"Few doctors dispute that testing drugs on people is necessary. No amount of experimentation on laboratory rats will reliably show how a chemical will affect people," David Evans, et al. writes in the Bloomberg article "Drug Industry Human Testing Masks Death, Injury, Compliant FDA". Doctors have recognized the importance of human experimentation since the days of Hippocrates, though the ancient Greeks used it to benefit individual patients rather than science itself or any profit-driven industry. In 1833, William Beaumont, the army surgeon physician who pioneered gastric medicine with his study of a patient who'd sustained a gunshot wound that left his digestive system permanently exposed, established the importance of human experimentation as long as it is with the subject's consent.

However, sometimes it's difficult to find human test subjects, especially for studies involving pain or high risk. In the 1930s, research scientists discovered a solution to their difficulty in finding willing test subjects: Don't ask for their consent. In the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the United States Public Health Service diagnosed 200 black men with syphilis and, rather than treating or even informing them of their illness, used them as human guinea pigs to study the symptoms and progression of the disease. Today, as the University of Virginia Health System writes in its online documentary "Bad Blood", "The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has become a powerful symbol of racism in medicine, ethical misconduct in human research, and government abuse of the vulnerable."

During the Holocaust, IG Farben trumped the moral depravity of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Why use and abuse only 200 unwilling human test subjects when you can choose from the multitudes imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps? IG Farben callously used concentration camp inmates of all ages for painful, debilitating and often deadly experiments. Because of this, medical experimentation has become synonymous with injustice, cruelty, prejudice and total disregard for human life. Today, few people would try to justify or support IG Farben's medical experiements, but the sad truth is that modern human medical experimentation is in many ways similar to the horrors carried out by IG Farben.

Experimental drug testing centers

During the Nuremberg Trial, Dr. Waldemar Hoven, the Nazi doctor who gave lethal injections to his patients at Buchenwald, gave the following account of the medical experiments he and other concentration camp physicians performed: "It should be generally known, and especially in German scientific circles, that the SS did not have notable scientists at its disposal. It is clear that the experiments in the concentration camps with IG preparations only took place in the interests of the IG, which strived by all means to determine the effectiveness of these preparations. They let the SS deal with the -- shall I say -- dirty work in the concentration camps. It was not the IG's intention to bring any of this out in the open, but rather to put up a smoke screen around the experiments so that ... they could keep any profits to themselves. Not the SS but the IG took the initiative for the concentration camp experiments."

Like IG Farben, Big Pharma doesn't perform its own experiments. Instead, it doles out the "dirty work" to experimental drug testing centers, some of which confine test subjects for portions of the study. In a Bloomberg article entitled "Miami Test Center Lures Poor Immigrants as Human Guinea Pigs", Argentinian immigrant Roberto Alvarez describes the eight days he spent confined to the Miami-based SFBC testing center: "It can be weird inside. It's like a jail."

In many ways, it is like a jail. In Miami's SFBC, which is the largest center of its kind in North America, test subjects sleep six to a room in double-decker beds. They even have uniforms to wear -- purple drawstring pants and T-shirts, much like the uniforms of concentrate camp victims. Dr. Hoven's criticism of IG Farben's experiments in Nazi concentration camps could easily be directed to Big Pharma's human experiments. In fact, it has. "Some test centers, FDA records show, have used poorly trained and unlicensed clinicians to give participants experimental drugs. The centers ... sometimes have incomplete or illegible records," David Evans, et al. writes.

Informed consent?

Even though the FDA has required informed consent of test subjects since 1981, many people believe that researchers often don't fully explain risks and potential side effects, so as not to deter potential test subjects. "Human subjects are in very short supply, so it's not surprising that under the growing pressure to find them, there are sometimes terrible ethical violations," says Marcia Angell, who was editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1999 to 2000. The centers meet the legal requirements of informed consent by providing an informed consent form, but the form may be written in a language the potential subjects do not fully understand because they are immigrants, who make up a large portion of human test subjects. Even if they are written in the subjects' native language, the forms may be long and dominated by obscure technical jargon. In "Drug Industry Human Testing Masks Death, Injury, Compliant FDA", Argentinian immigrant Roberto Alvarez admits, "The thing I pay most attention to when filling this thing out is this: How much it pays and how long it takes. I don't read them too carefully," while skimming through a 12-page consent form.

The Nazi doctors didn't even bother with consent forms. Why waste time when you can just force-feed concentration camp inmates a pill or inject them with an experimental substance? "I remember one of the SS doctors holding my jaw open and forcing pills down my throat," Auschwitz survivor Zoe Polanska Palmer told BBC Radio 4 reporter Mark Handscomb in It's My Story. Granted, giving potential subjects long consent forms written in language they can't fully understand is better than shoving pills down someone's throat, but it still seems unethical and it can still put human life at risk.

Even Kenneth Lasseter, the executive medical director of the SFBC experimental drug testing center, admitted in the Bloomberg article, "It's clear to me. Perhaps it needs to be explained more." Lasseter was speaking of the consent form for an experimental drug that may treat overactive bladders. "The goal of this study is to determine the highest daily dose of TD-6301 that will not cause an undesired increase in heart rate." Yes, that wording may be clear to Lasseter, but it may not be clear to the average test subject. "They're saying it backwards to a population that may not be of the highest education level. The real purpose of the study is, 'We're going to make you sick in order to find out at what level you get sick when given this drug.' Obviously, they don't want to say that," University of Miami bioethicist Ken Goodman told David Evans, et al..

Preying on immigrants and other poverty-stricken individuals

During the Holocaust, the Nazis confined the marginalized sectors of society -- Jews (including children), gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded -- into camps that became human guinea pig-filled laboratories for IG Farben's experimental drug studies. Today, marginalized populations still make up a large portion of experimental drug test subjects; however, socioeconomic factors, rather than concentration camp authorities, make them more likely to sell their bodies to Big Pharma.

It's no accident that SFBC, the largest experimental drug testing center in North America, is located in Miami. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Miami-Dade County "is the only county in the country where more than half the residents are foreign-born." After immigrants come to Miami from countries like Cuba, Colombia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Argentina and Mexico, they need money, yet experience the employment limitations that little or no fluency in English, little education, unfamiliarity, prejudice and, in some cases, lack of a work permit brings. With few other options available, these immigrants find one of the few legal jobs that doesn't require any amount of English proficiency or education and may even accept forged social security cards: Professional guinea pig.

Many immigrants participate in multiple, simultaneous drug studies. Combining these experimental drugs is a recipe for disaster "because researchers don't know how the different chemicals interact or what side effects the mix may have on a person," according to the Bloomberg article "Miami Test Center Lures Poor Immigrants as Human Guinea Pigs". However, given the fact that some studies only pay $25 per day, what else are the truly marginalized subjects supposed to do? "It's not the job I would choose, but financial circumstances require you to do it sometimes,'' Venezuelan immigrant Oscar Cabanerio told Bloomberg.

We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.

For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.

In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and illiterate. While superior information--often embodied in military technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were done). Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change the nature of the city. The rise of the modern West broke the pattern. Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life." Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only error.

The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.

It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals, countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or countries could "make it" on sheer muscle power and the will to apply it. You could work harder than your neighbor and win in the marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle power in an age of labor-saving machines and methods. In our own country, we have seen blue-collar unions move from center stage to near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At the same time, expectations have increased dramatically. There is a global sense of promises broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the planet believe they have played by the rules laid down for them (in the breech, they often have not), only to find that some indefinite power has changed those rules overnight. The American who graduated from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would allow his family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at all.

For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed--emotions rather than strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.

We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but never all--of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart.

Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.

The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince Congress that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly assume that while foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly, and continue to achieve higher and higher economic growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and leading a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation.

Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a sure prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis. No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a reason to fear the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history.

Freedom works.

In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even approach the capabilities of our information-based force because it is so profoundly an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army will employ many marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still be the soldier, not the machine, and our soldiers will have skills other cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts, fleeing human complexity, like to project enemy capabilities based upon the systems a potential opponent might acquire. But buying or building stuff is not enough. It didn't work for Saddam Hussein, and it won't work for Beijing.

The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will be impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able to come from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our officers and soldiers. For all the complaints--in many respects justified--about our public school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature of education in our society and culture is imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a second-nature grasp of technology and the ability to sort and assimilate vast amounts of competitive data that no other population will achieve. The informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying to anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level foreign elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does with the classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education system as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the meantime, our children are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection in coping with the information deluge that is drowning many of their parents. These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. We just have to make sure they can do push-ups, too.

There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage war immer so ernst," that translates very freely as "The sky has always been falling." Despite our relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most powerful, robust culture on earth. Its discontinuities and contradictions are often its strengths. We are incapable of five-year plans, and it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption, technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our military best, we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility. Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases that will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow's service members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven bombers would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow's military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the most humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing our best to shut it inside a technological straight-jacket.

There is no "big threat" out there. There's none on the horizon, either. Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the constant conflicts of richly varying description that will challenge us--and kill us--at home and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the beloved dinosaurs are dead.

We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not embark upon the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating. If we insist on a "proven" approach to military affairs, we will be throwing away our greatest national advantage.

We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the right information.

Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new catchphrase--information warfare--and then duck. Although there has been plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been as helpful and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we already knew. Studies study other studies. For now, we have decided that information warfare is a matter of technology, which is akin to believing that your stereo system is more important to music than the musicians.

Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey's tanks. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.

Within our formal military, we have been moving into information warfare for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and, especially, data dissemination within the force has broken with global military tradition, in which empowering information was reserved for the upper echelons. While our military is vertically responsible, as it must be, it is informationally democratic. Our ability to decentralize information and appropriate decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but only within carefully regulated guidelines--and they could not enable the process with sufficient information dissemination).

No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants, sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely to do so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power within our military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the behaviors are changing. What, other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have in common with the division of World War II? Even as traditionalists resist the reformation of the force, the "anarchy" of lieutenants is shaping the Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not understand what their lieutenants are up to, and generals would not be able to sleep at night if they knew what the battalion commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army is changing itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should be a welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain rigidly hierarchical.

Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape. The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of American culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of Japanese militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong. Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.

In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that freedom had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always find enemies. The problem with freedom is that it's just too damned free for tyrants, whether they be dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders, exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and demands personal responsibility. What could be more threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of this new information age has opened a fresh chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and head-bashing. The number one priority of non-Western governments in the coming decades will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information within their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of conservatism--informational corruption--and will cripple their competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.

The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.



Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.

His recurring premise is that the management of information is, in our epoch, the sole factor upon which a life worth living, i.e. the 'good life' by American standards, rests. Already the puerile and mind-boggling assumption that all civilizations aspire to the same ideals as the US, and that all civilizations are desperate to acquire the same tools to attain the same goal. This prevalent and tiresome American assumption that all the world wants to be like them is painfully clear here, and it is upon this assumption that the entire argument rests. The reason for the prevailing strife, according to Peters, is the jealousy of other societies, a jealousy that breeds hatred for the "haves" ie the US on the part of the rest of the world, which he defines as the "have nots." It is our sense of ineptitude, our lack of understanding of the 'new American century' our failure to be able to participate in life on American terms that prompts our discontent. Those who have gone along with the US programmes – usually by way of puppet governments – are, apparently, our "more fortunate neighbours" who further incite our hatred and envy. The first false premise.

The second false premise is that the need to compete is the life blood of any workable society. The fact that the US has rammed its laws favouring the juggernaut corporations down the throats of the peasant farmer who, previously, was able to support his family, is dubbed "fair competition" and upon this premise the sentiments of the victims expressed from the urban ghettoes to which they and their families have been dispatched, are only inspired by pure hatred because they're not of the calibre to 'make it' – again, in American terms. Their former lives of honest work with dignity, independence, some standing in the community and freedom from debt are merely tokens of a "golden age that never existed." But remember – "There is no effective option other than competitive performance."

It's true that traditional cultures are ever-menaced by the onset of creeping US culture – one cannot but be aware of the tiny bright plastic entrepreneurial obscenities that litter the landscape of civilised cultures. But as a French friend told me when I expressed astonishment at this assault on the French landscape and its apparent success, "It's just something new. The French will get bored with it after a while, as anyone does with some transient novelty, and move on." That which seems to have happened, by all accounts, to MacDonald's, whose business, it was reported, has fallen of. Perhaps people are recognizing that an equally fast-prepared omelette aux fines herbes avec une verre de Sauvignon blanc is always preferable to cheap-cut-chopped-beef-on-a bun, even with the ubiquitous Ronald as company.

It's also true that, in this age of advanced technology, the blue-collar worker is out in the cold. But we are led to believe that his disenchantment comes from his frustration at comparing the soap tripe such as 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas' with his lot and the disparity between his world and this other which, he finds, 'devilishly enchanting.' Oddly, having established that modern technology has effectively excluded this "discarded foreigner" from the circuit of self-sufficiency, Peters goes on to state that those same dispossessed can "accept no personal guilt for his failure," hence the sense of victimization, hence the spawning of "dynamic hatreds."

"Transience" and "impermanence" is indeed the essence of much of the culture of Hollywood - garbage can always be recycled. It is a culture which can indeed be a powerful tool to warp and debase the average healthy minds of impressionable people. This isn't however, a universal phenomenon as Peters supposes. Apropos of the link Peters attempts to make between the transience of American culture and the transience of "beauty," "passion" and "the quality of light on a winter afternoon" (!!) (exclamations mine) we need not dwell on such a statement. These are subjects drawn upon by our timeless, ageless poets who created the priceless treasures that will outlast all the hyperbole and braying of the Hollywood fanfare machine. Nothing transient there.

Peters is right that the primal instincts of man – sex and violence - (going back to the age of the cudgel and churned out by Hollywood) are in evidence everywhere. Along with their paltry moral quest – the triumph of brute force, and to the-victor-the-spoils-sex goes the irresistible attraction, apparently, of the comfort, riches and ease that will characterize a life won by our Hollywood hero. The popularity of such themes very likely rests on the often insupportable void that exists within the psyche of many contemporary societies, a void brought about by the failure to feel complete in their world, a world torn to shreds by competition, warfare, stress, overprogramming, poverty, dysfuntional relationships, and so on. Drugs, movies, alcohol, fantasyland - anything to assuage the tension, anything to download the overworked mind, to afford an escape, an escape which can also pollute at the same time. Don't worry about not having yet produced the 'Iliad', Maj. Peters – the moral impact of that work would be far from Hollywood's comprehension. It has to do with heroism, but not in any neanderthal sense.

It would seem that it is the 'information victims' that will see no other resort but to violence. In accepting this premise – that violence is perpetrated by those unable to meet the challenges to compete with US techno/informational superiority, we see their discontent erupting into a landscape of conflict on all fronts. All because of a failure to be able to compete. And this is where the US military comes in: 'the de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. T/o those ends we will do a fair amount of killing.'

In order to possess that most prized possession – a military force sine qua non – we are told that the education system in the US has been geared to emphasize techno-supremacy. America' s children, then, are being trained to become information robots and groomed to make "mean techno-warriors." They will enter a world of "hatred, jealousy and greed" – emotions that will "set the terms of the struggles." And: "Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart.' (bold print added). So America's children must not display such weakness. The thrust would seem to be to raise a generation of fighting robots, nothing more, explicitly stated thus: "The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military. . . " And "These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. . ."

Another example of American-style 'positive thinking' is: "We will outcreate, outproduce. . . .outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too." As the US se;f-inflates, the rest of the world, the "foreign discarded." shrinks within its sense of impotence and inferiority in the light of US invincibility whose creativity, clearly stated, "is devastating."

Clearly nothing can stop this indefatigable force: "Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities – usually with marginal, if any, success." A trail of twaddle ensues to reassure the concerned American who might express some disquiet, indicating the presumptuous and misled nature of any other culture to affirm its own identity.

The drift goes on to describe a growing mutability within the hierarchy of the military. Gone is the top-down iron fist of authority, apparently. Such blurred delegation of power might explain the aberrations at Abu Ghraib prison, or Guantanamo, or the small-group attacks on civilians in Iraq. To some the no-accountability sounds like the green light for the indulgence of the bestial instinct.

Sad but, according to Peters, true: "Most world cultures are imprisoning" and people rage over what they cannot escape. It would follow, then, that we would prefer to place our feet on the rotten surface of the ease, the comfort, the flab that comes from the attainment of low ideals. What Peters hasn't realised is that driving societies down to the depths of their endurance will only force them to dig ever more deeply into what they are capable of. 'Far from wanting to escape their identity and join the Dynasty crowd, they are resisting to preserve it. Their identity has been forged not by what they have parked in their garage or what they wear on their backs, but what they have within themselves. It is a conflict, indeed - a conflict between these two forces.

I know which side I'd rather be on.

Barbara Langford - langford.barbara @ wanadoo.fr

"Yes," said Faiz Bafana.

"Can you identify this person?" Moussaoui asked.

"He looks exactly like you," Bafana replied.

The Alexandria jury that will decide whether Moussaoui will live or die for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks got a taste -- via videotape -- of what the penalty trial might have been like if he had been allowed to act as his own attorney.

For most of the second full day of testimony, the jury at U.S. District Court in Alexandria watched a November 2002 videotaped deposition of Moussaoui cross-examining Bafana, a member of a southeast Asian terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda. Moussaoui watched from the courtroom, along with everyone else.

In opening statements Monday, prosecutors portrayed Moussaoui as a hardened terrorist, saying he should die because he lied to investigators when he was arrested a month before Sept. 11. If he had revealed all he knew about the plot, prosecutors contended, the attacks could have been prevented, and nearly 3,000 lives could have been spared.

But defense attorneys painted Moussaoui as bumbling and unstable, saying he had no specific knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. Homing in on the government's failure to prevent the attacks, they said that investigators ignored warning signs and likewise would have failed to act on Moussaoui's information.

Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaeda in the Sept. 11 plot, but he has insisted that Osama bin Laden had instructed him to fly an airplane into the White House at another time. When he pleaded guilty, he signed a document saying that bin Laden had told him, "Sahrawi, remember your dream."

Bafana testified on the videotape that he had met a man, identified only as John, who visited him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in mid-2000. Bafana said that John told him of his dream to fly a plane into the White House and that this dream had been blessed by bin Laden.

While being questioned by prosecutors for a couple of hours on the videotape, Bafana was never asked about John's real identity. It took Moussaoui, asking questions on his own behalf, to link himself to John. Bafana said John did not feel comfortable talking in his home because he thought it might be bugged. He said they left his home and talked on a park bench.

Although Moussaoui never attended law school, he demonstrated in the videotape that he knew how to object, which he did repeatedly, often on the grounds that the question being asked lacked the proper foundation.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema granted Moussaoui the right to represent himself but later took it away and restored his standby defense attorneys. Sometimes she sustained his objections on the videotape, but she also scolded him for asking the same question over and over again.

"You're wasting your time," Brinkema told him on the videotape.

"I am not wasting my time," Moussaoui snapped back, which prompted smiles from several jurors watching the tape.

Bafana said he was certain Moussaoui and John were the same person.

"Are you sure?" Moussaoui asked.

"Very sure," Bafana answered.

"Was the person you mean very heavy in weight?" Moussaoui pressed.

"I am sure it is you," the witness replied.

Bafana said he was treasurer of a chapter of Jemaah Islamiya in Singapore. He said he helped raise money for terrorist attacks -- including one on a train station in Manila in December 2000 that killed 22 people -- and served as a host for visitors, such as John, when they stopped in Malaysia.

Bafana testified that a couple of weeks after they first met, John called him and asked for $10,000 because he wanted to "contact some brothers in Europe" and wanted to attend flight school. Bafana said Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, who is known as Hambali and who was Jemaah Islamiya's chief strategist until his capture in Thailand in 2003, told him to give John 2,000 Singapore dollars -- about $1,200 U.S. -- instead.

Bafana also said that Moussaoui talked about jihad, or holy war, during the 2000 conversation in Malaysia and said it was important to "bring down America."

"It's another Zac," continued his mother, visibly upset. "I believe, in this moment, he has been drugged, in order for him to be calm and not disturb anybody."

The French-born Moussaoui, who has confessed his role as an Al-Qaeda conspirator, faces death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Aicha el-Wafi has not seen her youngest son since July 2002.

On Tuesday Moussaoui entered the courtroom and glanced at the public, ignoring his mother. He never looked towards her during the proceedings.

During a discussion of a controversial New Jersey high school class project involving the mock trial of President Bush for alleged war crimes, MSNBC host and former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) said: "This isn't about free speech. This is about slandering the commander in chief at a time of war." Later in the show, Scarborough added, "[I]t's not free speech. It's perverse. It's completely wrong."

Scarborough made his comments in response to Parsippany, New Jersey, township Councilman James J. Vigilante, who said on the March 7 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country that he was "not ashamed" of the Parsippany High School project, adding, "And I've got to say, from the comments of most of the kids in that class, although I don't agree with the lesson plan, myself, is the fact that they've exercised their right to free speech."

Scarborough responded: "The right to free speech? They're 16-, 17-year-old kids. And the mere fact -- I mean, that's like me saying, 'Well, why don't we have an experiment? And why don't we try you for the rape of a 6-year-old child?' "

Vigilante then asked: "But are you saying that 16- and 17-year-old kids shouldn't have the right to free speech?" To which Scarborough responded: "You have been slandered by the fact that we're even trying you for the rape of a 6-year-old girl. Just like the president of the United States has been slandered for this trial. This isn't about free speech. This is about slandering the commander in chief at a time of war. And you don't see a problem with taxpayers in your community paying for that?"

Vigilante answered: "I pay the same taxes everybody else does. I just think that, you know, I am sworn to uphold the Constitution of America as a reservist and also as a councilman in my town. And that is the right to free speech."

Following the panel discussion, Scarborough said of Vigilante: "[Y]ou've got people sitting back like the town councilman, who are saying, 'Hey, you know what? It's free speech.' No, it's not free speech. It's perverse. It's completely wrong."

A March 3 article in the Morristown, New Jersey, Daily Record noted that in addition to being a U.S. Air Force reservist, Vigilante is a Republican who identified himself as "a Bush fan."

From the panel discussion with Scarborough, Vigilante, and conservative author and columnist Ben Shapiro on the March 7 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country:

VIGILANTE: I'm not ashamed of what's going on. I think everybody has to take the focus off of, you know, Bush being on trial and the lesson was learned by the children. You are talking about 17-, 18-year-old children here. And I've got to say, from the comments of most of those kids in that class, although I don't agree with the lesson plan, myself, is the fact that they've exercised their right to free speech. And the comments the kids --

SCARBOROUGH: Wait a second. The right to free speech? They're 16-, 17-year-old kids. And the mere fact -- I mean, that's like me saying, "Well, why don't we have an experiment? And why don't we try you for the rape of a 6-year-old child? And we'll do that for a week. We'll put it in the newspapers and, hey, guess what? If people decide at the end of the week you didn't rape a 6-year-old boy, hey, it's a great learning experience." No, it's not.

VIGILANTE: But are you saying that 16- and 17-year-old kids shouldn't have the right to free speech?

SCARBOROUGH: You have been slandered by the fact that we're even trying you for the rape of a 6-year-old girl. Just like the president of the United States has been slandered for this trial. This isn't about free speech. This is about slandering the commander in chief at a time of war. And you don't see a problem with taxpayers in your community paying for that?

VIGILANTE: I pay the same taxes everybody else does. I just think that, you know, I am sworn to uphold the Constitution of America as a reservist and also as a councilman in my town. And that is the right to free speech.

SHAPIRO: Oh, boy.

VIGILANTE: And I don't think we need -- I don't think that we should censure them as government.

SCARBOROUGH: The right to free speech.

SHAPIRO: The right to free speech. I mean, I'd just like to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes and probably one of the most famous justices ever on the Supreme Court. And he said in 1892, look, there's a right to free speech, but, for instance, there's no right to be a policeman. And I think that same sentiment applies here with regard to a teacher. There's a right to free speech. There's is not a right to say whatever you want in a context being paid by the state to do a job. No one is arguing that these students can't say what they want to outside the classroom. No one's arguing they can't say what they want to inside the classroom. What we're arguing here is whether the professor, or the teacher, in this case, can pose a question in such a way as to slander the president of the United States on the taxpayer dollar.

SCARBOROUGH: No doubt about it. Thanks so much. I appreciate everybody on the panel being with us. Friends, let me tell you what I think. I think we've got a system here across America, where you've got school teachers, you've got liberal unions, you've got liberal principals. They're going in and they're polluting our children's mind, and guess who's paying them to do that. You're paying them to do that, and I'm paying them to do it. Meanwhile, you've got people sitting back like the town councilman, who are saying, "Hey, you know what? It's free speech." No, it's not free speech. It's perverse. It's completely wrong. I mean, why don't they try our Founding Fathers for crimes against African-Americans? Oh, wait. This teacher and this principal and this school district is doing that next. They're going to try our Founding Fathers for war crimes against humanity. They are a disgrace.

The NSA approach, "Network Geo-location Technology," is diferent, Military Information Technology magazine notes. It relies on latency, instead. By looking how long traffic on one computer takes to get to another, it can tell where that first PC is.

"The most common use of Internet geo-location technology is in the area of ad-serving. When users do a Google search, for example, the technology will show ads to them that are localized depending on their geographic location," the magazine says. "The technology is also used for on-line verification of identity. If a user is registering on-line to buy an airline ticket, for instance, and the user claims to be located in a certain place, the technology can determine whether that user is actually located there or in a different place and then either block the transaction or ask for additional verification."

The system is one of 44 technologies that the NSA is looking to sell off to businesses. Others include a "Shredder Residue Dispersion System" and an "Enhanced Beacon Recognition for Laser Communications."

William Buckley Jnr

INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT

'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'

Francis Fukuyama

AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM

'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'

Richard Perle

ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK

'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong. We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'

Andrew Sullivan

PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER

'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'

George Will

RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT

'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'

I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don't jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.

I can't see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can't even see straight.

Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal. They're talking about "a lobby reform package." We don't need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff scandal is a once in a lifetime gift-a perfect lesson on what's wrong with the system being laid out for people to see. Run with it, don't mess around with little patches, and fix the system.

As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:

1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it's a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.

2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.

3) Single-payer health insurance.

Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, "unpatriotic" by a bunch of rightwingers.

Take "unpatriotic" and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? "Unpatriotic"? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.

This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass.

Who are these idiots talking about Warner of Virginia? Being anodyne is not sufficient qualification for being President. And if there's nobody in Washington and we can't find a Democratic governor, let's run Bill Moyers, or Oprah, or some university president with ethics and charisma.

What happens now is not up to the has-beens in Washington who run this party. It is up to us. So let's get off our butts and start building a progressive movement that can block the nomination of Hillary Clinton or any other candidate who supposedly has "all the money sewed up."

I am tired of having the party nomination decided before the first primary vote is cast, tired of having the party beholden to the same old Establishment money.

We can raise our own money on the Internet, and we know it. Howard Dean raised $42 million, largely on the web, with a late start when he was running for President, and that ain't chicken feed. If we double it, it gives us the lock on the nomination. So let's go find a good candidate early and organize the shit out of our side.

Molly Ivins writes in this space every month. Her latest book is "Who Let the Dogs In?"

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Copyright - The Progressive, Inc. http://progressive.org

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

As a young man I was honored to serve our nation as a commissioned officer and helicopter pilot in the
U. S. Navy. Before me in WWII, my father defended the country spending two years in the Pacific aboard the U.S.S. Hornet (CV-14). We were patriots sworn "to protect and defend". Today I conclude that you have dishonored our service and the Constitution and principles of our oath. My dad was buried with full military honors so I cannot act for him. But for myself, I return enclosed the symbols of my years of service: the shoulder boards of my rank and my Naval Aviator's wings.

Until your administration, I believed it was inconceivable that the United States would ever initiate an aggressive and preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us. Until your administration, I thought it was impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to "disappear" them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. Until your administration, in my wildest legal fantasy I could not imagine a U.S. Attorney General seeking to justify torture or a President first stating his intent to veto an anti-torture law, and then adding a "signing statement" that he intends to ignore such law as he sees fit. I do not want these things done in my name.

As a citizen, a patriot, a parent and grandparent, a lawyer and law teacher I am left with such a feeling of loss and helplessness. I think of myself as a good American and I ask myself what can I do when I see the face of evil? Illegal and immoral war, torture and confinement for life without trial have never been part of our Constitutional tradition. But my vote has become meaningless because I live in a safe district drawn by your political party. My congressman is unresponsive to my concerns because his time is filled with lobbyists' largess. Protests are limited to your "free speech zones", out of sight of the parade. Even speaking openly is to risk being labeled un-American, pro-terrorist or anti-troops. And I am a disciplined pacifist, so any violent act is out of the question.

Nevertheless, to remain silent is to let you think I approve or support your actions. I do not. So, I am saddened to give up my wings and bars. They were hard won and my parents and wife were as proud as I was when I earned them over forty years ago. But I hate the torture and death you have caused more than I value their symbolism. Giving them up makes me cry for my beloved country.

Joseph W. DuRocher

- "My son has just returned from his third deployment in Iraq. He turned 19 over there the first year, He turned 20 in Fallujah the second year, and this year my son was on the Syrian border when he turned 21. I cannot explain to anyone the paralyzing fear I had every second of every day he was there, and to be quite honest sometimes I still cry because I am so lucky he came home to us. Please continue your good work. Somehow we have got to get our boys home. Thank you again,"

- "I truly have been Blessed. I thank you for all that you do, and ask that you keep on trying to get the word out there. This country needs to hear the truth for a change."

- "...When people ask me if I think my Son is going to have to go back to Iraq, I say over my dead body!!! I mean it!! I have been writing my Congress men and women asking for help, almost begging...I get back form letters thanking me for my support of the war, which really infuriated me because I told them the whole story about my son being over there for the third time, and how he spent his past three birthdays over there, how lucky were we already that he came home each time. How much is enough?"

- "[My son] was going to stay in and make a career out of this. But the 3rd time really broke his spirit. That and I begged him to get out. I told him I would support him for the rest of his life.. .anything but that constant paralyzing fear I was in."

- "It seems like only yesterday he was there in that horrible place...Mothers still have their sons there. It has got to end."

- "My son is due to get out in June. We are all praying that it happens like it is supposed to but you never know. I am trying to stay positive that his time will be up and that this nightmare will be over."

- "My Son is still not ready to talk-only bits and pieces. I call him a lot, Even on times I probably should not do so. I just need to hear his voice."

- "I cannot begin to tell you how hard this was on my other children. We are so close it was like our heart was torn out. My youngest son had a very hard time… He was the only one in his class to have a brother over there."

- "[T]hey asked me if I had heard from my son, and I just lost it. Mostly because I had not heard from him, and so many marines were dying for what??? And the fear was just too much. I could not hold it in. …until he was home I honestly couldn't pull myself together and really came close to losing it."

- "There has to be something we can do to stop this Madness. So many lives have been totally destroyed, for one man's lies."

- "If I could say one thing that I truly mean from my heart, I would like people to know that anytime we hear that another soldier has died over there be it Marine, Army, Navy.. Every Mother and wife falls to their knees because it could be their son or husband. I still weep when I hear a soldier has died. I cannot imagine the pain."

That is a mother's love-and why this war must end. LuAnne's family is just one of hundreds of thousands of American families who have been caught up in Mr. Bush's war; and they are the lucky ones. Over 2300 families have not been so lucky. They have made the ultimate sacrifice.

President Bush often speaks about his noble cause in Iraq, and assures us that the sacrifice is worth it.

- "We don't know the course our own struggle will take, or the sacrifices that might lie ahead. We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice, we do know the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history, and we do know the cause of freedom will once again prevail. (Applause.)" --George W. Bush, 11/11/05

In fact, Mr. Bush believes we should honor the sacrifice of our troops by sacrificing some more of them:

- "These brave men and women gave their lives for a cause that is just and necessary for the security of our country, and now we will honor their sacrifice by completing their mission." --8/24/05

What this mission is, and how we will know when it is done, has become rather fuzzy. President Bush's simple-minded plan: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." is just not good enough any longer. It has been three years, and at last count, there was not one Iraqi unit considered capable of operating on their own. The predicted "cake walk" in Iraq became "a long hard slog", and now our neoconservative masters are calling it the opening act of what they have dubbed "the Long War".

They can't even figure out how to get our troops out of Iraq, but they are already threatening to start a war with Iran, or Syria, or some other evildoer. My question is "Who do they think is going to fight all these wars?" Are they going to stop Luanne's son from getting out of the Marines and send him back to fight for a fourth time, a fifth time, a sixth time; and then what?

It is time to say "Enough!" It is time for Americans to turn off the so-called reality shows-like Survivor, and start paying attention to the real life and death survivor show that is playing every day in Iraq.

This is our country. They are our troops. It is our government. It is time to tell your representatives in Congress that the Bush Administration's insane plan to dominate the world is not worth one more American life, or limb, or drop of blood. Tell them, "It is time to bring our troops home!"

So, how is it that we are so complacent? Why are we so willing to allow our elected officials to heap lie upon lie and not be accountable? If it were our children that were so dishonorable there would be hell to pay. At the very least, they'd lose their right to play their favorite game or confine them to their room where they could no longer wreck havoc.

But not so with our government and its elected officials. Nay, we seem to be long on suffering, patient beyond comprehension and errant in our condemnation for righting wrongs. There is no accountability nor are we demanding it. Why is that? Have we become comfortable with the status quo or just ignorant? Have we turned the other cheek so many times it's become an automatic reflex?

Allow me to pose some questions. What if you were up for a promotion but one of your co-workers was more than just a schmoozer. In fact, this person wanted the promotion so badly that he or she made certain that promises were made to the right people, that monies even exchanged hands. Do you think you'd sit idly by and do nothing? Hell no. Your anger would be unquenchable. You would do whatever you needed to do, or could do, to find justice. More than likely you would report this illegal wrangling to the agencies that oversee employee injustices. Some of you might even bring about a lawsuit. But one thing is for certain: you wouldn't sit still and allow your future to go down the drain.

Now, what if you were a corporation interested in participating in the rich business of rebuilding a country our country had desolated but you were not allowed to negotiate the possibility? What if the decision of who would reap the financial rewards was decided long before the ruins? Before the attacks even. What if these exceptionally lucrative contracts were assigned to bosom buddies and never even opened for bid? Would you have any recourse? Would you consider this the way business is done? I think not.

What if you were an indigent or disabled or an elderly individual who couldn't afford to buy your expensive prescription medications, but the pharmaceutical companies offered a program that gave you the ability to get your prescriptions for free? However, even though the pharmaceutical companies were exceedingly rich; rich, in fact, beyond the concept of most folk, they no longer wanted to play the role of humanitarian. So, they put their best minds to work and devised a program that would confuse and befuddle and in the end put gold back into their coffers. They created a plan – and sold it via their savvy lobbyists – to offer a drug program that on the surface would appear to be magnanimous. But, this is where the best part is, they fooled them all. No longer would they be obligated to "give" their expensive drugs, which actually cost them only pennies, to those poor folk. No! Now, they could get their just due. But, where does that leave you? Twenty-eight dollars, or eighty-four dollars, or a hundred and twenty-eight dollars is still way out of your ability to pay. You tell me, who's the winner here? Surely it's not the patient on a limited income. So, what's a little guy to do? Who is going to help him fight city hall? Not his elected official that's for sure.

What if you were a curious kinda gal or guy? You read every thing you could get your hands on. It isn't enough that you scanned the worldwide web to read what was being written and talked about all over the world in many different lifestyles and cultures, but your insatiable thirst for learning even brought you to your local library where you would take out book after book, topic upon topic. Well, low and behold, it seems your curiosity caught the attention of those who seem to know what's bad and what's good. Next thing you know there's a knock on your door and there's men in grey suits coming in your home, your private abode. "Why", you ask. "Shut up" you're told. You're taken away. To where you don't know, nor do your loved ones, or anyone who knows you for that matter. It takes a while but you find out your considered an endangerment to your country: a subversive, possibly even a terrorist or a person with terrorist connections. It appears you are deemed so because of your reading material on the worldwide web and your town library. What do you do? Who do you tell? How do you free yourself from this unwarranted imprisonment? And where oh where are the principles that our fair land was built upon?

Think these are unlikely scenarios? Think again, my dear friends. Every day in this fair land of ours our rights guaranteed, we thought, forever and ever, we thought, by our founding fathers; guaranteed to us as inalienable rights of our Bill of Rights and our Constitution. But little by little, day by day, our liberties, our precious rights are being dwindled down to a precious few.

The truth is right before our eyes if only we open them to see. The fear of seeing I know is almost too great, but if we don't before too long there will be nothing of memory to see. As we sit on our comfy couches mesmerized by the latest Survivor or Apprentice or handsome Bachelor, we are being dissolved, extinguished. Our jobs are going to China and India and Pakistan; our freedoms are being abolished; our air polluted; our waters putrefied; our forests fallen; our wildlife exterminated; our culture obliterated.

The fear so palatable that we are on the precipice of losing all that we believed was ours: our dignity, our honor, our precious freedom that I can barely breathe at all. The atrocities are piled high and wide and yet we sit comfy and watch our TV's. All the while poor innocents die horrible, starving deaths, men and women are tortured in the name of national security while agents of our land are outed for retribution on the highest order. Citizens are wiretapped, personal phone calls are listened in to, private communications are spied upon, here, at home, in the United States of America. How is this possible? How are we allowing this to happen before our very eyes? In America, in the land of the brave, business is business as usual.

The ink is dripping red, the debt growing exponentially and in numbers unfathomable and incalculable, enlisted men and women are dying needlessly, our foundation is methodically being hacked to death and we are doing nothing. We appear to believe the lies were fed. It's either that or worse: we don't care. Our children's destiny is uncertain. So, too, is their freedom, or notion of freedom. Destitution, disease, illiteracy, and incivility are commonplace. Pain and suffering, abuse, and injustice are in every neighborhood, on every block, and yet we do nothing. In America, in the land of the brave, business is business as usual.

We have but to open a newspaper or better yet search the Internet to read Katrina, Abramoff,Plame,Haliburton,NSA wiretaps,Abu Ghraib,Guantanemo Bay,EPA, US Patriot Act,Homeland Security, Dubai, US Ports,eavesdropping, Mission Accomplished,Tom DeLay, Election fraud,Chertoff,Brown,lies,deception,Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iran, Korea,Outsourcing,tax refunds,prescription drug plan, civilian spying,medical malpractice caps, AFTA,FBI, CIA, FCC, FDA,CDC, deception, lies,Sadaam Hussein,Downing Street Memo, Tony Blair, New Orleans, FEMA, levees, contribution reform, AIDS, homeless,healthcare,Osama bin Ladin, FISA,electronic surveillance, stem cell research,Roe vs Wade, corruption,lies, deception,election reform,campaign reform,WMD,abuse of power,Cheney shooting, airport security,Christian coalition,anti-abortion rights, deficit, gasoline prices, terror alert, Enron, Worldcom, conspiracy,indictments,lies,deception, corruption, The words colliding in a maelstrom of horror and a fear I fear.

Norma Sherry is an award-winning writer, co-founder of Together Forever Changing, an organization designed to enlighten and encourage citizens to fight for our liberties. She is also the producer and host of the weekly Norma Sherry Show on WQXT-TV. Norma welcomes your emails: norma@togetherforeverchanging.org

© Norma Sherry 2006

The Abrams tanks are constructed with a layer of radioactive uranium metal plates. The big tanks fire a giant uranium dart at 2,100 mph, much faster than an F-16 fighter aircraft, mach III to airplane pilots and very, very fast to the rest of us.

American taxpayers paid to ship the tanks to Iraq and to return them for disposal or re-building in the United States. The tanks are 12 feet wide and weigh a stout 70 tons, or 140,000 pounds.

The enduring vigorous stupidity of the U.S. military pretends that radiation is one of those things that if you can't see it, it can't hurt you. They are thoroughly delusional, of course. A National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds that there is no safe level of radiation. Any radiation is bad.

From America to Iraq and back, these giant radioactive hulks can only sicken and kill Americans. On top of the sheer, unrelenting stupidity of playing with radiation with unsuspecting soldiers, now the neo-con government is involving everyday Americans in their radiation madness.

The Pentagon can't even follow simple radiation hazard mitigation instructions. Their own rules and regulations have the force of law throughout the world. Yet they are ignored in the United States.

Dr. Doug Rokke

Dr. Doug Rokke is the Pentagon's former director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project. When contacted on Oct. 22, he viewed Chris Bayruh's photographs and made this statement about the radioactive tanks in Kansas: "The radioactive damaged Abrams tanks that were left unsecured on a Kansas railroad track are a perfect example of exactly how not to ship damaged radioactive equipment and how not to protect our Army's Abrams tanks from possible sabotage and compromise of classified battle systems."

On Oct. 10, prior to the discovery of the radioactive tanks, Dr. Rokke made the following statement. It is eerily predictive of what would happen in Kansas three days later. "U.S. Department of Defense officials continue to deny that there are any adverse health and environmental effects as a consequence of the manufacture, testing and/or use of uranium munitions to avoid liability for the willful and illegal dispersal of a radioactive toxic material - depleted uranium."

Dr. Rokke continued, "They [the U.S. military] arrogantly refuse to comply with their own regulations, orders and directives that require United States Department of Defense officials to provide prompt and effective medical care to all exposed individuals." (See Note 1 below.)

"They also refuse to clean up dispersed radioactive contamination of equipment as required by Army regulations." (See Note 2.)

"Specifically, they are required (see Note 3) to accomplish four things:

1) Military personnel must 'identify, segregate, isolate, secure and label all RCE' (radiologically contaminated equipment).

2) 'Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible.'

3) 'Radioactive material and waste will not be locally disposed of through burial, submersion, incineration, destruction in place, or abandonment' and

4) 'All equipment, to include captured or combat RCE, will be surveyed, packaged, retrograded, decontaminated and released.'

"The past and current use of uranium weapons, the release of radioactive components in destroyed U.S. and foreign military equipment, and releases of industrial, medical and research facility radioactive materials have resulted in unacceptable exposures."

Dr. Rokke added, "Therefore, decontamination must be completed as required by U.S. Army Regulation 700-48 and should include releases of all radioactive materials resulting from military operations.

"The extent of adverse health and environmental effects of uranium weapons contamination is not limited to combat zones but includes facilities and sites where uranium weapons were manufactured or tested, including Vieques, Puerto Rico, Colonie, New York, and Jefferson Proving Grounds, Indiana.

"Therefore, medical care must be provided by the United States Department of Defense officials to all individuals affected by the manufacturing, testing and/or use of uranium munitions. Thorough environmental remediation also must be completed without further delay.

"I am amazed," exclaimed Dr. Rokke, "that 14 years after I was asked to clean up the initial DU mess from Gulf War I and almost 10 years since I finished the depleted uranium project, United States Department of Defense officials and many others still attempt to justify uranium munitions use while ignoring mandatory requirements.

"But beyond the ignored mandatory actions, the willful dispersal of tons of solid radioactive and chemically toxic waste in the form of uranium munitions just does not even pass the common sense test.

"Finally, continued compliance with the infamous March 1991 Los Alamos Memorandum (see Note 5) that was issued to ensure continued use of uranium munitions cannot be justified.

"In conclusion," Dr. Rokke urged, "the president of the United States, George W. Bush, and the prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, must acknowledge and accept responsibility for willful use of illegal uranium munitions - their own "dirty bombs" - resulting in adverse health and environmental effects."

"President Bush and Prime Minister Blair also should order:

1) medical care for all casualties,

2) thorough environmental remediation,

3) immediate cessation of retaliation against all of us who demand compliance with medical care and environmental remediation requirements,

4) and ban the future use of depleted uranium munitions," Dr. Rokke concluded.

A little old lady in tennis shoes

Leuren Moret is a world famous scientist and radiation specialist who formerly worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, where she became a whistleblower in 1991. She has spoken out about the danger of uranium munitions to humanity in more than 42 countries.

Moret has appeared in four documentaries about uranium munitions (depleted uranium). "Beyond Treason" debuted in August 2005 and won the Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Film Festival. The newest film, "Blowin' in the Wind," was nominated during its debut the first week of November in Australia for an Academy Award.

Moret was an expert witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan and serves as an adviser and expert witness in court cases regarding radiation exposure. Her statement, made Oct. 24, about the dead tanks in Kansas follows:

"Sally Devlin, a little old lady in tennis shoes, went to a public meeting several years ago, held by the Air Force in Pahrump, Nevada. Two officers told the citizens of the town that the Air Force would be moving 80 old target practice tanks and tons of old depleted uranium munitions through their town.

"The radioactive bullets had been picked up off the Nellis gunnery ranges by order of the state of Nevada and were being transported to the Nevada Test Site [a nuclear weapons test site] to be buried as radioactive waste.

"When Mrs. Devlin politely asked them how they would prevent the residents of the town from being contaminated by the radioactive dust on the tanks and bullets, the officers said, 'We're wrapping them in Saran Wrap.' She told them that would be unacceptable and stopped the Air Force dead in their tracks," Moret concluded.

Whether it is Saran Wrap in Nevada or nothing at all in Kansas, the Pentagon just doesn't get it when it comes to uranium radiation dispersing weapons. It is way past time to take all their nuclear weapons and uranium munitions away from them and send them home to get real jobs. They are clearly incapable of protecting this country from all dangers, including those created by our own U.S. military.

The U.S. military shows so little regard for Americans in Kansas, one wonders what on earth they have done to Iraq. The U.S. military has distributed an estimated 8 million pounds of weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas, aerosols and dust on a practically defenseless little country of 26 million people (see Note 6), according to an estimate by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

What is this lethal radioactive weapon supposed to do? Why was it used? Ceramic uranium oxide gas is a genocidal weapon, for God's sake. It persists in the environment forever. In Leuren Moret's pithy words, "The Iraqis are uranium meat."

The politicians, Pentagon staff, generals, commanding officers and others responsible for this war crime must be arrested, tried, convicted and appropriately punished for their crimes against humanity.

There is another explanation

Another explanation is that the U.S. Army and other branches of the military are far from stupid. They are, in fact, the most lethal and carefully planned military in the history of the world. The extensive use of weaponized uranium oxide gas, aerosols and dust is not an accident or an oversight. They did it on purpose.

If this is true, they purposely used a genocidal weapon over at least a 15-year period. No, this is not a callous mistake of empire; it is a calculated act of genocide to weaken the oil- and gas-rich countries of Central Asia, including Iraq. Take your choice: they are either stupid or genocidal monsters.

A British group has estimated the weaponized ceramic uranium oxide will account for an additional 25 million cancers in Iraq in the next several years. There are only 26 million Iraqis to start with, minus the nearly 1.7 million killed by war or sanctions since 1991, plus some live births.

A National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds that there is no safe level of radiation. The committee dismissed the idea that any radiation could be harmless or beneficial.

The radioactive tanks in Kansas and Iraq are the same. They are placed there at great expense by the senior American political and military leadership, with premeditated malice. The bottom line purpose of a 140,000-pound radioactive tank is to kill people.

Uranium munitions a war crime

Dennis Kyne, noted speaker and writer, is a former drill instructor (DI) and a 15-year veteran of the Army as well as a Gulf War vet (see www.denniskyne.com). Kyne makes a point of how "hot" or radioactive the tanks in Kansas would be if they were hit by "friendly fire" to get beat up so much. They could be contaminated with as much as 30,000 times background radiation. That is what uranium munitions do to a tank, bunker or building.

Karen Parker, a prominent U.S. international human rights lawyer, says there are four rules derived from humanitarian laws and conventions regarding weapons:

1. Weapons may only be used against legal enemy military targets and must not have an adverse effect elsewhere (the territorial rule).

2. Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict and must not be used or continue to act afterwards (the temporal rule).

3. Weapons may not be unduly inhumane (the "humaneness" rule). The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 speak of "unnecessary suffering" and "superfluous injury" in this regard

4. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment (the "environmental" rule).

"DU weaponry fails all four tests," Parker states. "First, DU cannot be limited to legal military targets. Second, it cannot be 'turned off' when the war is over but keeps killing.

"Third, DU can kill through painful conditions such as cancers and organ damage and can also cause birth defects, such as facial deformities and missing limbs. Lastly, DU cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment.

"In my view, use of DU weaponry violates the grave breach provisions of the Geneva Conventions," Parker concluded, "and so its use constitutes a war crime, or crime against humanity."