal branch, but they are the branch -- no court or Congress can check them. This is not just about the president any longer, it's about these assertions of inherent power in the executive to override constitutional, international, congressional limitations, and judicial limitations. That's a big problem because that's essentially a dictatorship.

OR: With all this gratuitous conduct that has been amassed in the media, the question arises, why haven't there been many legal successes stopping this behavior?

MR: At the CCR, in almost every single action discussed in the articles, we have various lawsuits going. The problem is that they take a long time. Also, the courts are not always in our favor. And, even when we win, the administration is able to undercut them. You don't just win by lawsuits; you win by popular protest, people in the streets. That's the way you have to win. The Center really believes that our lawsuits are important and people have to be represented. We have to stop torture to the extent that we can. But there has to be popular protest in this country, or our lawsuits are not going to change anything.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.

"If you are looking for a message to take back the House and the Senate or the White House, there are better ways to go about it," says Democratic communications ace Joe Lockhart, a media aide to Mr. Clinton during the Republican impeachment effort.

That puts mainstream Democrats, on this issue at least, echoing the Republican National Committee. "Voters elect candidates because they understand the issues rather than engage in leftwing fantasies," says RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. It also guarantees tension between some of the party's most fervent members and its electoral strategists, who are directing efforts to recapture Capitol Hill.

Impeachment advocates are undaunted. "Just because you can't win a political battle doesn't mean certain battles shouldn't be fought," says Bob Fertik, a founder of the ImpeachPAC effort. "If we don't hold a president accountable for lying to start a war, we might as well throw out the Constitution of the United States."

Mr. Fertik, 48 years old, founded a group called Democrats.com in 2000 and began organizing protests from his home computer in New York before the first U.S. bombers hit Baghdad. When the so-called Downing Street Memo emerged in Britain last year, he discerned evidence that the Bush administration had manipulated prewar intelligence.

An organization he helped found, AfterDowningStreet.org, soon assembled an electronic coalition containing 300,000 email addresses. The group hired independent pollster John Zogby to test support for impeachment in June and found that 42% of likely voters supported that step if it were proved that the president lied about prewar intelligence.

By November, the proportion reached 51% -- prompting an impeachment drumbeat from Mr. Fertik and like-minded activists. He cofounded ImpeachPAC, a political action committee dedicated to recruiting and backing candidates who support an impeachment inquiry.

The $60,000 that ImpeachPAC has raised so far isn't much, but has kept the Internet-based organization afloat. David Swanson, the 36-year-old director, works from his home in Virginia.

The movement can point to some small successes. Radio celebrity Garrison Keillor posted an article for the online magazine Salon calling for Mr. Bush's impeachment. Three California cities -- San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Arcata -- have passed resolutions backing impeachment, and municipalities in North Carolina and Vermont are considering such steps.

But the Democratic National Committee, chaired by 2004 campaign firebrand Howard Dean has declined to chime in. A House resolution offered by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan seeking an initial impeachment inquiry has attracted support from just 26 of 201 House Democrats. Even Mr. Conyers, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, allows, "This isn't something we have to do right away."

Democratic strategists remember the fallout Republicans suffered among swing voters in 1998 amid their bid to oust Mr. Clinton. The National Republican Congressional Committee sank $10 million into a last-minute advertising blitz focused on Mr. Clinton's character, only to lose five seats and see House Speaker Newt Gingrich pressured to resign.

A Bush impeachment drive could only move forward if Democrats regained control of the House from the president's party. But even then it would be an uphill fight.

"At most, they could show a mistake in judgment, it seems to me," says the Rev. Robert F. Drinan of the Georgetown University Law Center, a former Democratic House member who backed seeking the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974 over Watergate. Michael Gerhardt, an impeachment expert at the University of North Carolina law school, says there could be a "credible basis for an inquiry," but additional facts would have to be established before anyone could "demonstrate an impeachable offense occurred."

Mr. Trupiano, a 45-year-old radio talk-show host, doesn't need convincing. Members of both parties must "exercise oversight," he says, "and once and for all, let's settle some of these discrepancies" about prewar intelligence.

He is seeking the Detroit-area House seat held by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a two-term Republican incumbent who hasn't decided if he will seek re-election. He predicts his impeachment stance will become an issue, since Republicans "are going to try to define me as something of a radical."

"From our side of the fence, people are very supportive of the president," says Mr. McCotter's spokesman Bob Jackson. He adds that Mr. McCotter, who won re-election in 2004 with 57% of the vote, hasn't heard complaints about inadequate congressional oversight of the Bush administration.

Mr. Trupiano acknowledges that the economy is the No. 1 concern of the suburban electorate he is courting. And on the stump, he usually avoids using the word "impeachment," opting instead to call for holding the administration "accountable" for its handling of prewar intelligence and its warrantless wiretaps of some Americans' telephone calls as part of the war against terrorism.

"I'm not afraid of the word," says Mr. Trupiano. "But some people are uncomfortable with it."

Write to Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings@wsj.com

Last Thursday, administration lawyers cited the Graham provision in fighting a detainee's lawsuit claiming military officials violated the torture ban when they used brutal tactics to force-feed him and end his hunger strike.

The administration's response could be paraphrased in two words: "So what?" Even if the tactics qualified as torture under the law, Guantanamo detainees have no right to challenge them in U.S. courts, Justice Department lawyers said.

Regrettably, this does not appear to be a controversial reading of the law. Human rights officials and even attorneys for detainees concede the administration is probably right. Tom Malinois, of Human Rights Watch, puts it this way: "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."

Congress is to blame for this disgraceful situation. Craven, ineffective lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they agreed to remove general access to U.S. courts for prisoners at Guantanamo. To put it in military terms, Congress has been absent without leave since Sept. 11, 2001, from its constitutional duty to oversee the administration's prosecution of the war against terror.

There is no longer any reasonable doubt that detainees have been tortured in the black hole that is Gitmo. A recent U.N. investigation found that conditions at the prison routinely violate international law and detainees have been subjected to acts tantamount to torture, including punitive force feedings and a grim array of "special interrogation" techniques.

While many of the detainees are terrorists or Taliban supporters, others were wrongly swept up in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan when warlords were offered cash bounties for suspects. The U.S. government has conceded that 15 detainees are Chinese ethnic Uighurs who do not qualify as enemy combatants, yet it refuses to release them, even after five years of imprisonment.

Congress has played the role of an enabler by setting no boundaries for an administration in desperate need of them. Now, it must atone for its five-year sin of omission by enacting laws that are unambiguous and consistent with international standards of humane treatment of prisoners. It should require the administration to either put detainees on trial in a court or release them. And it should order the closure of Guantanamo, which has become a global symbol of everything the Bush administration has done wrong in its war on terror.

Habeas actions are getting a lot of media attention lately. The unfortunate American military conduct in Abu Ghraib has begun to raise questions about the treatment of prisoners at the US Navy detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where incidents of torture and abuse have been reported and largely ignored over the past four years. The habeas question looms large on the heels of two recently-published case studies (by the National Journal and the Seton Hall University School of Law) that suggest that the majority of people held in Guantánamo are innocent, and the report by the United Nations seeking the closure of the facility. Americans seem split on whether federal judges should be involved at all. Some people want judges to be able to investigate whether the military is holding people for valid reasons, while others think that -- in a time of war -- how the military conducts itself is a matter for the President only, and judges' interference might impair the President's ability to protect America.

On the litigation front the dispute is largely the same, with pro bono habeas counsel on one side, and the Department of Justice, counsel to the Executive Branch, on the other. But in Congress, the dispute embodied itself in the passage and potential application of the Detainee Treatment Act (the "DTA") -- a part of the defense spending bill signed into law on December 30, 2005. Detainees' counsel (such as me) thought the DTA was only going to stop future cases. The Executive Branch now maintains that the DTA knocks out pending cases too. The matter is before both the United States Supreme Court and the DC Circuit Court (argument is currently scheduled to take place before the Circuit Court on March 22nd).