Speaking to The Alex Jones Show on the GCN Radio Network, the star of current hit comedy show Two and a Half Men and dozens of movies including Platoon and Young Guns, Sheen elaborated on why he had problems believing the government's version of events.

Sheen agreed that the biggest conspiracy theory was put out by the government itself and prefaced his argument by quoting Theodore Roosevelt in stating, "That we are to stand by the President right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

"We're not the conspiracy theorists on this particular issue," said Sheen.

"It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75% of their targets, that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions."

Sheen described the climate of acceptance for serious discussion about 9/11 as being far more fertile than it was a couple of years ago.

"It feels like from the people I talk to in and around my circles, it seems like the worm is turning."

Suspicious collapse of buildings

Sheen described his immediate skepticism regarding the official reason for the collapse of the twin towers and building 7 on the day of 9/11.

"I was up early and we were gonna do a pre-shoot on Spin City, the show I used to do, I was watching the news and the north tower was burning. I saw the south tower hit live, that famous wide shot where it disappears behind the building and then we see the tremendous fireball."

"There was a feeling, it just didn't look any commercial jetliner I've flown on any time in my life and then when the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother 'call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition'?"

Sheen said that most people's gut instinct, that the buildings had been deliberately imploded, was washed away by the incessant flood of the official version of events from day one.

Sheen questioned the plausibility of a fireballs traveling 110 feet down an elevator shaft and causing damage to the lobbies of the towers as seen in video footage, especially when contrasted with eyewitness accounts of bombs and explosions in the basement levels of the buildings.

Regarding building 7, which wasn't hit by a plane, Sheen highlighted the use of the term "pull," a demolition industry term for pulling the outer walls of the building towards the center in an implosion, as was used by Larry Silverstein in a September 2002 PBS documentary when he said that the decision to "pull" building 7 was made before its collapse. This technique ensures the building collapses in its own footprint and can clearly be seen during the collapse of building 7 with the classic 'crimp' being visible.

The highly suspicious collapse of building 7 and the twin towers has previously been put under the spotlight by physics Professor Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan of Underwriters Laboratories, the company that certified the steel components used in the construction of the World Trade Center towers.

"The term 'pull' is as common to the demolition world as 'action and 'cut' are to the movie world," said Sheen.

Sheen referenced firefighters in the buildings who were eyewitnesses to demolition style implosions and bombs.

"This is not you or I watching the videos and speculating on what we saw, these are gentlemen inside the buildings at the very point of collapse."

"If there's a problem with building 7 then there's a problem with the whole thing," said Sheen.

Bush's behavior on 9/11

Sheen then questioned President Bush's actions on 9/11 and his location at the Booker Elementary School in Florida. Once Andy Card had whispered to Bush that America was under attack why didn't the secret service immediately whisk Bush away to a secret location?

By remaining at a location where it was publicly known the President would be before 9/11, he was not only putting his own life in danger, but the lives of hundreds of schoolchildren. That is unless the government knew for sure what the targets were beforehand and that President Bush wasn't one of them.

"It seems to me that upon the revelation of that news that the secret service would grab the President as if he was on fire and remove him from that room," said Sheen.

The question of how Bush saw the first plane hit the north tower, when no live footage of that incident was carried, an assertion that Bush repeated twice, was also put under the spotlight.

"I guess one of the perks of being President is that you get access to TV channels that don't exist in the known universe," said Sheen.

"It might lead you to believe that he'd seen similar images in some type of rehearsal as it were, I don't know."

The Pentagon incident

Sheen outlined his disbelief that the official story of what happened at the Pentagon matched the physical evidence.

"Show us this incredible maneuvering, just show it to us. Just show us how this particular plane pulled off these maneuvers. 270 degree turn at 500 miles and hour descending 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes, skimming across treetops the last 500 meters."

We have not been able to confirm that a large commercial airliner hit the Pentagon because the government has seized and refused to release any footage that would show the impact.

"I understand in the interest of national security that maybe not release the Pentagon cameras but what about the Sheraton, what about the gas station, what about the Department of Transportation freeway cam? What about all these shots that had this thing perfectly documented? Instead they put out five frames that they claim not to have authorized, it's really suspicious," said Sheen.

Sheen also questioned how the plane basically disappeared into the Pentagon with next to no wreckage and no indication of what happened to the wing sections.

Concerning how the Bush administration had finalized Afghanistan war plans two days before 9/11 with the massing of 44,000 US troops and 18,000 British troops in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and in addition the call for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor," as outlined in the PNAC documents, Sheen stated, "you don't really put those strategies together overnight do you for a major invasion? Those are really well calculated and really well planned."

"Coincidence? We think not," said Sheen and he called the PNAC quotes "emblematic of the arrogance of this administration."

A real investigation

Sheen joined others in calling for a revised and truly independent investigation of 9/11.

Sheen said that "September 11 wasn't the Zapruder film, it was the Zapruder film festival," and that the inquiry had to be, "headed, if this is possible, by some neutral investigative committee. What if we used retired political foreign nationals? What if we used experts that don't have any ties whatsoever to this administration?"

"It is up to us to reveal the truth. It is up to us because we owe it to the families, we owe it to the victims. We owe it to everybody's life who was drastically altered, horrifically that day and forever. We owe it to them to uncover what happened."

Charlie Sheen joins the rest of his great family and notably his father Martin Sheen, who has lambasted for opposing the Iraq war before it had begun yet has now been proven right in triplicate, in using his prominent public platform to stand for truth and justice and we applaud and salute his brave efforts, remembering Mark Twain's quote.

"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

I was also terrified on a personal and primal level for my son, Casey. As a mother, that terror came from a deep and up to then, unreachable and unknown place in my soul. I hoped in my head that the predictions of swift and easy victory by the various neocon liars would be true, but I knew in my heart that such a "cake walk" would not be possible.

When George flew onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln on May 1st, 2003 and declared "mission accomplished" and an end to major combat in Iraq, I wanted to jump for joy, but I thought his playing fighter pilot in his special costume and his posturing pronouncements were premature.

When the 4th Infantry Division from Ft. Hood captured Saddam in his hidey-hole in December of 2003, I was hoping against hope that our troops would be coming home soon, since they got the person who took Osama's place as George's "most wanted" and again, selfishly prayed that Casey would not have to go over to the mess for his scheduled deployment in March of 2004.

I saw many people in George's circle telling us that the paths of our troops would be strewn with flower petals instead of improvised explosive devises and that chocolates, not bullets, would be tossed at them. No amount of praying, hoping, or kidding myself stopped the invasion from happening, or brought a swift conclusion to the war. Right around the 1st anniversary of the invasion, Casey and the 1st Cavalry left for Iraq. After Casey had been there for 5 days, he and 7 other soldiers were killed on 04/04/04 in an ambush in Sadr City by the Mahdi forces loyal to Moqtada al Sadr.

Shortly after Casey was killed, power was transferred from Bremer to a puppet government and Bremer skulked out of Iraq in the middle of the night with 8.8 billion dollars missing from the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer came home to a Presidential Medal of Freedom and Casey came home in a cardboard box and we picked him up from SFO at the United Airlines loading dock the day before Easter that year. Casey was also awarded medals that were pinned on the uniform that covered his breath-less chest.

George Bush said today that the war was going to take more fighting and more sacrifice. I want to know who is fighting? I want to know if the members of the executive and legislative branches that are so willing to leave our troops in the middle of sectarian violence and a militarily undefeatable resistance are willing to send their children and other of their relatives over to the dessert to take the place of the at least 72% of soldiers who want to come home? Are they willing to go over there themselves to fight? George Bush didn't finish his commitment to the country when he went AWOL from the Alabama National Guard, why hasn't he been called back up to go and fight and die in his own "noble cause?" I have heard of other men and women his age who have been called back up. This is not our children's fight. As in all war, the only people who benefit are the war profiteers.

I would also like to know who is sacrificing in this country besides the soldiers and their families? Where are the shared sacrifices of the past? There was a USA Today poll recently which said that at least 50% of our population has "cried" because of the war and so many more have put magnets on their cars. I wonder how many of our citizens wake up everyday with broken hearts and holes in their lives that can never be filled? I wonder how many wake up missing arms, legs, or both? I wonder how many can't sleep because they are afraid of the nightmares that haunt even their waking hours? George Bush is sacrificing squat and it is easy for him to keep the people of Iraq and our troops in harm's way because it costs him absolutely nothing.

In one of George's canned speeches to another hand-picked audience (who obviously were not wearing t-shirts with his own tragic number of war dead on them), he assured another poor, unfortunate Gold Star Mother, that he would make sure her son didn't die in "vain." He is still insisting on killing more people because he has already killed so many. I realized a hard fact of life shortly after Casey was killed. He died in vain. He and so many more of his buddies would be alive if their commander in chief and the war machine weren't so greedy, heartless and incompetent.

As the country of Iraq disintegrates more everyday, and we know that the bodies are piling up in the morgues faster than they can be buried, it is time to honor the sacrifices of our young people who were misused, ill-used and killed in Iraq by bringing their still living buddies home immediately. The Iraqi people know that the violence won't stop until the occupiers leave. The insurgency cannot go on without targets. It is time to realize that no matter how hard the Pentagon works at its propaganda machine, terrorism cannot be stopped by killing innocent people. Terrorism can only be stopped by analyzing what is causing the terrorism and changing behavior accordingly.

Buddhists say that everyone dies twice. Once when his/her body dies and once when the last person who remember him/her dies. I want Casey and his buddies to live forever. I want the memories of our children who have been tragically killed in this war to be honored by remembering them as the last casualties of the military industrial complex not as pawns used in an evil game of corporate greed run amok and governmental corruption and cold-heartedness gone unchecked.

Finally, today George said that the temptation to abandon "our" commitments is strong. Did he have a mouse in his pocket? I never made a commitment to preemptive war. I didn't authorize Congress to abrogate their responsibilities to declare war. I didn't give the orders to invade a country that was absolutely no threat to the USA. I also didn't give the orders to use depleted uranium and wmd in Iraq. I wasn't the one who devoted myself to torture and imprisoning people without due process. I didn't lie to the world about the reasons for the invasion. I have no commitments to honor in Iraq but I believe George's commitments are criminal and they should be abandoned as swiftly as humanly possible.

I am not a war criminal: Most of us are not. These are not my commitments. It is time for all of us who don't want to be linked or identified with the criminal cabal in DC to stand up loudly and repudiate the behavior of the ones who would lead the world to disaster. It is time to declare stridently that these crimes against humanity are not being done in our names, or with our consent or approval.

Instead of a 4th anniversary of shock and awe next year, we need to strive together everyday to bring our troops home and turn our mourning into celebration and our depression into joy.

Honor the dead. Protect the living. End the war.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on April 04, 2004; Founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace ( www.GSFP.org ) and author of Not One More Mother's Child. Cindy is also the very proud mother of Carly, Andy, and Janey Sheehan who hold down the fort in Vacaville, California.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush wants to trim the state budget so he can deliver $1.5 in tax cuts to his wealthy friends. How to go about it-auction off some Diebold voting machines? Execute fewer blacks (perhaps just temporarily exclude kids, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, or the demonstrably innocent)? No. He is actually denying high-nutrient formula to high-need, high-risk children, such as those with CP or those on dialysis who need to be fed through a stomach tube. Medicaid went from a more expensive version to one which cost $15 for six cans, to nothing. It was suggested that parents and caregivers 'blenderize' food and insert that down their sick kids' tubes, something which most doctors argue is ineffective and dangerous. Maybe just send the kids to Guantanamo, where they know how to deal with picky eaters.

But really. Why would a Governor, a filthy rich guy, a member of the Bush Dynasty, perhaps the next American emperor, a Christian who wears his love o' Jesus on his sleeve, why would such a man want to deny life-saving nutrients to sick and dying children at a real savings amounting to a virtual nullity, that is a negative number because as they get sicker as a result of his policy, children need more and more expensive medical intervention. Is this the same governor who became girlie-man hysterical over the case of the unfortunate Terri Schiavo who turned out to be deathly impervious to all his incantations and invocations and pious pronouncements about the sanctity of life? Turns out she was as brain dead as the last guy he ushered to the electric chair, just as all the not-so-girlie doctors said. It's funny the life-and-death distinctions that the reptile republicans draw with such ease. Did I mention that the milk-denied feeding-tube kids happen to be dirt-Katrina poor? Maybe that's a clue. At the same time as the Schiavo fiasco was unfolding, the exact opposite was taking place with regard to a little girl on a ventilator in another hospital. The insurance company wanted it shut off. The mother did not. Guess who won? And do you think the little girl was white, or black? Seems in Bushland if you're white (with money) you have a right to life (even if you're dead). If you're black, and poor, you have a right to die. Harsh? Katrina, kachink.

What is it with these Bushes? Granddaddy Prescott, not content to run a bank and get stinking rich and enjoy what passes for 'refinement' in America, instead found it necessary to help bankroll Hitler at a time when such otherwise laudable high finance couldn't quite be overlooked in America. Jeb's brother Neil bankrupted a bank (very well, a Savings and Loan) that he ran, leaving taxpayers on the hook for maybe a couple of billion. But praise the Lord of miracles! Jesus kept him out of jail.

Poppy Bush after being chief CIA spook and authorizing who knows what cloak-and-dagger mayhem and (illegal) murder around the world, claimed to be 'out of the loop' when it came to Rapacious Ronnie Reagan's arms dealing with hostage holding Iran (and as part of that dirty deal the captives were held far longer than they would otherwise have been) and his resulting loving aid to his nun-raping, Archbishop murdering, exploders of children's heads, Reagan's darling 'Freedom-fighters' in Nicaragua (sound familiar?). You'd think a former head of the CIA would at least have learned to lie convincingly, but for that perhaps one must first understand basic syntax. But looped or not, George H. W. got lots of unnecessary blood on his hands during Gulf War I. Whole oases of the stuff while his brave military men and women used bulldozers to bury surrendering conscripts-kids buried alive in the desert, or systematically picked off, one by one, from low-hovering helicopters, unarmed and unresisting. And then let's not forget the piece de resistance, the mother of all massacres, the so-called Highway of Death, in which not even dogs and goats were spared. But Jesus must've been looking over somebody's shoulder, because Poppy never got charged with war crimes. Jesus kept him out of jail too.

It's quite normal for a son to want to follow in his Daddy's career footsteps and to dream of exceeding the accomplishments of the old geezer. But what if you're Genghis Jr., or Attila Jr., or George II? That can complicate matters a little. How to outdo Daddy's deeds when he was so devilishly good at what he did? How many people can a Vlad Jr. impale? You almost have to have a plan. In modern times you need a PNAC. And with the help of people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Jeb Bush, Eliot Abrams, and others, including the ultra-nasty Karl Rove. George Jr. got one. Or maybe it got him.

PNAC (Project for a New American Century), was think tank whose deep ruminations and profound ponderings had been bubbling and percolating and sending up sulfurous fumes since even before the time of that other profound thinker Ronald Reagan ('Ideas are stupid things.'), and which had advocated, amongst other items, a 'winnable' nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Now it just needed the right leader to come along, plus, please, please, please, a 'new Pearl Harbor event' to galvanize citizens into stupefied compliance, a PNAC panic, and their gift to the world could be wrapped in just the right colorful tissues of patriotism, freedom, democracy, and Christian values. A flag-wrapped American Crusade for global domination. And George was just the guy to deliver the package, which actually contained those usual staples of American domestic and foreign polity: Banality, Bullshit, Bullets, and Blood. That was the real 4-B Plan for the New American Century that its patient proponents had waited so long to implement.

And they didn't have to wait much longer. In George they had their man at last. Already plans were in place to invade Iraq, Syria, Iran, plans George liked very much, especially that first destination. 'They tried to kill my Daddy!' Bastards!

Karl Rove especially would have loved Operation Northwoods. That was the plan, advocated by Commie-obsessed dumbass maniac General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time (and perhaps even inspired by outgoing General Eisenhower), to murder an unspecified number of Americans on American soil (the number would have to have been sufficiently large to get everyone's attention-bombs and shootings in Washington and Miami and elsewhere) and plant evidence pointing to Cuba, thus 'justifying' an invasion to rid the island of that meddlesome Castro and make it safe once again for democracy, or at least for Batista/Mafia types like in the good old days before the long-winded Generalissimo stole the place and closed the crooked casinos. President Kennedy put a stop to the madness, but one can visualize the PNAC people, and especially Karl grow all knock-kneed and girlie-man faint at the pure Straussian beauty of the plan. It had everything-death, deception, plausible deniability-and perhaps sweetest of all, the knowledge that only the boys in the secret tree house held the power. Sweet secret terrorism for freedom and Jesus. And Jesus would keep them out of jail.

Now PNAC had George, but they still needed their Straussian artifice, their own cloak-and-dagger Op Northwoods, their own private Pearl. It had to be big, and spectacular. It had to have the power to anesthetize the people into allowing their Straussian masters to implement the plans so carefully drawn and so patiently waited upon. It had to scare the crap out of everybody so that they would remain complacent and allow the newly proclaimed 'wartime leader' to defend them. And to seek revenge in their name, of course. Against whom didn't so much matter.

It worked. 9-II was the perfect, prayed-to-Jesus-for PNAC Pearl. Well, the pearl wasn't quite faultless; it was lumpy, it was discolored, it was fake, that is, manufactured, but for the purposes of the PNAC people it was precious nonetheless. It was a pure Rovian rapture. When World Trade Center buildings one, two and seven came down in ways consistent with controlled demolition and in defiance of any other scientific explanation (the odds of even one building collapsing naturally in that manner even after such an attack have been calculated at billions to one), at a time when New York and Washington airspace was left unguarded (that the White House, Pentagon, Washington Monument, and millions of people in Washington and New York would accidentally be left unprotected only on that coincidental occasion simply defies logic), there was no turning back. It was show-time. It was blow time. Did you notice perchance how quickly evidence from crime scene 'Ground Zero' was removed and destroyed? How the White House resisted every reasonable call for an inquiry into the disaster, and when that proved impossible because of public opinion, how did its best to strangle it by denying personnel and funds and by so narrowly defining its mandate that it doesn't even answer to the fate of Building 7? Anyway, it was time for Shock and Awe, American style, without delay. First an ugly orgy of pure destruction in Afghanistan as if to bomb an unfortunate stone-age country back to, well-the First Neolithic age, one supposes. Five-hundred pound bombs and cluster bombs cannot distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, and nor can bullets in the control of those who don't care who gets hurt and for whom everyone is a 'Raghead' anyway. And of course the use of depleted uranium (half-life: 4.5 billion years) is a crime against humanity in itself. There would be many such crimes amid empty talk of freedom and democracy. Death and lies. Lies and death. Banality, Bullshit, Bullets and Blood. And it was as if despite the tough cowboy rhetoric, Osama bin Laden was worth a lot more alive than dead to the Bush administration after all, and soon the President couldn't stifle a yawn whenever the 'Evildoer' was mentioned. His real ambitions lay elsewhere, where the bastards had tried to kill his Daddy, who killed a heck of a lot of other peoples' Daddies.

The incipient further slide into American Barbarism might have been predicted by that term-shock 'n awe-as if blowing up Iraqi families (in the name of freedom and democracy, and liberation, of course) were no more consequential than providing a fireworks display for the amusement of Amerikaner Ubermenschen on the ground and those lapping it up on Fox or CNN. And a rapid slide it was. And in America, even before 9-11 occurred, even as put options were being taken on United and American Airlines stock and that of Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch, that is, individuals with inside knowledge were betting massively that those companies' shares would soon lose value, plans had been made to invade Iraq-massive lies had been invented (as Goebbels taught, the bigger the lie, the better its chances of being believed), a propaganda machine greased, Jesus was bonked on the head and snatched on board by the Christian far-right Falwellian loonies and other 'good-doers', Iraqi oil assets were tentatively divided up on paper, and it was show time.

When Donald Rumsfeld says that the gloves are coming off, you had better believe him, especially if you suspect he had itchy knuckle syndrome all along. Soon there was blood on cell walls-mostly Muslim blood, but no less red-in New York and Los Angeles and Boston and Chicago, amid a de facto suspension of domestic habeas corpus because the Justice Department used all kinds of tricks and loopholes to deny due process, or simply disregarded the law. Hey, everything changed, remember? Well it sure did. And if you thought that torture doesn't exist in a domestic gulag system that has swallowed up more prisoners than any other nation on earth, mostly non-violent underprivileged and undereducated Black and Hispanic males, you would be quite mistaken. Muslim 'terrorist suspects' were routinely subjected to denial of civil rights, to beatings, threats, sleep and food deprivation, and what other perverted torments might occur to their racist and sadistic guards. No charges were laid, but many detainees were deported on spurious or real, if minor, immigration infractions. Others left in disgust.

As President Bush moved inexorably toward the concept of a 'Unitary Executive' Presidency, that is, the notion that a 'wartime' president is above the law, the Constitution and any constraints upon his behavior whatsoever including any impediment regarding the imprisonment without charge or trial, torture-or even the ex-judicial killing-of anyone he perceived to be a threat to National Security, as defined by himself, the United States was slipping into the greatest crisis of her history. Never mind that Bush was/is no more a wartime President than any other President conducting un- undeclared war whether on drugs, crime, or Vietnam. This one was based on deception and lies from the beginning, and thus was and remains illegal, and therefore criminal. Furthermore, the concept of 'Unitary Executive' is as hollow as the legal-weasel justifications for torture or the treatment of the Constitution, with its sacred guarantees of civil rights-which Bush swore to uphold-as '…just a goddam piece of paper.' And presumably the rights of American citizens-previously thought by some to be 'God-given'-are just goddam paragraphs on that goddam piece of paper, to be ignored at the pleasure of the Unitary Executive, who as we know all too well doesn't like to read. Except for the Presidential 'findings' he likes to write allowing himself to ignore any and all laws, and a concept as meaningless legally as 'Unitary Executive', unless you're the torture-enabling, Constitution-suspending, ass-licking Attorney General. But he's Hispanic! And Jesus has kept him out of jail.

They caught Saddam and put him on show-trial, quite illegally. Charge: killing 114 innocent Iraqis. American Post Gulf War I sanctions killed one million innocent Iraqis, half of whom were children under the age of five. Gulf War II has so far killed between 50,000-100,000 innocent Iraqis, many of them women and children. There is no evidence that Saddam tortured children, although perhaps he did. There is videotaped evidence that Americans have tortured and even raped young children, sometimes in front of their parents. Chaney and Bush are adamant that such practices will continue. Is a sense of irony lacking? Outrage? Why aren't the streets full of vomit?

So just six years into the new century, and five into the disastrous Bush Imperium, with ever patient PNAC having finally had its chance to implement its bold policies, and already it could take a century or two for America to regain a semblance of honor and respect in the world. If that's even within the realm of possibility. That is, if Americans recover the vision and courage to recognize that the America they thought they knew is gone, dead-stolen in two elections, democracy's red blood bled out of her, her veins filled with the stinking formaldehyde of fascism. America the torturer. America the denier of justice and due process. America as brutal, illegal warrior and plunderer of the world. America the paranoid, spying illegally on its own citizens. America, gulag master to the globe. America in the thrall of a Jesus myth as crazy and vicious as PNAC's own impending Armageddon. America, nuclear first-striker. America, failed state.

The danger is that the PNAC peanuts and their Divinely Inspired Protégé have committed such crimes on such a massive scale that there is now nothing to lose in moving forward even further. Having embarked on a great criminal scheme with all the bravado and machismo of the average stupid criminal, they are now left with no choice but to bluff their way through, to go down shooting, or to go to jail. Two elections have been stolen, why not attempt a third? Or cancel elections altogether? Or, having been complicit (at the very least) in 9-11, why not go for 9-11 The Sequel and hope for even a fraction of the original's success? When you have as much innocent blood on your hands as these people do, a little more won't make much difference. Look for a sequel sometime around late September '06. It might even happen in Canada, just for the touch of Straussian finesse that would offer-it would show that the Evildoers are still at work, and it would teach those uppity Canadians a lesson for not joining the Coalition of the Killing. Straussians love to kill two or even three quail with one stone while sending secret decoder messages.

I began with the bizarre decision on the part of Florida Governor Jeb Bush to spend extra medical dollars in the Sunshine State by denying seriously sick children adequate nutritional sustenance. It's not as if they were 'bad' children, refusing to say their prayers while demanding chocolates and ice-cream; they have to be fed formula through a tube directly into their stomachs. Many of them probably don't have long to live. Gov. Jeb's State government tried to present this as a money-saving measure. Those tax breaks, you know…

It turns out that his big Presidential bro indulged a similar incomprehensible mean streak (as if we didn't know). Before passing the despised Patriot Act II, he had some tame Gonzalez or other slip in a clause giving the President authority to put any state on the so-called fast-track for carrying out the death penalty. For all the body parts, and blood, and torture, and insanity and sadness and death he is responsible for in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems that George just can't get enough of the stuff. So in spite of recent DNA proof that many American death row inmates are innocent, or had terrible representation, or are mentally handicapped or were children at the time of their alleged crimes, George trumped Jeb by removing what few safeguards which might remain against wrongful death. Why? There is speculation that as Governor of Texas just such a plan was denied because of that state's demonstrably abysmal record of judicial oversight. (Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist, now mercifully departed, found that even innocence is not necessarily a defense against execution, make that black execution of course.) As governor, even with the enthusiastic help of the Ghoulish Gonzalez, George was only able to execute 151 individuals (including the virtually undefended, mentally handicapped, children). Still a record, but imagine what he might have accomplished without such artificial constraints!

Sometimes the devil you know is the worst possible scenario.

America at the crossbones. If it's already too late-bon soir et adieu!

John S. Hatch is a Vancouver writer and film-maker. Currently he is Associate Producer of 'Windup', a Dave Coté film entered at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don't know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson-so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist"-lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

Everyone lied about Vietnam-Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991-hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the people" who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that-not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor-is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there-the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"-do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief-no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general-that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all."

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the home of the brave." There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation-just 5 percent of the world's population-for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values-democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise-to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this "the American century," saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time." Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: "The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities."

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison-more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States."

© 2005 The Progressive. All Rights Reserved

Though the last case study in "The March of Folly" was about America's war in Vietnam, Tuchman argued that the brilliance of the United States Constitution had thus far protected the country from the traumatic upheavals faced by most other nations. "For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain," she wrote. Then she suggested such protection could soon give way: "Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change. Social systems can survive a good deal of folly when circumstances are historically favorable, or when bungling is cushioned by large resources or absorbed by sheer size as in the United States during its period of expansion. Today, when there are no more cushions, folly is less affordable."

For all her prescience, it seems likely that Tuchman, who died in
1989, would have been stunned by the Brobdingnagian dimensions of American folly during the last six years. Just over 20 years after she wrote about the Constitution's miraculous endurance, it's hard to figure out how much of the democratic republic created by our founders still exists, and how long what's left will last. The country (along with the world) is in terrible trouble, though the extent of that trouble is both so sprawling and multifaceted that it's hard to get a hold on.

It's not just that America is being ruled by small and venal men, or that its reputation has been demolished, its army overstretched, its finances a mess. All of that, after all, was true toward the end of Vietnam as well. Now, though, there are all kinds of other lurking catastrophes, a whole armory of swords of Damocles dangling over a bloated, dispirited and anxious country. Peak oil -- the point at which oil production maxes out -- seems to be approaching, with disastrous consequences for America's economy and infrastructure. Global warming is accelerating and could bring us many more storms even worse than Katrina, among other meteorological nightmares. The spread of Avian Flu has Michael Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, warning Americans to stockpile canned tuna and powdered milk. It looks like Iran is going to get a nuclear weapon, and the United States can't do anything to stop it. Meanwhile, America's growing religious fanaticism has brought about a generalized retreat from rationality, so that the country is becoming unwilling and perhaps unable to formulate policies based on fact rather than faith.

At any time, of course, one can catalog apocalyptic portents and declare that the end is nigh. Obviously, things in America have been bad before -- there has been civil war, depression, global conflagrations. The country seems to have exhausted its ability to elect decent leaders, but some savior could appear before 2008. One doesn't want to be hysterical or give in to rampaging pessimism. Books about America's decline in the face of an ascendant Japan filled the shelves in the 1980s, and a decade later, the country was at the height of power and prosperity.

Yet just because America has endured in the past does not mean it will in the future. Thus figuring out exactly how much danger we're in is difficult. Are things really as dire as they seem, or are anxiety and despair just part of the cultural moment, destined to be as ephemeral as the sunny mastery and flush good times of the Clinton years? It's human nature to believe that things will continue as they usually have, and that we'll once again somehow stumble intact through our looming crises. At the same time, it's hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the country regains its equilibrium without first going through major convulsions.

So how scared should we be?

Kevin Phillips' grim new book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century," puts the country's degeneration into historical perspective, and that perspective is not conducive to optimism. The title is a bit misleading, because only the middle section of the book, which is divided into thirds, deals with the religious right. The first part, "Oil and American Supremacy," is about America's prospects as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, and the last third, "Borrowed Prosperity," is about America's unsustainable debt. Phillips' argument is that imperial overstretch, dependence on obsolete energy technologies, intolerant and irrational religious fervor, and crushing debt have led to the fall of previous great powers, and will likely lead to the fall of this one. It reads, in some ways, like a follow-up to "The March of Folly."

"Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation," writes Phillips. "What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline."

There's a sad irony to the fact that Phillips has come to write this book. His 1969 book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," both predicted and celebrated Republican hegemony. As chief elections and voting patterns analyst for the 1968 Nixon campaign, he is often credited for the Southern strategy that led to the realignment of the Republican Party toward Sun Belt social conservatives. Today's governing Republican coalition is partly his Frankenstein.

Phillips has been disassociating himself from the contemporary GOP for some time now -- his last book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," attacked the presidential clan as a corrupt threat to American democracy. His concern with the growing power of religious fundamentalism was evident then. As he wrote in the introduction, "Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern- dominated electoral coalition was the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-2004 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the head of the Religious Right and the President of the United States can be the same person is a precedent- shattering circumstance that had barely crept into national political discussion."

Since then, there's been much more attention paid to the role of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party. In "American Theocracy," though, Phillips brings something important to the discussion -- a global historical perspective on the relationship between growing religious zeal and the end of national greatness. "[T]he precedents of past leading world economic powers show that blind faith and religious excesses -- the rapture seems to be both -- have often contributed to national decline, sometimes even being in its forefront."

To tell the story of the impending end of American supremacy, Phillips ranges through history and across subjects, going into detail about seemingly tangential matters like the production of whale oil in 17th century Holland. It can be a slog -- Phillips is sometimes a dry writer who builds his arguments by slapping down numbers and statistics like a bricklayer. (At least he's self-aware -- at one point in his section on religion, he notes, "By this point the reader may feel baptized by statistical and denominational total immersion.") Much of what he writes in individual chapters has been covered elsewhere in numerous books about peak oil, the religious right and economic profligacy.

But Phillips' book is very valuable in the way he brings all the strands together and puts them in context. He has a history of good judgment that affords him the authority to make big-picture claims: In 1993, the New York Times Book Review wrote of him, "through more than 25 years of analysis and predictions, nobody has been as transcendentally right about the outlines of American political change as Kevin Phillips." Other recent books foresee American meltdown; James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" deals with some of the same gathering threats as "American Theocracy." Kunstler is a far more engaging writer than Phillips, but he's also more prone to doomsday speculation, and he sometimes seems to relish the apocalyptic scenario he conjures. It's Phillips' sobriety and gravitas that gives "American Theocracy" ballast, and that makes it frightening.

The first section, "Oil and American Supremacy," covers the history of oil in American politics, both foreign and domestic, and what it means for America when oil starts running out. The subject of peak oil has been extensively covered elsewhere, yet it remains on the fringes of much of the political debate in America, despite its massive implications. Essentially, peak oil is the point at which more than half the earth's available oil has been extracted. "After this stage, getting each barrel out requires more pressure, more expense, or both," writes Phillips. "After a while, despite nominal reserves that may be considerable, more energy is required to find and extract a barrel of oil than the barrel itself contains." Before that point comes, scarcity will drive prices to unheard-of levels. If that happens, the entire American way of life -- the car culture, agribusiness, frequent air travel -- will become untenable.

Experts differ about when we might pass the peak, but as Phillips notes, "even relative optimists see it only two or three decades away." Unfortunately, the United States is uniquely unable to grapple with the mere idea of life after cheap gasoline, because the country's entire sprawling infrastructure was built on the assumption that oil would remain plentiful. Writes Phillips, "[B]ecause the twenty- first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith -- with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure -- it's no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit... The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back."

The end of previous empires, Phillips explains, also corresponded with the obsolescence of their dominant energy source. The Netherlands was the "the wind and water hegemon" from 1590 to the
1720s. In the mid-18th century, Britain, harnessing the newly discovered power of coal, became the leading world power, only to be left behind by oil-fueled America. "The evidence is that leading world economic powers, after an energy golden era, lose their magic -- and not by accident," he writes. "The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky, successes eventually became economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens."

"American Theocracy's" middle section deals with religion. Once again, the book's value lies not in any new revelations -- Phillips mostly relies on the work of other reporters and analysts -- but in the context provided. In his sweeping overview, he misses some subtleties. He writes, for example, "Opponents of evolution -- successful so far in parts of the South -- are indeed busy trying to ban the teaching of it and textbooks that support it in many northern conservative or politically divided areas." That's not quite true -- Darwin's foes might dream of the day when he's expunged from the schools, but right now, their focus is on having creationism or "intelligent design" taught alongside evolution, not in place of it.

That's a relatively small point, but it's indicative of the rather cursory treatment Phillips gives to the dynamics of the movement he decries. He's much more interested in what it portends -- a kind of soft theocracy that itself is an indication of an empire in decline. What he's talking about is not a Christian version of Iran, but a country ruled by an evangelical party whose electoral machinery is integrated into a network of fundamentalist churches.

Again, the most fascinating part of this section lies in Phillips' comparisons of America with past global powers -- the intolerance of Christian Rome, the militant, expansionist Catholicism of 17th century Spain, the theocratic Calvinism of the mid-18th century Netherlands and the evangelical enthusiasms of Victorian Britain. Toward the end of the Netherlands' worldwide dominance, he writes, "Dutch Reformed pastors called for national renewal and incessantly attacked laziness, prostitution, French fashions, immigrants and homosexuals."

Phillips' final section, about national debt and the increasingly insubstantial nature of the United States economy, follows the model of the rest of the book, offering a summary of others' research on the subject, followed by historical analysis. What concerns Phillips here is not just the country's staggering national debt -- although that concerns him plenty -- but also the shift from a manufacturing to a financial-services economy, which he calls financialization. Instead of making things, Americans increasingly make money by moving money around. Finance, he writes, "fattened during the early 2000s -- this notwithstanding the 2000-2002 collapse of the stock market bubble -- on a feast of low interest enablement, credit-card varietals, exotic mortgages, derivatives, hedge-funded strategies, and structured debt instruments that would have left 1920s scheme meister Charles Ponzi in awe."

Unless the United States proves immune from the economic laws that have heretofore prevailed, this arrangement is unsustainable. As former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker wrote last April in the Washington Post, under the placid surface of the seemingly steady American economy, "there are disturbing trends: huge imbalances, disequilibria, risks -- call them what you will. Altogether the circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do much about it."

Again, as Phillips shows, the historical record provides warnings: "Historically, top world economic powers have found 'financialization' a sign of late-stage debilitation, marked by excessive debt, great disparity between rich and poor, and unfolding economic decline."

Looking at the possible crises facing the country, Phillips writes of the "potential for an incendiary convergence if -- a big if, to be sure -- several of the worry-wart camps prove to be correct... I can't remember anything like this multiplicity of reasonably serious calculations and warnings. It is as if the United States, like the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'One-Hoss Shay,' is about to lose all its wheels at once."

For someone who is profoundly uneasy about America's future right now, there's something perversely comforting about reading this from a figure like Phillips. It suggests that one's enveloping sense of foreboding is based on something more than the psychological stress of living under the Bush kakistocracy. A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it's possible that it's a sign of sanity.

But if Phillips is correct, the coming years are going to be ugly for all of us, not just blithe exurbanites with SUVs and floating-rate mortgages. With oil growing scarce and America unable or unwilling to even begin weaning itself away, we could see a future of resource wars that would inflame jihadi terrorism and bankrupt the country, shredding what's left of the social safety net. As Phillips notes, a collapsed economy would leave many debt-ridden Americans as what Democratic leaders have called "modern-day indentured servants," paying back constantly compounding debt with no hope of escape via bankruptcy. The prospect of social breakdown looms. The desperation of New Orleans could end up being a preview.

Desperate economic times are not good for democracy. The Great Depression, which ushered in the New Deal, was an anomaly in this regard. In an Atlantic Monthly article published last summer, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman wrote, "American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation's tolerance and threatened citizens' freedoms." During the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of families lost their land due to a combination of rising interest rates and falling crop prices, the Posse Comitatus, a far-right paramilitary network, made exceptional recruiting inroads. One poll had more than a quarter of Farm Belt respondents blaming "International Jewish bankers" for their region's woes.

The right's ideological infrastructure has only grown stronger since then. Kunstler may not have been exaggerating when he told Salon, "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar."

Eventually, like Spain, England and the Netherlands, the United States, shorn of imperial fantasy, may evolve into something better than what it is today. But terrible times seem likely to come first -- years of fuel shortages, foreign aggression, millenarian madness and political demagoguery. A Democratic president could stop exacerbating the country's problems and could reconcile with the rest of the world, but it's unclear how much he or she could really turn things around. America's economic and energy foundations are too badly eroded to be restored anytime soon. Besides, redistricting and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate mean that the GOP will remain powerful even if a decisive majority of Americans vote against it. Zealous conservatives in Congress and the media will almost certainly mount an assault on any future Democratic president just as they did on Bill Clinton. Governmental deadlock, as opposed to flagrant recklessness and misrule, is probably the best that can be hoped for, at least for the next few years.

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn't occur to most people to wonder whether the country's very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute. Almost five years later, with Bush still in the White House, a whole cavalcade of catastrophes bearing down on us and a lack of political will to address any of them, the scope of Osama bin Laden's triumph is coming sickeningly into focus. He didn't start the country on its march of folly, but he spurred America toward bombastic nationalism, military quagmire and escalating debt, all of which have made its access to the oil controlled by the seething countries of the Middle East ever more precarious. Now the United States is careening down a well-worn road faster than anyone could have imagined.

Copyright © 2005 CanWest Interactive Inc., an affiliate of CanWest Global Communications Corp.

America's involvement has helped Al Qaeda recruit more operatives, and analyses from our own embarrassed government note an increase in worldwide terrorism. Iraq's civil war may heat up and drag the entire Middle East into chaos.

We are hurting ourselves overseas. The administration has increased the risk faced by our soldiers because it has tortured prisoners. Our people have suffered greatly, as discussed in another op-ed in this section, including mental illness and cancers from exposure to depleted uranium weapons.

At home, the American public is polarized, as overall costs of the war may exceed $1 trillion. The Halliburtons grow wealthier, while our own needy suffer from further social service budget cuts. The War on Terror has given President Bush an excuse to infringe on privacy and democracy.

War advocates will unreasonably demand that we can only withdraw from Iraq if there is a solution that is complete, able to predict every contingency. But their only solution is to bluster, as they did during Vietnam that we can't just pull out. No one has offered a practical military or political strategy that solves all the problems of leaving Iraq. No one ever will. The administration may, in a sleight-of-hand strategy, replace ground troops with air strikes that kill even more civilians. This is, of course, a false and cynical solution.

Those who understand the spiraling tragedy of Iraq must unite and admit to the world that preemptive invasion, torturing prisoners, slaughtering of innocents, even harming our own soldiers are simply wrong. Only such an admission - and an apology - will put us back on the path to being a member of the global community.

What happens after this first step? We don't know. But speaking truth to tyranny is the place to start. Otherwise, we will learn directly, not just from history books, that just as empires rise, they also fall, brought down by their own hubris.

Jordan is dean of the College of Social and Political Justice, International University for Graduate Studies, St. Kitts and Nevis, BWI. Wollman, a senior fellow at Peace Studies Institute, teaches psychology at Indiana's Manchester College.

Six years into his presidency it is difficult to think of a single, substantial foreign policy initiative that US president George Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it. There is good reason for this. It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure and spending almost seven times the amount of its nearest rival, China.

Yet greatness eludes him. For if the last six years have proved anything, it is the limitations of military might as the central plank of foreign policy. Indeed, shorn of meaningful diplomacy or substantial negotiation, it has failed even on its own narrow, nationalistic terms of making America safer and securing its global hegemony. In short, in displaying his strength in such a brash, brazen, reckless and ruthless manner, Bush has asserted power and lost authority and influence both at home and abroad.

With his approval ratings at Nixonian lows and the mid-term elections on the horizon, many of his fellow Republicans regard him as a liability.

Stumbling across the political landscape, rallying support for lost causes, he resembles Ernest Harrowden in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a character whom Oscar Wilde described as "one of those middle-aged mediocrities, who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends".

Last week's release of the national security strategy did not counter that trend but confirmed it. Insisting that diplomacy remains America's "strong preference", it went on to reaffirm its commitment to pre-emption. "If necessary, under long-standing principles of self-defence, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur," it states. Iran received special mention, with a warning that talks "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided".

In practice this translates into a per perverse version of carrot-and-stick diplomacy. Offer your adversary a carrot and then threaten to whack them with the stick while they are eating it.

That America's standing has plummeted with this approach is without question. Of the 10 countries polled in 2000 and again in 2005 by the Pew research group, the US had fallen in people's estimation in eight of them. In only three - Canada, Britain and Russia - did a majority still look upon the US favourably. It's not difficult to see why.

Last week the country that aspires to lead the free world stood alongside only Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands and against 170 countries in rejecting the creation of a new UN council to protect human rights. Only the US and Somalia (which has no recognised government) have failed to ratify the UN convention on the rights of the child.

So long as the US clung to the notion that military strength would always have the last say, none of this mattered. Like a band of demented Millwall supporters, the Bush administration could strut across the global stage chanting: "No one likes us, we don't care". Indeed, in the first few years after 9/11 it wore its unpopularity like a badge of honour.

But as events in Iraq have soured, the ability of the Bush administration to deliver on these threats has diminished considerably. With its military overstretched and its diplomatic goodwill spent, it has been forced back to the table from a relative position of weakness, because nobody trusts it or particularly fears it. If anything, both Iran and North Korea have been emboldened by its failures in the Gulf.

Meanwhile, elections keep on producing the wrong results. Hamas is in power in Palestine; René Préval, the protege of Jean-Bertrand Aristide whom the US helped remove in a coup two years ago, won the presidency in Haiti; Ahmed Chalabi, the protege of the neocons whom the US wanted to impose on the Iraqi people at the outset of the war, could not win a single seat. Elsewhere, voters in Latin America have opted for leaders who campaigned against the neoliberal economic strictures imposed by Washington.

The issue is not whether the developing world is ready for democracy - as the administration keeps arguing - but if the US is ready for the democratic choices made by the developing world.

But the principle area where the US has demonstrated its military supremacy and its diplomatic weakness is Iraq. This misadventure has not only alienated most of the world from the administration, but increasingly alienated the two constituencies it really does need to win over - the Iraqis and the Americans. One of the key demands of the United Iraqi Alliance, the broadbased Shia coalition that won the elections in December, was the removal of the American military. Given that the Sunnis are leading the insurgency, this leaves few backers among the Iraqis.

And, simultaneously, support for the war in the US is haemorrhaging. A CNN/USA Today poll last week showed 60% of Americans believe it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq and disapprove of the way Bush is handling the war. More than half want to see the troops withdrawn within a year. Even three-quarters of the soldiers fighting in Iraq, according to another poll, believe the US should leave within a year.

These problems may in no small part be due to the fact that in invading Iraq, Bush fulfilled only half of Crowe's criteria for a great presidency. Despite efforts to convince the world otherwise, the war for which he will be remembered - Iraq - had nothing to do with why the US was attacked on September 11. On its own, that would be a moral issue of lying to the public.

What has transformed it into a political problem is the dire situation on the ground in Iraq. The most important single factor that shapes Americans' attitudes to any war is whether they think America will win, explains Christopher Gelpi, an associate professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy. Over the past year, the percentage of Americans who believe the US is "certain to win" has plummeted from 79% to 22%; those who are either certain it will not win or believe this to be unlikely have risen from 1% to 41%.

"They are in big trouble," explains Gelpi. "Bush's speeches, even as late as December, managed to shore up public opinion a little bit. But what you can do with speeches at this point is pretty limited. It's not even clear who's listening."

Wrong war. Wrong strategy. Wrong president. Just plain wrong.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

The demonstrators who blocked Market Street were arrested and will be cited for failing to obey police and blocking an intersection, said San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens.

More than 100 protesters crowded behind police barricades in the rain. Several demonstrators carted the prison cell into the intersection and hopped inside, while others held banners and stood sentinel holding anti-torture and anti-Bush banners.

A half-dozen trumpeters, saxophone players and drummers from The Brass Liberation Orchestra, a live music group advocating peaceful causes, belted out upbeat jazz tunes as protesters were shepherded into a police van.

"Our government is openly torturing people and detaining them indefinitely and we have to put an end to it," said Ayah Young, 23, a San Francisco State University student. "This was fairly effective even though it wasn't a huge turnout. It was spiritual and peaceful and we got our message across."

The protest started around 8:15 a.m. and police redirected traffic in a two-block radius around the demonstration, Gittens said.

Market Street reopened about a half-hour later, he said.

In 1999 Bill Clinton was acquitted by a vote of the full Senate after being impeached over lying about an extramarital affair.

Today George W. Bush sits apparently shielded from accountability by loyal and unified Republican control of the House and Senate. Bush, who deceived this nation into a catastrophic war and has admitted domestic wiretaps without warrants in clear violation of federal law, has seemed invulnerable to even the possibility of impeachment.

Is the tide finally beginning to turn?

Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine for nearly 30 years, wrote a cover essay for the March issue of the magazine that makes a strong and well-reasoned case for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Lapham has recently shifted roles, becoming editor emeritus so that he can devote himself to editing Lapham's Quarterly, a new journal about history, while continuing to write his monthly column for Harper's.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: I had to go to four newsstands to buy a copy of the March issue of Harper's. The first three were sold out. I assume it's because of the red sleeve attached to the cover with the words "IMPEACH HIM" in large bold letters. Why did you write this now?

LEWIS LAPHAM: In late December I came across a report that had been assembled by congressman John Conyers of Michigan which lays out much of this case. He had begun to assemble a report a year ago in May, before the discovery of the Bush administration's use of the NSA to impose electronic surveillance on American citizens.

TM: So before what seems most clearly to be a violation of federal law?

LL: Right. Conyers held a series of hearings last summer on what are known as the Downing Street Minutes, a series of memoranda that were exchanged back and forth within the British government in the spring and summer of 2002, between its officials in London and its representatives in Washington. It becomes very clear in the correspondence that the Bush administration is determined to go to war in Iraq no matter what the facts are. And it's clear that there are no weapons of mass destruction, that there is no connection between Saddam and Al Qaida, that Saddam is not in any kind of a position to pose a threat -- certainly to the United States or probably not even to any of the countries in the Middle East.

The British intelligence people are saying to each other that Washington is determined to invade, and they're going to fix the facts to fit their wish. There had been suspicions and rumors of this for two or three years, but here it was in print. The memoranda were not rejected or contradicted by the British government. Conyers held a hearing, and then sent a letter to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon signed by 130 members of the House of Representatives.

TM: I'll bet most people think Conyers was out there alone. One hundred thirty people signed this letter?

LL: It could be 120 or 124, but it was a substantial number, and it was backed by signatures from 500,000 American citizens acquired over the internet. The petition to the administration sought answers to questions. This is what has been said -- what do you have to say about it? And of course there was a stonewall; there was no answer whatever.

Reacting to that, Conyers then set out with his staff to find out what could be learned from open sources -- press, books, congressional testimony -- to establish that a criminal fraud was perpetrated on the American people and on the American Congress in going to war. When he released the report -- 182 pages with 1,100 footnotes -- there was no mention at all in any of the mainstream press. As far as the New York Times, Washington Post, the networks and so forth were concerned, it never happened.

I called Conyers' office and asked if they could send a copy. I read it, and it seemed to me an impressive piece of work, at least worth being discussed and given broader circulation. I wrote the essay in somewhat the same spirit that Conyers had presented the report, which was to at least ask the questions.

I said to Conyers, look, you've got no chance of getting an impeachment motion going in the House of Representatives, which is controlled with an iron fist by the Republican majority.

TM: Whereas, in the case of Nixon, there were Republicans like Howard Baker, not the lockstep partisanship that we face today.

LL: Exactly. Subsequent to writing the essay, I came across George Washington's farewell address. In it, he says that we in the United States must be very vigilant against the despotism likely to be imposed by one party on the other. Our government only works with a balance of power between the judiciary, the legislative and the executive.

TM: Some wise people I've interviewed have pointed out that while we were one of the first to institute this sort of democracy, it doesn't mean ours is the best form. Many other countries have learned from our model and have instituted proportional representation, parliamentary elections and so on. Here, short of impeachment, a president is assured of four years, so checks and balances become all the more important.

LL: And I think that is a weakness in our system and a strength in some of the European systems, where you can have a vote of no confidence.

TM: At this moment -- after Katrina, the release of the illegal wiretap information, and 34 percent approval ratings and 70 percent against the war -- you would call an election.

LL: Yes.

TM: I suspect this despotic reign may be reinforced by both John Roberts and Samuel Alito with their interpretations of a "unitary executive" and a more imperial presidency.

LL: That's entirely possible. We don't know yet, but I think that's a pretty fair supposition.

People tend to forget that we have three branches of government, and that it is the constitutional task of the Congress to assert its power to correct the imbalance of power when it gets out of hand, which it now clearly has. For Congress not to do this is an abdication of their responsibilities.

Let's go back to the '70s. There were Republicans, Baker among them, who knew that it was their duty to act as senators and not simply as representatives of a political party. When you mention branches of government to people these days, they're apt to think you mean Democrat and Republican.

There was greater political consciousness during the impeachment proceedings against Nixon because the country was emerging from a poorly conceived war in Vietnam, a very clear demonstration of what happens when the government in Washington acts in secret.

TM: Though not as assertive as they might have been, Congress did at critical moments stand up to Johnson and to Nixon.

LL: They did. We've lost some of that backbone over the last 30 years. There's been a softening of the American political will and energy within both parties.

TM: Finally, given the political calculus we've just been talking about, you do not see impeachment as likely -- what's your best-case scenario when this kind of information gets out into the general public?

LL: I hope for a gradual raising of the political consciousness. You now see Sen. Russell Feingold suggesting a motion to censure of the president for his actions with regard to electronic surveillance. A motion to censure is preliminary to a motion to impeach. So you have more people talking about it, and you have more people trying to understand the constitutional crisis and what's at risk.

What's at risk is our constitutional system of government. More people need to understand that. They also need to understand their power as citizens. More people need to remember these people work for us.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

No amount of flowery language and repeated pulls at the patriotic heartstrings of America, no repeated assault on the senses and sensibilities through repetitious referral to the events of 9/11 can jump start a second phase of the kind of mindless nationalistic fervor that greeted the erstwhile Cowboy President when he first herded a compliant America down the path of war with Iraq three years ago.

Looking back on the string of unfulfilled objectives, broken promises, squandered dreams, shattered bodies and eviscerated lives that was and is the war in Iraq, one thought emerges plain and clear. This isn't simply a result of bad governance. This is criminal.

Bad governance is telling the American people that a war with Iraq would be concluded in a manner of months, and would cost the American taxpayer less that $2 billion, when in fact the war has gone on for three years now, with no end in sight, and over a quarter-trillion dollars have been expended, with untold billions more to be spent.

Criminal governance is the fabrication of a justification for war (weapons of mass destruction), hiding the President's true intentions from the American people and the Congress of the United States (Bush signed off on the Iraq war plans in late August 2002, and yet continued to publicly state that no decision for military action had been made), and shredding international law by waging an aggressive war of pre-emption void of any United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing such actions.

Bad governance is manipulating war planning on the part of military professionals so that we enter into a conflict with far too few troops for the task, with no plan for how to proceed once the fighting ended and the reality of occupation set in.

Criminal governance is violating every principle of the laws of war in the conduct of the occupation of Iraq, manipulating the economic and political direction of Iraq, suppressing its population, and engaging in wanton acts of widespread murder, torture and abuse of the Iraqi people.

The fact is the war in Iraq has degenerated into one giant hate crime.

American soldiers and Marines are being thrown into a cauldron of our own making, scalded by a conflict with no purpose or direction, with the end result being that in order to survive these fighting men and women have dehumanized the totality of the Iraqi people.

The ancestors of ancient Babylon have become nothing more than "sand niggers", "rag-heads", "camel jockeys", "ninja women" or "haji" in the hearts and minds of American fighting men who are now killing Iraqis in ever increasing numbers. Gone is any talk of rebuilding Iraq. We are there to destroy it. The criminal nature of the war in Iraq is starting to become common knowledge among observers of the war.

It has long sense been common knowledge on the part of those waging it. In Vietnam Americans were shocked by the revelations of Mai Lai and the murder of innocent Vietnamese civilians by American fighting men. But Mai Lai is repeated in bits and pieces every day in Iraq, with the American military occupation slaughtering family after family of Iraqis in the name of bringing peace and security.

The realization that something has gone horribly wrong in Iraq, however, has not translated into any kind of discernable action on the part of the American people. While pundit after pundit breaks ranks with the Bush administration on Iraq, often repudiating their own pre-war chest beating and encouragement of the war, the fact is that the manifesto which manifested itself in the invasion of Iraq -- the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States -- continues to dictate the manner and nature of America's interfacing with the rest of the world in unquestioned fashion.

Indeed, President Bush has, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Iraqi war, promulgated a new, improved version of this manifesto, the 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States, which re-affirms America's commitment to the principles of pre-emptive war. In short, the President has re-certified America as the greatest threat to international peace and security in modern times, especially when one considers that even as America is engaged in the brutal rape and occupation of Iraq, President Bush has his eyes firmly set on another war of aggression in Iran.

What are the American people doing in response? There is a huge difference between becoming aware and taking action. While poll numbers on Iraq reflect a growing unease about the war, this unease has not manifested itself into any discernable reaction of consequence. The Democratic Party has remained largely mute, largely because of the culpability on the part of much of its membership in facilitating and sustaining the Iraqi war and its underlining doctrine of global domination by the United States.

But in the face of the near total subservience on the part of the Republican Party in supporting the policies of President Bush no matter how illegal and harmful they are to America and the world, the Democratic Party must shake itself free of the doldrums it currently finds itself stuck in. The time for passive recognition that the war in Iraq has gone bad is long past.

The time for concrete political action has arrived. The Democrats need to recognize that the political struggle in America today is not a trivial extension of the partisan Red State-Blue State nonsense the American media likes to bandy about, but rather a far more serious struggle of national survival, if one in fact defines the American nation as being reflective of the ideals and values set forth by the Constitution of the United States.

The Iraq War, if anything, is a reflection of the total abrogation of constitutional responsibility and process by the Congress of the United States. As a result, the President has led a nationdown the path of illegal war of aggression which has damaged America's reputation abroad, and its very fabric here at home. The Republican-controlled Congress has done little to stop this collective march towards national self-destruction, rubber-stamping the president's illegal actions with little regard to either the rule of law or Congress's status as a second but equal branch of government.

This must end.

The fact is that America today stands on the brink of having everything we stand for as a nation being swept away by a power-crazed President and a compliant Congress, both of whom are Republican. Whatever direction the Democratic Party takes in the future, it must be with the recognition that the hopes and dreams of saving the United States as a nation of laws founded in the words and principles of the Constitution rest heavily on their shoulders. The Democratic Party must become laser-like in its rejection of the war in Iraq, resolute in condemning this war for what it is, an illegal war of aggression,and determined in fighting for the concept of a nation governed by the rule of law by holding President Bush accountable for his illegal actions.

In short, the rallying cry of the Democratic Party must become impeachment. Given the magnitude of the crimes committed by the United States in Iraq under the direction and leadership of President Bush and his administration, there is simply no other recourse that can bring a halt to the madness in Iraq, and the insanity being planned in Iran and elsewhere.

The remedy is clear. The question now is whether the Democratic Party is up to the task.

Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Nation Books, 2005).

Writing in The Washington Post, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary - blamed by many for the absence of post-invasion planning - was equally unrepentant. The big picture would be determined by history, "not by daily headlines, website blogs, or the latest sensational attack", Mr Rumsfeld declared. To retreat now would be "the modern equivalent of handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis, or of asking the former Communist states of eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination because the West did not have the patience to see through the job of turning them into free countries".

The plain fact, however, is that back in March 2003, almost no Bush administration policy-maker could even imagine that yesterday the country would be in agonising debate over a conflict three years old with no end in sight - in an Iraq that even the pro-American former prime minister Iyad Allawi said was in the midst of a civil war.

When Mr Bush triumphantly proclaimed an end to the war in May 2003 from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, the Pentagon's expectation was that by the end of that year no more than 30,000 US troops would be deployed in Iraq. Today 130,000 are still there - and General George Casey, the senior US commander in the country, warned yesterday that he saw "a couple of more years of this". The war has been a drain on American blood, treasure and morale. As of yesterday, at least 2,311 US servicemen had died there, and more than 13,000 had been wounded. By the end of 2006, the conflict will have cost $320bn (£183bn).

The psychological cost is unquantifiable, but enormous. For a minority the war has brought bereavement and personal sadness. Half of all Americans know someone who has served in Iraq; some 10 per cent of them had a relative or friend who had been killed or wounded there, according to a poll by USA Today.

Mr Bush's place in history will be determined by his decision to invade. Back in March 2003, his approval ratings stood at 70 per cent. Now they have dropped to less than 40 per cent. Two-thirds of the public believes the country is "on the wrong track". Iraq sweeps every other issue off the table.

This November's mid-term elections meanwhile may well turn into a referendum on Iraq, and the Republican Party may lose control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate, conceivably both.

Even among the Republican faithful, support for Mr Bush is starting to erode. "If you demand complete victory, you'll never leave," Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who is mulling a 2008 White House run, said yesterday.

The war, he declared, was helping to bankrupt the country. "And if you ask, are we better off, is the Middle East more stable than three years ago, the answer is, 'Absolutely not'."

Manliness, he writes, "seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk." It entails assertiveness, even stubbornness, and craves power and action. It explains why men, naturally inclined to assert that "our policy, our party, our regime is superior," dominate in the political sphere.

Though manliness is "the quality mostly of one sex," Mansfield allows that women can be manly, too, though the sole example he can seem to come up with, and deploys time and again, is Margaret Thatcher. "Is it possible to teach women manliness and thus to become more assertive?" he wonders, but not really. "Or is that like teaching a cat to bark?" Me-ow!

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

Think about it this way: Is a trait exemplified by reluctance to ask directions -- "for it is out of manliness that men do not like to ask for directions when lost," Mansfield writes -- really what you want in a government deciding whether to take a country to war?

The undisputed manliness of the Bush White House stands in contrast to its predecessors and wannabes. If Republicans are the Daddy Party and Democrats the Mommy Party, the Clinton White House often operated like Mansfield's vision of an estrogen-fueled kaffeeklatsch: indecisive and undisciplined. (Okay, there were some unfortunate, testosterone-filled moments, too.) Bill Clinton's would-be successor, Al Gore, was mocked for enlisting Naomi Wolf to help him emerge as an alpha male; after that, French-speaking John Kerry had to give up windsurfing and don hunting gear to prove he was a real man. And Bush's father, of course, had to battle the Wimp Factor. Mansfield recalls Thatcher's manly admonition to 41 on the eve of the Persian Gulf War: "Don't go wobbly on me, George."

No wimpiness worries now. This is an administration headed by a cowboy boot-wearing brush-clearer, backstopped by a quail-shooting fly fisherman comfortable with long stretches of manly silence -- very "Brokeback Mountain," except this crowd considers itself too manly for such PC Hollywood fare. "I would be glad to talk about ranchin', but I haven't seen the movie," Bush told a questioner.

There are, no doubt, comforting aspects to the manly presidency; think Bush with a bullhorn on top of the smoldering ruins of the twin towers. After a terrorist attack, no one's looking for a sensitive New Age president. Even now, being a strong leader polls at the top of qualities that voters most admire in Bush.

But the manliness of the Bush White House has a darker side that has proved more curse than advantage. The prime example is the war in Iraq: the administration's assertion of the right to engage in preemptive and unilateral war; the resolute avoidance of debate about the "slam-dunk" intelligence on weapons of mass destruction; the determined lack of introspection or self-doubt about the course of the war; and the swaggering dismissal of dissenting views as the carping of those not on the team.

The administration's manliness doesn't stop at the water's edge. Pushing another round of tax cuts in 2003, Vice President Cheney sounded like a warrior claiming tribute after victory in battle: "We won the midterms. This is our due," Cheney reportedly said. After the 2004 election, Bush exuded the blustering self-assurance of a president who had political capital to spend -- or thought he did -- and wasn't going to think twice before plunking down the whole pile on Social Security.

Mansfieldian manliness is present as well in Bush's confident -- overconfident -- response to Hurricane Katrina (insert obligatory "Brownie" quote here). And the administration's claim of almost unfettered executive power is the ultimate in manliness: how manly to conclude that Congress gave the go-ahead to ignore a law without it ever saying so; how even manlier to argue that your inherent authority as commander in chief would permit you to brush aside those bothersome congressional gnats if they tried to stop eavesdropping without a warrant.

Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

But that's just my view.

marcusr@washpost.com

Yet, as with so many such events, there is the sanctioned history and the secret history-players hidden from view. In the Kennedy murder, the involvement of shadowy organizations like the Mafia and the CIA came into question. This way of thinking came to challenge the official narrative put forth by the Warren Commission. It is not exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

But if Oswald didn't kill the president, who did? So 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.

Now here we are again, contemplating the seemingly unthinkable events of September 11. An official explanation has been offered up: The nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists. Again, this narrative has been accepted by many.

But not all.

2. War Without End
"Just your average wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy nuts," Father Frank Morales told me as he surveyed the 200 or so graying beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting IS IT FASCISM YET? buttons who had assembled in the basement of St. Mark's Church for the weekly Sunday-night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth Movement to hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.

Saying he was in New York "to debunk the outrageous myth . . . the absurd fairy tale" that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen fanatics with box cutters sent by a bearded man in a cave, the 60-year-old Tarpley projected a slide designated "State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism," depicting a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles.

Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising "dupes," "useful idiots," "fanatics," "provocateurs," and "Oswalds." Included here were the demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. The second ring, marked MOLES, contained "government officials loyal to the invisible government," such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed "technicians," "CIA special forces," "old boys"-the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept their mouths shut.

September 11 was the true face of corporatized terror, said Tarpley, graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton), and author of an "unauthorized" biography of George Herbert Walker Bush. The book paints the Bush-family patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, as knowingly profiting from Hitler's Third Reich in his role as a director of the Union Banking Corporation, where, Tarpley's book says, the Nazis kept their money.

According to Tarpley, this, roughly, is how it went down on September 11: Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pet Goat–engrossed president played their assigned roles enabling the strange events of the day, including the wholesale "stand-down" of the multi-trillion-dollar American air-defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged 72-virgin-craving crew got the blame, the towers collapsing not from fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but thanks to a well-planned "controlled demolition."

Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the "unanswered questions" that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.

Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?

And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time-only 56 minutes in the case of the South Tower?

And why, if the impact destroyed the planes' supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?

And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD?

How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash into the Pentagon, headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11-occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?

And why was it so important, as decreed by Mayor Giuliani, to clear away the debris, before all the bodies were recovered?

And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down-was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?

There were so many questions. But when it came to the big "why" of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: "Who benefits?"

For Tarpley and others, this was a slam dunk: September 11 was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century, which, like its Svengali, Leo Strauss, recognized the U.S. masses to be meth-addled, postliterate, post-logical lard-asses, a race of "sheeple" that would never rise to inherit the mantle of post–Cold War world-dominators without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor." In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.

Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, take your pick. What mattered was that 3,000 human beings were dead, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War on Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbesian/with-us-or-against-us struggle to corner the planet's dwindling bounty-a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.

3. Your "HOP" Level
In his paper "What Is Your 'HOP' Level?" Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September 11. The options essentially boil down to four.

(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. "The Official Conspiracy Theory"). The received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there was "no warning."

(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, "Reno Wall" Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission Report.

(C) LIHOP (or "Let It Happen on Purpose"). Many variations, but primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector were aware of the hijackers' plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

(D) MIHOP ("Made It Happen on Purpose"). The U.S. government or private forces planned and executed the attacks.

Tarpley's conception of a far-flung, supragovernmental alliance of intelligence agencies (he reserves a key spot for Britain's MI6) and military forces is only one of many MIHOPs floating around 9/11 Truth circles. Popular are various configurations of a Cheney-Bush MIHOP, with most asserting that the vice-president, who appeared to be in charge on 9/11, was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is the ecodoomsday Peak Oil MIHOP, the idea that the "peaking" of petroleum reserves required a false provocation to start an "oil war" in the Middle East.

More controversial is Mossad MIHOP: the conjecture that Israeli intelligence (and kowtowing by the U.S. to the "Israel lobby") played a crucial role, attempting to draw the U.S. into a prolonged struggle with Israel's enemies. Notable in this is the "white van" story: Five men observed filming the attacks from Liberty State Park were later pulled over by cops near Giants Stadium. One man was found to have $4,700 in his sock. "We are Israelis," the men reportedly told the cops. "We are not your problem." The men were quickly deported to Israel, after which the Forward claimed that the company that owned the van, Urban Moving Systems, was a Mossad front.

Mossad MIHOP dovetails with the baseless rumor, widely believed in Arab countries, that 4,000 Jewish World Trade Center workers were told to stay home that day, showing that conspiracy theory can be tricky terrain. Mossad MIHOP easily morphs into Zionist MIHOP or Jewish MIHOP, leading to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged the 9/11 Truth movement. "Do I believe Israel has undue influence over U.S. foreign policy?" asks one activist. "Absolutely. But there are people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. You have to draw the line at Holocaust denial."

Deeper into late-night-talk-radio, Da Vinci Code territory are numerous incarnations of the New World Order MIHOP, defined by Nick Levis as the work of "a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist." Ever elastic, NWO MIHOPs often date back to secret societies like the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 during the First Crusade. (Bush's alleged slip of calling the terror war a "crusade" was a key hint to the real, if surreal, agenda.) The continuity is clear to any student of the hidden history. The Templars begat the Freemasons (look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on every dollar in your pocket, fool!), from whom emerged the nefarious Illuminati, and onward to current standard-bearers like Yale's Skull and Bones society (both Bushes are Bonesmen; John Kerry, too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and the blue-helmeted armies of the United Nations.

Less-cited scenarios include Sino MIHOP, claiming the attack was a first strike in the inevitable conflict between China and the West. Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, imagining evil Thetan psychologists as culprits. In the postmodern battle of paranoid narratives, we get to choose our terror dream, identify our own evil genius.

4. Inevitable MIHOP
"For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because the more you know, the more you know," says Les Jamieson, a friendly, eminently reasonable 51-year-old from Brooklyn who remembers the moment the scales of Official Story hallucination fell from his eyes.

"I read a story in Newsweek, which said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. Obviously, someone knew. My reaction was, 'Holy shit.' This process has been one holy shit after another."

Father Frank Morales's conversion was more dramatic. Raised in the Jacob Riis Projects, Morales, who if not for his priest collar could be mistaken for an East Village hipster, is a longtime Lower East Side hero, primarily for his work with local squatter communities. The day after 9/11, the diocese asked if he'd go to ground zero to perform last rites. "They said be prepared, because 'we're not talking bodies, Frank, we're talking body parts.' "

"I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest is supposed to feel," says Morales. Sitting with a fireman, Morales called out, "If I had somebody in this mess, I'd wanna get those motherfuckers." It was then, Morales says, that the fireman whispered, "Hey, that's not it. You wanna know something? Bush and bin Laden have the same banker."

It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act and Iraq, that turned him into a 9/11 Truth activist, says Morales, who likewise sees little alternative to MIHOP.

"To me," Morales says, "this is about history. History and truth, the nature of truth in a not particularly truthful age."

"We're like the minutemen of Revolutionary times, prosecutors in the discovery phase for a trial that is sure to come," says Jamieson, who on Saturday afternoons can often be found at ground zero holding up a banner proclaiming that 9/11 was AN INSIDE JOB.

As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They've got people on their side like the "WebFairy," who runs a site "proving" the towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or "ghost planes." Still, the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle. As Nick Levis says, "Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?"

5. A Fast-Moving Meme
Google "911 conspiracy" and the bytes bury you. The first great conspiracy theory of the Internet Age-imagine JFK assassinationology with the Web!-9/11 Truth is a fast-moving meme. The thicket of "truth" sites is myriad. There is "911truth.org," 911forthetruth.com," "911truthla.org," "nakedfor911truth.com," "911truthemergence.com," "911citizenswatch.org," "911research.wtc7.net," "911review.com," and hundreds more.

It can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in the 9/11 Truth assault. Apocalyptical survivalists and extreme Bush-haters are equally attracted to the movement's blanket J'accuse. Be you a Starbucks-window breaker or John Bircher, you don't need a weatherman to know which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist windbaggery blows.

This is not a movement that takes its Nagra tape recorders to document Dealey Plaza acoustics to ascertain which bullet came from what angle. When 9/11 Truth "researchers" cite "the physical evidence," they usually mean the referred reality of photographs or videos posted on the Net. Paul Thompson, whose 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of Truth research, does all his work on the Net. "I don't have to be any particular place to do this," says Thompson, who for a while moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to concentrate.

Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this movement. The conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. As Marshall McLuhan would swear if he weren't dead, there has never been a more conspiracy-ready medium than the Net. It is an exhilarating serendipity that every surfer has felt: the glorious synchronicity in the way one link handshakes the next, the sensation of not knowing how you got there but being sure this is the right place. Such miraculous methodology cannot simply be random. For the moment, it feels like Truth.

"There's reality, and there's illusion," says William Rodriguez. "When illusion becomes reality, that's a problem; 9/11 is a giant illusion."

Coincidences are rife. What is to be made of reports that prior to September 11, parties unknown purchased the domain names "nycterrorstrike.com," "horrorinnewyork.com," and "tradetowerstrike.com." Was this Mohammad Atta's idea of a cyberjoke?

Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel Players, by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, the book describes how Pammy, working for a firm called Grief Management Council, which has its offices in the World Trade Center, at first thought the WTC was "an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?" Later, DeLillo writes, "to Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light."

Even dismissing numerological smut-like how 9+1+1=11 and there are eleven letters in both George W. Bush and The Pentagon, for which ground was broken September 11, 1941, exactly 155 (=11) years after the Masonic-dominated Founding Fathers opened the Constitutional Convention on September 11, 1786, not to mention, for CIA MIHOP fans, that Kissinger and the Langley boys chose September 11, 1973, to overthrow Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende-we appear to have entered the realm of the precognitively strange.

Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency's plot to crash a remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a "tin-pot dictator" who was "begging to be smart-bombed"?

And why does every 9-year-old know how to fold a $20 bill so it forms a likeness of the burning Pentagon on one side and the Trade Center on the back? (See clydelewis.com/twenty.html.)

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen may have been roundly chastised for calling 9/11 "the greatest work of art ever." Yet what is the conspiracist's obsessive attempt to make sense where there is no sense but a kind of (paranoid) art? No wonder Jungian shrinks, who churn out copious papers on the topic, are so crazy about 9/11. It's got so much archetype. Perhaps one of these learned men will pen a monograph on mandala-like smoke patterns (wwnet.fi/users/veijone/satan.htm) in the burning South Tower, which seem to form a likeness of Lucifer?

6. Inside the Truth Vacuum
"People are always coming up with stuff about holograms and planes shooting pods. That's what happens when the truth is systematically suppressed," says Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, was killed in the attacks.

Monica, who describes herself as being "a completely normal housewife paying my taxes, raising my children" before 9/11 and who now lives on Long Island "with my dog, my alarm, and some plants," testified before the 9/11 Commission. She ended her statement saying she hoped "this commission understands the need to leave a legacy of truth, accountability, and reform as a tribute to all of the innocent victims . . . We look to you for leadership."

Asked if she ever expected to get a "legacy of truth," Monica, who manifests an endearingly New Yorkish manner, laughs. "I must be an idiot because, yeah, I did. I was brought up to believe in things like the U.S. government. But we got screwed. The commission was whitewash, a stonewall. Maybe 3,000 people dead wasn't enough to do the right thing. Did they need 5,000, or 10,000?

"They had these people come in, made them promise to do better next time, and gave them medals. Rich was dead, and nobody was at fault. To me, that's a sin . . . With them, everything is fake. The government gave out ceremonial urns to the victims' families. It had beach sand inside. From Coney Island or somewhere. They could have at least used the dust from the Trade Center. Something real."

Asked about 9/11 Truth, Monica laughs again. "You want tinfoil-hat-wearing nutters? I get these e-mails from this woman. She's nice, supportive. Then she says to be careful because 'our thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions are being controlled 100,000 percent by electromagnetic waves.' But I write back. I know she means well. Everyone needs a friend."

"Conspiracy theories," says Lorie Van Auken with a sigh. She's one of the "Jersey girls" who pushed the Bush administration to convene the 9/11 Commission. Her husband, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed in the North Tower. She says, "That's why we demanded the commission, so there wouldn't be any conspiracy theories.

"Now, when I hear Philip Zelikow [the 9/11 Commission's executive director] wrote a book with Condi Rice or was seen with Karl Rove, it drives me crazy. I feel like I'm trapped in a truth vacuum."

One thing that has changed over Lorie's "career as a 9/11 widow" is that she's come to appreciate "these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you want to call them.

"At first, we widows didn't want to be seen with conspiracy people. But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they're just Americans, looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right."

7.Why 7 WTC Fell
Talking to these women was not unlike watching the Zapruder film, I thought. The famous 8-mm. movie shot by ladies'-garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder has been used to justify any number of Kennedy-assassination theories. Think the driver of the limo was the actual shooter, as a few nutbags have postulated? It's in the Zapruder film, if you're stoned and squint enough.

However, you always get to the part where the president's head explodes in a flash and shower of blood. It remains a horrible, frozen moment. One look and I am back in geometry class at Francis Lewis High School, the principal's voice on the loudspeaker saying that the president had been shot, that he was "dead."

Speaking with the widows, or simply walking by a firehouse, was a teleportation back to the raw unspun brutality of the Day. This isn't as much of a stretch as it sounds, since I was there on September 11.

I'd just walked right into what would come to be called ground zero. No one stopped me. I knew the towers had fallen, seen it on TV. Still, I didn't expect things that big to totally disappear, as if the ground had swallowed them up.

"Where are the towers?" I asked a fireman. "Under your foot" was the reply.

Hours later, I sat down beside another, impossibly weary firefighter. Covered with dust, he was drinking a bottle of Poland Spring water. Half his squad was missing. They'd gone into the South Tower and never come out. Then, almost as a non sequitur, the fireman indicated the building in front of us, maybe 400 yards away.

"That building is coming down," he said with a drained casualness.

"Really?" I asked. At 47 stories, it would be a skyscraper in most cities, centerpiece of the horizon. But in New York, it was nothing but a nondescript box with fire coming out of the windows. "When?"

"Tonight . . . Maybe tomorrow morning."

This was around 5:15 p.m. I know because five minutes later, at 5:20, the building, 7 World Trade Center, crumbled.

"Shit!" I screamed, unsure which way to run, because who knows which way these things fall. As it turned out, I wasn't in any danger, since 7 WTC appeared to drop straight down. I still have dreams about the moment. Even then, the event is oddly undramatic, just a building falling.

Now the 9/11 Truth movement tells me I saw much more. According to Jim Hoffman, a software engineer and physicist from Alameda, California, where he authors the site 911research.wtc7.net, what I saw was a "classic controlled demolition." This was why, Hoffman contends, 7 WTC dropped so rapidly (in about 6.6 seconds, or almost at the speed of a free-falling object) and so neatly, into its "own footprint."

For 7 WTC to collapse unaided at that speed, Hoffman says, would mean "its 58 perimeter columns and 25 central columns of structural steel would have to have been shattered at almost the same instant, so unlikely as to be impossible."

What happened at 7 WTC might be the key to the entire mystery of September 11, contends Hoffman. The $500 million insurance profit made by Larry Silverstein is a garden-variety motive, but the list of 7 WTC tenants sets conspiracy heads spinning.

To wit: The IRS, the Department of Defense, and the CIA kept offices on the 25th floor. The Secret Service occupied the ninth and tenth. The Securities and Exchange Commission (home to vast records of bank transactions) was on floors 11 through 13. The 23rd floor was home to Rudy Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management, his crisis center. If this wasn't enough, the mortgage of 7 WTC was held by the Blackstone Group, headed by Pete Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, stalwart players in any NWO MIHOP.

In the 9/11 Truth cosmology, the destruction of 7 World Trade Center is akin to Jack Ruby's shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Seven WTC was the home of secrets. It had to go. Central to the scenario is a comment made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary.

"We're like the minutemen of Revolutionary times, prosecutors in the discovery phase of a trial that's sure to come," says Les Jamieson.

"We've had such a terrible loss of life," he quotes himself as saying on 9/11. "Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it."

"Pull it," as Truth people never tire of repeating, is the term usually used for controlled demolition.

These were vexing questions, especially since 7 WTC is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report. Nor is the building given much shrift in the subsequent "Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Towers," compiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

And there I was, thinking all I saw was a building falling down.

8. The Magician and the Expert
A few days after the St. Mark's meeting, I went to a Community Board No. 1 forum where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was in the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest structure when it was completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed a good place to talk about the only former world's tallest building(s) to fall down. I was with William Rodriguez, who, as he always does, brought along his video camera, "so they know I'm watching them."

As a boy shining shoes in Puerto Rico, William dreamed of being wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down from a flaming rope. "That was going to be my big trick. It was my goal to become a magician, the greatest illusionist in the Caribbean basin."

Later, Rodriguez met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, the magician best known as a debunker of supernatural claims, offering the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate verifiable evidence of psychic powers.

"Randi was my mentor," said William. "I admired him for his tricks but also because he never said they were anything but tricks. He separated the truth from the phony."

William moved to New York, but beyond some gigs at Mostly Magic, his career did not take off. He started working for a cleaning company in the World Trade Center. He'd stay there twenty years.

On 9/11, William was late. Instead of mopping the stairwells on the 110th floor, where he almost certainly would have died, he was chatting with the maintenance crew on level B-1 in the basement. "I heard this massive explosion below, on level B-2 or 3. I saw this guy come up the stairs. The skin on his arms was peeled away . . . hanging. Then I heard another explosion, from above. That was the first plane, hitting the building."

In possession of one of the few master keys in the building, William led firemen up the stairwells. He was responsible for getting at least a dozen people out of the towers. Trying to escape as the North Tower fell, he found himself beneath a half-buried fire engine.

"I told myself this is going to be a slow death, but I should make it last as long as I could. My training as an escape artist helped me. I knew to be calm. They found me just in time. I understood my whole life had been pointing to this moment."

Acclaimed as "the last man pulled from the rubble," William became a hero of 9/11. "I was at the White House. They took my picture with President Bush."

Four years later, after repeatedly being rebuffed in his attempts to tell officials his story about the basement explosion, William is suing the U.S. government under the rico statute, legislation drafted to prosecute Mafia families. The suit reads like an Air America wet dream, with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Karl Rove, and others (the Diebold Company is thrown in for good measure) listed as defendants.

"They say I'm a conspiracy theorist; I call them conspirators, too," William says.

"It is like Randi said. There's reality, and there's illusion. When illusion becomes reality, that's a problem. Nine-eleven is a giant illusion. Besides, what can they do to me? I'm a national hero, Bush told me so himself."

"That's him, the NIST guy," William said, indicating Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, head of the institute's Trade Center report.

An elegantly attired man in his fifties, Dr. Sunder, holder of degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and MIT, took his seat beside Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects of the new $700 million replacement for 7 WTC. Behind them was a slide of "the new downtown skyline," dominated by another Skidmore project, the Freedom Tower, which, at an iconic 1,776 feet, is next in line to be the world's tallest building. Like the new 7 WTC, which Galioto said featured a "two-foot-thick vertical core encasing the elevators, utility infrastructure, and exit stairs," the Freedom Tower will be "among the safest buildings ever built." This was important, the architect said, because "constantly building and rebuilding" was what New York was all about.

After Dr. Sunder's presentation (planes and fire did it), a woman from N.Y. 9/11 Truth stood up and said she hadn't been able "to sleep at night" since her best friend had died at the WTC. She had hoped NIST would clear up doubts, but this was not the case. "I have here a report which contradicts much of what you say."

The woman put a paper by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University, in front of Dr. Sunder. Jones makes the case for controlled demolition, claiming the persistence of "molten metal" at ground zero indicates the likely presence of "high-temperature cutter-charges . . . routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel."

"I hope you read this; perhaps it will enable you to see things a different way," the woman said.

"Actually, I have read it," Dr. Sunder said with a sigh.

Later, asked if such outbursts were common, Dr. Sunder said, "Yes. I am sympathetic. But our report . . . it is extensive. We consulted 80 public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who's Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we can't worry about that. Facts are facts."

I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building barely mentioned in the final report?

This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year.

NIST did have some "preliminary hypotheses" on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. "We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors."

Then Dr. Sunder paused. "But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7."

9. Can 49.3 Percent of the People Be Crazy?
Late in the summer of 2004, as the Republicans in Madison Square Garden extolled George Bush's staunch protection of the homeland, a Zogby poll asked New Yorkers if they believed that "some of our leaders knew in advance attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and consciously failed to act."

Of city residents, 49.3 percent said yes.

A year and a half later, doubt had increased, at least according to my own informal canvassing. Per Nick Levis's "HOP" paper, I offered four choices: (A) the Official Story; (B) the Official Story plus incompetence; (C) LIHOP; (D) MIHOP.

Of the 56 respondents, 28 said C, 23 picked B, with 4 (including two Muslim cabdrivers) opting for MIHOP.

Almost every white person with a straight job said B. Many disliked Bush but said they couldn't bring themselves to believe the U.S. government would take part in the death of 3,000 of its countrymen.

Typical was the opinion offered by an investment banker at a downtown bar. "I can see them wishing it would happen, secretly happy it did. But on purpose? Look at the way they've managed Iraq. They're boobs. They couldn't have pulled off 9/11 without getting caught. Not possible."

Uptown, responses were different. "Yeah, they knew," said a retired transit worker on 116th Street, one of the 17 of 22 black people questioned who picked C. He said he'd heard Marvin Bush, the president's younger brother, was a director of Securacom, a firm that on 9/11 was in charge of security not only at the World Trade Center but also for United and American airlines as well as at Dulles airport, where Flight 77 took off.

"That true?" he asked.

Yeah, I said. That's what I heard.

"There anywhere he ain't got no brother?"

"Bush's cousin, Wirt Walker III, worked there, too."

"Wirt? The third? You're shitting me."

This was pretty much the opinion. If Katrina proved the government was willing to let people die, right there on TV, why should 9/11 have been any different? Only one person picked A, the official story. This was a fireman, who was smoking a cigarette outside a downtown engine company. Truth be told, I wasn't keen on quizzing firemen about 9/11 Truth, but I knew the guy's brother from high school.

"Not answering that," he said, warning not to ask others in the company, which had lost men on 9/11. This didn't mean he wasn't of the opinion that if he lived to be a million he'd never "see anything as corrupt, bullshit, and sad as what happened at the WTC.

"They got their gold and shipped us to Fresh Kills," he said. Call it one more conspiracy theory, but many uniformed firefighters believe the powers that be cared more about finding the gold reserves held in vaults beneath the Trade Center than the bodies of their fallen brothers.

Still, the fireman said, if he had to pick a letter in my poll, it would be A.

"Osama fucking bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone else, then I'd have to do something about it. And I don't want to think about what I'd do."

10. Disinformation
It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting aftermath. Being a supposedly unflappable New Yorker offers little solace. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface.

Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.

With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: "That in 2006, we will crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11-heads and return to normality." A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued, quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden's supposed CIA code name, "Tim Osmond . . . as in Donny and Marie," to speculation about the role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani's former OEM guy, in the post-9/11 anthrax threats.

Talk came to a halt, however, with the mention of whether it was American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

Broached in 2002 by Thierry Meyssan in his French best-seller L'Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), the idea that the Pentagon was struck by a missile instead of a 757 is the most controversial tenet of 9/11 Truth–iana. The claim is based on Meyssan's reading of photographs ("Hunt the Boeing" at asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm) supposedly showing the hole in the building to be no more than fifteen to eighteen feet wide-far too small to fit a plane with a 125-foot wingspan.

But there are problems, such as the many eyewitnesses who saw a plane flying low near the Pentagon shortly before impact. Disputing the no-crash theory, Jim Hoffman has argued, "This is just the sort of wackiness defenders of the Official Story harp on to show how gullible and incompetent we conspiracy theorists are supposed to be." In other words, Meyssan and other no-plane believers were either wrong, unknowing dupes or spreaders of disinformation.

The D-word is nothing to take lightly in conspiracy circles. For, as Thomas Pynchon notes in his "Proverbs for Paranoids," if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

At Veselka, the question was, if Flight 77 did not crash, what happened to the 56 people on the plane? This query did not sit well with Nico Haupt, a thin, black-clad man from Cologne, Germany, compiler of the 9/11 Encyclopedia (911review.org/Wiki/Sept11Topics.shtml).

"Gassed," he hissed. "Have you ever heard of gassing? It is very easy. You open the door of the plane, and it spreads."

"You think they gassed them?" Would even the Illuminati stoop this low?

Haupt cast a withering look. "That, or some other method of murder. Assholes!"

"Nico, calm down," said Tarpley. "This is tactics. There's no reason to make an enormous moral issue out of everything."

But Haupt was past consoling. "You are motherfuckers. Stupid motherfuckers." Slamming the tabletop, he gathered his things and stormed out.

"Nico is so emotional," said one activist, returning to her plate of pierogi.

11. 250 Greenwich Street
After dinner, I stopped at ground zero. Before the towers were built, my father took me here when the area was called Radio Row and sold tubes cheap. After 9/11, I spent many nights watching the great plume of water, shining in the vapor lamps, raining onto the smoking pit.

Now I was in front of the replacement for 7 WTC, Silverstein's $700 million baby, a nifty parallelogram with a stainless-steel finish like a Viking stove in a Soho loft. According to the Web brochure, 7 WTC collapsed "probably" as a result of "the ignition of Con Edison diesel stored in the base." To "avoid this hazard in the new building, the diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened Greenwich Street."

Another change is the offering of an alternative address, 250 Greenwich Street. Apparently, Silverstein felt this would play better in "the trendy Tribeca neighborhood." Call it real-estate MIHOP.

When the new 7 WTC opens, N.Y. 9/11 Truth plans a demonstration here. Now, however, it being late Sunday night, the place looked like a neutron-bomb landscape, lights on in the finished lobby, gleaming card-reading security gates in place, but no sign of humanity anywhere.

A giant LCD screen scrolled various alphabetical fonts, one after another. It was numbing watching this, thinking that time was moving on, new fortunes would be made here, and like 11/22, it would never be known who did what on 9/11.

A cop car pulled up. They wanted me to move on. Cops always want you to move on. Not that I was in any hurry. Larry Silverstein didn't own the sidewalk. I had as much right to the disaster as anyone.

Then I remembered one more factoid. David Cohen, who headed the CIA office at 7 WTC on September 11, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly as deputy commissioner of Intelligence. It was Cohen who instituted the subway bag search, one more chimera of security in the post-9/11 world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I moved on. Can't trust anyone nowadays.

Mossad Did It
A common theory, especially in the Arab world, holds that Israel orchestrated the attacks in order to bring the U.S. into conflict with Israel's enemies. Evidence cited ranges from the arly spurious and deeply anti-Semitic (the oft-heard, oft-refuted canard that Jews were told to leave the towers before the attacks) to the apparently true but unexplainable. (Five men who were seen filming the attacks in Liberty Park were later apprehended and found by the Forward to have ties to Mossad.)

Oilmen Did It
A theory based on the idea that worldwide oil production, having reached its peak, is beginning a long decline, leading to surging energy prices and global economic collapse. The 9/11 attacks, goes this scenario, were orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, and their friends in the oil industry and government, in order to begin a process that would secure further reserves in Iraq and increase the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.

Bush and Cheney Did it
The most basic of conspiracy theories. Bush and Cheney orchestrated the attacks, for much the same reason Roosevelt was sometimes said to have orchestrated Pearl Harbor: in order to begin the conflict that would allow them to realize their global ambitions.

The New World Order Did It
After winning a long struggle against the old Kissingerian pragmatists and balance-of-power devotees, neocon idealists centered at the Council on Foreign Relations initiated the conflict in order to establish the United States as the sole global power.

A Rogue Network Did It
A secret government used Bush and Cheney as patsies in carrying out the attacks. Bush was kept on the run in Air Force One (code-named "Angel") by an anonymous call saying, "Angel is next." Bin Laden and his henchmen were CIA plants and double agents. Britain's MI6 intelligence service was involved. The towers were blown up from inside, by teams of secret government assassins. Even Bush and Cheney are in the dark about why the attacks took place.

Shrinks Did It
Scientologists believe that psychiatry (through a mechanism that remains murky) helped give birth to the suicide attackers "through drugs and psycho-political methods."