The writer, Dennis Prager, goes on to argue that this all comes down to "multicultural hubris." After all, "What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book."

So the Bible is America's holiest book? Was there a vote? Did Oprah decide? Was it Jefferson? And if so was it his version of the Bible? Does that mean it is true of every American citizen? Even Kevin Federline? And if it is true then America, with its indifference to the poor and lust for money and power, would be seriously backsliding and in need of spiritual counseling.

No, the BIble isn't Ameirca' holiest book. America doesn't have a holy book. It does have two holy documents, however. One is called the Constitution. The other is known as the Declaration of Independence. That's it. Book study finished.

The Bible may be America's most symbolically holy book for many people. But that is only within the context of American civil religion. And only within the context of civil religion is there a question of whether or not the Koran can be used for a swearing in ceremony.

There, again, the answer is an easy one - yes. In courts across America today, people pledge to tell the truth and the whole truth without putting their hands on the Bible if they so choose. (The same thing is true in swearing-in ceremonies). President Bush participates in celebrating Ramadan. If Islam is good enough for President Bush, I suppose its holy book is good enough for a swearing in ceremony.

What is more deeply troubling than Prager's column, however, is the reaction of a group called the American Family Association. Its head, a man named Donald Wildmon, has called for his supporters to egg on Members of Congress to pass a new law - one requriing every official to be sworn in using the Holy Bible. Good idea except for that dreaded Constitution again. After all it contains these diabolical words in Article VI, section 3, "...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Darn those liberal Founders.

The recent, unfunny performance by "Kramer" is the latest evidence that the nation is under Soviet attack far more destructive than Nine Eleven. There is much more to it than "Kramer's" personal situation. Here is a quirky talent who found a niche that propelled him into nationwide prominence and profit. Viewers chortled over his every word and antic. His face was known to millions.

After "Seinfeld," he had his own show, which, if I remember correctly, bombed. Working in a comedy club, he was back at the beginning, which may mean simply that it is difficult for a talent so quirky to find another magical niche. In his business, lightning often strikes only once. So there may have been considerable, suppressed anger waiting to erupt. Whatever the reason, it is reasonable to speculate that "Kramer" now needs to find a new line of work despite his unceasing apologies.

Adding to the preposterous nature of the event, word now arrives that the two men who heckled him were so affronted by his outburst - I say so offended, sir, so hurt, so emotionally devastated, so therefore unable to function, et cetera and so on - that they are demanding money from "Kramer," as much as $10 million. Who can blame them? As Jesse and Al would probably say, the honky is down, so get it while you can.

Why are a few public uses of the word "nigger" worth $10 million? This is a word that blacks use daily when addressing each other in ordinary conversation. But, if you are white, you felt a twinge just now - didn't you? - when you read the word on your screen. Seeing the word triggered something in your head.

A few years back, a financial official in the District of Criminals referred to an appropriation as "niggardly." He was fired of course, presumably by a pinhead who doesn't know the word has nothing whatsoever to do with race, means "stingy," and is of Swedish derivation. The District of Criminals is of course a black city.

"Kramer" is the latest in a long series of white men who suddenly erupt in a religious, or, more often, a racial outburst, and then spend considerable time groveling in apology. Before there was "Kramer," there was Mel Gibson, who apparently took off on the Jews after a bender. Sometimes the outburst appears spontaneous. Sometimes it is the product of much provocation.

Remember that Jews and Jewish groups that specialize in provoking lucrative anti-Semitism excoriated Mel for months about his movie, "The Passion," accusing him of almost everything except child molestation. And the two men who want money heckled "Kramer" at the comedy club. That is Stage One. In Stage Two, the victim, provoked beyond endurance, erupts. In Stage Three, the people he dumps on claim to be insulted. And in Stage Four, the perpetrator publicly grovels and pleads.

By now, this has become routine, to such an extent that I wonder who will be next. What is happening? Notice that you could call people "wops," "micks," "dagos," "honkies," "krauts," "mackerel snappers," "polkas," and so on, all day. Most of the targets of that terminology would laugh. There would be no backlash. For years, whenever I would see a beautiful Polish lady of my acquaintance in San Francisco, she would press me to tell her the latest Polish jokes.

But you had better have everything securely nailed down if you plan to use the words, "nigger" or "kike." Even "broad" or "dame" could get you into trouble. The situation is even more farcical when you remember Jesse's characterization of New York as "Hymietown," and Al's involvement in the fraudulent Tawana Brawley hoax.

Many years ago, in New York, there was a club comedian named Myron Cohen. I interviewed him a couple of times. When Myron came out to perform, he looked like a magazine ad for very expensive suits. I asked him about it and he explained that he never sat down in a working suit. That was why he looked so good. When he finished his act he would return to his dressing room and hang it up.

Myron Cohen was Jewish, but that was irrelevant. His "shtick" was dialects. He told ethnic stories in the appropriate dialects, and he could do any one you could name: Irish, Jewish, German, Polish, black, Latino, Italian, you name it. He was riotously funny, and the people in the audience whose dialects he did probably laughed the loudest. But it is probably just as well that Myron is now in Heaven swapping stories with Henny Youngman ("Now take my wife. Please!) because he would not be allowed to work today. He would be sitting down in his stand-up suits.

The answer to my question is that for many years the people of our country have been subjected to the same brainwashing the Soviets used in Russia and Central Europe; the same brainwashing Mao Tse-tung used on the people of China. And its purpose is the same: to bring the target nation to its knees so that it can be conquered.

Again, I offer my periodic request that you read a couple of books by the man who coined the term "brainwashing," journalist Ed Hunter. I believe that if enough Americans were to read those books, the "Kramer" problem would evaporate. They are Brainwashing and Brainwashing in Red China. Don't let the titles fool you. Because Ed Hunter was a journalist and a good writer, both books are very easy to read and exciting.

They will prove that what is happening to us has happened before; it is exactly what the Communists did in Red China. It has nothing to do with the hurt feelings of offended blacks. In fact, the conspirators who are conducting this latest brainwashing campaign couldn't care less about blacks (or any other minority) whom they consider as inferior as did Simon Legree.

The condemnation of certain words over the course of many years is designed to produce that twinge in your head when you hear words like "nigger," until you respond as an automaton, like a lab animal in a behavioral science experiment. The ultimate purpose is to neutralize you, to reduce you to a quivering hulk afraid to raise your head, a terrified weakling afraid to speak up, who can be easily manipulated.

Look around you. Isn't that the atmosphere we have now? No one wants to lose his job, forfeit lots of money and maybe have to undergo "diversity training," which is just another name for a brainwashing session. Guilt is an enormously effective weapon of control. But if you knew you had nothing to be guilty about, knew you were under attack, the fog would lift.

Notice that the attack is concentrated exclusively on the white man, who is blamed for every problem from asthma to zits. Why? Very simple and it has nothing at all to do with race. The conspiracy for world government assaults the white man because most of the people who run this country are white men. If blacks ran it, the conspirators would be doing the same thing to blacks.

The object is not to indemnify any particular racial, religious or ethnic group for some offense, but to bring America down. That is the explanation for America's present failure of nerve, for the fact that Americans will grovel before any challenge and acquiesce in any outrage, however outrageous.

That is why homosexuality and Islam - and utterly phony history - are now taught in the government schools. That is why the nation is being invaded by illegal aliens. That is why so-called "mainstream" churches now worship Bush, not Jesus Christ. That is why the Communist scheme to eliminate public expressions of Christianity from this country is succeeding.

The recent incident in which six "imams" were removed from that US. Airways flight is more of the same. The obvious purpose is to put you on the defensive with charges of religious discrimination, paving the way for even greater outrages to come. They can get away with it only because of the guilt expertly installed in the American psyche, starting in kindergarten, continuing through college and then maintained by our Communist media, left and right.

Some years ago, I was guesting on a radio show. The black host asked me how guilty I felt about slavery. He was genuinely nonplused when I said I felt no guilt at all, so I explained that slavery in this country was gone long before my grandfathers were born and that during slavery my progenitors were not even in this country; they were running for their lives somewhere else. He seemed genuinely surprised; what I had said was a revelation.

First read the books and see how the Communists divided the Chinese. See how they divided our POWs in Korea and set them against each other. Then let the scales fall from your eyes. Recognize that the nation cannot be saved unless the brainwashing stops. Remember that if black is beautiful, white is all right. You do not need to apologize for being white. Shake the guilt. Stand tall. Then get some Myron Cohen recordings.

This is the central reality of our nation today. Sometimes I think that talking about anything else - taxes, the collapsing auto industry, even global warming - is a mistake till we get the hell out of Iraq.

Anyone not named George W. Bush knows that the "war," which was never ours to win, is hopeless. No, New England town democracy isn't suddenly going to pop up in some zone where the Sunni and Shia are gleefully murdering each other when they can't find any U.S. Marines to snipe at.

There are decent and patriotic Americans who know this, and yet are genuinely and understandably confused about when we should get out. "Yes," a woman told me, "we never should have been there. But if we leave now won't everything just collapse into murderous chaos?"

Yes, that is a point - as if murderous chaos weren't happening now. Yet it isn't as if, by staying, we could somehow calm things down.

After more than three years, all the signs show that we're just making things worse. The American people don't want any more of this. We are going to leave, hopefully sooner than our delusional head "decider" imagines.

The only positive thing Bush now could do is announce that we are leaving, and that as part of the process of getting out, we will be working to help set up a federation with autonomous areas for Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

That would be wildly popular with the Kurds, who have never had a country they could call their own. Would it work? Doubtful. But it would represent something positive, and might give various Iraqis something worth defending.

I recognize that this would mean hundreds or thousands or millions of people might have to move. That's what happened when India and Pakistan became separate countries in 1947, and there was a lot of bloodshed then too.

Not that George W. "Captain Queeg" Bush would be likely to agree to anything that makes sense. The finest columnist in the nation today, in my opinion, is The New York Times' multitalented Frank Rich. Check out his column last Sunday, "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?"

"We've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn't merely in a state of denial, but is completely untethered from reality. It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the truth is," Rich said.

"When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity ... urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality."

This one isn't. There is more, much more, brilliantly put. But George W. Bush doesn't deserve all the blame for abandoning American values and putting on a bad remake of the decaying Roman Empire.

We are all to blame: The so-called "mainstream media," who were so worried they might be called "liberal" or "biased" that they chose not to report the truth. In return, some got to ride around "in bed with" the soldiers in tanks. Then there were the Democrats, who wanted to have it both ways.

Yes, to paraphrase the immortal words of John Kerry, most of them voted against taking the 30 pieces of silver before they changed their mind and snatched them up. Only much later did they start whining that they should never have gone with the Republicans in the first place.

That doesn't matter now. What matters is getting us out of this mess, and trying to figure out how to start being worthy of being Americans again.

So - do I now finally think George W. Bush should be impeached?

No, I still don't. I've taken a lot of heat ever since I said a few weeks ago that I was opposed to trying to impeach the president.

For one thing, removing him from office isn't practical; there isn't enough time to make a case, and there won't be votes in the Senate to convict him.

But even if we could remove this smirking little man from office, I worry what that would do to our system. Our democracy will be weakened if we get in the habit of trying to remove any president we don't like, anytime they screw up.

Impeaching Bill Clinton over tasteless sex acts was a national farce that made our country look like the worst of Comedy Channel.

And the biggest reason not to impeach Bush is that we voted for this. George W. Bush lied and stole his way into office the first time, and then lied about the reasons for starting this insane war. Yet we re-elected him, long after it was clear what he was selling.

Nobody is innocent. And nobody is offering a white knight who will pop up and clean this up for us.

We have to do it ourselves.

Something nice about the Free Press: Every week, people disgusted with the newspapers urge me to write more criticizing them. I have, however, pretty much decided to stop. The Free Press in particular has virtually abandoned being a newspaper; that is, something that attempts to provide an intelligent and balanced digest of important national, state and local events.

What's maddening is when every so often it does show that it can still be a newspaper. Sunday's paper, for example, had a front page that looked respectable. Granted, stripped across the top was a huge headline about a football game that will never happen.

Otherwise, there was a significant story about the University of Detroit Mercy greatly expanding its dental services and a well-written and carefully nuanced package of stories about aging Nazi war criminals in Michigan.

You just knew, however, that none of those stories would have been there had Pamela Anderson murdered Kid Rock in Warren.

Every week on radio station WUOM I talk to newsmakers about stories that you never hear about. Did you know the Great Lakes are threatened by a new disease that makes fish bleed to death, and the governor can't decide what to do about it?

All I really want from these newspapers is what my muse, Lindsay Lohan, wants from life. Lindsay, who may just be the moral philosopher for the Age of Bush, wrote these two mysterious words to the late Robert Altman's family: "Be adequite," she advised them.

She was trying to tell us all something, which is that we live in a world where our media, whether movies or newspapers, are never quite adequate. And you thought she was just a party girl.

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times. Contact him at letters@metrotimes.com.

Specifically, the new language adds "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident" to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority - particularly "if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order."

Since the administration broadened what constitutes "conspiracy" in its definition of enemy combatants - anyone who "has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States," in the language of the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) - critics say it's a formula for executive branch mischief.

Yet despite such a radical turn, the new law garnered little dissent, or even attention, on the Hill.

One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law.

It "subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law," he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.

"The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor," he said.

Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint.

"Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy."

And he criticized the way it was rammed through Congress.

It "was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study," he fumed. "Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals."

No matter: Safely tucked into the $526 billion defense bill, it easily crossed the goal line on the last day of September.

Silence
The language doesn't just brush aside a liberal Democrat slated to take over the Judiciary Committee come January. It also runs over the backs of the governors, 22 of whom are Republicans.

The governors had waved red flags about the measure on Aug. 1, sending letters of protest from their Washington office to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

No response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill - Sens. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and his Democratic opposite, Nancy Pelosi of California.

"This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors," said the Aug. 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, "and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors . . .to the federal government."

"We urge you," they said, "to drop provisions that would usurp governors' authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act."

Again, no response from the leadership, said David Quam, the National Governors Association's director of federal relations.

On Aug. 31, the governors sent another letter to the congressional party leaders, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had met quietly with an NGA delegation back in February.

The bill "could encroach on our constitutional authority to protect the citizens of our states," they protested, complaining again about how the provision had been dumped on a midnight express.

"Any issue that affects the mission of the Guard in the states must be addressed in consultation and coordination with governors," they demanded.

"The role of the Guard in the states and to the nation as a whole is too important to have major policy decisions made without full debate and input from governors throughout the policy process."

More silence.

"We did not know until the bill was printed where we stood," Quam said.

That's partly the governors' own fault, said a Republican Senate aide.

"My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices," she said. "If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day."

Quam disputed that.

"The letter was only the beginning of the conversation," he said. "The NGA and the governors' offices reached out across the Hill."

Blogosphere
Looking back at the government's chaotic response to Katrina, it's not altogether surprising that the provision drew so little opposition in Congress and attention from the mainstream media.

And of course, it was wrapped in a monster defense bill related to the emergency in Iraq.

But the blogosphere, of course, was all over it.

A close analysis of the bill by Frank Morales, a 58-year-old Episcopal priest in New York who occasionally writes for left-wing publications, spurred a score of liberal and conservative libertarian Web sites to take a look at it.

But a search of The Washington Post and New York Times archives, using the terms "Insurrection Act," "martial law" and "Congress," came up empty.

That's not to say the papers don't care: There's just too much going on in the global war on terror to keep up with, much less write about such a seemingly insignificant provision. The martial law section of the Defense Appropriation Act, for example, takes up just a few paragraphs in the 591-page document.

What else is in there? More intriguing stuff, it looks like - and I'm working my way through it.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER
Putin on the Risk: Don't be too quick to finger Russian president Vladimir Putin in the radiation rub-out of disaffected former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London Nov. 23, says a retired CIA operative who spent a career trying to outwit his Soviet opposites. "I see it all as a little too pat," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran and chief of its Soviet/East European Division when the Kremlin crumbled in 1990.

"Is Putin insane or stupid? I think not," Bearden e-mailed me last week.

"I tilt toward a setup," Bearden said. The villain? "Someone with the [scientific] resources of a state," a large research laboratory, perhaps, with connections to the criminal underworld.

"This story has legs," Bearden went on, "just what Putin would not want if he was behind it."

Stay tuned...

More on Torture Law: Most legal analysts, as reported here last week, believe that the new law setting up Military Commissions will exempt U.S. officials from prosecution for abusing prisoners, by narrowing the definitions of torture in the 1997 war Crimes Act. But at least one eminent jurist begs to differ.

"Even as retroactively amended and narrowed, a person whose actions caused 'serious' or 'severe' mental or physical suffering at any time after 1997 committed a felony violation of the war Crimes Act and can be prosecuted," maintains Stephen Rickard, a former top State Department official, foreign policy adviser to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., and prominent Washington lawyer with a speciality in human rights.

"I don't like the definitions of 'torture' and 'cruel and inhuman' conduct," Rickard e-mailed me last week, "but even with all of their flaws, I don't see how they exempt interrogators from potential punishment, especially for the harshest, most controversial techniques."

These days Rickard is the director of the Washington Office of the liberal Open Society Institute.

The Bush administration's excuse for this betrayal of our legal system was that Padilla was a dangerous al Qaeda agent, a big fish caught in the administration's successful pursuit of its much ballyhooed war on terror. In the words of then-U.S. Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, Padilla was "a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." Those lurid claims were abandoned when the government, faced with a belated U.S. Supreme Court censure, finally charged Padilla with vague and lesser crimes carrying a maximum 15-year sentence.

Were this some isolated case of officially condoned sadism, say in a rural county jail, it could be minimized as an aberration. Instead, it is an all-too-accurate reflection of a presidential policy of dehumanizing anyone even suspected of being an enemy. The Times photos, taken from a government video, give evidence of a heavily manacled prisoner with masked eyes and muffled ears being walked down a corridor within a Navy brig, lending physical evidence to Padilla's lawyer's claims of a pattern of disorienting isolation. "There is nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement," Philip D. Cave, a former Navy judge advocate general, told the Times.

Obviously, a prisoner who has been deliberately disorientated for so long is no longer in a position to exercise his right to confront his accusers. An examining psychiatrist wrote that "as the result of his experience during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness ... complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation."

The excuse for this heinous treatment of a U.S. citizen is the same as that given for an entire orgy of despicable treatment of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and a gulag archipelago of secret military facilities around the world: Our enemies, all linked through sophistry to the 9/11 terror attacks, are so vile and dangerous that the limitations on government power enshrined in our guiding documents and political culture no longer apply. Once the Twin Towers were knocked down, supposedly, we could no longer afford to be "nice guys"-as if the rule of law is an indulgence of only the most secure nations.

By that standard, any tyrant can justify the cruelest of actions by citing enemies, real or imagined, be it King George III blockading Boston Harbor to teach the rebellious colonists a lesson or Saddam Hussein killing Kurdish villagers after an assassination attempt on his life. The very uniqueness of our national experiment was the checks and balances put upon the government to prevent such convenient rationalizations for abuse of the individual. The Founding Fathers won a war, but their true contribution to human history was to tackle head-on the reality that humans and their institutions can so easily become that which they despise.

Even when an American is suspected of a "capital or infamous crime," as was Padilla, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically says he still cannot "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." That is why the Supreme Court finally forced the Bush administration to give Padilla his day in court.

In the end, the administration has retreated from its hoary claims; Padilla's trial, set to begin on Jan. 22, does not include any reference to dirty bombs, al Qaeda, or any specific plans to attack America. Instead, he faces lesser charges claiming he was the recruit of a "North American support cell," whose interest was in jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. As if it had no bearing on the disoriented state of mind of the defendant, the Bush administration's lawyers have argued in motions that his treatment as a prisoner should not be presented before the jury.

The more important question now, however, is when will those who, like Ashcroft, used this case to shamelessly exploit our fears for political purposes face their own day of accountability in a court of law?

This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

The strategies

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

Cut And Run

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

Stay The Course

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (£1bn) a week and has lost public support.

Send In More Troops

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

Regional Devolution

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.

Ivanov, a father of two, had no criminal record, Kyrgyz government officials said. He was killed by two pistol shots to the chest, police said.

Troops at the base, set up in 2001 to support operations in nearby Afghanistan, enjoy a similar status to diplomats and cannot be prosecuted by Kyrgyz courts under an agreement between the two countries.

A statement released by U.S. forces on Wednesday said the airman from the base's security forces "used deadly force in response to a threat".

A military spokesman said on Thursday Ivanov threatened the airman with a homemade knife at the checkpoint after parking his truck. The airman fired his pistol in response.

Bakiyev said Kyrgyz police should be allowed to question the airman and he should not leave the country until an investigation had taken place.

In a separate security incident linked to the base in September, a U.S. Air Force major went missing for several days after a shopping trip in the nearby capital Bishkek.

Major Jill Metzger reappeared unharmed. According to U.S. media, she said she had been kidnapped, although Kyrgyz police sources questioned the assertion and she was flown out of the country within hours of being found.

It was the start of a day that transformed Mr Rodriguez from a maintenance man to the hero of 9/11. He ran back into the crumbling tower three times, and helped save hundreds of people.

In the months that followed, his role would change again, from the "face" of the rescue effort to an outspoken critic of the government.

For Mr Rodriguez, a native of Puerto Rico, swears his ordeal began before the first plane hit the Twin Towers. He claims that the White House failed to act, and accuses the government of being involved in "sponsored terrorism" in a bid to find a motive to invade Iraq. He brought his argument to a Westcountry audience on Wednesday, when he spoke in Torquay as part of the Global Truth movement.

Before America's trade epicentre was reduced to rubble, Mr Rodriguez routinely ate breakfast at the Windows of the World restaurant, on the top floor of the North Tower, where his friends would feed him free of charge. On 9/11, he was running late, so he skipped the treat.

It was while he was in basements of the North Tower that Mr Rodriguez says he felt an explosion from below. "It was so hard that it shook the foundations of the building and the walls cracked," he said. "The ceiling fell on top of us."

Mr Rodriguez, 45, had worked in the building for 20 years, and survived the 1993 bomb blast. As the sprinkler system came on, he was mentally transported back. It was only then that he claims he heard the sound of the first plane hitting the tower, at 8.46am. "It came from far away - all the way at the top of the building," he said.

The handyman's thoughts immediately raced to the plight of his friends on the top floor, and he spent the rest of the ordeal battling his way through the building, trying to reach them.

Mr Rodriguez, one of only five people to hold a master key which opened the doors to an escape route, repeatedly encountered people in need of help. He saved scores from the crumbling tower, including two who were stuck in a lift shaft that was filling with water from the sprinklers.

"I could hear them shouting 'we're going to drown'," he said. "I was always an agnostic, but in that moment, I prayed."

He suddenly remembered where ladders were stored, and found the longest one unlocked, so he was able to drop it down the shaft and escort two workers out to waiting ambulances.

Mr Rodriguez dived back into the building to try to reach his friends, but again he encountered a casualty in need, this time on the 34th floor. "There was a blonde woman, lying on the floor shaking. I told her she had to get out, but she was new and she didn't know where to go."

Mr Rodriguez helped her down the stairs, and ran back into the building on his third trip. This time, he played a role in helping a man in a wheelchair to the waiting ambulance crew.

"It was like a scene from The Towering Inferno," he said. "Pieces of rock kept falling all over us and hitting us. I said to the man in the wheelchair 'when we get out we will go for a drink'. His face was just a dust mask."

Mr Rodriguez was set to make a fourth trip up the stairs when he heard police outside ordering him not to look back. "Of course, when they tell you not to look back you always do," he said. "It was the worst memory I ever had."

The blonde woman he had helped save lay dead, just outside the exit of the building, her body mangled by falling debris.

"I looked around, and saw all the bodies of people who had jumped out of the windows, and they looked as if they had melted into the ground," he said.

Mesmerised by the apocalyptic vision, Mr Rodriguez realised the ground was trembling. To cries of "run", he dived under a nearby fire engine as the huge building tumbled down. "I thought I was going to die from asphyxia," he said. "I thought 'God, please don't let my mother see my body cut in half'."

But the media saw Mr Rodriguez dive, and soon rescue workers were hauling him free.

Today, Mr Rodriguez is grateful to be alive, but he said: "I never found my friends. I saved hundreds of people, but the reason I do what I can to get the word out is that I lost 200 friends who have no way of claiming justice."

In the aftermath, Mr Rodriguez was hailed a hero, and felt he was playing a big role in the 9/11 Commission. "I thought they were going to do the right thing," he said.

But Mr Rodriguez soon felt his evidence was being covered up, when he became the only person to be interviewed behind closed doors. And his account was omitted from the final report. He claims evidence he collected from scores of other witnesses was overlooked.

The final straw came when he was asked to give a public address on why Iraq should be invaded. "I said no - 9/11 was nothing to do with Iraq. I helped organise the families, and we voted against the President using us for his political motive. That's when the thrust changed, and the invasion suddenly became about weapons of mass destruction."

These days, Mr Rodriguez fears for his life - and says his plight is relevant in the wake of the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy many believe was poisoned by the Russians.

But Mr Rodriguez continues to speak out. Once a prominent magician, he said: "The 9/11 attacks are just an illusion. It never happened in the way they say. It's all manufactured to give the impression that it happened like that."

'She was completely humourless and inflexible, and showed no understanding of my excitement about the Ashes.'

He was stopped at Baker Street in Central London as he headed to a pub to meet up with friends to watch the match being televised from Australia.

Mr Hurd, a leg-spin bowler for his local team, said: 'I took the ball to the office because I was getting more and more excited about the start of the Ashes.

'All day long, I was fiddling with it and throwing it into the air, which I do to strengthen my arm muscles for spin bowling.

'But when I was stopped after work, I was just holding the ball going up the escalator. There was a policewoman on the step below me and she was staring at the ball all the way up.

'As we got to the top, she tapped me on the shoulder and said she wanted a word. I wondered what on earth I had done. She asked if I was aware I was carrying a very hard object and I said, "Yes, it is a cricket ball".

'She told me I should not be carrying it in public because it was a potentially lethal weapon. I told her I was only carrying it because the Ashes were about to start and I was very excited.

'I was wearing a boring suit and looked every inch the bean counter I am. It is not as if I was unshaven and looked dangerous.

'But she confiscated the ball for most of our conversation, gave me a verbal warning and said she was being very lenient.

'She filled out a stop-and-search form and finally gave the ball back at the end and sent me packing.'

Mr Hurd, of Belsize Park, North London, said the experience had shaken his faith in the police.

'I have not really had many dealings with them before,' he said. But what happened struck a chord with the complaints you hear from minority groups over stop and searches.

'The policewoman failed to realise that I presented no threat whatsoever and I left feeling completely misunderstood. It wasted ten minutes and left her with paperwork. How can a cricket ball be an offensive weapon? I don't think it would be anyone's weapon of choice and all I was doing was holding it.'

A spokesman for British Transport Police declined to comment without knowing the full details of the incident.