The Information Operations Roadmap, a 30 October 2003 document approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "provides the Department with a plan to advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency" and "stands as an another example of the Department's commitment to transform our military capabilities to keep pace with emerging threats and to exploit new opportunities afforded by innovation and rapidly developing information technologies." The plan was developed by an oversight panel led by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Resource and Plans) and representatives from the Joint Staff, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Special Operations Command, among other organizations.

The Roadmap presents as one of its key assumptions the importance of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), particularly in wartime: "Effectively communicating U.S. Government (USG) capabilities and intentions is an important means of combating the plans of our adversaries. The ability to rapidly disseminate persuasive information to diverse audiences in order to directly influence their decision-making is an increasingly powerful means of deterring aggression. Additionally, it undermines both senior leadership and popular support for employing terrorists or using weapons of mass destruction." The military defines PSYOP generally as "planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals."

The Roadmap has been cited in the media several times (see James Bamford, "The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war," Rolling Stone, November 17, 2005; Stephen J. Hedges, "Media use backfires on U.S.; Many ask if Pentagon altered information to make case for war," Chicago Tribune, December 11, 2005.) [see references], but has not previously been released to the public. The document calls on DoD to enhance its capabilities in five key Information Operations (IO) areas: electronic warfare (EW), PSYOP, Operations Security (OPSEC), military deception and computer network operations (CNO).

In light of recent media coverage of alleged propaganda activities by the military in Iraq, the Roadmap gives as one of its recommendations the need to "Clarify Lanes in the Road for PSYOP, Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy." The U.S. government is legally prohibited from conflating these operations by targeting PSYOP activities--intended for foreign audiences--at the American public. 22 U.S.C. § 1461 (Smith-Mundt Act), which created the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1948, directs that information about the United States and its policies intended for foreign audiences "shall not be disseminated within the United States, its territories, or possessions." Amendments to the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972 and 1998 further clarified the legal obligations of the government's public diplomacy apparatus and several presidential directives, including Reagan's NSD-77 in 1983, Clinton's PDD-68 in 1999, and Bush's NSPD-16 in July 2002 (the latter two still classified), have set up specific structures and procedures, as well as further legal restrictions, regarding U.S. public diplomacy and information operations.

President Clinton's secret Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-68), issued on April 30, 1999, expanded public diplomacy and public affairs operations beyond USIA and the Department of State to include all agencies and set out the objective of IPI "to synchronize the informational objectives, themes and messages that will be projected overseas . . . to prevent and mitigate crises and to influence foreign audiences in ways favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives." (PDD-68 also cautioned against using the new information operations to influence the American public, but recognized the potential for "backwash" of IPI information to the United States and so called for coordinated domestic and foreign public affairs operations to synchronize foreign policy messages.

The newly-released Information Operations Roadmap, with the goal of expansion and central coordination of Pentagon PSYOP and public diplomacy operations, also recognizes the legal conundrum presented by the use of overseas propaganda in the information age. But while the document recognizes the need for boundaries-referred to as "[l]anes"-between U.S. public diplomacy and foreign propaganda, it fails to provide any such limits: [See linked article for graphic displays]

The discussion of the relationship between public diplomacy and IO neither cites the applicable legal restrictions nor institutes specific guidelines, but references only the "intent" of the U.S. government in "targeting" either foreign or domestic audiences: [see linked article for graphic displays]

By means of recommendations for enhancing PSYOP capabilities, the oversight panel directed "improvements . .

. to rapidly generate audience specific, commercial-quality products into denied areas" and a "focus on aggressive behavior modification at the operational and tactical level of war." Additionally, the Roadmap cites improved military support to public diplomacy efforts and support for "active public affairs programs that influence foreign audiences" as vital components of the new IO strategy.

Called the "Information Operations Roadmap," the document was approved by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003.

It was made public by the National Security Archives, a private non-profit research group which obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The document said that psychological operations, or "psyops," are restricted by Pentagon policy and executive order from targeting US audiences, US military personnel and news agencies and outlets.

"However, information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa."

In a press release, the National Security Archives said the document "calls for 'boundaries' between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not 'targeted,' any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter."

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita vehemently denied that the Pentagon was unconcerned about possible blowback.

"I reject the premise of this release which is, 'Hey if it bleeds back we're okay with it.' We're not okay with it," he said.

DiRita said that, with the exception of "battlefield deception," psychological operations used to influence foreign publics were based on factual, accurate information.

He said that the Pentagon has sought to erect "firewalls" between psychological operations that aim to "influence" foreign publics and public affairs, which "inform" the press and the US public.

But he acknowledged that the distinction between the two has become blurred.

"It's an important distinction to understand, but increasingly in the world we're in it's a distinction that deserves scrutiny," he said.

Disclosures last month that US military psychological operations units were secretly planting paid-for stories with the Iraqi press through a contractor brought some of those issues to the surface.

General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is reviewing the results of an investigation into the case, but officials have said that the disclosures have so far prompted no changes.

The anchorman whose boss once characterized him as ice compared with his successor's fire was anything but chilly in the impassioned speech he delivered Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts.

"Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news," said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN's NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show's ratings closer to front-runner Fox News.

Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. "But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice," he said.

When NewsNight spent four hours covering the arrest of actor Robert Blake for the murder of his wife, Brown received thousands of e-mails criticizing the amount of time the show spent on the story. Nevertheless, that show, which aired in April 2002, received the highest ratings of any program since NewsNight's coverage of the November 2001 crash of American Airlines flight 587.

"Television is the most perfect democracy," Brown said. "You sit there with your remote control and vote." The remotes click to another channel when serious news airs, but when the media covers the scandals surrounding Laci Peterson, the Runaway Bride or Michael Jackson, "there are no clicks then," the journalist said.

With the departure from the screen of the "titans" — Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather — who "resisted the temptations of their bosses to go for the ratings grab, it will be years before an anchorman or anchorwoman will have the clout to fight these battles," he said.

Brown has spent most of his 30-year career in television news. He's covered everything from the Columbine High School murders to the aftermath of the space shuttle Columbia disaster. But viewers may remember best his on-the-spot coverage of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

He's shocked "by how unkind our world has become," he said. E-mail and talk radio appear to have given people the license to say anything, regardless of how cruel or false it may be, he said.

He cited the example of an e-mail faulting what the sender considered to be NewsNight's inadequate coverage of an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. The note ended with, "I hope the violence visited on the people of Iraq will someday be visited on your children."

Those on the opposite side of the political spectrum are no more tolerant, Brown said. "Any criticism of the administration is regarded as hatred of the president and hatred of the country itself," he said.

Important issues, such as the prosecution of the war in Iraq at home and abroad, are being clouded over by "mud-wrestling" that skirts substance, he said. Consider what he called "the swift-boating of John Murtha," the Democratic congressman whose war record was smeared when he called for an exit strategy in Iraq. "Cable didn't search for the truth, but engaged in mock debates pitting those making the charges against Murtha's defenders," he said.

Many Americans on the left and the right aren't interested in the truth, but simply want news that confirms their viewpoints, he said. "You'd think that it's no more complex than good vs. evil," he said.

Journalists have fallen short in presenting important news in ways that allow viewers to see how it matters in their lives. But viewers must take up the battle as well, he said. "It's not enough to say you want serious news. You have to watch it. It isn't enough to say you want serious debate. You have to engage in it."

The administration has declined to release records of Abramoff meetings, saying it will not "engage in a fishing expedition." But in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, 76 percent said the White House should produce such a list. Even 65 percent of Republicans said so.

Ethics Gone Awry?

As things stand, the ethics situation in Washington is not working to Bush's advantage. In advance of his 2006 State of the Union address, 56 percent now disapprove of the way the president is handling ethics in government, up from 49 percent in mid-December.

Beyond disapproval of Bush on ethics, there's been some weakening for the Republicans more broadly. Asked which party they trust more to stand up to lobbyists and special interest groups, just 27 percent of Americans picked the Republicans, down from 34 percent last month. More, 46 percent, preferred the Democrats.

Independents — quintessential swing voters — picked the Democrats over the Republicans in trust to handle ethics by 46 percent to 20 percent. But skepticism is considerable; a quarter of all Americans, and about a third of independents, volunteer that they don't trust either party on lobbying, or draw no distinction between them.

There is some belief that Congress in the next year will enact tough new regulations on lobbying, but it's muted: Nearly half, 46 percent, call this likely, while 51 percent think it's unlikely. Just 11 percent see it as "very likely" that such legislation will come to pass; 24 percent, on the other hand, call it very unlikely.

Concern

Other measures show the extent of public doubts about honesty in Washington today. Fifty-five percent — essentially the same as last month — think the Abramoff case is evidence of "widespread corruption" in the capital, rather than being limited to a few individuals. Republicans are much less apt than Democrats or independents to see it that way.

Moreover, 43 percent say the overall level of ethics and honesty in the federal government has fallen during Bush's presidency — about 20 points more than Bill Clinton during the Whitewater controversy more than a decade ago.

Methodology

This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Jan. 23-26, 2006, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. The results have a three-point error margin. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by TNS of Horsham, Pa.

Insisting once again that NSA covert eavesdropping is legal, the president signaled that he would oppose congressional attempts to change the program if the effort appears likely to compromise the program launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

With Democrats pounding their Republican opponents for corruption and threats to civil liberties, Bush mounted an aggressive defense in an effort to deflect questions from the White House. But he said he would cooperate with federal prosecutors in a spreading probe of Abramoff's use of bribes to advantage his lobbying clients.

Earlier this month, Republican Party officials said Bush would donate $6,000 in Abramoff's personal 2004 campaign contributions to the American Heart Association. All told, the one-time super-lobbyist steered about $100,000 in contributions to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

"There's a serious investigation going on by federal prosecutors," Bush declared during the 46-minute question-and-answer session. "If they believe something was done inappropriately in the White House, they'll come and look, and they're welcome to do so."

Comment: "And we'll circle up the wagons and shoot to kill if they try to come onto the sacred ground of my palace."

He also insisted that he attempts to keep his distance from lobbyists and called for constraints on earmarks – the practice of lobbyists using ties to key lawmakers to win money or contracts for their clients without legislative scrutiny.

Taking aim at a lobbying culture that led to the conviction and resignation of former California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bush said, "This is about earmarks and people making, you know, special deals in the budget. ... There needs to be earmark reform."

Pressed about the Abramoff photos and his own exposure to lobbyists, Bush conceded that the pictures demonstrated that he had met the convicted felon but insisted he couldn't remember the occasion and asserted, "I don't know him."

He teased a reporter about having posed for a presidential picture with him at a White House holiday party, as he cited one estimate that he had to stand still for as many as 9,000 photos during the Christmas season.

"It's part of the job of the president to shake hands ... with people and smile," Bush remarked.

Appearing a day after he had delivered a stout defense of the eavesdropping program during a visit to the nearby NSA headquarters, Bush offered what may be a preview of how he would strike back at Democrats who criticize the high-tech snooping operation. The primary targets are said to be e-mail and telephone traffic, linked to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, that flow across U.S. borders.

Referring to a recent videotape of al-Qaeda's fugitive leader, Bush said, "We're at war with an enemy that wants to hit us again. Osama bin Laden made that clear the other day, and I take his words very seriously. And I also take my responsibility to protect the American people very seriously. And so we're going to do what is necessary – within the Constitution and within the law and at the same time guaranteeing people's civil liberties – to protect the people."

He reiterated the administration's contention that it might have aborted the assaults on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon if the warrantless surveillance program had been in place prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Two of the airliner hijackers were in San Diego while the attack was being plotted.

Referring to the nation's second ranking intelligence official and former head of NSA, Bush declared, "Michael Hayden said that because he believes that had we had the capacity to listen to the phone calls from those from San Diego, elsewhere, we might have gotten information necessary to prevent the attack."

Previewing next week's speech, Bush argued in favor of making permanent the time-limited tax cuts that were enacted in his first term, including reductions in investment taxes.

Saying he has "one more off-year campaign in me," Bush spoke with relish of the prospect of stressing his signature issue as a tax-cutting president when he hits the stump next fall one final time before retiring from the presidency three years from now.

"I think raising taxes will hurt the economy, and that's a debate I look forward to having with the people as we get close to the 2006 elections," Bush said, as he mocked Democrats and others who argue that the struggle to balance the budget could be aided if the earlier tax cuts were allowed to expire.

"That's not how it works," Bush said. "They're going to raise your taxes and they're going to continue to expand the government."

Comment: This from the man who had driven the US into never-before-seen deficit! But it isn't really "government" when it answers only to the president....

He indicated that he would ask Congress to approve tax breaks designed to help individuals and families shoulder health care costs at a time when employers are cutting back on insurance coverage.

He defended the administration against critics who say that its recovery plan would abandon poor people whose homes in New Orleans' low-lying neighborhoods were ruined.

The $85 billion congressional appropriation for helping to rebuild the storm-ravaged areas is "a significant commitment to the people whose lives were turned upside down ... by that hurricane," he said.

He also suggested that the city and the state of Louisiana have been tardy in coming up with a rebuilding plan.

Answering critics who say the military has been stretched too thin by the war in Iraq and its other commitments, Bush declared that the armed forces have the capability of achieving victory in Iraq and defending U.S. interests in areas of strategic importance such as the Far East.

Emphasizing the promise of greater reliance on technology as the military undergoes a process of transformation, Bush asserted, "The things I look for are the following: morale, retention and recruitment. And retention's high. Recruitment is meeting goals. And people ... feel strong about the mission."

Kenneth Pedeleose, an industrial engineer for the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), told Hearst that his 30-day suspension was "absolutely related" to his whistleblowing.

In 2002, Pedeleose's 90-page report "Criminal Vulnerability and Fraud" which accused Lockheed Martin of "willfully" overcharging the Pentagon and defense officials of ignoring his warnings led Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (Rep-IA) to persuade DoD's Inspector's General offices to launch investigations.

Pedeleose told Federal Times in 2004 that he believed he "ruined his career and lost any chance for promotion because of his fight."

The Washington Post reported last November that Pedeleose faced suspension for refusing to cooperate in an internal investigation to determine "the source of a rumor that management had "targeted certain employees" to be fired."

Excerpts from Rosenberg's article:

Kenneth Pedeleose, 45, an industrial engineer and 11-year veteran of the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), who has uncovered excessive costs on Lockheed Martin Corp. aircraft, claimed his suspension is reprisal for disclosing overcharges and for disrupting a cozy relationship between the agency and Lockheed Martin -- the country's largest defense contractor....

DCMA previously attempted to suspend Pedeleose in 2003 after officials claimed he had made threats against fellow employees. The agency later acknowledged that he had made no such threats and reinstated him.

Pedeleose's suspension, which is effective Jan 25, is "for the offense of refusal to cooperate with an agency investigation, insubordination and failure to follow instructions," according to a copy of the suspension notice.

"The overall seriousness of your misconduct warrants a heavy disciplinary penalty," said the letter from Steven Bogusz, deputy director for DCMA's regional headquarters in Boston, to Pedeleose.

I recall times long ago when my Grandfather on my father’s side used to say, “What’s the use of having ignorance if you don’t show it?” I laugh every time I think of this. Granddaddy had a humorous way of making a point. But there are times when ignorance, especially when it occurs on a national level, is no laughing matter. The present time of crises is one of those times.

Ignorance serves as blinders to vision and hope. It makes us susceptible to the most fantastic lies that inevitably lead to self deception. It makes us look like fools in the eyes of the rest of the world. It allows us to live in denial; to ignore reality. It fosters fear even as it shuns understanding. The truly ignorant are made to believe the most fantastic lies. They are led astray to feverishly work against not only their own interests, but also against the interest of the Commonwealth of which they are a part.

Ignorance in such inexhaustible abundance is a dangerous thing. It fosters the perversion of language and distorts truth into grotesque monstrosities. It alters meanings in ways that renders truth virtually unrecognizable to the unsuspecting masses. It substitutes opposites. Up becomes down, and down becomes up. Political novelist George Orwell referred to this manipulation of language as ‘Newspeak.’ Thus war is peace. Foreign invaders and occupiers become the apostles of democracy and freedom. Those who defend their homes against occupation morph into terrorists or insurgents. The cold blooded murderer of thousands of Palestinians can be called “A man of peace.” Injustice becomes justice. Lies become truth. Hate is called love. This is the language of empire; a language that does not serve people of justice. The results produced by this co-option of language goes far beyond tragic.

When this happens we lose our grounding in reality. Our perspective is distorted, as fantasy supplants reality. In a very real sense we are no longer of this world.

The decline of America could not have happened had the way not been prepared by producing an ignorant public. Understand that in this context ignorance does not infer a lack of intelligence. It infers a pathological unwillingness to confront the evidence and thus the inability to come to rational decisions based upon verifiable facts. Ignorance allows the grossest injustice to flourish with indifference. It allows the roots of fascism to grow deep into the bedrock of society. It happened in Nazi Germany in the prelude to World War Two, and it is happening now in America. This kind of ignorance produces a faith in corrupt leadership that is not only blind; it is deaf and dumb. Only the ignorant can be so easily misled by the disingenuous leadership of empire.

The remedy to our national malaise should be obvious. There is an abundance of information out there that could set us free. Knowledge is power in that it frees us from the constraints of blinding ignorance. However, it requires critical thinking skills to see things as they really are. It requires a will to uncover hidden truth; to weigh the evidence and to make rational decisions about what that evidence tells us. It requires that we not allow ourselves to be programmed by our tormentors; but to think for ourselves. One wonders if critical thinking is becoming a lost art, like making hand cut dovetail joints for a chest of drawers.

The criminal cabal that is running the country could have little power over an informed and active citizenry. They would be forced to invent new methods of control, perhaps more coercive than the ones now in vogue.

Millions of people set mesmerized hour after hour before their television sets and their radios, hungrily absorbing the propaganda that oozes into their minds. These people are not being informed, as they think; they are being programmed. Programmed to act against their own interest, and that of the Commonwealth. They are programmed to serve empire even as they betray democracy. Sadly, the masses can no longer recognize the difference. The helpless sheep will always do what they are told by those who hold the reins of power. This ignorance dooms them to be ever the servants of power.

In the parlance of computer technology there is a saying—GIGO. That is, garbage in, garbage out. The computer spews out a result that is programmed into it. That is the kind of citizenry we have produced in this country; a citizenry whose minds are filled with garbage; a citizenry that cannot think for itself, and act in its own defense.

Some time in the hazy future, anthropologists and historians may examine the wreckage and rubble of the American empire, and puzzle over how the people could have allowed it to happen. Long asleep in our graves within the mantle of the nurturing soil that gave us life, some of us will know that we tried to stop this. There is a peace of mind that can only come from struggle for just causes.

Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer residing in the eastern panhandle of West Virgina. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net

[Excerpt]: It won't come with jackboots and book burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won't come with "black helicopters" or tanks on the street. It won't come like a storm – but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place.

As in Rome, all the old forms will still be there; legislatures, elections, campaigns – plenty of bread and circuses for the folks. But the "consent of the governed" will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small group of nobles who rule largely for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.

To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized – usually by "the people" themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.

The rulers will often act in secret; for reasons of "national security," the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of "enemies" selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new "security structures" targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem "normal," as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone. [End of excerpt]

If a yokel like me could see all this coming – just by observing the open declarations and actions of the Bush Administration and its Congresssional and media sycophants in the first few weeks after the September 11 attacks – then what excuse do the lords and mandarins of the Establishment have for standing by and allowing all this to happen? They have no excuse. There is no excuse.

So whenever some big media beast or Democratic "leader" steps forward now to say, "Gee, we were misled by these guys" or "Boy, if I'd only known before," or some other craven, mealy-mouthed expression of self-justifying ignorance – tell them to their face that they lie. If they were ignorant, it was a willful ignorance, a co-opted ignorance, a bribed and bought ignorance, born from their desire to keep on feeding from the trough of power and privilege just as long as the slops keep coming. Wadded with power, privilege and nice pay packets, they were willingly deceived.

For when we speak of the media and political elite, we're talking largely about a generation that lived through the gross crimes and deceptions of Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO, the Phoenix Program, and dozens of other associated scandals – perpetrated by many of the same people brought back into power by George W. Bush. And yet at every turn, Bush and this gang of known scofflaws were given – and continue being given – the benefit of the doubt by the "wise men" of the Establishment: "Gosh, presidents and government officials don't ever lie, deceive, spy, murder and steal, do they? We've certainly never seen anything like that before. There must be some reasonable explanation for Mr. Bush's actions."

This faux-naivete bespeaks a level of cynicism every bit as deep as the sugar-coated public piety that masks the Bush gang's bloodsoaked greed for loot and power.

Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal.

But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under?

As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”

Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon’s Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that ’30s movie “The Good Earth.”

I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early ’70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: “He actually refers to the United States as an empire!” It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about “The American Century.” What a difference a word makes!

Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”

Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. “Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John’s apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the ‘Rapture.’

“Finally, we shouldn’t be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration…. As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going…. Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation—these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don’t care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack.” I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers’ report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio’s vote).

Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. “In a ‘State of the First Amendment Survey’ conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment ‘goes too far’; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of ‘certain religious groups’ in the name of the war on terror.”

It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman’s to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don’t know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: “The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses.”

We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic—or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush’s wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don’t produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of “King Kong,” the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood—the Indian film business—may soon surpass us! Berman writes, “We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America’s creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was ‘careening toward insolvency.’ ” Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.

Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.

Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society’s less fortunate—the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.

Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.” I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as “a wartime president,” and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.

The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we’d ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn’t up to his job and so had lost the people’s confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.

One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.

On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.

"We're already pushing cities and counties to set aside some apartment complexes for smoke-free housing," said Paul Knepprath, spokesman for the American Lung Association of California. "This is going to help."

California has pioneered some of the world's toughest anti-cigarette laws that ban smoking in nearly all enclosed workplaces, restaurants, bars and public buildings.

Thursday's action alone does not expand smoking restrictions. It merely identifies secondhand smoke a "toxic air contaminant," on a par with cancer-causing diesel soot, asbestos and lead.

But the listing requires the air board to evaluate whether any measures are needed to reduce exposures. Air board officials, who are more accustomed to setting clean-fuel and engine standards, said they didn't expect to impose any mandates.

"Our greatest role will be education about smoking in cars ... because that is a staggering exposure," said Catherine Witherspoon, the air board's executive officer.

Breathable smoke particles in vehicles ranged up to 10 times higher than those found in some smokers' homes, according to the air board's review of studies.

Putting secondhand smoke in the same category as the most-toxic automotive and industrial pollutants should spur more cities, employers and smoking parents to reduce exposure on their own initiative, said Joan Denton, director of the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which conducted the health-effects analyses supporting the new hazard designation.

"Californians, especially parents, would not willingly fill their homes with motor vehicle exhaust, and they should feel the same way about tobacco smoke," Denton said.

In listing secondhand smoke Thursday, the air board accepted findings by the state health hazard group and university scientists that go further than any before in establishing a link between breast cancer and breathing of secondhand smoke.

The scientists made international news last spring in concluding that exposure to tobacco smoke is not merely associated with breast cancer but clearly can cause the disease in young women who never smoked.

They found, from close review of several recent studies, that exposure to tobacco smoke elevates the risk of breast cancer 70 to 120 percent in young women, primarily those who have not reached menopause. The research on postmenopausal women is inconclusive.

The highest risk group would include women working in bars and restaurants in states where smoking is permitted, said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Glantz was one of nine university-based California scientists who reviewed the state's smoking studies.

Not all health experts, including those with the American Cancer Society and the U.S. Surgeon General's Office, are as sure about the connection to breast cancer, saying more evidence is needed.

After analyzing thousands of studies from around world, the California scientists added premature birth and the induction and exacerbation of asthma in adults to the list of ills that had already been linked to secondhand or "environmental" smoke, including heart disease and lung and nasal sinus cancer in adults.

The research also found stronger links between secondhand smoke and sudden infant death syndrome and respiratory and heart diseases.

Notably absent from the Sacramento meeting were representatives of the tobacco industry.

"We decline to comment," Mike Neese, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, told The Bee.

Cynthia Hallett, executive director of the nonprofit Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights in Berkeley, predicted that the California smoking studies, the product of more than a decade of research and peer review, will have far-reaching influence across the United States and abroad.

The report probably will come into play in the current debate over smoking restrictions in Utah and in many towns across the Midwest, Hallett said.

Sawyer, who made his debut Thursday as Gov. Schwarzenegger's newly appointed air board chairman, said he just returned from Ireland, where he learned that the California agencies' tobacco research served as the scientific justification for that country's recent smoking ban in pubs and restaurants.