A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid meglomaniac" as well as a sadist and "untreated alcoholic"

Dr. Justin Frank, writing in Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, also says the President has a ""lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad."

Even worse, Dr. Frank concludes, the President's years of heavy drinking ""may have affected his brain function - and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse."

Dr. Frank's conclusions appear to confirm a June 4, 2004, Capitol Hill Blue report that says the President's erratic behavior and wide mood swings have White House aides concerned.

Bush shows an inability to grieve - dating back to age 7, when his sister died. "The family's reaction - no funeral and no mourning - set in motion his life-long pattern of turning away from pain [and hiding] behind antic behavior," says Frank, who says Bush may suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Other findings by Dr. Frank:

* His mother, Barbara Bush - tabbed by some family friends as "the one who instills fear" - had trouble connecting emotionally with her son, Frank argues.
* George H.W. Bush's "emotional and physical absence during his son's youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W."
* The President suffers from "character pathology," including "grandiosity" and "megalomania" -- viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable.

Dr. Frank has been a psychiatrist for 35 years and is on staff at George Washington University. A Democrat, he once headed the Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

In an interview with The Washington Post's Richard Leiby, Dr. Frank said he began to be concerned about Bush's behavior in 2002.

"I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote, and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank told Leiby. Bush, he said, "fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated."

Dr. Frank's expert recommendation? "Our sole treatment option -- for his benefit and for ours -- is to remove President Bush from office . . . before it is too late."

Comment: It is too late. America had its chance. Bush has been mandated to pursue worldwide death and destruction for another four years - it is hard to say if the world will survive them.

A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The claims came as the Bush administration was fighting to shore up its credibility among a series of anonymous government leaks over its distortion of US intelligence to manufacture a case against Saddam.

This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September, and had access to the classified reports which formed the basis for the US case against Saddam, spelled out by President Bush and his aides.

Mr Thielmannn said yesterday: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq."

He conceded that part of the problem lay with US intelligence, but added: "Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided."

As Democrats demanded a congressional enquiry, the administration sharply changed tack. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told the Senate the US had not gone to war against Iraq because of fresh evidence of weapons of mass destruction but because Washington saw what evidence there was prior to 2001 "in a dramatic new light" after September 11.

At a press conference yesterday, Mr Thielmann said that, as of March 2003, when the US began military operations, "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbours or to the United States".

In one example, Mr Thielmann said a fierce debate inside the White House about the purpose of aluminium tubes bought by Baghdad had been "cloaked in ambiguity".

While some CIA analysts thought they could be used for gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, the best experts at the energy department disagreed. But the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said publicly that they could only be used for centrifuges.

Mr Thielmann also said there was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida. He added: "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude ... 'We know the answers - give us the intelligence to support those answers'."

Responding to claims of deliberate distortions, Mr Bush accused his critics of "trying to rewrite history" and insisted "there is no doubt in my mind" that Saddam "was a threat to world peace".

Comment: Bush and his cronies lied to the entire world. Iraq had no WMDs and was no threat to anyone, yet it was not the American people who suffered as a result of these lies...

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.

Comment: 100,000 innocent men, women and children - murdered on the orders of Bush and Co. Today, the murderers have received the votes of approval of millions of Americans. What does that tell us?

Having signaled to their government that they are only too happy to be deceived and made complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the American people will surely be treated to much more in the next four years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says the U.S. war on terror shouldn't end with Iraq.

Iran is just as dangerous and a top priority for a regime change, Sharon said this week. He argued that although Iraq is an "insane" regime, Iran is a "center of world terror."

In an exclusive interview with the New York Post, Sharon said that as soon as Iraq is dealt with, he "will push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." [...]

Comment: Given the barbarity of the Bush administration, can anyone expect that they will not eventually turn on their own?

Anti-terrorism provisions build on precedents of the drug war to weaken the Fourth Amendment

Protecting its people is Job One of any government -- keeping them safe from an external enemy or lawless elements of its own society.

But not by any means necessary.

The Founders of the American republic recognized the temptation of a government concerned with maintaining order to trend toward an all-powerful police state. That's why it wrote a set of rules -- the Bill of Rights and Constitution -- to keep everyone honest.

But the Bush administration is throwing the rule book on the trash heap in the name of fighting terrorism. It has already weakened nearly every procedural safeguard guaranteed by the Constitution at every stage of the legal process -- detection, prosecution and punishment.

And now it is seeking to marginalize due process even further. Last week, President George W. Bush asked for additional powers to fight terrorism, including bypassing judicial oversight in obtaining warrants; the ability to hold terrorist suspects without bail; and the death penalty for terrorists regardless, presumably, of whether or not their actions actually killed or were intended to kill -- a major affront to the principle of proportional punishment. [...]

Expanding secret courts

The Patriot Act is an appalling assault on civil liberties almost from top to bottom. But a couple of examples highlight why it is particularly offensive to due process.

The act tinkers mightily with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate magazine explains, was a constitutional "bargain" struck between Congress and the executive branch in 1978.

Congress, acknowledging that law enforcement authorities needed special leeway in foreign intelligence investigations, carved out a small exception to the Fourth Amendment's probable cause standard. Under this standard, police have to show evidence of a crime before getting the go-ahead from a court to conduct physical searches or subpoena business records.

The surveillance act relaxed that standard, so no evidence of a crime is necessary. Instead, intelligence authorities can go to a secret court and obtain a search warrant simply by demonstrating that the primary purpose of their investigation is to gather foreign intelligence and the person in question is a proven agent of a foreign power.

Few people would likely find that egregious. But once the door is cracked for a due process exception, kicking it wide open becomes much simpler.

And that's exactly what the Patriot Act does. Its Section 218 expands on the surveillance act standard to allow the same secret courts to grant warrants if federal law enforcement agents can certify -- not prove by hard evidence -- that the person to be searched is a suspected terrorist or a suspected foreign agent. No longer does terrorism or foreign intelligence need to be the "primary" purpose of the investigation; it is sufficient if it is a "significant" purpose.

"This may seem like a trivial change, but it isn't," says Robert Levy of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. It will turn the foreign surveillance court, which already has no authority to second guess government evidence, into even more of a rubber-stamp, Levy says, further limiting judicial review.

Worse, it will allow law enforcement to piggy back ordinary criminal investigations on to the espionage or terror warrant.

"The new rules would open the door to the major circumvention of the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements," Levy maintains.

The foreign surveillance court recognized the danger and initially refused to implement the expanded powers, but it was overruled by a never-before-convened three-judge panel.

Encouraging sneak-and-peek

Perhaps even worse are the Patriot Act's "sneak-and-peek" clauses.

These provisions, which the House overwhelmingly voted to repeal, extend the Justice Department's ability to conduct secret searches of the homes and businesses of individuals -- citizens and noncitizens alike -- not just in terrorism or espionage cases, but for all criminal investigations.

Certainly, the Justice Department has to meet the higher probable cause standard to conduct the searches. Still, authorities do not have to notify homeowners of the searches as long as the Justice Department can show that notification would in any way jeopardize the investigation.

Since notification would in almost every case undermine an investigation, this could effectively spell the end of the "knock and announce" requirement on police executing searches, a major abrogation of privacy rights.

The Fourth Amendment was added to the Constitution because of the Founders' deep-seated revulsion against the practices of their former English masters, who had wide-ranging powers to ransack homes in search of any evidence of tax evasion or other crimes.

The search powers were used to enforce the Stamp Act, the pivotal event leading to the Declaration of Independence.

And yet here Americans are again, supposedly in the name of preserving liberty, returning to the onerous abridgements of freedom the nation was founded to reject.

I'm terrified.

Not of terrorists. We can personally plan for the randomness of terrorism only as much as we can plan for severe weather and personal protection and as a nation we've survived worse than 9/11.

It's the other stuff I fear, things individuals can't plan for because they steal from us what we don't even realize is lost until it's too late.

I'm terrified for our country, for what it stands.

After 9/11 the president said be afraid, but go shopping. Laws were passed that infringe upon my constitutional rights to freedom of speech and religion, from search and seizure, to access to public records and meetings, and more. They are meant to silence me, intimidate me, keep me unaware of what my government is doing, and prevent me from defending myself even if I'm wrongly accused.

Total strangers shout at me for expressing anything but blind faith in the president and his political party because "we're at war" and for some reason this means we have to swallow any foolishness that comes out of Washington. I'm told I must accept a religious political ideology that doesn't match my spiritual beliefs or religious tradition, and accept the codification of discrimination.

I'm terrified that the freedoms we revere are denied by strident calls to keep us uninformed and "right thinking."

Osama bin Laden remains free, and terrorist ranks are swelling, because we invaded a country that posed no imminent danger to America. It's a basic truth: Attack a sovereign nation and its people will hate and resist you. If the world suddenly tried to overthrow our war-mongering regime, wouldn't we all take up arms in our country's defense? Can we expect less of the Iraqis?

It's not our right to wage war on ideology. That smacks of the Crusades. Ideological change must take place from within, as it did in our Revolutionary War and Civil War. If our mission, as the president now states, is to spread freedom and democracy in the world, how many more nations will we be invading? The other 60 nations harboring terrorists?

I'm terrified for my nieces and nephews in their teens and 20s, and for my own son in grade school. Because a culture of war cannot sustain itself without the bodies of our young.

The president promises there will be no draft. If he continues on the path he has already chosen, he will have no choice.

While the president focused on war, my family's meager health coverage went up more than $150 per month, for fewer benefits, higher deductibles, and not one cent of pharmacy. The president talks about medical savings accounts and catastrophic plans that have lifetime caps on medical coverage. Savings accounts are great if you have the money to save, and if those accounts aren't being constantly depleted covering your care.

I'm terrified that I will soon reach a break point where I can no longer afford to give anything else up to pay for health insurance premiums.

I've tried to plan for the future. But the future and all its medical savings accounts, private Social Security accounts and IRAs rely on economic performance that ended in 2001.

I'm terrified I won't be able to provide for my retirement or my son's education.

While distracting us with orange alerts and Iraq, the government has used Orwellian language to roll back 40 years of environmental gains. Under titles like "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" the president has allowed increased pollution and destruction of our environment, dismissing science while placing corporations in charge of the agencies meant to regulate them. Instead of investing in alternative fuels that could improve profitability and free us of foreign oil, the president's focus is on drilling for oil in Alaska and making wilderness accessible to miners and clear cutters.

I'm terrified that we will take this planet too far to recover. That we will leave for our children a legacy of disease, and a planet denuded of the beauty and health sustained by its diversity.

I'm terrified by what I'm seeing in this election. Voter registration scams, "suppress the vote" efforts, outright lies and distortions of candidate records, attempts to assassinate character and disparage service, corporate campaigning and media partisanship. These are agents against democracy. They intend to disenfranchise we the people, to take away our voice and deny us the opportunity to make informed choice.

Not one of the nine presidencies I've lived through was perfect, no matter its achievements. Almost all of them lied, cheated, misled, spent like drunken sailors or used fear to manipulate us. President Bush promised he would bring integrity to the office and would not engage in nation building. He claimed he was a peace president and a uniter, not a divider. All the while he has pushed an agenda of corporate payoffs, nepotism, war and evangelic nation building. He's built a climate of fear and an intolerance of dissent. He has chosen to take from our future and to erode our freedoms.

Terrorists win when we lose our freedoms.

I'm terrified, almost paralyzed with fear, for the state of democracy in America.

Ouspensky asked Gurdjieff:

"Why, if ancient knowledge has been preserved and if, speaking in general, there exists a knowledge distinct from our science and philosophy or even surpassing it, it is so carefully concealed, why is it not made common property? Why are the men who posses this knowledge unwilling to let it pass into the general circulation of life for the sake of a better and more successful struggle against deceit, evil and ignorance?"

Gurdjieff. replied:

"There are two answers to that. In the first place, this knowledge is not concealed; and in the second place, it cannot, from its very nature, become common property. We will consider the second of these statements first.

"You do not understand this because you do not understand that knowledge, like everything else in the world, is material and matter is limited. So that, if knowledge is material, then it means that there is a definite amount of knowledge available. Taken in a large quantity in a given place, that is by one man, let us say, or by a small group of men, it produces very good results; taken in a small quantity (that is, by every one of a large number of people), it gives no results at all; or it may give even negative results, contrary to those expected. Thus if a certain definite quantity of knowledge is distributed among millions of people, each individual will receive very little, and this small amount of knowledge will change nothing either in his life or in his understanding of things.

"But if, on the contrary, large quantities of knowledge are concentrated in a small number of people, then this knowledge will give very great results. From this point of view it is far more advantageous that knowledge should be preserved among a small number of people and not dispersed among the masses. If knowledge is given to all, nobody will get any. If it is preserved among a few, each will receive not only enough to keep, but to increase, what he receives.

"At the first glance this theory seems very unjust, since the position of those who are, so to speak, denied knowledge in order that others may receive a greater share appears to be very sad and undeservedly harder than it ought to be. Actually, however, this is not so at all; and in the distribution of knowledge there is not the slightest injustice.

The fact is that the enormous majority of people do not want any knowledge whatever; they refuse their share of it and do not even take the ration allotted to them, in the general distribution, for the purpose of life."

From the above we understand that, on this planet there are at least two very different types of people, with very different inner orientations. As Gurdjieff says, "the vast majority" reject the little truth that is available to them. This reality is controlled by those that control the knowledge that makes the reality of this world.
Certain people desire the limited, illusory reality that is presented to them; others seek a more complete understanding of the truth. This latter group would seem to be in the extreme minority.

For those that seek objective truth, there can be no assessment of true reality by looking to the actions and words of the majority that are happy to accept illusion. The first step in the quest for truth must be undertaken alone. Once begun, we may seek the companionship of those that pursue the same quest. It is not a true choice if we do not make it ourselves.

We should not attempt to seek salvation outside ourselves, but rather by looking within to ascertain if there is a core desire to know the truth that is so lacking in this world. If we perceive that it is there, we then begin the search for the real and the true in the world outside.

"This is particularly evident in times of mass madness such as wars, revolutions, and so on, when men suddenly seem to lose even the small amount of common sense they had and turn into complete automatons, giving themselves over to wholesale destruction in vast numbers, in other words, even loosing the instinct of self-preservation. Owing to this, enormous quantities of knowledge remain, so to speak, unclaimed and can be distributed among those who realize its value.

"There is nothing unjust in this, because those who receive knowledge take nothing that belongs to others, deprive others of nothing; they take only what others have rejected as useless and what would in any case be lost if they did not take it.

"The collecting of knowledge by some depends upon the rejection of knowledge by others.

"There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning or the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably loose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations."

It seems that Gurdjieff knew only too well the effect that global upheaval exerts on the illusion-seeking majority of humanity. When confronted with the ever widening gap between the reality being presented to them and the facts before their eyes, and at some point unable to reconcile the two, those that attempt to cling to the lie as truth are driven mad.

We see that, in the current war on terror, the US and Israeli governments are attempting to drive the people of the world crazy with fear of phony "Arab terrorists" and the threat they pose to us all. Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, were very likely reposnsible for the recent bombings in Madrid, designed specifically to increase the fear factor among Europeans.

Yet Gurdjieff also understood the opportunity that such an outpouring of fear and madness presents for those that seek the truth to finally see and know it. We cannot ignore the fact that our own civilization at present appears to be on the edge of a precipice. In a very natural way this may act as a "wake up call" to those that have an inner desire to seek and know the truth.

"This aspect of the question is clear. The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine all the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship. Consider what the cultured humanity of our time spends money on; even leaving the war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that humanity, as it is now, with the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has."

And we see the truth of this in the current state of our planet. Yet truth was never the domain of the people. Since the dawn of modern civilisation, the truth has been withheld and used to control rather than liberate.

At present we are living at the tail end of this grand millenia-long deception. As our world stands on the brink of all out war and cataclysmic destruction, the masses continue to perform the most complex of mental gymnastics to enable the continuance of their illusions about themselves and their world. They wll believe anything, as long as it is not the reality that their very existence hangs in the balance. Yet none can claim that justice is not being served, for what can be more equitable than to give that which is asked for? As a result of their insatiable appetite for illusion, it is very likely that the sleeping masses, so enamoured of illusion, will receive exactly what they have asked for - they will be the victims of the greatest deceit at the hands of those that, against all logic and reason, they have placed their trust in.

"Imagine that for the whole of mankind half a pound of knowledge is allotted a year. If this knowledge is distributed among everyone, each will receive so little that he will remain the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that very few want to have this knowledge, those who take it are able to get, let us say, a grain each, and acquire the possibility of becoming more intelligent. All cannot become intelligent even if they wish. And if they did become intelligent it would not help matters. There exists a general equilibrium which cannot be upset.

"That is one aspect. The other, as I have already said, consists in the fact that no one is concealing anything; there is no mystery whatever."

The Signs page, the articles on the Cassiopaea web site, and the books in print, are a result of the collecting of this knowledge and its presentation for those that understand its application. While we attempt to facilitate an understanding of the application of this knowledge, we can only go so far. Definite and real steps must be taken by the seeker in order to make clear that they understand that which they are choosing. If we choose to commit to the search for knowledge, it must be by DOING something, not by showing a vicarious interest from the sidelines and expecting to have knowledge given to us.

"But the acquisition or transmission of true knowledge demands great labor and great effort both of him who receives and of him who gives. And those who possess this knowledge are doing everything they can to transmit and communicate it to the greatest possible number of people, to facilitate people's approach to it and enable them to prepare themselves to receive the truth.

"He who wants knowledge must himself make the initial efforts to find the source of knowledge and to approach it, taking advantage of the help and indications which are given to all, but which people, as a rule, do not want to see or recognize. Knowledge cannot come to people without effort on their own part. And yet there are theories which affirm that knowledge can come to people without any effort on their part, that they can acquire it even in sleep. The very existence of such theories constitutes an additional explanation of why knowledge cannot come to people."

This point cannot be overstated. There is no "free lunch" in the universe - if you think there is, you run the risk of being "lunch" yourself. What is the point of your existence if you are willing to renounce and discard the abilities you have? Why would you even want to have someone else understand reality for you? What "use" are you in this case? Our goal is to be useful to creation, to create, to align ourselves with that which is real, to reject lies and deceit at every turn, both in the world and within our own beings. People that believe in illusion, in lies, are making a statement to life, to the real objective universe, that they do not desire to exist in it. While very often we do not get what we desire in life, we can be sure that, in the end, we will get back that which we give to life.

"Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the 'past.' People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the 'Future.'"