I never hesitate to say that these drugs -- selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) -- help millions of people. But any drug that can cause positive changes in people's brains can also cause negative ones unless care is taken to avoid it. We do not take such care. So it was no surprise to me when, in August 2003, more headlines appeared. These were based on reports by British authorities and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about unpublished studies showing an increased risk of suicide in children and teenagers taking Paxil (1-3).

Prior reports of suicidal and homicidal acts in adults taking SSRIs have been explained away by drug industry defenders and mainstream doctors, who claim that suicide is common in depression anyway. And that no type of antidepressant helps everyone. Some depressed patients don't get better and choose suicide. That's true sometimes, unfortunately. But these reports describe more impulsive, violent acts than expected. As I said fifteen years ago at the time of the first reports and again in Over Dose in 2001 (4), SSRIs could create a unique combination of side effects that might severely impair judgment and impulse control. This has been described by others as well (5-16).

Psychosis After Three Days of Treatment

One of my first cases with Prozac involved a 35 year-old woman with a job and family, who had a mild depression with no suicidal tendencies. This changed after just three days on Prozac, when she became acutely psychotic. Any psychiatrist will tell you that excessive doses of antidepressants can cause brain dysfunctions including disorientation, confusion, and cognitive disturbances. This was commonly seen with old-time antidepressants like Elavil and Tofranil (17). But more than the older drugs, SSRIs can also cause a severe degree of agitation or restlessness that may become intolerable and reduce impulse control (5-6A). Impulsive behavior, especially if coupled with impaired cognitive functioning, can be dangerous.

Antidepressants can also trigger similar, manic-like symptoms in people whose depression is part of a manic-depressive syndrome, which often gets overlooked when people are given SSRIs. "Some of these individuals may have serious adverse reactions to antidepressants including irritability, aggression, and mania," wrote Dr. Ronald Pies, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University (18).

The Devil Is in the Dosage

My book Over Dose opens with a man whose anxiety and depressive symptoms got much worse rather than better with the standard 20-mg starting dose of Prozac (4). A letter to the editor in the August 11, 2003, issue of the New York Times described a similar reaction to Celexa:

"During the first month, I experienced extreme, almost manic tendencies. My mind raced, I was restless, I couldn't sleep. Eventually that restlessness subsided (18)."

Sometimes the symptoms don't subside. Sometimes the symptoms get out of hand. The writer of the letter made an another important point: "They need new dosing and treatment strategies to counteract the manic effect." Exactly.

These reactions are occurring because the standard starting doses of many antidepressants are excessively strong for many people. One clue is that most of these reactions occur shortly after people have been started on SSRIs or after the dosage has been bumped up. These are called "first-dose" reactions by mainstream medicine, and they almost always indicate a mismatch between the patient and the dosage. With the Paxil study, the New York Times reported:

"Some experts suspect that in the first few weeks of therapy, drugs like Paxil can shove a small number of patients toward a mental precipice, perhaps because they can cause a severe form of restlessness known as akathisia. Patients who make it through the first weeks of drug therapy uneventfully do fine on the medication on the long term, these experts say (3)."

But it doesn't have to be a sink or swim situation. Merely reduce the dose awhile, allow patients to adapt to the medicine, and then increase it again gradually. Sometimes it doesn't need to be increased, because lower doses work for many patients.

When my patient became psychotic in 1988, I researched the problem and found an article that shocked me. This large study, published before Prozac was marketed, showed that 54% of the patients with severe depression improved with just 5 mg -- one-quarter of the standard 20 mg starting dose (19). But Prozac wasn't marketed with a 5 mg recommended dose. 20 mg was the recommended initial dose for everyone -- 400% more than many people needed -- a huge difference pharmacologically. No wonder these reactions were occurring.

I wasn't the only expert to recognize the problem. A 1993 study concluded "that starting fluoxetine [Prozac] at doses lower than 20 mg is a useful strategy because of the substantial fraction of patients who cannot tolerate a 20-mg dose but appear to benefit from lower doses (20)." Similar dosing problems have been seen with and other SSRIs.

Informed Consent Means Having Enough Information to Make an Intelligent Choice

Unfortunately, most doctors don't understand that many problems with SSRIs are caused by standard doses that are excessive for substantial numbers of patients. And although Prozac, Zoloft, and other SSRIs now come in lower doses, many doctors still start patients on the stronger, standard doses.

As I've said when invited to speak at the FDA and at other major conferences, drug companies must define the lowest, safest, effective doses of drugs. They must include this information in package inserts and the Physicians' Desk Reference, and they must market pills that make lower dosing possible. And they must do it from the start.

Unfortunately, marketing trends in recent decades have gone in the other direction. Many drugs are marketed one-size-fits-all. Many drugs are dosed exactly the same for big and small, young and old, healthy and frail. The same strong doses are prescribed to people taking no other medications and people taking a dozen. Such methods defy medical sense and common sense.

Shortly after the reports from the British authorities and U.S. FDA about higher incidences of suicide in youngsters taking Paxil, Dr. Richard Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, wrote:

"For too long, drug companies have been allowed to tell us only the good news about their products. Now we're ready for the whole story (21)."

The whole story begins with patients and their doctors knowing about the lowest, safest, effective doses of drugs. Most people don't like taking medications. If they must, they prefer taking as little as possible. But this isn't possible if we aren't given adequate information. Informed consent is denied when information is withheld. We need to know the full range of effective doses, and we need enough pill sizes to make individualized dosing possible. Prevention begins with complete information.

In the meantime, you have to be your own researcher, using books and the Internet, learning enough to choose selectively from the information you see. Since 1996, I have published 15 medical journal articles and Over Dose to help inform you and your doctor about lower, safer, proven-effective drug doses because such information was unavailable to most people. Using all of the resources available today, you can learn a lot, and when you do, tell your doctor -- doctors respect good, scientifically-based information -- so that your doctor can inform others following you.


References
1. Waechter, F. Paroxetine must not be given to patients under 18. BMJ, June 14, 2003;326:1282.
2. FDA statement regarding the antidepressant Paxil for pediatric population. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, June 19, 2003:www.fda.gov -- accessed 9/18/O3.
3. Harris, G. Debate Resumes on the Safety of Depression's Wonder Drugs. New York Times, Aug. 7, 2003:nytimes.com.
4. Cohen, JS. Over Dose: The Case Against The Drug Companies. Prescription Drugs, Side Effects, and Your Health. Tarcher/Putnam, New York: October 2001.
5. Medawar, C, Herxheimer, A, Bell, A, et al. Paroxetine, Panorama, and user reporting of ADRs: consumer intelligence matters in clinical practice and post-marketing drug surveillance. International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine 2002;15:161-169.
6. Donovan, S, Clayton, A, Beeharry, M, et al. Deliberate self-harm and antidepressant drugs. Investigation of a possible link. British Journal of Psychiatry, 2000;177:551-6.
6A. Rogers, L, Waterhouse, R. Prozac Makers Told to Warn of Side-Effects. The Sunday Times [Britain], July 8, 2001:www.sunday-times.co.uk/news.
7. Glenmullen, J. Prozac Backlash: Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Other Antidepressants with Safe, Effective Alternatives. Simon and Schuster, March 2000.
8. Healy, D. The Antidepressant Era. Harvard University Press, Sept. 1997.
9. Hickling, L. Questions Persist concerning Prozac's Role in Suicide Risk. Www.drkoop.com Health News, May 11, 2000: www.drkoop.com/dyncon/article.asp?at=N&id=11009.
10. Teicher, MH, Glod, C, Cole, JO. Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupation during fluoxetine treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 1990;147(2):207.
11. Fichter, CG, Jobe, TH, Braun, BG. Does fluoxetine have a therapeutic window? Lancet 1991;338.
12. Anderson GM; Segman RH; King RA. Serotonin and suicidality: the impact of fluoxetine administration. II: Acute neurobiological effects. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 1995, 32(1):44-50.
13. Lancon, C, Bernard, D, Bougerol, T. [Fluoxetine, akathisia and suicide]. Encephale, 1997 May-Jun, 23(3):218-23. Abstract.
14. Liu, CY, Yang, YY, et al. Fluoxetine-related suicidality and muscle aches in a patient with poststroke depression [letter]. Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, 1996 Dec, 16(6):466-7.
15. Jackson, A. Drug Turned Loving Man into a Killer, Says Judge. Sidney Morning Herald, Fri., May 25, 2001:www.smh.com.au/
16. Donovan, S, Clayton, A, et al. Deliberate self-harm and antidepressant drugs. Investigation of a possible link. British Journal of Psychiatry, 2000;177:551-6.
17. American Society of Hospital Pharmacists. American Hospital Formulary Service, Drug Information 1999. Gerald K. McEvoy, Editor. Bethesda: 1999.
18. The Debate Over Antidepressants (5 Letters). Letters to the Editor. New York Times, 8/11/O3:nytimes.com.
19. Wernicke, JF, Dunlop, SR, Dornseif, BE, et al. Low-dose fluoxetine therapy for depression. Psychopharmacology Bulletin 1988;24(1):183-188.
20. Louie, AK, Lewis, TB, Lannon, MD. Use of low-dose fluoxetine in major depression and panic disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 1993;54(1):435-438.
21. Richard A. Friedman. What You Do Know Can't Hurt You. New York Times, 8/12/O3:nytimes.com.

One Nation, Two Futures?

The formula that emerged from the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections was provocative: The less dense the population, the more likely it was to vote Republican. Republicans appeared to have lost the cities and inner suburbs, positioning themselves as the party of country roads, small towns and traditional values. Though Bush was often mocked for the time he spent on his ranch, sleeves rolled up, gun in hand, the image was widely promoted and became a cornerstone of his identity among Republican voters.

Conversely, it looked like Democrats had lost the country -- that is, until November 2006 when Democrats won decisive victories in the Midwest and Great Plains, often by leveraging their candidates' rural identities against a national Democratic Party that local voters saw as being overly urban, secular and affluent. By November 8, the electoral map looked a whole lot bluer. Yet Democrats could not have won without appealing to libertarian, anti-urban sensibilities.

"Millions of rural people have come to reject the larger framework of urban life," writes public radio reporter Brian Mann in his compelling new book Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Heart of America's Conservative Rural Rebellion. "They despise the liberal modernism that shaped metro culture in the twentieth century and see it as an ideology that is every bit as foreign and threatening as communism."

Voting is just the tip of the iceberg. Antagonism toward cities is an under-recognized, under-analyzed factor in right-wing organizing, but now more and more writers are struggling to understand the rural/urban divide, how it has shaped national politics, and what it means for progressive organizing.

Mann coins the term "homelander" to describe largely white, anti-urban conservatives and says the homeland is a state of mind. You hear the homeland ethos not only in George W. Bush's acquired Texas twang, but in the voices documented in recent books from Mann, Steve Macek, and Juan Enriquez.

"Urban America breeds things that will probably never be here [in Perryton, Texas], but it scares people," Jim Hudson, publisher of Perryton Herald, tells Mann. What kinds of things? asks Mann. "Gay culture," he replies. "HIV sure wasn't bred in rural America."

The City and the Tower

Homelander ideologues of all stripes, from religious to libertarian to neoconservative, agree that cities, like governments, should be small enough to drown in the bathtub. Their hostility has deep cultural roots.

The homelander vision of the city starts with a story in Genesis 11:1-9. When God saw the first city of humankind and the tower its residents had built, He destroyed the tower and confused their language, "so that one will not understand the language of his companion" and "scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city."

Later in Genesis, God destroys the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah for gross immorality, which many Christians have interpreted as homosexuality. (Classical Jewish texts specify economic greed, not sexuality, as the cause of God's wrath.) Thus begins the Christian history of urban life.

Now let's skip ahead several thousand years, to the birth of the American Republic. "Enthusiasm for the American city has not been typical or predominant in our intellectual history," writes Morton and Lucia White in their 1962 study, Intellectuals Against the City. "Fear has been the more common reaction." Thomas Jefferson described "great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man"; Henry David Thoreau preferred his cabin in the woods to "the desperate city"; in 1907, the Rev. Josiah Strong called the modern city "a Menace to State and Nation."

This is not to say rural politics was (or is) always conservative, or even anti-urban. From the Sierra and Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, rural progressives built a great, creative tradition of civil disobedience, multiracial organizing, and cultural dissent. Yet in recent political history, that heritage was obscured by conservative organizing that promoted a race-based depiction of the city as "chaotic, ruined, and repellent, the exact inverse of the orderly domestic idyll of the suburbs," as Steve Macek writes in his recent book Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and Moral Panic Over the City. In such a view, urban poverty is a natural byproduct of unnatural urban life; it is slack morals, not racism or capitalism, which create the urban underclass and its affluent liberal enablers.

Thus the solution to urban poverty and lawlessness is not welfare and economic development, which will "prolong the problems and perhaps make them worse," but instead law enforcement, religious evangelism, and market-driven ethnic cleansing.

Tilting Against Towers: The New Right's Common Ground

As America urbanized and conservatives resurrected the ancient image of the city as dirty and dangerous, they simultaneously affirmed the ideal of the small town and countryside. Religious and secular conservatives alike found common ground in promoting the idea of an urban/rural divide and, in the process, helped make it real.

When the New Right emerged as a political force in the early 1980s, journalist Frances Fitzgerald paid a visit to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Jerry Falwell founded one of the first suburban megachurches and launched the Moral Majority, the first major organizational expression of the modern religious Right. There, in 1981, Fitzgerald found a homelander utopia with over one hundred churches.

"Lynchburg calls itself a city," she writes in Cities on a Hill, "but it is really a collection of suburbs. In the fifties, its old downtown was supplanted by a series of shopping plazas, leaving it with no real center ....The automobile has cut too many swaths across it, leaving gasoline stations and fast-food places to spring up in parking-lot wastelands. But it is a clean city, full of quiet streets and shade trees." She also found Falwell's congregation to be astonishingly uniform in race, culture, and dress, despite a substantial minority of African-Americans in the suburbs around them.

In his church sermons Falwell talked with his congregation about his trips to New York "and the narrow escapes he has had among the denizens of Sin City," hitting racial code words like "welfare chiselers," "urban rioters," and "crime in the streets" -- all phenomena with which his congregation had little or no personal contact. These helped mobilize the homeland against the forces of modernism that converged in the city.

The Right's Attack on Cities

Though the Religious Right bases its public policy agenda on the authority of the Bible and the libertarian Right bases its on the sovereignty of the individual, they converge in the same suburban parking lot. As the Right gained power on a national level, their policies and preconceptions have had a direct impact on cities. "During the Reagan and Bush eras alone," Steve Macek writes, "federal aid to local governments was slashed by 60 percent. Federal spending on new public housing dropped from $28 billion in 1977 to just $7 billion eleven years later. Meanwhile, shrinking welfare benefits have made it harder for the disproportionately urban recipients of public assistance to make ends meet."

Conservative policies and the retreat of liberal commitment to ending poverty combined to make cities increasingly unequal. But as Juan Enriquez makes clear in the The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing and our Future, welfare didn't disappear -- the money just shifted from cities to the homeland in the form of farm and corporate subsidies, price supports, military spending, and pork-barrel projects. Reviewing a chart of tax benefits to states, Enriquez notes that it is curious "that the most productive, high-tech states tend to vote Democratic. The most dole-dependent tend to be hard-line, antigovernment, antispending Republicans. Seventy-five percent of Mr. Bush's votes came from taker states."

Conservative policy initiatives like California's Proposition 13 (which in 1978 slashed property taxes by more than two-thirds) devastated urban school systems, to the benefit of suburban and exurban homeowners. More recently we've seen public transportation funding slashed, AIDS funding shift from Blue to Red States, and homeland security funding distributed as a form of pork. "Low-population states such as Wyoming and North Dakota received forty dollars per person to arm themselves against the impending al-Qaeda menace," Brian Mann notes. "Meanwhile, the big I-have-a-bulls-eye-on-my-forehead states like California and New York managed to pocket about five dollars per capita."

Mann points to the 9,000 residents of Ochiltree County, Texas, "the most Republican place in America," who were graced by nearly $53 million in federal money in 2003 alone -- which is, by any standard, a generous reward for their unstinting support of President Bush. The state of Kansas went from losing $2 million a year in what it paid in taxes, to making "a sweet profit of $1,200 per person" by 2004. When Mann raises this fact to his conservative brother Allen, he is enraged. "I don't believe it," Allen says. "No way. I know so many people in my town who refuse to take government money. They'd rather go hungry." Allen urges his brother to drop the issue. "You'll make rural people so mad that they won't listen to anything else you have to say."

The Popular Culture Divide

How have so many rural folks and their political allies gotten so hostile to cities and cosmopolitan values? Part of the answer, as I have suggested, lies in the particular cultural histories of Christianity and America. Race is also a factor, as it has been from the moment Europeans set foot on the continent.

But why has this front of the culture war suddenly gotten so rhetorically violent, the rift so wide? Mann argues that, over the past two decades, homelanders have succeeded in building their own alternative mass culture -- separate and unshaped by urban sensibilities. "When I was a kid," Mann writes, "you drank from the spigot of urban culture or you went without." "Back when the three media networks controlled everything and AP and UPI were the only sources of news, that was our window on the world," says Jim Hudson, the publisher of Perryton Herald. "Now I start my day with Fox and Friends. Then I do a computer check, reading NewsMax.com, a very conservative site."

"These days, rural Americans can get their news, books, art, movies, and music from sources that more closely reflect their values," writes Mann. "The break isn't clean or absolute; small-town folks still watch Everybody Loves Raymond and buy Stephen King novels .... But now they can also get their news from Fox, Sinclair, or NewsMax.com. They can buy top-notch thrillers and romance novels written by evangelical Christians." In effect, homelanders are bicultural; they can understand the language of urban popular culture, but mainstream urbanites are often clueless about the homeland lingo. "This media balkanization extends beyond politics and journalism," Mann writes. "These days, for every Dr. Spock, there is a Dr. Dobson. For every Stephen King, there's a Tim LaHaye."

Beyond the Myth: The Truth About Cities

"Modern liberalism was born in the big cities and died there," neocon Fred Siegel writes in his 1977 book The Future Once Happened Here, painting American cities as economic and moral dead zones. But as the most recent elections reveal, nothing could be further from the truth. For all the mistakes committed in the name of liberal and progressive urban policy, an urban liberalism is flourishing; in places like San Francisco and Portland, it has achieved a confident hegemony. Though the San Francisco Bay Area has plenty of problems, including profound wealth inequality and troubled public schools, it remains a seat of technological and cultural innovation, with its low fertility rates offset by immigration and emigration that keep the city culturally diverse

Even families who flee from city centers take their urban values with them into the increasingly diverse inner suburbs, where Democrats won 58 percent of the presidential vote in 2004. Both left and Right are turning out to be wrong about the politics of sprawl, which is emerging as the bleeding edge, rather than the death, of urbanization. Today "edge" cities like Las Vegas and Miami have turned deep blue, as their populations grow denser and more diverse. Even the urban outposts of places like Montana and Oklahoma run politically to the left.

According to the homelander urban narrative, such places should now be pestilential, blighted dens of inequity. Yet, despite all the conservative prophecies of urban apocalypse, the level and pace of urbanization continues to accelerate, with complex economic and social results.

Every year two million people move to American cities and inner suburbs, adding islands to the archipelago, while America's homeland population falls fast toward 56 million, "roughly the level of the mid-1970s," notes Mann. Far from declining demographically, the United Nations predicts that the percentage of the North American population living in urban areas will rise to 84 percent of the population by 2030.

Cornell researchers Barclay G. Jones and Solomane Koné found that from 1970 to 1990, per capita income increased directly with population size in metropolitan areas. Similar trends have been found for social capital: A 2003 study by the General Social Survey found that city dwellers were more likely to help each other out than their rural counterparts. Such statistics -- there are many -- stand in contrast to the Stygian alienation depicted in conservative "yuppie horror films" like Judgment Night (1993) and Ransom (1996), which show urbanites as antisocial and uncaring.

An Urban Backlash Is No Solution

Dumbfounded by the homeland ascendancy, many urbanites have embraced a misguided strategy of rebranding progressivism as specifically urban. In their influential 2004 manifesto "The Urban Archipelago," the editors of the Seattle weekly, The Stranger, argue that it's time for urbanites to aggressively pursue their own self-interest on a national stage. "We need a new identity politics," they write, "an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents...To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues."

Yet cutting the Red States off the federal dole, ignoring the downward-pressure on income created by Wal-Marting the homelander economy, or leaving Red States out of environmental policymaking -- all steps recommended by The Stranger's editors -- ignores our mutual interdependency and breeds self-destructive partitions.

"People are hurting in the countryside," Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute of Southern Studies, told me. "You go into western North Carolina, and you see hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are being shattered by economic dislocations. If progressives turn their backs on those people, they're losing a huge opportunity and they're failing to address this country's deepest problems."

And as Brian Mann points out, even if The Stranger's strategy was desirable, it would be extremely difficult to pursue on a national level. The Senate, for example, gives each state two seats regardless of population. "As a consequence, those lucky homelanders in Wyoming and Alaska receive 72 times more clout per capita than do California's metros," Mann writes. "It's a startling fact that half of the American people live in just nine highly urbanized states -- most of them staunchly Democratic -- but they hold only 18 percent of the Senate's power." Similarly, the structure of the Electoral College has tilted power towards the rural states, while gerrymandering has given Republicans an edge in the House of Representatives.

"Put bluntly, our political system is no longer a neutral playing field," Mann writes. "In ways our founding fathers could never have imagined, the Electoral College and the Senate now favor one way of life, one set of cultural and political values, over another. Because those values are no longer shared by most Americans, the result is a growing disconnect between our political elites and the people they govern."

At this writing it's too early to tell, but November 2006 may stand as a turning point, when rural liberals and progressives fought their way back onto the electoral map. We still have a long, long way to go, and we need more research, writing, and debates like the ones found in Welcome to the Homeland and The Untied States of America. There is more at work in the homeland ascendancy than pure ideology and moral politics; we also have to respond to the self-interest of people whose lives are being turned upside down by war and economic change.

Too many liberals and progressives are isolated in their metropolitan towers, looking down not only at the people The Stranger deem "rubes, fools, and hatemongers," but also at the disenfranchised and dispossessed of their own unequal cities. Even if the homelander challenge fades to a historical footnote, metropolitans will still need to face cities rived by class and race. Maybe it is time for those of us who live in cities to come down from our towers, before it's too late.

A longer version of this essay appeared originally in Public Eye magazine, which presents reports by scholars and journalists on trends within the U.S. Right.

For six years, Jeremy Adam Smith was a student and community activist in North Central Florida. Today he lives in San Francisco and works as the managing editor of Greater Good magazine. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic.

The story which broke last week about a traveler risk scoring system called the Automated Targeting System, or "ATS," evokes an image of an Orwellian world in which the State compiles a secret dossier on every individual and sorts the population according to secret criteria, assigning each person a "risk score." The individual has no recourse to challenge his risk rating, and he has no way of correcting any false or incomplete information about him. In fact, he will never know what information is being used against him, or even the criteria on which he has been judged a risk to the State. It is a disturbing image, and the fact that the government has been conducting the ATS program in secret for four years has shocked many people. However, the ATS is hardly a surprise to those who have been keeping track of similar programs.

First, there was Total Information Awareness, or "TIA," a program that was to data mine "the transaction space" in order to single out people who might be terrorists. Then there was the Multi-state Anti-terrorism Information Exchange, or "MATRIX," which linked together state and commercial information and was probably a data-mining program. In a test run of their technology for government officials, its developers boasted that they had found 120,000 likely terrorists living in the United States. In the area of travel, the second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or "CAPPS II," was to data mine airline and commercial information in order to score travelers as red, green or amber risks. Its successor program, "Secure Flight," tried to do a similar thing. Then, in the area of telecommunications, there was the NSA program, secretly authorized by the President to data mine the telephone calls and emails of the American people.

All of these programs, except for the NSA's, were ostensibly scrapped by the government or Congress. Americans thought TIA was just too creepy, states opted out of MATRIX in droves because it was so intrusive, the GAO said that CAPPS II was ineffective in identifying possible terrorists, and Secure Flight was killed after it was caught risk scoring, which Congress had expressly forbidden it to do. Each program never really went away. Instead, they were simply repackaged -- or carried on in secret, like the ATS program.

Data mining is the use of computer algorithms to search masses of information for specified criteria. Risk scoring is a statistical rating on how closely an individual matches the criteria. The government is using these two techniques to sort through the masses of information it has been gathering and buying from private data aggregating companies since 9-11, in order to watch every transaction made by the American population, and populations outside the United States, all of the time. This is mass surveillance, and it's global in scope. Domestic systems feed into global ones and global systems -- like biometric passports, the sharing of airline reservation system information, the interception of international banking records, and the interception of global communications, to name a few -- feed into the domestic.

The purpose of data mining is not to check individuals' personal information against information about known terrorists, or those suspected of terrorism on "reasonable grounds" as they cross borders, send emails or access public services. The purpose of it is to predict who might be a terrorist -- a little like the film "Minority Report," in which officials stop criminal acts before they happen by reading people's minds. However, the technology that is being used today falls far short of the technology of Hollywood fantasy.

First, the information on which data mining or risk scoring depend is often inaccurate, lacking context, dated, or incomplete. And like the ATS program, data mining and risk scoring programs never contain a mechanism by which individuals can correct, contextualize or object to the information that is being used against them, or even know what it is. Operating on a "preemption" principle, these systems are uninterested in this kind of precision. They would be bogged down if they were held to the ordinary standards of access, accuracy, and accountability. Secondly, the criteria used to sort masses of data will always be over-inclusive and mechanical. Data mining is like assessing guilt by "Google" key-word searches. And since these systems use broad markers for predicting terrorism, ethnic and religious profiling are endemic to them.

Welcome to the national insecurity state, where our virtual identities are continually assessed for the risk we pose to the state and the normal relationship between the individual and the state in democratic societies is turned on its head. Now, the individual answers to the state and woe betide the person who is branded with a high "risk score."

Maureen Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues, most recently testifying before the House and Senate Committees reviewing the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act. In 2001, Webb was a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University in New York. A litigator for some of the first constitutional cases heard under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including the landmark freedom of association case, "Lavigne, "and a case challenging the powers of Canada's newly instituted spy agency, CSIS, she sits as co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. She is also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada. Her first book Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World will be published by City Lights in February 2007.

Democracy is supposed to be about ordinary people, common folk, having a say-so in the decisions that shape their lives; the idea that there's an "inalienable right" to certain freedoms; that the only legitimate government is one that answers to "the people." In democracies, people are not subjects, but citizens.

Democracy?

Raed Jarrar, the Iraq project director for Global Exchange, a human rights organization, who has spent a lot of time talking to members of Iraq's parliament, points out how the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to extend the occupation force in Iraq. The security council voted with the quickness after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki requested the extension.

U.S. and British "diplomats" rushed the vote through last month, even though it wasn't on the council's agenda for November.

"The Iraqi parliament was not informed about this (request) by al-Maliki. I talked to four Iraqi MPs: a Sunni, a Shia, and two seculars, and all of them were totally shocked that al-Maliki bypassed the Iraqi parliament."

Dr. Hajim al-Hassani, a Sunni secular MP and the former speaker of parliament, told Jarrar: "We were supposed to have a meeting with al-Maliki and other top officials in the parliament during the next couple of weeks to decide what to do with the mandate."

"According to most of the MPs I talked to," Jarrar continues, "it is unconstitutional to have the prime minister renewing the mandate without consulting the Iraqi parliament."

Democracy?

A recent poll conducted by The Program on International Policy Attitudesfound that three of four Americans believe that in order to stabilize Iraq, U.S. policymakers should engage Iran and Syria in talks and eight in 10 support an international conference on Iraq.

A majority of Americans oppose keeping U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely and instead support a timetable for withdrawal within two years or less, which is in line with several key proposals of the Iraq Study Group.

That's probably because most Americans understand the we-don't-negotiate-with-terrorists line is nonsense, especially since Reagan negotiated with Iranian "terrorists" for the release of U.S. hostages and, as James Baker noted, "we talked to the Soviets for 40 years when they were trying to blow us up." Baker emphasized that it's not a sign of weakness to talk to your adversaries. After all, peace is made with enemies; not friends. Interestingly, U.S. public opinion is similar to Iraqi public opinion. Sure, there are those true believers who cling to neocon myths about Iraq and avoid serious thinking by writing all this off as "liberal" propaganda.

OK, well check out what the very conservative Cato Institute has to say.

"A new, extensive survey of Iraqi public opinion conducted by Gallup and other groups discredits numerous cherished beliefs that hawks have held about Iraq."

"For months, the Bush administration and its supporters have argued that there is a silent majority of Iraqis who regard coalition forces as liberators, want those forces to stay for a prolonged period, oppose insurgent attacks on coalition troops, and are enthusiastic about creating a Western-style democracy for their country. The poll results contradict every one of those assumptions."

The poll found that 57 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops out "immediately." Though only 3 percent of Kurds want the forces to depart immediately, 61 percent of Shiites and 65 percent of Sunnis -- the ones who have the most to lose by U.S. withdrawal -- want to see a quick U.S. exit strategy.

In Baghdad, where U.S. troop presence is more visible and concentrated, 75 percent of the city's residents want the U.S. out ASAP. Where the violence is at its worst, three-quarters of the population don't feel protected or liberated by U.S. forces.

Democracy and freedom? Yeah, right.

Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff reporter and a syndicated columnist.

The article begins by noting that total US income in 2004-the latest year for which tax information is available-was $7.044 trillion, down from more than $7.143 trillion in 2000. The decline was attributed to two factors: the stagnation of median household income-which fell by 3 percent, or about $1,600, between 2000 and 2004-and the fact that the earnings of the richest Americans have not yet caught up with the peak reached before the Internet bubble on Wall Street burst in 2000.

Incomes in 2004 rose by an average 6.8 percent but the vast bulk of the increase went to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of all Americans-living in some 130,500 households with an average income of $4.9 million-who saw their incomes rise by 27.5 percent over the course of one year. During the same period the income of the poorest one-fifth of the population-some 60 million people-rose by only 1.8 percent.

The sharp rise in income for the wealthiest Americans-due in large measure to the Bush administration's cuts in capital gains taxes, corporate profit rates not seen in nearly 40 years and the recovery of the stock market-has led to a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich. According to a separate study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans took in 9.5 percent of all pretax income, or about $679 billion in 2004, excluding unreported income.

Referring to this elite group, the New York Times article notes, "those very top households, which include about 300,000 Americans, reported significantly more pretax income combined than the poorest 120 million Americans earned in 2004, the data show. This is a sharp change from 1979, the oldest year examined by the I.R.S, when the thin slice at the top received about one-third of the total income of the big group at the bottom."

This staggering fact reveals a great deal about the economic and political processes that have unfolded over the last quarter century. While the portion of national income controlled by America's corporate and financial elite declined in the aftermath of the Great Depression and stabilized during the postwar period, over the last 25 years a massive social transformation has occurred and the share of the national income now controlled by America's social oligarchy is at the highest levels since 1929.

The Times article goes on to note, "Over all, average incomes rose 27 percent in real terms over the quarter-century from 1979 through 2004. But the gains were narrowly concentrated at the top and offset by losses for the bottom 60 percent of Americans, those making less than $38,761 in 2004." It continues, "The bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than 95 cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979, the analysis of IRS data showed. The next best-off group, the fifth of Americans on the 60th to 80th rungs of the income ladder, averaged 2 cents more income in 2004 for each dollar they earned in 1979.

"Only those in the top 5 percent had significant gains," the newspaper notes. The average income of those on the 95th to 99th rungs of the income ladder rose by 53 percent, almost twice the average rate. The largest gains, however, went to those at the very heights of American society. "A third of the entire national increase in reported income went to the top 1 percent-and more than half of that went to the top tenth of 1 percent, whose average incomes soared so much that for each dollar, adjusted for inflation, that they had in 1979 they had $3.48 in 2004," the Times article says.

The last 25 years has seen an enormous transfer of wealth from working people into the hands of America's economic elite. With the full backing of both the Democrats and Republicans, corporate America responded to the decline of its competitive position in the 1970s by launching an unrelenting attack on the jobs and living standards of the working class that continues to this day. The enrichment of those at the top has come at the direct expense of the vast majority of the working population in America, whose share of national wealth has plummeted.

At the other pole of society is an increasingly impoverished working class, including some 25 percent of all workers who labor for poverty wages. The Times article notes that the bottom fifth of all taxpayers earned below $11,166 and their average reported income was only $5,743 each. Because the IRS includes a single individual or a married couple in its definition of a "taxpayer" the poorest 26 million taxpayers account for the equivalent nearly 48 million adults and about 12 million dependent children. According to the Times analysis, this means the poorest 60 million Americans have reported incomes of less than $7 a day!

The official poverty line in 2004 was $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child-although the real cost of attaining basic necessities is far higher. The Times article notes that the IRS income data does not include the value of government benefits like food stamps, earned-income tax credits and subsidized medical care. But the social programs for the poor-including federal welfare assistance-have largely been wiped out or curtailed and what programs do remain are not sufficient to lift families out of poverty.

It is often noted that 3 billion of the world's poorest people live on less than $2 a day. In the US, where the cost of living is far higher, $7 a day is only enough to guarantee a life of destitution. The fact that 60 million people live in such dire poverty-and tens of millions more could face the same fate if they lost their jobs or confronted some other financial catastrophe-is a damning indictment of American capitalism and the free market model it touts around the world.

The levels of social stratification and inequality in the US are incompatible with genuine democracy. Political life in America is completely subordinated to the needs of a financial aristocracy whose pursuit of ever greater levels of personal wealth constantly collides with the social needs and democratic rights of the broad masses of people in the US and internationally. The needs of this elite-for further wars of conquest, tax cuts, the elimination of social programs and a drastic reduction of living standards-cannot be imposed, in the final analysis, without recourse to authoritarian means.

The social transformation that has occurred over the last 25 years has coincided with a shift to the right by both big business parties and in particular the abandonment of any program of social reforms by the Democratic Party, whose leading personal, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and leading presidential contender Senator Hillary Clinton, are themselves multimillionaires. Insulated from the majority of the people and unwilling and unable to respond to their needs and concerns, the leading members of the incoming Democratic majority in Congress have already made it clear that they will not roll back the Bush-era tax cuts that have helped bring unimaginable wealth to their real constituents.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "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, ie, post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation". José Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism. He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant", Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were "commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at Guantánamo, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles".

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation". The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the US for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22 and a half hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation". The yard consists of a concrete well about 3.5 metres in length with walls 6 metres high and a metal grille across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, more than 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric ward, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

www.monbiot.com

The 49-year-old Webb, a divorced father of three who was living alone in a rental house in Sacramento County, California, then raised the gun and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.

His body was found the next day after movers who were scheduled to clear out Webb's rental house, arrived and followed the instructions from the note on the door.

Though a personal tragedy, the story of Gary Webb's suicide has a larger meaning for the American people who find themselves increasingly sheltered from the truth by government specialists at cover-ups and by a U.S. news media that has lost its way.

Webb's death had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations - that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn't have been true.

Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, published in August 1996, revived the story of how the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of these crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.

Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator a "randy conspiracy buff." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Kerry's Contra-Cocaine Chapter."]

Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Webb's series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting the contra-cocaine trafficking to the crack epidemic that had ravaged Los Angeles and other American cities in the 1980s. For that reason, African-American communities were up in arms as were their elected representatives.

So, the "Dark Alliance" series offered a unique opportunity for the major news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the attention it deserved.

Media Resistance

But that would have required some painful self-criticism among Washington journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they had avoided retaliation from aggressive Reagan supporters who had made an art of punishing out-of-step reporters for pursuing controversies like the contra-cocaine scandal.

Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken shape and was in no mood to accept the notion that President Ronald Reagan's beloved contras were little more than common criminals. That recognition would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic status.

There was the turf issue, too. Since Webb's stories coincided with the emergence of the Internet as an alternate source for news and the San Jose Mercury News was at the center of Silicon Valley, the big newspapers saw a threat to their historic dominance as the nation's gatekeepers for what information should be taken seriously.

Plus, the major media's focus in the mid-1990s was on scandals swirling around Bill Clinton, such as some firings at the White House Travel Office and convoluted questions about his old Whitewater real-estate deal.

In other words, there was little appetite to revisit scandals from the Reagan years and there was strong motive to disparage what Webb had written.

It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack. The Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.

But - in a pattern that would repeat itself over the next decade - the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the right-wing press. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb's story.

The Post's approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news - "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post reported - and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted - that it had not "played a major role in the emergence of crack."

A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy fears."

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on against Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA's internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.

But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.

Nevertheless, Webb was becoming the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants.

"Oliver Stone, check your voice mail," Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]

Webb's suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North's emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership.

"Few of the so-called leaders of the movement ... really care about the boys in the field," Owen wrote. "THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM." [Capitalization in the original.]

Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key facts about the contra war, but that didn't stop them from pillorying Gary Webb. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat. On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series "fell short of my standards." He criticized the stories because they "strongly implied CIA knowledge" of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. "We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship," Ceppos wrote.

The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos's retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury News' continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.

For undercutting Webb and other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national "Ethics in Journalism Award" by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.
The CIA Probe
Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan administration had conducted the contra war.

The CIA's defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Inspector General Hitz's findings on Jan. 29, 1998.

Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz's Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb's allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA's knowledge.

Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called "Frogman Case." On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA's weakening defenses.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department.

The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan and were implicated in heroin trafficking.

The next breach in the defensive wall was a report by the Justice Department's inspector general Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb's series, Bromwich's report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA's Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.

According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.

Bromwich's report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.

The report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb's series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.

Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb's series.

Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses's operation and his financial assistance to the contras. For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds.

Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.

The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador.

Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. "We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport," he wrote.

Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries.

Cocaine Crimes & Monica

By fall 1998, Official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two.

In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.

According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

The earliest contra force, called ADREN or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen "to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre," according to a June 1981 draft CIA field report.

ADREN also employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian planes and hijackings, to disrupt the Sandinista government, the CIA knew. Cocaine smuggling was also in the picture.

According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.

ADREN's leaders included Enrique Bermudez and other early contras who would later direct the major contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermudez remained the top contra military commander.

The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN's cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermudez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States which went ahead nonetheless.

The truth about Bermudez's supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear. According to Volume One, Bermudez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler, to raise money and buy supplies for the contras.

Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandon, who told Hitz's investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermudez in 1982.

At the time, Meneses's criminal activities were well known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But the FDN commander told the cocaine smugglers that "the ends justify the means" in raising money for the contras.

After the Bermudez meeting, contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandon get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandon and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.

There were other indications of Bermudez's drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermudez of narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz's report.

After the contra war ended, Bermudez returned to Managua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.

CIA Drug Asset

Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. But Hitz discovered that the U.S. government may have contributed to the problem.

Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative - known by his CIA pseudonym "Ivan Gomez" - in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez's drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.

In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted that he "knew this act was illegal."

Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said "his brother had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business."

Gomez's brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica. Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas charged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the contras.

Gomez "was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren't supposed to," Cabezas stated publicly.

But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez's picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.

While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas's allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz's report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez's direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry's investigation in 1987.

The Bolivian Connection

There also was more about Gomez. In November 1985, the FBI learned from an informant that Gomez's two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia's infamous drug kingpin Roberto Suarez.

Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with the support of Argentine's hard-line anti-communist military regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center government.

The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia the region's first narco-state. Bolivia's government-protected cocaine shipments helped transform the Medellin cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.

Some of those profits allegedly found their way into contra coffers.

Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.

In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other Argentine intelligence officers - veterans of the Bolivian coup - trained the contras.

CIA Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the Bolivian-contra connection. One contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his anti-Sandinista activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters.

Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier.

Despite all this suspicious drug activity around Ivan Gomez and the contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family's drug business.

The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that "Gomez directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity," Hitz wrote.

But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 DOJ-CIA agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by non-employees.

Instead, the CIA eased Gomez, an independent contractor, out of the agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional oversight committees.

When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second thoughts. "It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy's involvement in narcotics didn't weigh more heavily on me or the system," the official acknowledged.

The White House Trail

A Medellin drug connection arose in another section of Hitz's report, when he revealed evidence suggesting that some contra trafficking may have been sanctioned by Reagan's National Security Council.

The protagonist for this part of the contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for North's NSC operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica.

Frigorificos de Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm's principals - Carlos Soto and Medellin cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez.

Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. At the AP, his operation was one of the targets of our investigation.

Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez on March 25, 1987, about his alleged cocaine trafficking. He responded by pointing the finger at his NSC superiors.

"Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council," Hitz reported.

"Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."

After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision. There would be no further efforts at "debriefing Nunez."

Hitz noted that "the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for the decision" to stop the Nunez interrogation.

But the CIA's Central American task force chief Alan Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the contra money handled by North]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter."

Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA's station chief in Costa Rica, later confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez "was involved in a very sensitive operation" for North's "Enterprise." The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged.

At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated interrogation, the CIA's acting director was Robert M. Gates, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Dec. 6, 2006, to be President George W. Bush's new Secretary of Defense.

Miami Vice

The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on the contra project, Hitz found.

One of Nunez's Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras, Hitz reported.

The CIA also learned that Vidal's drug connections were not only in the past.

A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal's ties to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was working with anti-communist Cuban, Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medellin cartel representative within the contra movement.

There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where Vidal worked.

Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro's assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986.

By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of a congressional inquiry into contra drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information. On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from Alan Fiers, who didn't mention Vidal's drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.

But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. attorney in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected entities. This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA's Latin American division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5, 1987, the CIA's security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal drug information "could be exposed during any future litigation."

As expected, the U.S. Attorney did request documents about "contra-related activities" by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that "no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter," a statement that was clearly false. The CIA continued Vidal's employment as an adviser to the contra movement until 1990, virtually the end of the contra war.

Honduras Trafficking

Hitz revealed that drugs also tainted the highest levels of the Honduran-based FDN, the largest contra army.

Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a contra commander who rose to be chief of staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian prison.

In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America where he joined the contras. Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the contras. But one CIA cable noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 thoroughbred horse at the contra camp.

Contra military commander Bermudez later attributed Rivas's wealth to his ex-girlfriend's rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that "some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking."

Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that DEA take no action "in view of the serious political damage to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become public."

Rivas was eased out of the contra leadership with an explanation of poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.

Drug Flights

Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose "Frank" Arana.

The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans "to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South America."

On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged. Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana's association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms.

If "Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty," the DEA responded.

Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs.

Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on the DEA cable about Arana stating: "Arnold Arana ... still active and working, we [CIA] may have a problem."

Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.

During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.

Hitz found other air transport companies used by the contras implicated in the cocaine trade. Even FDN leaders suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes that might be returning with drugs.

Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero's brother and the chief of contra logistics, grew so uneasy about one air-freight company that he notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south, not the return flights north.

Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly contra missions from 1983-85.

In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid contra supply company linked to the drug trade.

Fig Leaf

By the time that Hitz's Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA's defense against Webb's series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking.

But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA's own analytical division.

Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn't want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

According to Hitz, the CIA had "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. ... [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program."

One CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war."

Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contras hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA's analysts.

Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that "only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking." That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations - serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.

Nevertheless, although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth']

On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's report was posted at the CIA's Internet site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood.

Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA's Volume Two.

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb's career never recovered.

Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up. By December 2004, he found himself forced to move out of his rented house near Sacramento.

Instead, Webb decided to end his life.

One Last Chance

Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times one more opportunity to set matters right, to revisit the CIA's admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability on the Reagan-era officials implicated in protecting the contra crimes.

But all that followed Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb. The Los Angeles Times ran a graceless obituary that made no mention of the admissions in the CIA's Volume Two and treated Webb like a low-life criminal, rather than a journalist who took on a tough story and paid a high price.

The Times obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post. No one reading this obit would understand the profound debt that American history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion's share of the credit for forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.

Yet, the big media's consistent mishandling of the contra-cocaine scandal in the 1980s and 1990s carried another warning that the nation missed: that the U.S. press corps was no longer capable of reporting complex crimes of state.

That unaddressed danger returned with disastrous results in late 2002 and early 2003 when George W. Bush sold false stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction while the major newspapers acted as cheerleaders and accomplices.

At the time of Webb's death on Dec. 9, 2004, the full scope of the Iraq disaster was still not evident, nor was the major press corps ready to acknowledge that its cowardice in the 1980s and its fecklessness in the 1990s were the direct antecedents to its complicity in the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Gary Webb had been a kind of canary in the mine shaft. His career destruction in the 1990s and his desperate act of suicide in 2004 were warnings about grave dangers that, if left ignored, would wreak even worse havoc on the United States and the world.

But - on this second anniversary of Webb's death - it should be remembered that his great gift to American history was that he, along with angry African-American citizens, forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any White House: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.

It is way past time for that reality - and that gift - to be acknowledged.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at ecrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.' This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.

Sheehan and about 100 other members of a group called Global Exchange were rebuffed last March when they attempted to take a petition with some 72,000 signatures to the U.S. Mission's headquarters across a street from the United Nations.

Prosecutors said they were arrested after ignoring police orders to disperse.

The four were acquitted of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing government administration. They had faced up to a year in jail if convicted of all counts.

Sheehan, 49, of Vacaville, Calif., lost her 24-year-old son Casey in Iraq on April 4, 2004. She has since emerged as one of the most vocal and high-profile opponents of the war, drawing international attention when she camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the war.

The women, calling their campaign "Women Say No To War," had hoped to give the petition to Peggy Kerry, the mission's liaison for non-governmental organizations and sister of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as they had in 2005.

Kerry refused to meet with the women in the presence of Cindy Sheehan and the news media. She testified during the trial that the presentation seemed like a publicity stunt.

The women ignored police orders to leave and were reading it aloud on the sidewalk when police moved in. The women sat on the sidewalk and were carried to patrol wagons.

Sheehan's co-defendants were Melissa Beattie, 57, of New York; Susan "Medea" Benjamin, 54, of San Francisco; and Patricia Ackerman, 48, of Nyack, N.Y.

The officer's initial search turned up more than 100 names, including Iranian diplomats who had defended the country's nuclear enrichment programme or attended meetings at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The list was eventually narrowed down to 12 Iranians, who could now be subject to travel bans or curbs on their business dealings under a draft resolution before the United Nations. The resolution would freeze the assets of 11 institutions and a dozen individuals suspected of aiding Iran's banned enrichment programme, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, and the director of Iran's main nuclear energy facility.

The newspaper said the state department adopted the research method after the CIA refused to reveal any names of Iranians involved in the country's weapons programme.

The agency claimed that agents on the Iran desk were already overworked, and that such a disclosure could compromise its intelligence sources on Iran.

But it is also believed that the CIA was reluctant to tip its hand on Iran following its failure before the 2003 invasion of Iraq to establish that Saddam Hussein had failed to realise his nuclear ambitions, and that the country did not have a dangerous arsenal.

After bureaucratic wrangling, the CIA eventually confirmed the suspicions about some of the people on the state department list.

However, the agency said that that none of those identified by the state department were directly connected to Iran's efforts to produce a nuclear warhead.

I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy," Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. "... I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."

His wife, Char, cradled his hand. Barnes declined an interview request through the church.

Unlike Haggard, who had the ear of the White House, Barnes is not a household name. He is a self-described introvert who avoids politics, preferring to talk about a Gen-X service at the nondenominational church he started 28 years ago in his basement, church officials said.

Barnes and Grace Chapel stayed out of the debate over Amendment 43, a measure approved by Colorado voters last month defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

"I can't think of a single sermon where he ever had a political agenda," said Dave Palmer, an associate pastor.

Palmer said the church got an anonymous call last week from a person concerned for the welfare of Barnes and the church. The caller had overheard a conversation in which someone mentioned "blowing the whistle" on evangelical preachers engaged in homosexuality, including Barnes, Palmer said.

Palmer met with Barnes, who confessed. At an emergency meeting Thursday, a board of elders accepted Barnes' resignation after he admitted "sexual infidelity," violating the church's code of conduct. Church leaders also must affirm annually that they are "living the moral and ethical teachings of Scripture in my public and private life."

Asked for details of Barnes' transgressions, Palmer called them "infrequent events in his life" that to his knowledge did not take place in recent months.

Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.

In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.

Barnes thought, "'Is that how you'd feel about me?' It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."

When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said. He said he cannot accept that a person is "born that way," so he looks to childhood influences.

Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a "horrible burden."

The soft-spoken Barnes is an unlikely big-church pastor.

After graduating from Dallas Theological Seminary, Barnes and his wife moved to Denver and began a Bible study. His church met in a school and a mortuary, bought property at Colorado Boulevard and Arapahoe Road, and now occupies a campus off County Line Road that used to be a car dealership.

Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that "this is my thorn in the flesh."

Barnes expressed hope for a future where one can "be who you are" and be accepted and loved in the Christian community and also spoke about "separating some of the teachings from Scripture" from Jesus Christ.

Palmer said he wasn't sure what Barnes meant, but Barnes told him that he believes God views homosexuality as a sin.

Barnes said he has been in counseling three times and never found anyone he could talk to.

His wife said on the video that she didn't know about her husband's struggles until he confided in her last week. The couple has two daughters in their 20s.

Char Barnes said she feels "like I'm living someone else's life" but was grateful her husband revealed himself. The couple said they hope to stay in Denver. Near the tape's end, Paul Barnes says, "This is what it is, it's right, and it's time."

Church elder Russ Pilcher said the reaction at services Sunday was largely concern for the couple. "I thought, 'Where did I fall short in making myself so unapproachable that he couldn't come to me?"' Pilcher said.

Paul and Char Barnes will get counseling, but unlike Haggard, they will not go into seclusion or report to a board of reconcilers, Palmer said. He said it will be more personal and that church members will play a role.

Associate pastor John Zivojinovic is the interim senior pastor, and choosing a successor is still months away, Pilcher said.

Given the Haggard story, Pal mer was asked whether Barnes' fall from grace would expose the evangelical community to further charges of hypocrisy.

"The criticism is valid if you look at perfection being the mark, because the next person who stands at our pulpit is going to be guilty of not being perfect as well," he said. "Does that mean we have to change what we say about the word of God? We can't do that."

Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-954-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.