And yet this ageing unkempt figure exudes a timeless cool, a languorous, dishevelled grace that only those who truly don't give a hoot what the world thinks of them exude. Despite what style magazines might tell you, it is a look that cannot be bought or styled. It takes a lifetime of not caring to perfect, and if you were to ask Neil Young about it he would look at you like you were mad, and maybe fix you with that gimlet stare of his that has chilled many an interviewer's soul.

'People were always afraid of Neil,' his long-time manager Elliot Roberts once remarked when asked about his charge's legendary hair-trigger temperament, 'but he was actually very frail. He sort of glared at people and they'd freeze. He was so intense, nothing was casual.'

The glint in his eye is still there but today, at least, it seems more mischievous than malevolent. And Neil Young, though he has had a recent brush with mortality, no longer appears frail, but robust and hearty. When he finally ambles into the back room of the studio he seems relaxed and affable, and, despite his longstanding aversion to interviews, comes across initially as shy rather than wary.

'I'm doin' good,' he says, grinning, when I tell him how well he looks. Last year he underwent brain surgery to remove an aneurism that had gone undetected for years, and there were some unspecified post-operative complications he is loth to talk about. 'I've come though, and I feel kind of blessed.'

There is no evidence to suggest that this recent illness has made him ease up on his relentless work schedule. If anything, the opposite is the case. He recently released Living With War, hismost controversial album to date. It signals another major change of direction, both musically and politically, the abrasive sound matched by lyrics that pull no punches in their anti-war, anti-Bush message. 'Let's impeach the President for lyin'.' runs one song, 'and misleading our country into war/Abusing all the power that we gave him,/And shipping all our money out the door.'

He cut the album in a couple of weeks and initially released it on the internet. It followed close on the heels of last year's wistful and reflective Prairie Wind, several songs of which were written and recorded in the fortnight between the diagnosis and the removal of his aneurism. 'I had to wait a few weeks because the doctor wasn't available to do the operation,' he says matter of factly, 'so I just headed up to Nashville and started working.'

Last year, too, he played a pair of intimate shows in Nashville which form the core of new concert film, Heart of Gold, directed by his friend Jonathan Demme and due for release here in August. There is also a late summer stadium tour scheduled where he will once again be reunited with the equally grizzled Crosby, Stills & Nash with whom he has conducted a fitful and often fraught working relationship. 'When we were younger we fought like brothers,' he says, 'but we've got some history on that now.' One wonders, though, what's in it for him; as a rueful David Crosby once remarked, 'Neil needs the three of us like a stag needs a hat rack.'

In the meantime, in this very studio, he is overseeing the final stages of an exhaustive - and, among fans, semi-mythical - archival project which will culminate in the release of a series of CDs of unreleased material spanning his 40-year career. 'I've be en real busy this year, even by my standards,' he laughs. 'I kind of picked up a head of steam back there after the illness, and I just went with it. Plus,' he says, without a discernible trace of irony, 'I reckon I'm finally getting pretty good at what I do.'

What can you say to that? I just grin back at him and shake my head. If truth be told I'm feeling slightly nervous-going-on-starstruck in his presence. Journalistic objectivity be damned, I'm just grateful to be meeting the great man. We go back a long way, Neil and me, back to my teenage years in the early to mid-Seventies when his songs as well as his high prairie voice and his brooding outsider persona held me in their sway like nothing since.

For a long time back there, like many closet romantics, I was mesmerised by the very notion of Neil Young, and by the promise his songs carried of another altogether more gilded life among the impossibly bohemian denizens of America's fabled West Coast. A life lived in thrall to the highway and the desert and spent in the blissful company of all those dreamy sunkissed Laurel Canyon ladies. A life where you simply hung out and got high and wrote song after song about the heartbreak and despair of unrequited love. What could be finer?

Back then, in the grey, rain-drenched dreariness of small-town Northern Ireland, I listened to Neil Young's albums incessantly, poring over the sleeves, the credits, the lyrics. I even had my mother sew patches of an old rug on the backside of my Wranglers in homage to that photograph of Neil's jeans on the back of After the Goldrush. He was the brooding West Coast-rock troubadour par excellence. And wherever Neil went I journeyed with him, even along the druggy, desolate back roads he travelled on the ragged masterpiece that was Tonight's the Night, even across the remote, whacked-out terrain he was stranded in on On the Beach

Not even the great punk purge of the late Seventies, which consigned most of his complacent contemporaries to the dustbin of musical history, could shake my faith in the man or his music. I stuck by Neil and he responded accordingly, releasing the magnificently twisted Rust Never Sleeps, the album that bequeathed us his most infamous and oft-quoted line: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away'. Fifteen years later that same line would come back to haunt him when the dismal Kurt Cobain, much to Young's dismay, scrawled it on his suicide note.

But to everyone's surprise, including his own, Young neither burnt out nor faded away. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, it seemed like the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keeping on. It's been quite a journey. Or, as Elliot Roberts once put it: 'It's not like the art is separate from the life, it's one and the same with Neil.' Only Dylan, indeed, has walked that line with the same kind of devil-may-care determination and utter disregard for the vagaries of musical taste. Only Dylan walks on to a stage trailing such a mythology, such a surfeit of startling songs, such a devoted to-the-point-of- obsessive following. Put simply, Neil Young is one of the last great maverick geniuses of rock, and bone fide living legend to boot. Not that he gives a hoot about that either.

'It's strange but I now have the kind of fame that comes with just being around so long,' he says. 'I have all the people who have been with me for a long time, and know my work, and have made the journey with me. But I also have all these other people who know who Neil Young is but don't really know shit about me. It all gets kind of strange sometimes.'

We are gathered here ostensibly to talk about his latest album, Living With War, a bunch of what he calls 'rough and ready, simple, straight-ahead folk songs about the war in Iraq'. In typically perverse fashion he has set those songs to storming electric guitar riffs and employed a 100-piece choir to ram home the anti-Bush message. The whole album, he tells me proudly, was recorded 'live and fast and with no overdubs'. The most catchy, and controversial, song is called 'Let's Impeach the President', which I can't imagine has received much mainstream radio play in America.

'More than you'd think, actually,' he says, eyes glinting. 'Which surprised me, too. A big part of what this record is about is just getting the information out there that Americans have a conscience about what's happening, too. There's a lot of people in America who didn't want this war to happen, who just want to be able to express themselves about this situation, but for various reasons they are not being heard. In a way this record is not for me, it's for them.'

Why, though, did he make a 'metal-folk' record that's heavier on the metal than the folk - and then bring a choir on board? 'Well I just went with my instincts as always. I was trying for a sound that really resonates so that's why the choir's on there. I wanted something so utterly simple and unarranged that people could sing along with it and play along with it, just like those old stirring folk songs. So when we play them live, anyone can get on board. There's no arrangements to learn, no fancy harmonies. It's stripped-down folk really, but I wanted it to sound angry and agitated and raw, too. My voice, and what I think as an individual, is much less important on this project. It's the project itself that's the important thing. It's about making yourself heard.'

Living With War is indeed an angry record but one that manages to sound somehow patriotic, too. Young says he waited a long time to make it because he was hoping that 'maybe a younger artist would stand up and write these kinds of songs'. That never happened, or at least not in the high-profile way he thought it would. 'For a while, you know, I didn't feel it was my place. Being 60 years old, and being who I am, it just didn't feel appropriate,' he continues, getting into his stride. 'Plus, after 9/11, we were told by the government that expressing dissent was not patriotic. I mean, I trusted the government back then. I was one of those guys who thought the Patriot Act was an OK idea when it first came out. I got behind it.' He shakes his head at his own folly. What, I ask, changed his mind? 'Bush did. The government did. We need a leader who's more cautious, not so reckless with things they don't understand. Other cultures need to be respected. Culture itself needs to be respected. I mean, I feel Saddam was bad and had to be overthrown, but are we smart or are we stupid? At this point in our evolution, with all the technology that we have, there has to be a better way of doing this than bombing a country into oblivion.'

I read somewhere that the anger that underpins Living With War was precipitated by a newspaper article he had read about Iraq. 'Well, it was a picture on the cover of USA Today actually. A cargo plane full of soldiers who we re doctors ready to take off for Iraq. The story was about how medicine had made such leaps and bounds in this war, how doctors had learned so much from this conflict. Man, that was just too much for me. Are you really trying to tell me that the positive side of the war is the medical experience gained from all those wasted people. There's really something wrong with that picture.'

It has to be said that Young himself is a complicated political creature and his allegiances have often been decided with the same kind of impulsiveness that underpins many of his artistic decisions. (This is a guy, after all, who plots his creative course according to the lunar cycle, scheduling recording dates and even live shows to coincide with the full moon.) In the late Sixties, when Nixon was in office, he wrote one of the great American protest songs, the tense and accusatory 'Ohio', a visceral response to the shooting dead of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University. In the Eighties though, when he hit one of his more sustained fallow periods - releasing a series of albums that prompted his label boss and former friend David Geffen to sue him for making wilfully uncommercial music - he briefly came out publicly for President Reagan. It was a move that would have terminally scuppered the credibility of many a lesser artist.

More recently too, just after 9/11, he recorded the bullish 'Let's Roll', the kind of song you could imagine a fired-up fighter squadron listening to before they took off for Iraq. Consistency has never been one of Neil Young's characteristics, in his life or his art, but one senses that, following his illness and the recent death of his father, he finally has adopted a more centred - even, dare I say it, less contrary - world view.

'We need to discuss this stuff, you know, just address it in public,' he says, sounding impassioned but focused, when I press him on his anti-Bush stance. 'There's been too much silence, too much phoney news. That's why I have put the Living With War videos on my website with all the news info running through them. Let's debate. Let's discuss. It's an open sore on this country, this war, and you can't just put a band-aid on it. You gotta lance it, and drain it, and let it heal. Might take a while but what's the alternative?'

Young, whose faith in the internet as a 'tool for getting the truth out there' is almost total, has even created a link on his website called 'The Great Debate' where fans and critics alike can express their feelings. 'There's been a lot of viciously negative reviews and we've stuck them on there too,' he grins, ever the iconoclast. 'It's not the Sixties any more, it's not about rock'n'roll, it's a different world now. It's about the things people feel and fear today, and those feelings and fears need - and have a right - to be expressed too.'

Almost four decades have passed since the frail and shy 20-year old Neil Young drove another big, black, vintage car - a '53 Pontiac hearse, to be exact - all the way from his hometown, Ontario, to the promised land of Los Angeles. Four decades since he and his sidekick, the late Bruce Palmer, met up with Stephen Stills on Sunset Boulevard and formed Buffalo Springfield, the most promising - and in many ways most disappointing - West Coast rock group of the Sixties. The restlessness that precipitated that epic journey from Canada to California, an acoustic guitar and a bag of grass for company, has remained a constant in his life and is perhaps the key aspect of Young's extraordinary and often wilfully impulsive creative odyssey.

'I guess it's pretty constant, yeah,' he nods. 'I don't like to stay. Got to move on. Even when I'm writing songs I need to up and move, even if it's only down the block. Soon as you change the scenery something happens, and the words start coming. Anything but staying in the same place. That ain't ever worked for me.'

Where does he think that restlessness comes from? 'Growing up, I guess. Up in Canada we were always going to different places - down to Florida in the wintertime, back up to Ontario in the summer. As a kid I grew up with that sense of movement, the highway, the prairie rolling by. My dad was a writer and he liked to keep moving, too.'

His father, Scott Young, died last year, aged 87, and his spirit hovers over many of the more reflective songs on Prairie Wind. By all reports, Scott was a bit of a maverick himself. He worked as a sports writer of some repute in his native Canada and once moonlighted to write an illuminating book, Neil & Me, about the often troubled relationship he had with his more famous son. Neil Spencer, former editor of NME and now an Observer writer, remembers Scott turning up at the NME offices to trawl though the back issues while researching the book. 'He was quite a dashing figure, tall, handsome, well-dressed, extremely charming. He stayed all afternoon and you could see he was very rigorous and thorough. He chatted easily about Neil. I remember him saying he was "real proud" of him.'

The father-son relationship, though, was for a long time a troubled and fractious one. Scott Young was another itinerant soul, who had upped and left the family home when Neil was 15, leaving both his young sons in the care of their mother. According to Young's biographer, Jimmy McDonough, the indomitable 'Rassy' Ragland Young was a hard drinker who, until her deathbed, never forgave her errant husband for his betrayal.

Neil Young's life has also been mapped out by impulsive relationships with strong women. He married his first wife, Susan Acevedo, in 1968, and divorced her just as swiftly in 1970. That same year he moved in with Carrie Snodgrass, an actress he first saw and fell for while watching the film Diary of A Mad Housewife. She was later immortalised on the baroque ballad 'A Man Needs A Maid', on which he sang, 'I fell in love with the actress/ She was playing a part that I knew so well'.

Though he made some of his finest music in the Seventies, the decade was also marked by a series of personal tragedies. In 1972 his first son, Zeke, was born, and soon after diagnosed with cerebral palsy. That same year Young lost his guitarist and close friend 27-year-old Danny Whitten, and his favourite roadie, Bruce Berry, to drug overdoses. Then, six years later, having married his current wife, Pegi, Young's second son, Ben, was born with an even more severe form of cerebral palsy.

'It took time to get used to the fact that it wasn't one but two,' Young told Time magazine in 2005, one of the few times he has publicly commented on this appalling twist of fate. 'Eventually Pegi and I just came to the understanding that we had been chosen, and this was one of the things we were going to do with our life, turning this situation into something positive for all kinds of kids.'

To this end Young and Pegi, his wife of 28 years, founded the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California in 1986, which specialises in providing communication through technology for non-verbal, physically challenged children. Each year Young hosts and headlines a concert there and has cajoled the likes of Paul Simon, Tom Petty and Pearl Jam to appear.

Ben, now 28, quadraplegic and unable to speak often accompanies his father on tour in a coach that Young has fitted with a hydraulic lift. The singer's obsession with model trains - he is part-owner of Lionel, the model train company - is also bound up with Ben's condition. Young has developed a command and control system that allows his son to operate the vast model train track he has installed in the converted barn near his home. For the last 36 years Young has lived on that same sprawling ranch near San Francisco that he bought with the royalties of the first CSNY album, Deja Vu, and christened 'Broken Arrow' after one of his early songs. (His third child, Amber, aged 22, is studying fine art.)

'The ranch has given me root,' he says, 'and I have family now. Things tend to be a bit more planned these days. Didn't use to be, though.' He shakes his head and laughs. 'I used to just up and go where I wanted to, never tell anybody.'

I put it to Young that the family is now a recurring motif in his later work, just as the notion of movement and restlessness was on his earlier albums. 'Oh yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that. The whole underlying story on Living With War is the bond of the family, and the effect that living with war has on families, not just in Iraq but here in America. I mean, the news doesn't focus too much on the bodies of the kids that come home. That's the part that's heartbreaking to me. I'm a family man to the core.'

How, though, has he managed to balance his family commitments with the nomadic life of the rock musician? 'Well I try and take my family on the road with me. You have to commit to the family and the work, give them both the respect and the attention they deserve. With me, I have to go with the work when it takes me. I can wait around for the songs to come but I got to go with them when they do. My wife, Pegi, she's just a great woman, and it's worked largely because she's been so understanding of that. She's intelligent and she's a hell of a lot of fun. You got to have that stimulation in a relationship,' he says, grinning like a big, goofy kid, 'I got a lot of work to do just to keep up with her.'

I ask Young if his recent brush with mortality has affected the way he writes songs. 'That's a hard question to answer,' he says, staring off into the corner. 'I mean, when it comes to songwriting I tend not to analyse it too much. I just let if flow out from the subconscious, unedited. I figure if you don't question it too much you keep it pure. I don't analyse and I don't question, and I don't do too much editing.'

So he doesn't get hung up on mistakes? 'Hell, no. If I did I'd still be working on my first project. I can't afford the time. I'd rather do something new than try to fix something I already did. I got to move on. It's always the next thing with me. Always.'

What would he do if the muse suddenly forsook him, if the songs dried up? 'Shit! Who knows? I mean, I'm not threatened by the thought of not having an idea. It's happened before and I just waited it out. I just look at it that the Great Spirit has given me a break. I'd think, time to go sailing! Time to go swimming! Time to go to Hawaii and look at some fish! Man, there's so many other things to do.'

He thinks this over for a long while, looking around this overcrowded room at all the various fragments from his archives, the old tour schedules, the track listings, the photographs of his younger self, the CDs full of old familiar songs, and new songs and live songs. All the map reference points from his restless, song-strewn life. Then he says, 'what I do, it's all about energy. Always. But the energy comes from knowing when to hit it. I don't do it because it's on the schedule. It's not about a schedule. It's not about writing songs that are going to be accepted, or songs that are going to make a lot of money. None of those reasons are good enough anymore. You've got to have a valid reason if you want to make the kind of music I play. You really have to want to make music, and have something to say. That's what I'm committed to.'

Still restless then, and still searching, even at 60 Neil Young remains a law unto himself. Long may he run.

In his words

On his father It was from him I got the idea you could be whoever you want to be, just make up a character.

On Kurt Cobain's suicide I read something and someone told me a few things that made me think he was in trouble that week. I even had my office look for him.

On Iraq To be rid of Saddam was good for the Iraqi people. But the manner in which it took place,maybe there was a better way to do it. Our leaders lost patience.

On Bush Bush has polarised the country, creating a breeding ground for opposition.

On Buffalo Springfield If we reformed we'd be like a statue or something. A monument with birds shitting on our heads. That wouldn't be right.

Drumheller was stunned, the newspaper reported.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," it quoted the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, as saying. "But I turn on the television and there it was, again."

The newspaper said that although the US government had "acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war", new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on "one of the most spectacular failures of all".

This was, it added: "How US intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found."

Drumheller "described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech," The Post said.

Yet "the warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said," it added.

"In briefing Powell before his UN speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing.

"Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else," the Post said.

In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats, the newspaper went on.

"Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service," the Post said.

"The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment," Drumheller recalled.

"'He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,'" Drumheller was quoted as saying, declining to name the official.

"He said: 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.'"

Although "no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications," the Post said.

"We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous," King told the Associated Press.

King said he would write U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging him to begin a prosecution.

While the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times also ran stories about the program, King is targeting the New York Times because the paper in December also disclosed a secret domestic wiretapping program.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a letter on the newspaper's website Sunday that the decision to publish came after weeks of discussion with administration officials and that the paper didn't feel the program would be jeopardized.

The Times' editors, Keller wrote, "remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Earlier this month, King seized on the anti-terrorism arrests of 17 men in an alleged bomb threat in the Toronto area to raise concern of the possibility of an attack in the U.S. spawned in Canada.

"Americans should be very concerned," King said at the time. "Canada is our northern neighbour and there is a large al-Qaeda presence in Canada.

"I think there is a disproportionate number of al-Qaeda in Canada because of their very liberal immigration laws, because of how political asylum is granted so easily."

King is one of several politicians to seize on the revelations reported last week.

It was revealed that since late 2001 the CIA and the U.S. Treasury Department examined financial records from an international banking co-operative known as Swift (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).

Swift captures information on millions of wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the country each day.

The service generally does not detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ABM or bank deposits.

Democrats and civil libertarians have questioned whether the program violated privacy rights.

The United States notified Japan about the deployment plan on June 17 at a meeting in Hawaii about missile defense. Japan plans to accept the deployment arrangement in principle, according to the sources.

The missiles, with an effective protective range of tens of kilometers, will complement the Standard Missile 3 missiles installed on Aegis-equipped ships.

Some additional 500 to 600 U.S. troops are expected to be deployed along with three or four PAC-3 missile batteries, the paper said.

Japan's Self-Defense Forces will also deploy PAC-3 missiles at Iruma Air Base in Saitama prefecture by the end of fiscal 2006, and at Kasuga Base in Fukuoka, Gifu Base and Hamamatsu Base in Shizuoka prefecture by fiscal 2010.

The song is gruesome, to be sure, and CAIR complained that it celebrated the killing of Iraqi civilians. The video shows Belile performing the song before a laughing, applauding audience of fellow soldiers at their base in Iraq. Recognizing that the song could only bring bad publicity, U.S. military officials promptly issued a statement saying that it was "clearly inappropriate and contrary to the high standards expected of all Marines." Belile also apologized, saying the song was intended as "a joke" and that he didn't intend to offend anyone. Pro-war pundits, however, actually rallied to the song's defense. The conservative Little Green Footballs weblog thought news reports about the video controversy were the "mainstream media disgrace of the month." There's nothing wrong with the song, the Footballs said, because it doesn't actually describe a soldier killing civilians: "the people who kill the 'little sister' in this darkly humorous song are -- not the Marines -- but her father and brother, as they attempt to perpetrate an ambush." Some of the comments on LGF even called it "a wonderful song," and attacked the "nutless Pentagon star-chasing bastards" for their "capitulation." Here are some of the other comments about the song, from Little Green Footballs and elsewhere:

* "Damn it, we are in a fucking war! Nobody whined about 'insensitivity' to the fucking Japs and Jerries."

* "I expect more from the Pentagon. The State Dept & the CIA are just a bunch of cucumber sandwich eating fools. The Pentagon USED to be about waging war on our enemies. Now they just want to kiss up to them."

* "I'm Proud of my fellow Marines in that video. That is EXACTLY the espirit de corps needed, the HIGH MORALE needed in the middle of a combat zone where those self-same jihadists are trying to kill those Marines every single day.

* "Insensitive? Marines insensitive? God I hope so. We need them to kick ass and follow orders but we don't need them to be particularly sensitive. A sensitive Marine Corps will be the death of this country."

* "One of the things CAIR didn't like was the phrase 'Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad, Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah' which makes fun of the Arab language. To hell with CAIR and to hell with the Arab language. ... And the Islamist pigs can keep going to hell."

As these comments illustrate, defense for the song quickly turns into traditional conservative anger at what they see as censorious "political correctness." They have a right, they insist, to be insensitive and hostile to Arabs and Muslims. I would argue, in fact, that this cultural xenophobia is the main theme of the song and that the violence in it is a secondary byproduct.

Let's start with the title, "Hadji Girl." The term "hadji" (also sometimes spelled "haji" or "hajji") is the Arabic word for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it has become a common slang term used to describe the locals. According to a dictionary of war slang compiled by GlobalSecurity.org, the term is "used by the American military for an Iraqi, anyone of Arab decent, or even of a brownish skin tone, be they Afghanis, or even Bangladeshis" and is also "the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy." Related terms include "haji mart" (a small store operated by Iraqis) or "haji patrol" (Iraqi soldiers).

The term seems to have come into usage even before the war began in Iraq. Its use was noted following a U.S. military investigation into the 2002 murder of two prisoners at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan, by some of the the same soldiers who later oversaw abuses at Abu Ghraib. ''We were pretty much told that they were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants,'' said one of the soldiers at Bagram. ''I think that giving them the distinction of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them. A lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important.''

One of the prisoners beaten to death at Bagram was an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar whose only offense was that he happened to drive his taxi past the American base at the wrong time. According to Corey E. Jones, one of the MPs who guarded him, the beatings intensified when "He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god. Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny. ... It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah.' It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

The term "haji" is not simply an ethnic slur, like "gook," "jap," "jerry" or "nigger." All ethnic slurs entail hostile stereotypes, but "haji" is a specifically religious stereotype based on hostility toward Muslims. In our 2003 book, Weapons of Mass Deception, John Stauber and I described the efforts that the Bush administration has undertaken to rebrand America in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects including Radio Sawa, Al Hurra, a "Shared Values" campaign, and the Council of American Muslims for Understanding. Through glossy brochures, TV advertisements and websites, the United States has sought to depict America as a nation of religious tolerance that respects and appreciates Islam. These words, however, are constantly being undermined by the actual deeds and attitudes of the Bush administration's most ardent supporters, including soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the White House has tried to frame the war in Iraq as a "war on terror," its own supporters keep reframing it as a war against Islam. This is a serious, if not fatal error. Rather than fighting a few thousand actual terrorists, the United States is positioning itself in opposition to one of the world's major religions, with more than a billion adherents worldwide.

Culture shock and awe

"Hadji Girl" also refers to another aspect of soldiers' experiences in Iraq: the language barrier that prevents them from communicating effectively. The refrain, "Dirka dirka Mohammed Jihad / Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah," is borrowed from the movie "Team America: World Police." According to filmmaker Matt Stone, the the phrase is not real Arabic but a parody of "Arabic gibberish which they just go, you know, 'Dirka-dirka, Muhammad, Muhammad Ali.' ... And that, to me, is what terrorists sound like when I look at their little tapes that they release." This inability to comprehend the local language contributes to the soldiers' inability to distinguish between friend or foe, forcing them to suspect that anyone -- including the beautiful girl you just met, or her family -- might be a terrorist.

These facts began to shape the relationship between U.S. soldiers and Iraqis early in the war, as Associated Press reporter Andrew England noted in September 2003:

Young American soldiers -- many carrying out operations they have little training for -- find themselves in a hostile environment, unable to speak the local language or distinguish "the good guys from the bad guys."

Most just want to survive and return home. Some have grown to despise Iraqis, whom they call "Hajis," scowling rather than waving as they pass locals along highways and dirt roads. ... "I hate the Hajis. All of them are liars. They injured one of my soldiers," said one.

"You don't want to know what I think about them, they shot at me one too many times," said another.

It is worth noting that one of the few conscientious objectors who have actually served with the military in Iraq, Aidan Delgado, had a very different perspective of Iraqis because he did know how to speak the language:

It was tough for me to see brutality coming out of my own unit. I had lived in the Middle East. I had Egyptian friends. I spent nearly a decade in Cairo. I spoke Arabic, and I was versed in Arab culture and Islamic dress. Most of the guys in my unit were in complete culture shock most of the time. They saw the Iraqis as enemies. They lived in a state of fear. I found the Iraqis enormously friendly as a whole. One time I was walking through Nasiriyah with an armful of money, nadirs that were exchanged for dollars. I was able to walk 300 meters to my convoy -- a U.S. soldier walking alone with money. And I thought: I am safer here in Iraq than in the states. I never felt threatened from people in the South.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the casual brutality of "Hadji Girl" is coming from people who are simply evil or racist or cruel. The soldiers occupying Iraq are normal men and women who, in other circumstances, would never commit the abuses that have been documented in Bagram and Abu Ghraib and that are now alleged in Haditha. The situations in which this war has placed them -- far from home, surrounded by a foreign language and foreign culture, carrying guns and fearful for their lives -- have brought out behaviors that we would not see otherwise. If American soldiers and Iraqis could meet under different circumstances, things would be different. Here, for example, is how Iraqi blogger Salam Pax described his experience upon visiting the United States and having dinner with an American soldier:

You have no idea how strange it feels that we share so much in common. When I told him I would never actually approach an American soldier on the street in Baghdad, he told me that if we were in Baghdad he would probably be talking to me with his gun pointing at me because he would be scared shitless. Yet there we sat, drinking beers together.

America's cultural isolationism and prejudices are exposed by "Hadji Girl," but that's only part of the story. The war itself is encouraging these dark aspects of human nature, by bringing Americans and Iraqis together in an environment full of tension, fear, hatred and violence. And if the war itself is creating these evils, how can it hope to end them?

But Scalia has a point in implying that the case has little practical importance, since the protocol that police knock, identify themselves and then wait 15 or 20 seconds before entering, has gone the way of the 50-cent cup of coffee. It can still be found, but not often.

The Joe Friday approach to conducting a search has been replaced by Rambo in riot gear because years earlier the high court permitted the waiver of the "knock and announce" requirement - a rule grounded in our 4th Amendment privacy rights - in almost every circumstance. If there's a chance that evidence will be destroyed, such as the possibility of drugs being flushed down the toilet, or a potential for physical violence - police suspecting there is a gun in the home, for instance - the Supreme Court has said it is not necessary to give advanced notice of entry.

We now have plenty of experience with ''no-knock'' warrants, as they are called, and the trail of victims this terrorizing tactic has left behind. Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he has documented nearly 200 cases of ''wrong door'' raids occurring in the last 15 years, where the police broke into an innocent person's house. He says the correct figure is probably higher, but police and prosecutors don't generally bother keeping statistics on the operations they botch.

And when police come charging through the wrong door, they aren't dressed in a trench-coat and Dockers. These raids are typically conducted by militarized SWAT teams, outfitted for war. They are dressed in black masks and carry military-issue automatic weapons and other paramilitary gear, obtained gratis from the Pentagon. People who experienced such a raid must have felt like they were being attacked by an invading army. It isn't any wonder that, as in war, there is significant ''collateral damage.'' Balko has counted two dozen innocent people who died during one of these raids.

Some of the more notorious examples include the 1994 case of 75-year-old retired Methodist minister Accelyne Williams, who was reading a Bible in his living room when Boston police crashed through his door with sledge hammers. He died of a heart attack after being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed.

Similarly, in 2003, Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old employee of New York City, died after police battered her door in and threw a concussion grenade inside. The coroner ruled that Spruill's death was a homicide. She had been scared to death.

Sometimes, the victim gets shot because his natural reaction to an invasion by gun-toting masked men is to reach for a firearm himself.

Is this highly confrontational tactic really necessary to secure evidence or ensure police safety when serving drug warrants? Not in the least, Jack Cole says.

Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (http://www.leap.cc), an international drug-policy reform group made up of former drug warriors - police, prosecutors, wardens - who believe the U.S. War on Drugs has been a destructive failure. He is also a retired detective lieutenant and undercover narcotics investigator who spent 26 years with the New Jersey State Police.

According to Cole, ''too much violence is instigated by the police and it's just not necessary'' to do the job. Cole says a war metaphor has no place in domestic policing in a democratic society. When there is a war, there has to be an enemy, Cole says, and since 110 million people in this country above the age of 12 have admitted to having used an illegal drug, ''The enemy is us.''

Cole says that whenever he served a warrant, he was able to come up with some ruse to get an occupant to open the door without breaking it down or using violence. ''You just don't have to go in as a SWAT team,'' Cole says.

SWAT teams have proliferated not because they are needed but because police like to play soldier with relatively little of the battlefield risk; and they have been goosed along by a federal government that hands out surplus military implements like candy.

The only backstop to all this has been the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings establishing basic standards for police interactions with the public. But with the Hudson case, it is pretty clear there is a five-member majority for loosening whatever reins still exist. So, expect the ''war'' to get more bloody and its casualty list to get longer. Welcome to the Roberts court.

The attack was to have taken place before the second anniversary of Sept. 11 and involve the uncapping of jars of cyanide aboard subway trains whooshing through the tunnels, according to Ron Suskind in his new book "The One Percent Doctrine." Suskind also wrote the 2004 book "The Price of Loyalty" about the inner workings of the Bush administration, which, Suskind asserted, is among the most secretive in recent decades.

What were they thinking?

To avoid panic, the government decided not to reveal the plot. Which raises the question: What did the government think would happen in a cyanide attack: subway riders walking politely toward the nearest exit?

It's not critical of human nature to imagine terrified passengers pouring out of a stalled A train and stampeding over one another to get out to the street.

What do you do if you're the government?

Leonard A. Cole, a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark and author of "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas," thinks people should be informed so they can take precautions.

"And if that means no one's going to ride the subway, then close the subway," he says. "You give people information and let them make their own decisions."

Or do you keep it quiet and hope for the best? This way, at the moment cyanide is released, you witness panic and fear as they've rarely been seen before. Moreover, if you divulge news of the planned attack and scare daily riders off the trains, terrorists soon would understand they don't actually need to possess cyanide. They can just spread a rumor every so often. The disruption to people's lives and to business and commerce would be incalculable. If it works once, it probably would work again.

The New York Police Department knew about the 2003 threat and said nothing. The FBI isn't talking. The White House refuses to confirm or deny knowledge of it.

A 2003 attack wouldn't have been the first time the subway was targeted. Forty years ago it wasn't some snarling enemy but the U.S. Army that released what it described as harmless bacteria in the subways to check dispersion patterns. Cole, who has written extensively on that 1966 operation, said the alleged harmlessness has never been proved because the Army did no research and compiled no records about injuries or bacteria-related hospitalizations.

"The Army did say that if the material released had been smallpox, flu or anthrax, large numbers of passengers would have gotten sick and many would have died," Cole said.

Why was attack canceled?

The never-announced 2003 attack plan was canceled a mere 45 days before it was to have occurred by Ayman al-Zawahri -- Osama bin Laden's chief deputy. No one knows why. Or maybe someone does but just isn't saying. You never know.

So is it wise to announce such a cyanide threat?

Both arguments are compelling.

Living in the age of terror means the government can demand a man's Social Security number because he gets an item in the mail from Canada to make his grill easier to use and simultaneously can withhold information about plans for a chemical attack because discussing it might make people nervous.

Even if keeping news of a threat quiet is the right decision, there's still something wrong with this picture.