The Washington Post reported that the draft legislation had initially reaffirmed the 2001 Bush order that limited the jurisdiction of the military commissions to "alien enemy combatants." This language was crossed out, the newspaper said, and replaced by language giving the commissions authority to try anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," regardless of nationality.

When American John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, where he served as a member of the Taliban-controlled armed forces, he was not taken to Guantánamo because he was a US citizen. His case was tried in federal court, which provided him greater legal protections, ultimately making it necessary for the Bush administration to accept a plea bargain and a 20-year prison term rather than seek a death sentence. If the proposed draft legislation had been in effect, Lindh could have faced a military tribunal.

Other provisions in the draft legislation would permit the use of hearsay evidence, eliminate the right to a speedy trial (essentially sanctioning indefinite detention without a trial), and permit the use of classified evidence that would be provided to defendants only in summary form. Defendants and their civilian attorneys could be excluded from the proceedings at the discretion of the judge, with the prisoner represented only by a military attorney who, as a serving officer, must obey presidential authority.

Instead of a unanimous jury verdict, a two-thirds majority would suffice for conviction, and unanimity for the death penalty, which would have to be confirmed as well by the president. As in the current system, outlawed by the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, prisoners could be detained, even if acquitted, until "the cessation of hostilities." Given the Bush administration's expansive definition of the "war on terror," this means indefinitely.

According to language in the draft legislation quoted by the New York Times, the measure rejects a system based on courts martial as "not practicable in trying enemy combatants," in part because such proceedings would exclude "hearsay evidence determined to be probative and reliable."

Evidence obtained through torture would not be admissible, but this prohibition is largely gutted by a provision that military judges may accept testimony obtained through "coercive interrogation," a label which the Bush administration uses to describe methods, such as water-boarding, that the rest of the world regards as torture.

The bill was drafted without consulting with lawyers from the Judge Advocate-General (JAG) corps, because these career military prosecutors and judges have insisted on using the court martial system as a basis for trying prisoners, and on upholding the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to all prisoners captured by the US military. The JAGs, as well as the military defense lawyers who fought and won the Hamdan case, have warned that by carving out an exception to the Geneva Conventions, the US government would endanger American soldiers captured in current and future wars.

In addition to overturning Bush's 2001 order for military commissions, the Hamdan decision upheld the applicability of Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions to all prisoners captured by the US government, whether they are recognized as POWs or treated as "illegal combatants." Common Article Three bans "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" of detainees, a description that would apply to nearly every prisoner held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and secret CIA-run prisons elsewhere.

The legislation drafted by the White House would effectively override that element of the high court decision, by declaring that the Geneva Conventions "are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights." This means that individual prisoners would lose the right to file lawsuits against the violation of their rights, limiting such standing to governments. There are few governments that would risk a conflict with the Bush administration by filing a US court challenge on behalf of prisoners labeled as "terrorists."

Congressional approval of the bill in the specific form drafted by acting assistant attorney general Steven G. Bradbury is uncertain, but one key senator, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called it "a good start." Graham, himself a member of JAG corps in the reserves, said he supported the use of hearsay evidence and the exclusion of prisoners from their trials, so long as these actions were subject to appeal.

The draft legislation also seeks to forestall another anticipated consequence of the Hamdan decision: that US officials could face legal liability for war crimes charges because they authorized the violation of the Geneva Accords. Under the 1996 War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are crimes against the United States and the perpetrators can be subject to the death penalty if prisoners die as a result of their actions.

The 1996 law was drafted by a right-wing Republican and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress to pander to the POW-MIA (prisoner of war-missing in action) lobby in the US. It initially targeted Vietnamese government officials deemed responsible for the torture and death of American prisoners during the Vietnam War. By an irony of history, this law could now subject high Bush administration officials-Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others-to criminal sanctions for the deaths of prisoners held by the US government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

As the Washington Post summed up the matter in a front-page analysis published July 28, "An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in US courts." The newspaper reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has spoken privately to congressional leaders about the need for "protections" against such an eventuality.

The bill seeks to solve the problem by declaring that a law passed last year on humane treatment of US detainees-drafted by Senator John McCain and added to a military appropriations bill over White House opposition-would "fully satisfy" the requirements of Common Article Three.

The bill would also provide that the 1996 War Crimes Act applies only to violations of the Geneva Conventions as interpreted by the US government, not the international community, effectively gutting the conventions as an instrument of international law.

Given that the decision to prosecute rests with the US Department of Justice, headed by Bush crony Gonzales, there is no possibility that any Bush administration official will soon face charges for violation of the War Crimes Act. But the concern over their legal vulnerability is nonetheless real. The war criminals in the White House and Pentagon are well aware of the mass opposition to the war in Iraq, both internationally and increasingly in the United States, and they are looking nervously over their shoulders.

Camp 6, a state-of-the-art maximum-security jail built by a Halliburton subsidiary, will be able to hold 200 prisoners. Commander Robert Durand, a spokesman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said the $30m, two-storey block was due to open at the end of September. He added: "Camp 6 is designed to improve the quality of life for the detainees and provide greater protection for the people working in the facility."

This development will refuel the controversy about the jail, which still holds 450 prisoners from President George Bush's "war on terror". Campaigners pointed to Mr Bush's claim earlier this summer that he would "like to close" Guantanamo. Just weeks after he made his comments in June, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration's system for trying prisoners using military tribunals breached United States and international law.

At the time, some campaigners predicted the decision marked the beginning of the end of Guantanamo Bay. Since then, however, the Bush administration has signalled its intention to introduce new legislation that would circumvent the court's ruling. The revelation that Camp 6 is poised to open is proof that it intends to keep using the prison.

Amnesty International's UK campaigns director, Tim Hancock, said: "This appears to make a mockery of President Bush's statements about the need to close down Guantanamo Bay. In addition to strongly urging the President to step in to prevent any extension to this already notorious prison camp, we call on him to speed up the process of closing Guantanamo and of ensuring that all detainees are allowed fair trials or released to safe countries."

Zachary KatzNelson, senior counsel with the group Reprieve, which represents 36 Guantanamo prisoners, argued that public opinion and the courts would ultimately force the US to close the camp down. "If Bush had the choice, he would not shut it, and the men [held there] would never see the light of day, and neither would their stories come out," he said. "The reality is that the world knows too much. He has to shut it down."

The new facility is reported to be modelled on a jail in Lenawee County, Michigan. Commander Durand said Camp 6 will have better recreation and exercise amenities for detainees and integrated medical care. Other facilities at the US naval base on Cuba include Camps 1, 2, 3 and 5, which are maximum-security, single-cell blocks; Camp 4, which is a medium-security, communal living prison; and Camp Iguana, also medium security, which houses detainees cleared for release and awaiting transfer.

Of all the prisoners ever held at Guatanamo since it was established in January 2002, only 10 have been formally charged. An investigation earlier this year by New Jersey's Seton Hall University showed that, based on the military's own documents, 55 per cent of prisoners are not alleged to have committed any hostile acts against the US, and 40 per cent are not accused of affiliation with al-Qa'ida.

The same documents suggested only 8 per cent of prisoners are accused of fighting for a terrorist group, and that 86 per cent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani authorities "at a time when the US offered large bounties for the capture of suspected terrorists".

Speaking in the Rose Garden in June following the suicide of three prisoners, Mr Bush said: "I'd like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognise that we're holding some people that are darn dangerous, and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts."

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said there is no federal law shielding journalists from participating in grand jury investigations. The judge sided with prosecutors who suspect the footage may reveal who was behind the melee, part of an anarchist-led protest over the G-8 international economic conference last year in Scotland. A San Francisco police officer also was injured.

"This is direct evidence of what happened," Alsup said.

Alsup said he wasn't jailing Wolf to punish him. "The purpose of this is to get you to change your mind," the judge said as U.S. marshals removed Wolf from the courtroom.

Wolf's lawyer, Jose Luis Fuentes, said that relinquishing the footage to a grand jury would be tantamount to his client becoming "an arm of the government." Because of the subpoena, Fuentes said, the underground groups Wolf chronicles are denying him access.

The American Civil Liberties Union said federal authorities are disregarding California's shield law, which generally allows journalists to decline to divulge unpublished material to state authorities. That shield, however, does not attach to federal investigations.

Although the incident involved the San Francisco police, federal authorities are investigating because it involves the destruction of federally funded property.

"We're taking the position that the government hasn't shown it has a connection to a legitimate federal interest here," ACLU attorney Alan Schlosser said after the two-hour hearing.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

Although the commission's landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department's early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.

A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general's office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was "knowingly false." A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.

A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general's inquiry.

In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate -- though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals -- and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true."

Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

The NED still refuses to provide the requested documents or even reveal the grant amounts, but they are identified by these numbers: IRI 2002-022/7270, IRI 2003-027/7470 and IRI 2004-035/7473. Investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood asked Morillon on April 25 if her group was getting any money from the I.R.I., and she denied it, but the existence of the grants was confirmed by NED assistant to the president, Patrick Thomas.

The discovery of the grants reveals a major deception by the group, which for years denied it was getting any Washington dollars until some relatively small grants from the NED and the Center for a Free Cuba were revealed (see Counterpunch: "Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"). When asked to account for its large income RSF has claimed the money came from the sale of books of photographs. But researcher Salim Lamrani has pointed out the improbability of this claim. Even taking into account that the books are published for free, it would have had to sell 170 200 books in 2004 and 188 400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2 million the organization claims to make each year ­ 516 books per day in 2005. The money clearly had to come from other sources, as it turns out it did.

The I.R.I., an arm of the Republican Party, specializes in meddling in elections in foreign countries, as a look at NED annual reports and the I.R.I. website shows. It is one of the four core grantees of the NED, the organization founded by Congress under the Reagan administration in 1983 to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been devastated by exposure by the Church committee in the mid-1970s (Ignatius, 1991). The other three pillars of the NED are the National Democratic Institute (the Democratic Party), the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). But of all the groups the I.R.I. is closest to the Bush administration, according to a recent piece in The New York Times exposing its role in the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide:

"President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration's democracy-building efforts. The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Mr. Bush called democracy-building 'a growth industry.'" (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006)

Funding from the I.R.I. presents a major problem for RSF's credibility as a "press freedom" organization because the group manufactured propaganda against the popular democratic governments of Venezuela and Haiti at the same time that its patron, the I.R.I., was deeply involved in efforts to overthrow them. The I.R.I. funded the Venezuelan opposition to President Hugo Chavez (Barry, 2005) and actively organized Haitian opposition to Aristide in conjunction with the CIA (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006).

The man who links RSF to these activities is Otto Reich, who worked on the coups first as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and, after Nov. 2002, as a special envoy to Latin America on the National Security Council. Besides being a trustee of the government-funded Center for a Free Cuba, which gives RSF $50,000 a year, Reich has worked since the early 1980's with the I.R.I.'s senior vice president, Georges Fauriol, another member of the Center for a Free Cuba. But it is Reich's experience in propaganda that is especially relevant. In the 1980's he was caught up in investigations into the Reagan administration's illegal war on the Sandinistas. The comptroller general determined in 1987 that Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy had "engaged in prohibited covert propaganda activities." (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006). In early 2002, once George Bush had given him a recess appointment to the State Department, "Reich was soon tasked to orchestrate a massive international media defamation campaign against Chávez that has continued until this day" (Conkling and Goble, 2004).

Did Reich introduce RSF to the I.R.I. grants and coach the group in its propaganda efforts against Aristide, Chavez and Cuba? A look at the group's methods indicates this may be the case; the propaganda against Aristide, a former priest, was as crude as any of Reich's trademark slanders of Latin American leaders. RSF branded the Haitian president a "predator of press freedom" after linking him, without any evidence whatsoever, to the murders of journalists Jean Dominique and Brignol Lindor. It prominently featured photographs of the journalists' bodies on its web site, turning them into poster victims of Aristide's alleged repression against the press.

In 2002 RSF wrote, "A journalist was beaten to death in the town of Petit-Goâve on 3 December 2001 by a gang of killers with ties to local politicians and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas ("Avalanche") movement. The murder happened at a time when press freedom in Haiti was steadily deteriorating in the wake of the killing of Jean Dominique, head of the radio station Haiti-Inter, on 3 April the previous year" (Lionet and Avila, 2002). Note the intentional mistranslation of Lavalas (which means flood, not avalanche), and the way RSF tied the gang of killers to "Aristide's Lavalas movement," implying that the president himself was in charge of the gang.

The article is riddled with this kind of innuendo and outright falsehoods: "In this atmosphere, the killing of Lindor was seen by the entire media as a new warning." Here RSF has already tried and convicted Aristide by implying that he ordered the murders of the journalists to send a warning to the opposition media not to be critical of him. But Jean Dominique was murdered in April of 2000, many months before Aristide was even elected, and there is likewise no evidence the president had knowledge of the Lindor murder.

In the same piece RSF called the Aristide government an "authoritarian regime," accused him of calling for lynchings by the "necklace" method (see origin of this slander below), described Aristide supporters as "street thugs" and concluded that all of these alleged actions the group imputed to the government were "part of a wider strategy by the authorities to make use of para-legal militias to intimidate the media."

The propaganda would have been bad enough if RSF hadn't taken additional steps to help strangle the desperately poor, aid-dependent country ­ a tactic it has also tried to employ against Cuba (Barahona, 2005). AP quotes Secretary General Robert Menard, referring to the government's alleged failure to bring Dominique's killer to justice, "President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is responsible for this obstruction, and we will list him among the Predators of Press Freedom, if no progress is made in coming months" (Norton, 2001).

The article continued,"Menard said he hoped the list, which would be sent to world governments and financial institutions, would help influence the European Union to prolong the suspension of some $100 million in foreign assistance." The economic sanctions imposed by the United States caused inflation to soar and deprived the government of the money it needed to operate or defend itself. To illustrate RSF's double standards, Colombia has a dismal record when it comes to prosecuting the killers of journalists, but Menard has never lobbied the United States or the EU to cut off aid to the Uribe government.

But Reporters Without Borders wasn't content with a mere cutoff in aid; by January 2002 Menard was calling on the U.S. Congress and the EU to take "individual sanctions" against Aristide and Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, including "the refusal of entry and transit visas" and "the freezing of any foreign bank accounts they have" (Norton, 2002).

Following the Feb. 29, 2004 ouster of Aristide, RSF ignored nearly all of the violence and persecution against journalists critical of the foreign-imposed Latortue government, instead claiming that press freedom had increased. RSF's 2005 and 2006 reports failed to condemn the extrajudicial execution of community journalist and radio reporter Abdias Jean, whom witnesses say was killed by police after he had snapped shots of three youngsters the police had killed. It also ignored the arrests of journalists Kevin Pina (Pacifica Radio) and Jean Ristil, and failed to properly investigate several attacks on pro-Lavalas radio stations.

Asked for his response to news of the grants, Pina had the following to say: "It was clear early on that RSF and Robert Menard were not acting as objective guardians of freedom of the press in Haiti but rather as central actors in what can only be described as a disinformation campaign against Aristide's government. Their attempts to link Aristide to the murder of Jean Dominique and their subsequent silence when the alleged hit man, Lavalas Senator Dany Toussaint, joined the anti-Aristide camp and ran for president in 2006 is just one of many examples that expose the real nature and role of organizations like RSF. They provide false information and skewed reports to build internal opposition to governments seen as uncontrollable and unpalatable to Washington while softening the ground for their eventual removal by providing justification under the pretext of attacks on the freedom of the press."

We asked the group's Haiti expert based in Paris why RSF had ignored the murder of Abdias Jean, and he said, "We asked the police about the killings of Abdias Jean and we were told by the police that it was an attack made by the police but that they didn't know he was a journalist. He was taking pictures." He admitted that none of the witnesses to the murder had been interviewed, while all the unpublished information he had on the case was based on the testimony of the police, known for their widespread killings and abuses. Regarding the arrest of Pina and Ristil he said, "Generally when somebody is put in jail, we wait to see how long they will stay.They were released so we did not take up that case." Considering RSF never took up the case of Abdias Jean, the likelihood it would stick its neck out for Pina, a critic of both the interim government and of RSF, is negligible.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Taking its cues from the State Department, RSF has been guilty of demonizing governments that the U.S. wanted to overthrow, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti, while downplaying the human rights abuses of strategic allies such as Mexico and Colombia. Because it was able to hide I.R.I. grants which would have alerted people to its ulterior motives, RSF has been an effective tool in the Bush administration's covert attacks on recalcitrant Latin American leaders. The organization has also leveraged its image as an independent human rights organization to get its message into the U.S. media and university textbooks. This would be an impressive feat for a small group of individuals with no apparent journalistic credentials were it not for the fact that they have the richest, most powerful patrons in the world.

Diana Barahona is an independent journalist with an interest in Latin American politics. She can be reached at dlbarahona@cs.com

Jeb Sprague is a graduate student, freelance journalist, and a correspondent for Pacifica Radio's Flashpoints. Visit his blog at http://www.freehaiti.net

Special thanks to Jeremy Bigwood and attorney Michael D. Steger.

Barahona, D. (2005, May 17). Reporters Without Borders Unmasked: It's Secret Deal With Otto Reich to Wreak Cuba's Economy. Counterpunch.org.

David Ignatius (Sept. 22, 1991). Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups. The Washington Post. Retrieved from ProQuest database. "'A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,' agrees [Allen] Weinstein."

Bogdanich, Walt and Nordberg, Jenny (2006, Jan. 29). Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Towards Chaos. The New York Times. Retrieved from ProQuest database.

Barry, Tom (2005, Aug. 4). Profile: International Republican Institute. International Relations Center. Retrieved July 4, 2006, from

Conkling, Will and Goble, Sam (2004, July 13). Otto Reich: A Career In Disservice. Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

Lionet, Christian and Avila, Calixto (2002, Sept. 10). Zero tolerance for the media : an enquiry into the murder of journalist Brignol Lindor. Reporters Without Borders. Retrieved on 7 July 2006 from www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=3755

Necklace slander: The "necklace" allegations, as explained by Erwin Stotzky in his book Silencing the guns of Haiti , refered to a 1991 speech given by Aristide at the UN in which he vowed to "turn the streets red" employing the well-known kreyol protest mechanism of burning tires, with no explicit reference to "necklacing" or any method of violence. Soon after the speech, the Haiti Observateur, a right-wing opposition paper, twisted the kreyol metaphor into the allegation of support for "necklacing," which was recycled tenfold over the years by foreign media, CIA reports, and conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.

Norton, Michael (2001, Nov. 24). International press freedom group blasts Haitian government for stalling progress in Jean Dominique murder investigation. Associated Press. Retrieved 7 July 2006 from Lexis-Nexis database.

Obstruction slander: Three suspects (Ti Lou, Guimy and Markington) were arrested in connection with Dominique's murder under the Aristide government but they mysteriously escaped in a "prison mutiny" under Latortue's watch in February of 2005 and were never apprehended.

Norton, Michael (2002, Jan. 10). Journalists Group Urges Sanctions for Haiti's President. Associated Press. Retrieved 7 July 2006 from Lexis-Nexis database. "Aristide is personally responsible for the deterioration of press freedom in Haiti and sanctions should be taken against him personally," Menard said.

No question.

This sort of display would be embarrassing were it not so frightening.

Two days later, with Tony Blair standing at the adjacent podium, things went from bad to worse. One is used to hearing Bush say things that aren't true. He appears, however, from the look on his face and from the baffling nature of the untruths he uttered, to have lapsed from dishonesty into confusion. (Sheer boredom may have sent him tumbling to new depths of ignorance.) "There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory," Bush mused, "because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy."

It is? Has Bush forgotten that Hamas came to power as a result of elections that he insisted the Palestinian Authority hold? I happen to think the White House made the right call on the question of Palestinian elections -- even in retrospect, even knowing that Hamas won -- though many observers think his policy has merely backfired. Rather than defend the policy, however, Bush seems to have forgotten all about it. He returned to the theme later in the press conference: "One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles."

That's absurd. The president appears to be totally unfamiliar with what is perhaps the single most-discussed topic in international politics. Nothing gets people disagreeing quite like the subject of how to apportion blame for the Palestinian peoples' considerable suffering. But absolutely nobody blames Arab militants opposed to democratic principles. Terrorists opposed to Israel's very existence? Sure. Israeli intransigence? Why not. But only someone paying no attention whatsoever would subscribe to Bush's theory.

We have, meanwhile, policies that match the intellectual cesspool of the president's rhetoric. In its statements, the White House has consistently adhered to the view that the root cause of the troubles between Israel and Lebanon is Syrian and Iranian support for Hezbollah. Thanks to the dinner roll incident at the G-8 meeting, we know this is Bush's sincere view. "You see," Bush famously explained to Blair, "the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over." He further elaborated: "I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen."

There's something of a cliché going around about Bush talking loudly while failing to brandish a stick, but in truth he's mumbling indistinctly while Israeli bombs pummel Lebanon.

If Syria is the real problem here, then, not to put too fine a point on it, someone needs to take some action of some kind related to Syria. After all, why would Syria tell Hezbollah to stop doing this shit? What combination of threats and inducements is Syria supposed to offer Hezbollah to get it to stop? And why would Syria offer them anyway? What's Kofi Annan supposed to do about this? If Bush wants to make Syria do something, he needs to do something to make it happen. Either offer Syria something, or threaten Syria somehow, or some combination of the two. The same goes for Iran. In case Bush hasn't noticed, the regimes in Damascus and Tehran aren't run by kind people looking to help the world out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor has the administration's habit of vaguely suggesting we'd like to overthrow their governments rendered either nation more likely to help us or our Israeli friends out of a jam.

There's a temptation to call this combination of inflammatory tough-guy rhetoric and feckless inaction "the worst of both worlds," but in truth the war policy being advocated by the right's more fevered voices would actually be worse than Bush's embarrassing, illogical paralysis. The real problem is that the risk of a wider regional war involving the United States remains. And if that risk becomes a reality, our country will be led into it by a president who doesn't seem to grasp what's happening.

This article is available on The American Prospect. Copyright 2006, The American Prospect.

Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer at The American Prospect.

The findings, to be presented to the Senate Finance Committee, come as Congress considers delaying a 2007 deadline requiring passports or a small number of previously approved tamperproof ID cards from all who enter the United States.

Homeland Security spokesman Jarrod Agen said agents are trained to identify false birth certificates, driver's licenses and other documents. But he conceded that agents sometimes cannot verify more than 8,000 different kinds of currently acceptable IDs without significantly slowing border traffic.

"This creates a security vulnerability we were hoping to close" with the deadline at the end of next year, Agen said.

The GAO probe follows a similar inquiry in 2003 and 2004 when undercover investigators crossed unhindered into the United States at least 14 times using counterfeit drivers' licenses and, in one case, an expired, altered U.S. diplomatic passport. During that investigation, however, border agents in New York and Florida stopped three undercover officials who were using expired and forged passports, drivers' licenses or birth certificates.

By comparison, between February and June 2006, 18 GAO investigators breezed by border agents at checkpoints in California, Texas, Michigan, Idaho, Washington state, and twice each in Arizona and New York. In two cases - in Arizona and California - border agents did not ask the undercover investigators for any identification.

In a third case, in Texas, investigators offered to show identification - a counterfeit Virginia drivers' license. The border agent replied, "OK, that would be good," but released the investigators before inspecting it, according to the prepared testimony by GAO investigator Gregory D. Kutz.

Two of the 9/11 hijackers used fake Virginia residency certificates to get valid state ID cards needed to board the planes that flew into the World Trade Center. Neither GAO probe specified the location of any border checkpoints investigators went through.

The 9/11 Commission called for tougher ID card rules at borders to help prevent terrorists from entering the country. Responding, Congress in 2004 approved requirements for all travelers - including Americans - to show passports or a small number of other approved secure documents before entering the U.S.

Those requirements are supposed to take effect Dec. 31, 2007. But lawmakers from states that border Canada have since rebelled, contending the rules could hamper commercial and tourist travel. They are pushing to delay the rules by 17 months to ensure Homeland Security has proper technology to speed legitimate travel though border checkpoints.

Agen said Homeland Security agents intercepted 75,000 fraudulent documents from border travelers last year. The department last month arrested a Mexican fugitive suspected of running a counterfeit document operation whose fake ID cards have turned up in all 50 states.

About one in four drivers thinks of his or her car as "something special" instead of just a "means of transportation," according to a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Nearly one in three thinks it has "a personality of its own."

Americans have been loving their cars for about a century, buying increasingly bigger, faster and more expensive cars while the rest of the world moves toward economy and efficiency. But the new poll suggests that driving is becoming more of a burden for many.

The souring attitudes evolved as many Americans moved farther from central cities, generating longer commutes and more congestion. By 2001, the U.S. had more personal vehicles (204 million) than licensed drivers (191 million).

Urban drivers endured an average of 47 hours of rush hour traffic delays in 2003, a threefold increase from two decades earlier. The worst problems were in Los Angeles, where the average driver suffered almost 100 hours of traffic delays. That's about four full days of waiting for the car in front of you to move.

"I sit there in traffic when it should take half an hour, now it's taking an hour and 15 minutes," said Stacy Baglio, 36, who drives 28 miles to her sales job in northern New Jersey. "People are weaving in and out of traffic. There is no common courtesy whatsoever."

Pew conducted the survey of 1,048 drivers from June 20 to July 16. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The results were compared with a Gallup poll done in 1991.

The new poll's results were consistent among drivers of cars, pickups and SUVs. There were few regional differences among drivers, although northeasterners were more likely than drivers in the rest of the country to have "shouted, cursed or made gestures to other drivers" in the past year.

The key to rediscovering automotive bliss: Zen out. Too many people think of driving as competition, says Leon James, co-author of the book, "Road Rage and Aggressive Driving." Happy drivers think of traffic simply as part of the process of getting from one place to another, kind of like the process of taking a shower to get clean, he said.

"Americans are nice people," said James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii. "But there are certain areas that have to do with games and competition, where we become less nice to each other."

Jennifer Geisinger seems to have it figured out. The 31-year-old Realtor from suburban Minneapolis said she loves to drive her 1999 Honda CRV.

"It's something about being in control and getting out on the road," Geisinger said. "I don't have a sports car and I don't speed. But I love my car."

Geisinger also has something in common with 68 percent of all drivers: "Oh I sing, of course," she said, adding that her stereo plays country, opera and Broadway show tunes.