"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales replied.

Later, at the White House, spokesman Tony Snow said the eavesdropping program is reviewed every 45 days by senior officials, including Gonzales. The president did not consider the Justice unit that functions as a legal ethics watchdog to be the "proper venue," Snow said.

"What he was saying is that in the case of a highly classified program, you need to keep the number of people exposed to it tight for reasons of national security, and that's what he did," Snow said.

Yet, according to OPR chief Marshall Jarrett, "a large team" of prosecutors and FBI agents were granted security clearances to pursue an investigation into leaks of information that resulted in the program's disclosure in December. Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine and two of his aides were among other department officials who were granted clearances, Jarrett said in an April memo explaining the end of his probe. That memo was released by the Justice Department Tuesday.

The existence of the eavesdropping program outraged Democrats, civil libertarians and even some Republicans who said Bush overstepped his authority.

A group of 13 prominent legal experts wrote lawmakers last week that the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down military commissions for detainees at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba "strongly supports the conclusion that the president's NSA surveillance program is illegal."

Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., who requested the Justice Department investigation, said he and other lawmakers were preparing a letter to Bush asking him to allow the probe to go forward. "We can't have a president acting in a dictatorial fashion," Hinchey said.

Gonzales insisted Tuesday that the president "has the inherent authority under the Constitution to engage in electronic surveillance without a warrant."

Still last week, under a deal with Specter, Bush agreed conditionally to a court review of the warrantless eavesdropping operations.

Bush's 2001 directive authorized the National Security Agency to monitor - without court warrants - the international communications of people on U.S. soil when terrorism is suspected. The administration initially resisted efforts to write a new law, contending that no legal changes were needed. But after months of pressure, officials have grown more open to legislation.

Under the deal with Specter, the president agreed to support a bill that could submit the program to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a constitutional review.

Last week, Gonzales said the bill gives Bush the option of submitting the NSA program to the intelligence court, rather than requiring the review. Specter said Tuesday Bush assured him he will seek the court review if the legislation passes without significant amendment.

Critics of the legislation have called it a fig leaf that would give congressional blessing to a legally suspect program. "The so-called compromise reached by Senator Specter and the White House does nothing to establish a check over the administration's warrantless surveillance program," said Bruce Fein, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration.

On May 9th, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) announced it could not pursue an investigation into the role of Justice lawyers in crafting the warrantless wiretapping program. In a letter to New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey --the most dogged Congressional advocate for investigation of the spying program --H. Marshall Jarrett, OPR's Counsel, explained that he had closed Justice's probe because his office's requests for security clearances to conduct it had been denied.

"I am writing to inform you that we have been unable to make the meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," Jarrett explained in his reply to Hinchey. "Beginning in January 2006, this Office made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. On May 9, 2006, we were informed that our requests had been denied. Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

Who denied the requests? Who obstructed justice?

It turns out - according to Bush's very own Attorney General Alberto Gonzales - it was the President. Under sharp questioning this morning by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Arlen Specter, Gonzales said that Bush would not grant the access required to allow the probe to move forward.

Hinchey, and others like Representatives John Lewis, Henry Waxman and Lynn Woolsey, who originally requested the probe should demand that Gonzales and his Department reopen the investigation. And they should also demand that
President Bush explain why he obstructed a vital probe.

As Hinchey said at the time the probe was blocked, "The Bush Administration cannot simply create a Big Brother program and then refuse to answer any questions on how it came about and what it entails. We are not asking for top secret information." What becomes clearer with every revelation about this President's lawlessness is that Bush's arrogance and abuse of power must be checked.

Video clips of the remark were available on the Internet soon after that, but broadcast industry executives and attorneys said in an interview that airing the remark would put them at risk of Federal Communications Commission sanctions.

"I guess the FCC has performed a new feat by forcing broadcasters to censor the leader of the free world," one executive quipped.

Under rules adopted by the commission in 2004, the use of variations of the word "f---" or "s---" -- no matter how they are used -- can get broadcasters fined, even if it's a slip of the tongue.

"With the current single-expletive ruling, anything is fair game," one industry attorney said. "While they agree that context is all important, we'd only know after the fact because they can't issue advisory rulings."

Under commission decisions and court rulings, material is indecent if it "in context, depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Indecent speech can be aired safely between 10 p.m.-6 a.m. Under a new law signed by Bush this year, broadcasters face fines of up to $325,000 per incident.

Those rules do not apply to cable TV or Internet clips, even if those clips are provided by a broadcast outlet.

Bush's incident points out the problems the commission's rulings can cause. Does it decide that a slip by the president is OK, but a slip by a candidate for office is not?

"If it were coverage of a Democrat, it's probably indecent," one attorney said. "But if it's (Vice President Dick) Cheney telling (Sen. Patrick) Leahy (D-Vt.) to go f--- himself (on the Senate floor in 2004) or Bush saying they've got to stop this s---, then in context, it's probably OK."

Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared: "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as "knowable, teachable and testable."

Florida's lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of U.S. history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on "the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy"), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that "factual" and "constructed" are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That's the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.

For example, it's a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That's interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.

It's also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one's answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region's crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?

Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 presidential election, Florida's Republican secretary of state removed 57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons and not eligible to vote. It's a fact that at least 90 percent were not criminals -- but were African American. It's a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and why that happened?

In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much Florida's elected representatives might resist the notion. The real question is: How effectively can one defend one's construction? If Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend it.

One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: "We can't control what the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren't exposed to such nonsense."

The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is "Stalinist," a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that's what I learned in history class.

People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States.

But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in world history, we can't completely dictate the shape of the world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the scope of one's inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.

Is history "knowable, teachable and testable"? Certainly people can work hard to know -- to develop interpretations of processes and events in history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about those views. And students can be tested on their understanding of conflicting constructions of history.

But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

The Energy Department planned to announce the schedule at a congressional hearing Wednesday but shared it with congressional offices Tuesday. Several of them made it public.

Under the schedule, the department would submit its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on June 30, 2008, get authorization to begin construction on Sept. 30, 2011, complete construction on March 30, 2016 and begin accepting nuclear waste on March 31, 2017.

The dates correspond to general goals department officials have shared recently with lawmakers.

"Our work will continue to be based on sound science .... The program now has reachable, definable target dates that will allow us to open Yucca Mountain as the nation's repository for spent nuclear fuel," Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said in a statement.

"This is an ambitious schedule, but it's nice to actually see a schedule. This is the most detailed schedule on Yucca Mountain that I have seen in recent memory," said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

But Domenici, who last month released a proposal for interim nuclear waste storage at federal sites across the country, said his plan still would be needed because the government is years past its 1998 deadline to begin accepting spent fuel from nuclear reactors.

Yucca Mountain is planned as the first national repository for nuclear waste and is meant to hold at least 77,000 tons of the material for thousands of years. The dump site is in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The project has been delayed repeatedly by lawsuits, funding shortfalls, evidence that government scientists flouted quality control standards - requiring their work to be redone - and other problems.

Currently there are more than 50,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste waiting at nuclear power plants in 31 states. The government is obligated by contract to take the waste off the utilities' hands but has not done so because it has no place to put it.

"This timetable is a rosy scenario painted to please those desperate to see Yucca Mountain open for business," said Rep. Shelley Berkley (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., who along with the rest of Nevada's congressional delegation strongly opposes the dump. "The proposed nuclear garbage dump at Yucca Mountain still faces serious obstacles before it can be licensed, including additional legal challenges from the state of Nevada."