Professor van Creveld has previously drawn parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, and pointed out that almost all countries that have tried to fight similar wars during the last 60 years or so have ended up losing. Why President Bush "nevertheless decided to go to war escapes me and will no doubt preoccupy historians to come," he told one interviewer.

The professor's puzzlement is understandable. More than two years after the war began, and despite the huge financial and human cost, it is difficult to see any real benefits.

The weapons of mass destruction that provided the excuse for the invasion turned out not to exist and the idea that Iraq could become a beacon of democracy for the Middle East has proved equally far-fetched.

True, there is now a multi-party electoral system, but it has institutionalised and consolidated the country's ethnic, sectarian and tribal divisions - exactly the sort of thing that should be avoided when attempting to democratise.

In the absence of anything more positive, Tony Blair has fallen back on the claim that at least we're better off now without Saddam Hussein. That, too, sounds increasingly hollow.

The fall of Saddam has brought the rise of Zarqawi and his ilk, levels of corruption in Iraq seem as bad as ever, and at the weekend former prime minister Iyad Allawi caused a stir by asserting that the human rights are no better protected now than under the rule of Saddam.

Noting that some two-thirds of Americans believe the war was a mistake, van Creveld says in his article that the US should forget about saving face and pull its troops out: "What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon - and at what cost."

Welcome as a pullout might be to many Americans, it would be a hugely complex operation. Van Creveld says it would probably take several months and result in sizeable casualties. More significantly, though, it would not end the conflict.

"As the pullout proceeds," he warns, "Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge - if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not."

This is one of the major differences between Iraq and the withdrawal from Vietnam. In Vietnam, it took place under a smokescreen of "Vietnamisation" in which US troops handed control to local forces in the south.

Of course, it was a fairly thin smokescreen; many people were aware at the time that these southern forces could not hold out and in due course the North Vietnamese overran the south, finally bringing the war to an end.

Officially, a similar process is under way in Iraq, with the Americans saying they will eventually hand over to the new Iraqi army - though the chances of that succeeding look even bleaker than they did in Vietnam.

"The new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was," van Creveld writes.

Worse still, in Iraq there is no equivalent of the North Vietnamese regime poised to take power. What will happen once the Americans have gone is anyone's guess, but a sudden outbreak of peace seems the remotest of all the possibilities.

Not surprisingly, many who in principle would argue that the Americans had no right to invade Iraq in the first place are apprehensive about what might happen once they leave. The conference organised by the Arab League in Cairo last week was one example: it called for "the withdrawal of foreign forces according to a timetable" but didn't venture to suggest what that timetable might be.

With or without American troops, the war in Iraq has acquired a momentum of its own and threatens to spill over into other parts of the region.

There are four major issues: terrorism, Sunni-Shia rivalries, Kurdish aspirations, and the question of Iraq's territorial integrity - all of which pose dangers internationally.

Back in July 2003, terrorism in Iraq seemed a manageable problem and President Bush boldly challenged the militants to "bring 'em on". American forces, he said, were "plenty tough" and would deal with anyone who attacked them.

There were others in the US who talked of the "flypaper theory" - an idea that terrorists from around the world could be attracted to Iraq and then eliminated. Well, the first part of the flypaper theory seems to work, but not the second.

As with the Afghan war in the 1980s that spawned al-Qaida, there is every reason to suppose that the Iraq war will create a new generation of terrorists with expertise that can be used to plague other parts of the world for decades to come. The recent hotel bombings in Jordan are one indication of the way it's heading.

Contrary to American intentions, the war has also greatly increased the influence of Iran - a founder-member of Bush's "Axis of Evil" - and opened up long-suppressed rivalries between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The impact of this cannot be confined to Iraq and will eventually be felt in the oil-rich Sunni Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) that have sizeable but marginalised Shia communities.

Kurdish aspirations have been awakened too - which has implications for Turkey, Syria and Iran, especially if Iraq is eventually dismembered.

With a fragile central government in Baghdad constantly undermined by the activities of militants and weakened by the conflicting demands of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, the demise of Iraq as a nation-state sometime during the next few years has become a distinct possibility.

The effect of that on the regional power balance is difficult to predict, but at the very least it would bring a period of increased instability.

No one can claim that any of this was unexpected. The dangers had been foreseen by numerous analysts and commentators long before the war started but they were ignored in Washington, mainly for ideological reasons.

There were, of course, some in the neoconservative lobby who foresaw it too and thought it would be a good thing - shaking up the entire Middle East in a wave of "creative destruction".

The result is that even if the US tries to leave Iraq now, in purely practical terms it is unlikely to be able to do so.

Professor van Creveld's plan for withdrawal of ground troops is not so much a disengagement as a strategic readjustment.

An American military presence will still be needed in the region, he says.

"Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war ... Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf states, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.

"A divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name.

"The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance."

As described in the article, van Creveld's plan seems to imply that the US should abandon Iraq to its fate and concentrate instead on protecting American allies in the region from adverse consequences.

A slightly different idea - pulling out ground troops from Iraq but continuing to use air power there - is already being considered in Washington, according to Seymour Hersh in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine.

The military are reportedly unhappy about this, fearing it could make them dependent on untrustworthy Iraqi forces for pinpointing targets.

One military planner quoted by the magazine asked: "Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame it on someone else?"

Focusing on air power has obvious political attractions for the Bush administration, since it is the safety of US ground troops that American voters are most concerned about.

But, again, that would not amount to a real disengagement and would do little or nothing to improve America's image in the region - especially if reliance on air strikes increased the number of civilian casualties.

The inescapable fact is that the processes Mr Bush unleashed on March 20 2003 (and imagined he had ended with his "mission accomplished" speech six weeks later) will take a decade or more to run their course and there is little that anyone, even the US, can do now to halt them.

In his eagerness for regime change in Iraq, Mr Bush blundered into a trap from which in the short term there is no way out: the Americans will be damned if they stay and damned if they leave.

On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig laughing.")

The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.

There are many myths about Watergate -- among them that Woodward and Bernstein rode into Dodge and rescued the republic all by themselves, that the impeachment of Richard Nixon saved American constitutional democracy from destruction, and that the grounds on which Nixon was impeached were a fair reflection of what he and "all the President's men" had actually done. In American mythology, "the system worked."

To most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao, as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to "Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks, escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct which seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell wrote of "the distortions in the conduct of the presidency which deformed national politics in the Vietnam years -- the isolation from reality, the rage against political opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive action." He concluded that three presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs."

To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.

Saving the System in the Name of National Security

It would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system," Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing to go to defy Congress. Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the Reagan Administration.)

Now, once again, ideologues -- this time formerly anti-communist neoconservatives -- have taken America into another foreign war, whose pretext was as flimsy as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the relatively minuscule number of American casualties in Iraq as they were by the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering of Iraqis as they were to the millions of Indochinese who died.

Just as during Watergate and Iran-Contragate, the machinations of Beltway leakers -- in this case in the Plame affair -- carry more weight politically than life-and-death issues like the legalization of torture, the creation of secret, offshore CIA "black" prisons, the administration's campaign to suspend the constitutional rights of defendants and the protections of the Geneva Conventions, not to speak of the administration's drive to create a presidency of unfettered power. Revelations of war crimes by American GIs and CIA operatives have been quickly dismissed by picking a few low-ranking scapegoats like Lyndie England while higher ups go unpunished, just as the chain of responsibility for the My Lai massacres in Vietnam stopped with Lt. William Calley. Secret agent Valerie Plame in her Jackie O shades, posing for Vanity Fair with her whistleblowing husband Joe Wilson, becomes the celebrity du jour standing in for Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam war, who was photographed by the radically chic Richard Avedon.

The Genuine Articles

But are things simply the same as in the 1970s (and again the Reagan era) or is our present situation actually "worse than Watergate," as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, who turned on the President and his comrades to save himself, argued in his prescient 2004 book of that title?

The articles of impeachment Congress eventually framed to indict Richard Nixon make interesting reading these days. The first article had at its heart the Watergate break-in and the elaborate cover-up that followed, including "making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States," "endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States," and "making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a through and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States..."

Article 2 was a catch-all indictment of all the violations of Americans' rights ordered by the White House, including the political use of the IRS, CIA, Secret Service, Justice Department, and FBI as well as wiretapping, surveillance, and burglaries against those on President Nixon's notorious "enemies list." In all such acts, "national security" was the justification given.

The facts may be different, but do the charges themselves sound familiar?

Article 3 concerned the White House's refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas for the infamous tapes secretly recorded by the President and various papers relevant to the Watergate investigation. "In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the...House of Representatives."

No one would expect history simply to repeat itself, especially since memories of Watergate (and myths about it) have affected presidential actions ever since. Ronald Reagan and his handlers, faced with Iran/Contragate, certainly remembered how Nixon's cover-up came to seem more egregious than the actions it sought to conceal. Reagan immediately fired Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who masterminded the scheme, and sent his National Security Adviser Admiral John M. Poindexter packing (if only for a trip back to the Navy). He then appointed the Tower Commission and a special prosecutor to investigate, appearing to cooperate with Congressional investigations even while undermining them. In his comprehensive and fascinating book, The Wars of Watergate, historian Stanley I. Kutler points out how much cleverer the Reaganites were than Nixon's men in leaving no documents or tapes to be seized.

George W. Bush and his associates must have remarkably short memories. While he has been careful to mouth words of cooperation in the Plamegate case, he has depended on the Republican control of Congress to stonewall on just about every egregious misdeed that has seen the light of day, blocking public hearings into Abu Ghraib, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the CIA secret prison system, faux intelligence on Iraq, and Plamegate itself.

That felicitous Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and the word "impeachment" are now heard in circles on the left, with the legal grounds for impeachment being explored by lawyers like Elizabeth de la Vega in the Nation magazine and at Tomdispatch. But what special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case for a White House-led conspiracy to manipulate intelligence, destroy the Wilsons, and get back at the CIA is a whistleblower like John ("there's a cancer on the Presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the top Republican campaign aide who helped plan the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally cop a plea. Now that I. Lewis Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller, thick as thieves -- "entanglement" was the word that paper's Executive Editor Bill Keller used -- before the vice-presidential chief of staff's indictment, have been designated the fall folks in Plamegate and the administration's rush to war in Iraq, the question is: Could resentment for shouldering the blame alone (so far) lead Libby to disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as happened in Watergate?

Unlike in the Watergate years, however, most of the legal action that might just dent the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad. Just as the most revelatory reports about American abuses of power and war-making -- from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellowcake forgery to the recent Italian TV film on the American use of white phosphorus against civilians in Falluja -- have surfaced abroad, so the only real court actions against American abuses of power are taking place in Europe. There, an Italian court has indicted CIA agents for "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping operations on the streets of Milan. Spanish courts -- which sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for torture -- are now pursuing American violations of national sovereignty because CIA planes ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used airports in the Azores and the Canary Islands. Both the United Nations and the European Union are investigating the CIA use of secret European prisons and airfields in their "rendition" operations. If Congress won't act to punish Bush Administration officials who enacted a torture policy, perhaps the Europeans will.

Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers' break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration's unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration's imperial modus operandi.

The Politics of Impeachment and the One-Party State

Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!

What makes the Plame affair so odd, however, is this: Unlike Watergate or the Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know (or at least that we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was launched. The neoconservatives' long-standing plans to invade Iraq, the administration's blanket policy of secrecy and the lies it told Congress and the public, the political manipulation of the intelligence community including the CIA, FBI, and the military -- all rivaling in scope any similar Nixonian schemes-- were in plain sight for those who cared to look during the run-up to the war. Even the Downing Street memo, the now infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, describing the White House's commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was telling Americans it had no plans to do so, had little, if anything, new in it. (At least, its exposure in the British press, like the latest reporting on Plame affair revelations, helped chip away at what had once been a well-armored administration.)

In fact, one of the most revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre- and post-invasion period could be found not in the American press but in an extraordinary three-part series in the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica, articles which have received only a few skeptical references buried in the back pages of our major papers (while being headline news in the on-line world of political websites and blogs). The Italian investigative reporters do tell us something new -- exactly how two of the key administration arguments for war in Iraq were concocted and known to be bogus by Italian intelligence and discredited by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department officials until Vice President Cheney pounded CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission.

According to La Repubblica, the yellowcake story and the forged documents that were its source were cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who needed the money. (He's Plamegate's most colorful character, rivaling G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate's handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative.) And Italian intelligence knew that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein's regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a nuclear-weapons program, because the Italian military had once equipped the Iraqis with that make of rocket.

High-level Italian spies are quoted in the piece as being well aware that they needed to hook up with the rogue Cheney/ Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -- running counter to CIA analysis -- in order to keep their hand in with the White House. (Where is this era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA loyalist who told all because he feared the White House sought political control over the CIA?) Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also roundly dismissed as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ex-Ambassador Wilson was only the last in a long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about Saddam's nonexistent nuclear program.

As for the Bush Administration's insistence that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, last week the Los Angeles Times, in a stunning exposé, documented how German intelligence had repeatedly warned the CIA that an Iraqi defector dubbed "Curveball," who was the sole source for these claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story to get a German visa. But the CIA went right ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other presidential and vice-presidential saber-rattlings.

Even the weak-kneed Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA among others, discredited the administration's assertions that al-Qaeda operatives were in league with the Iraqis and gave the infamous Chalabi network of defectors (the main source for Judy Miller's "scoops") zero marks for credibility.

It's often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced Liddy, McCord, and the other Nixon "plumbers" back to the Committee to Reelect the President and the White House). Three decades later, much more was known about the Bush administration's excesses before the 2004 election. But times are very different. The young investigative reporter of Watergate morphed over those three decades into insider icon Bob Woodward, the "stenographer for the White House" who managed not to report on, no less mention to his editors, his all-too-close relationship to the Plame affair, while publicly disparaging its importance.

In the early seventies, however skeptical Americans were about Washington after more than eight years of the war in Vietnam under both Democratic and Republican war-makers, some hope of political change still smoldered. Cold War paranoia was ebbing, the horrors of 9/11 yet unimagined. Government was still a bipartisan concept; corporate money had yet to completely dominate elections; the media was still diverse, independent of the Republican attack machine, and skeptical of the powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that classic American checks and balances might right the ship of state.

Now, when the President waves the 9/ll voodoo doll, Congress, the media, and the public flinch. With both houses of Congress under Republican domination and both parties beholden to corporate America but not voting citizens, there have been no Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings, no public investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and secret prisons, war profiteering, or the lies told in the rush to war. The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a man whose party may well have stolen elections in Florida and Ohio.

We have no Sen. Sam Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose Watergate hearings educated Americans about the uses and abuses of government; no Rep. Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly chaired the House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican like Sen. Howard Baker, who began by defending the White House and came to understand during the Watergate hearings that loyalty to country was more important than the survival of a corrupt president. Congressional critics have no forum like the Watergate hearings and are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get the word out. But in recent weeks, moderate Republicans and John McCain, one of the few politicians still willing to fight for those quaint, old-fashioned things called "principles," are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably conservative Vietnam veteran Rep. John P. Murtha, who recently leapt over gutless wonders like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to demand the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

White House attempts to tar critics with treason have met their match in retired colonel Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who got five deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." (During Vietnam, Vice President Cheney received five deferments and never served in the military.)

We now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -- the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America -- has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs into the subject as well.

And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.

John Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -- scandals which did not unseat presidents -- than Watergate itself. In both the bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve -- even though Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of Cambodia. In Iran-Contragate, eleven top administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials -- to little media attention -- to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply.

Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She co-anchored (with David Gelber) Pacifica Radio's live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.

Copyright 2005 Judith Coburn

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.com

When those who are wise find themselves facing an impending defeat in any area of life, they confront their defeat, engage in self-examination, try to understand the reasons and come to terms with their own failure. Insight, courage and honesty are required. Others are not as wise, courageous or honest. The unwise who find themselves in the throes of defeat immediately begin to attribute their failure to others. The latter often begin to blame others, sometimes even cannibalizing their own, devouring them in an orgy of bloodletting in order to locate their failure externally. Enter Congressman John Murtha and the Democrats in Washington.

As the war mongers in Washington see their web of terror in Iraq begin to unravel, they feel compelled to launch new attacks - on one another. The vicious tone of this battle can be seen in an 11/19/05 NYT article,Uproar in House as Parties Clash on Iraq Pullout. In this article, Eric Schmitt wrote about the the current internal war in the U.S. House of Representatives over the Congressman John Murtha's demand for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Schmitt's article reveals the desperate attempt by politicians to abrogate their responsibility for their own impending defeat. The spectacle in Congress also happens to be "good theatre", supporting an illusion the corporate media has fed to U.S. citizens for a long time - the illusion that real debate takes place in the two-party system with respect to U.S. domestic and foreign policy. In this case it's about the U.S. war on the people of Iraq.

The New York Times article reads:

"The battle boiled over when Representative Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican who is the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she had just received from a Marine colonel back home.

" 'He asked me to send Congress a message: stay the course,' Ms. Schmidt said. "He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do."

"Democrats booed in protest and shouted Ms. Schmidt down in her attack on Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Vietnam combat veteran and one of the House's most respected members on military matters. They caused the House to come to an abrupt standstill, and moments later, Representative Harold Ford, Democrat of Tennessee, charged across the chamber's center aisle to the Republican side screaming that Ms. Schmidt's attack had been unwarranted.

" 'You guys are pathetic!' yelled Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts. 'Pathetic.' "

Typically, we see this kind of internecine bloodletting among the U.S. Democrats and Republicans, during their election campaigns. In those times it is ultimately about who benefits from the spoils from U.S. imperialism and wars. In those pre-election battles they fight for who will control of the wealth robbed from their victim nations and the workers and oppressed of this country. But this time their cannibalism has an added dimension.

This time the dogfight in congress is an attempt by the Democrats to suddenly disavow their involvement and complicity in the U.S. war on the people of Iraq and to blame the war on their political foes - the Republicans who obviously lied about WMD, fabricated linkages between Iraq and the 9/11/01 attacks and led the invasion in Iraq. The fight also serves to maintain an illusion that Washington was divided on whether to carry out the war and genocide which continues to be executed in Iraq.

These "debates" have always served to engage the U.S. population in periodic elections - elections which are controlled by government/ corporate structures and a corrupt, corporate media. From 1970 to 2005 the percent of eligible voters in the United States who actually voted ranged from 36.4% to 55.3%. The number of people who actually vote is of critical importance to the two party system because it reflects the confidence people have in the government itself. If noone turned out to vote, the U.S. government could no longer hide behind the cover of "democracy". Without such cover, Washington could no longer claim to be a "democracy" and could not make the ridiculous assertion that it makes war to spread democracy.
The illusion has apparently been supported by the Murtha strategy - at least with some U.S. citizens. On the website of the Democratic Party we find these words:

"Over 100,000 Letters for a Hero

"In less than 72 hours, over 100,000 Americans responded to Republican attacks on decorated veteran and Democratic Congressman Jack Murtha, sending notes of support and encouragement as he sought a new way on the Republicans' failed Iraq policy."

But with a turnout of eligible voters ranging from only 36 to 55 percent, the illusion of democracy has always been vulnerable. Those who do not vote are blamed by the government for "voter apathy". When that passive rebellion turns to active revolt, the bubble will burst and the realization of fundamental change in the fabric of U.S. governance and society will begin. We remind the skeptics that the catalysts for change can arrive in the forms of the capitalists overstepping themselves as they did at Mai Lai and Kent State in 1968 ... as they have done at Abu Ghraib and with their other atrocities and spectacular defeat in Iraq. Or catalyst for change can arrive in something as unpredictable as Hurricane Katrina, exposing their corruption and failure to provide for their own.

Controlling the Debate
These tactics are also used to limit the debate to the "conservatives" (so called) and the "liberals" (so called). The tactic also keeps the people of the not-so-united-states divided, fighting the same meaningless battles being acted out in congress right now. For example, Axis of Logic receives daily ridiculous e-mails attacking us for being "liberals", laced with adjectives unfit to print here. We reject the labels "liberal" and "Democrat" as much as we reject the labels, "conservative" and "Republican".

In tandem, the two political parties in Washington control the boundaries and parameters of allowable discussion. The strategy results in containing the possibility of change to reform of the existing systems, never exposing the two political parties to the threat of a peoples' revolution. Real debate will never take place in Washington until the capitalist/imperialist model itself is on the table. They will never voluntarily allow that debate to take place. Nobody gives up power willingly. If power is to be lost, it must be taken. The real debate about distribution of wealth can only be forced by an uprising of the people.

In the case of the U.S/Anglo war on the people of Iraq - We will never allow - the world never allow - the Democrats to forget that they supported the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, - from their beginnings in 1948, 1991 and 2002 respectively.

Anti-war movement and the Democrats

We will not allow the politicians in the Democratic party to now claim membership among those of us who have fought and continued to fight against these imperialist wars. Suddenly, the "War Hawk of the Democrats", John Murtha, calls for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Antiwar activists who praise John Murtha for his recent speech would do well to fix their gaze on the blood dripping from Murtha's hands as they applaud. They are buying into Washington's game of "reform" and entering into another cycle of stasis vs. change within fixed boundaries.

Layers of Duplicity and Deceit

Evidence of the duplicity of the Democrats can easily be seen in their refusal to join John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. While we certainly agree with Murtha's demand for immediate troop withdrawal, we eschew the transparent strategy behind his demands. A careful reading of his words show that this former killer in Vietnam only calls for troop withdrawal because: (1) He knows the U.S. has already lost the war in Iraq; (2) He knows his demands will not be enjoined by his cohorts in the Democratic party to force immediate withdrawal from the occupation; (3) He knows his demands will support the illusion that there is fundamental disagreement on the immorality and military folly of the war and occupation.

Evidence for the old imperialist strategy - Define/Control the Boundaries of the Debate

Why now? So why has John Murtha, a confessed killer in Vietnam, suddenly called for immediate and total troop withdrawal from a war he vigorously supported.

On May 7, 2005, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported:

"We cannot prevail in this war as it is going today," Murtha said yesterday at a news conference with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. Murtha said the incidents of prisoner abuse in Iraq were a symptom of a problem in which U.S. troops in Iraq are undermanned, inadequately equipped and poorly trained.
We either have to mobilize or we have to get out," Murtha said, adding that he supported increasing U.S. troop strength rather than pulling out."

So let's be clear. Note that Murtha's disagreement with the Bush regime has nothing to do with the morality of the war - only on their failure to win it. John Murtha is and always has been an advocate of the U.S. war on the people of Iraq. His reasons for an immediate pullout of U.S. military from Iraq is motivated by the factors stated above. Let's read an excerpt from his speech:
John Murtha stated:

"Much of our ground equipment is worn out and in need of either serious overhaul or replacement. We must rebuild our Army. Our deficit is growing out of control. The Director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being "terrified" about the budget deficit in the coming decades. This is the first prolonged war we have fought with three years of tax cuts, without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. The burden of this war has not been shared equally; the military and their families are shouldering this burden.

Our military has been fighting a war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty. Our military captured Saddam Hussein, and captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, with over 2,079 confirmed American deaths. Over 15,500 have been seriously injured and it is estimated that over 50,000 will suffer from battle fatigue. There have been reports of at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

I just recently visited Anbar Province Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground ... I am disturbed by the findings in key indicator areas. Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism ... I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." ... Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists ... A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis."

Now it's about damage control as the warmongers watch the unfolding of another spectacular defeat of the U.S. military. Their strategy is an old one: Defining and control the boundaries of the debate - thereby marginalizing any alternative position.

Stage 1: Murtha makes a "radical demand" for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. Troops from Iraq. It is reasonable to assume that he was hand-picked for the job, given his status as the pro war hawk in the Democratic party and his history of strong support for the war in Iraq. Anyone else in the party would have been dismissed as a "soft headed liberal".

Stage 2: The "other Democrats" find Murtha's demand to be "understandable" but also "unreasonable" and they "will not go that far". Senator John Kerry is one of those who has refused to sign on to Murtha's demand. The fabrication portrays Murtha's position as being "extremist" and the more reasonable position to be one of delaying withdrawal ... "to save the Iraqis from themselves". The corporate media prattles additional rationalization for the occupation - The occupation has to be continued "to defend the fledgling democracy"; to protect Iraq from civil war; to defeat terrorism; to build an Iraqi firewall against terrorism, etc., etc.

Stage 3: After framing the debate and voting to prolong the occupation, we see John Kerry and others diverting attention from troop withdrawal by engaging another "debate" altogether. Now, they argue, that the issue is about the Republicans attack on the integrity of John Murtha ... John Murtha, the "decorated U.S. Marine in Vietnam" - with ribbons and medals to symbolize every Vietnamese man, woman and child for whose deaths he was responsible, directly or indirectly. The former marine who has never seen an imperialist war or "foreign intervention" that he did not like ... until now.

The Sociopaths

Throughout our lives we have watched the corporate media parade serial killers in U.S. court rooms and through the hallways leading to their execution chambers. In this display of the government's ultimate power, they always remind us that the murderer must die, and especially so if they have shown no remorse for their atrocities. When have we seen John Murtha nor John Kerry demonstrate any remorse for the misery and suffering they personally caused in Vietnam? Why should we expect them to behave differently with respect to the war they supported in Iraq? Those responsible for the mass murder of over a million Iraqis since 1991 have shown no remorse. The lack of remorse and repentance are said to be characteristics of sociopaths and psychopaths. There are those who believe mass killing is justified by slapping the label "war" on it. But changing the label does not change the reality. Harsh words? Tell the dead and suffering in Iraq the words are too harsh.

These unrepentant killers include Kerry and Murtha - the "two Johns" - presently acting out their fight with George Walker Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney. They include H.W. Bush who seated Saddam Hussein in power and in 1991 began this war that is 14 years old and counting. We will always remind our readers that these remorseless killers include William Jefferson Clinton who enforced the sanctions, no fly zones and weekly missile attacks causing deaths of over a million Iraqis including 3/4 million children - which some say included a baby's death every 6 seconds from starvation and disease. We also remember the "anti-war activists" who marched at our side on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1991, carrying signs that read, "Sanctions not Bombs".

In Service to Global Corporate Empire

It is important to understand that both political parties are in full service to the global corporate empire - even as they try to cut each other's political throats in Washington. Therefore even this battle - and the reports in the corporate media like the ones referenced above are not what they seem to be. Even this gnashing of teeth between the Democrat and Republican dogs of war serves the global corporate empire very, very well.

One might ask how it is possible that this fight could possibly serve the empire. The answer is simple: Just as this fight maintains a very convincing illusion that real differences exist within the two-party system ... the illusion that voters in the U.S. can really make a difference come election day ... it maintains the illusion that the people have a significant role in government. Murtha himself admitted that the people are way ahead of the congress in their assessment of the war. Was he saying that we are ahead of the congress in knowledge or only in terms of morality?

Geopolitical Fronts in the War Against the Global Corporate Empire

Military Front: There are a number of fronts in the campaign against the U.S.-led Global Corporate Empire. The most obvious are the three military fronts. The gallant resistance armies of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine have weakened and drained the enemy's strength. These men and women give their lives and those of their children every day to defeat the scourge of imperialism.

Antiwar Front: Another front is the international anti-war movement which has also weakened the enemy. A year ago we could march a hundred thousand strong against the war and would find no mention of it in the morning news. Today, front page stories cover our opposition to the war because we can no longer be ignored.

Ideological Front: Finally, we see the ideological front of the war against the imperialists in the Bolivarian Revolution. When speaking to the people in Venezuela last month I pointed out that the Bolivarian revolution can no longer be defined as "Venezuelan". Today the revolution is "por todo el mundo" - worldwide. Its international ambassador, President Hugo Chavez Frias, has carried the Bolivarian message to the United Nations, to India, Iran, Italy, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Africa and most recently to the Summit of the Americas at Mar del Plata, Argentina. In every country he visits, the masses turn out to receive Chavez and his message of hope. It is now a worldwide revolution spreading throughout Latin America and the world.

The Bolivarian Revolution has been pushed by its internal dynamics, fed and directed by those it serves in reciprocity. It has largely been initiated by the indigenous uprisings but it is being picked up and carried along by everyone on the social spectrum as it spreads throughout the world. It has recently brought down U.S. backed, puppet presidents in Ecuador (Gutierrez)and Bolivia (Mesa)and has buried NAFTA, the imperialist's machine for profit and exploitation in Latin America. It has established self-governance among the people of Venezuela through participatory democracy and given them effective social programs. These are not half-baked giveaway programs like those thrown at the poor in the U.S. They are clear, working alternatives to the capitalist models which have wasted the lives of so many people in so many countries for so many decades. It's the ideological front in the war against the capitalist empire.

"Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity."

- President Hugo Chavez Frias

Personal Responsibility: Finding themselves in the midst of impending failure, the men in Washington are unable to look honestly at what they have done in Iraq. They are compounding their failure in two ways. First, their analysis of the problem is flawed. John Murtha has not analyzed the problem as morally wrong. In his analysis, the failure was one of poor planning and execution. Second, their reaction to impending defeat is to blame their failure on others in an effort to save their political skins.

But we are no longer allowing ourselves to be tricked or distracted by congressional theater. We must do everything we can to bust the illusions created by the corporate media. We are taking control of the debate. We have found the enemy and he is not us - as we've always been told by Pogo - a creation of the corporate media.

Each of us is called upon to give our time, energy, skills and money to the world revolution that is already underway. The beast would have us believe that he is invincible. But he is currently losing the war militarily, economically and in his struggle to control information. We will fight him until the empire has drawn its last breath and can kill no more ... until the dawn of that new day imagined by Simon Bolivar and many others who woke from their dream and went to work.

© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com

NEW YORK Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and her book publisher are upset about Associated Press and Reuters photos that allegedly presented a misleading impression of her book signing last weekend in Texas.

Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, gained wide fame last summer in an antiwar protest near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and then in a march in Washington, D.C. She returned to Crawford last week for a Thanskgiving protest. Her new book, “Not One More Mother's Child,” had just been published, and her publisher organized a book signing in a large tent in Crawford on Saturday.

Photos of the event, carried widely on the Web, and then picked up by conservative blogs, seemed to imply that the book signing was a bust. The photos showed Sheehan looking dejected, sitting at a table, with no one in the tent except for a couple of photographers. The AP caption simply read: “Anti-war activist CindySheehan waits for people to show up at her book signing near President Bush's ranch on Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 in Crawford, Texas.”

The Washington Post, which carried Evan Vucci's AP photo, noted that at a protest the same day Sheehan had addressed a crowd of only about 100. “In the morning,” the Post observed, “Sheehan signed copies of her new book, being published this week, for an even smaller crowd,” although it cited bad weather as a possible factor.

But in a statement today, Sheehan accused “right-wing” sites of “spreading a false story that nobody bought my book at Camp Casey on Saturday. That is not true, I sold all 100 copies and got writer's cramp signing them. Photos were taken of me before the people got in line to have me sign the book. We made $2000 for the peace house.”

Her publisher, Arnie Kotler at Koa Books, meanwhile released a letter to her supporters, charging that “AP and Reuters posted photos - I can't imagine why - of Cindy sitting at the book table between signings, rather than while someone was at the table. And now the smear websites are circulating an article, with these photos, that Cindy gave a signing and nobody came. It's simply not true…. the benefit books signing in Crawford, Texas on November 26, 2005 was well attended and a huge success.”

Asked for a response, an AP spokesman commented this afternoon:

"Photographer Evan Vucci, queried about the incident today said that he was present at the book signing from about 10 a.m. to about 11 a.m. During that time, he said, people were coming in to have their books signed in small groups of a few at a time.

"At the time the photos were taken 'maybe 5 people had come in,' Vucci says, and Sheehan was waiting for more to stop by, which they did individually as well as in very small groups. Therefore the wording of the caption is accurate in that Sheehan was waiting for people to show up at her signing."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff says President Bush was ''too aloof, too distant from the details'' of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's detachment and make bad decisions.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ''the president of the United States is all-powerful,'' and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ''otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.''

Wilkerson suggested his former boss may agree with him that Bush was too hands-off about Iraq.

''What he seems to be saying to me now is the president failed to discipline the process the way he should have and that the president is ultimately responsible for this whole mess,'' Wilkerson said.

He said Powell now generally believes it was a good idea to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but may not agree with either the timing or execution of the war. Wilkerson said Powell may have had doubts about the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein but was convinced by then-CIA Director George Tenet and others that the intelligence girding the push toward war was sound.

Powell was widely regarded as a dove to Cheney's and Rumsfeld's hawks, but he made a forceful case for war before the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, a month before the invasion. At one point, he said Saddam possessed mobile labs to make weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Wilkerson criticized the CIA and other agencies for allowing mishandled and bogus information to underpin that speech and the whole administration case for war.

He said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence and looked only at what supported their case for war.

A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 said that an al-Qaida military instructor was probably misleading his interrogators about training that the terror group's members received from Iraq on chemical, biological and radiological weapons. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi reportedly recanted his statements in January 2004.

A presidential intelligence commission also dissected how spy agencies handled an Iraqi refugee who was a German intelligence source. Codenamed Curveball, this man who was a leading source on Iraq's purported mobile biological weapons labs was found to be a fabricator and alcoholic.

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts on the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined fragile support for the Iraq war that followed.

Cheney's office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued ''that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases,'' Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: ''Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?''

Wilkerson also said he did not disclose to Bob Woodward that administration critic Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, joining the growing list of past and current Bush administration officials who have denied being the Washington Post reporter's source.

A leading aide to the former secretary of state Colin Powell has accused Vice-President Dick Cheney of creating the climate in which prisoner abuse could flourish, and implied that he might have committed war crimes.

Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's chief of staff until January this year, alleged that US policy on Iraq before and after the March 2003 invasion had been hijacked by an alliance between Mr Cheney and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld ­ fostered by President George Bush's "detached" attitude to details of post-war planning.

He also suggested that the faulty intelligence used to justify the war had been at the least "cherry-picked" by the White House and the Pentagon.

The controversy over prisoner abuse and torture has recently flared up anew in Washington. But for Colonel Wilkerson, the problem has arisen as the result of an "alternative decision-making process," led by Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld.

Mr Bush had tried to steer a middle course, whereby the Geneva Conventions would apply to "all but al-Qa'ida and al-Qa'ida look-alikes," Col Wilkerson told the BBC yesterday. That policy was defensible in legal terms, but was quickly undermined in practice.

Under Mr Cheney's protection, "the Secretary of Defence moved out to do what they wanted to do in the first place". Asked whether the Vice-President was guilty of a war crime, Col Wilkerson said it was "an interesting question". It was certainly a domestic crime "to advocate terror", and "I would suspect it is ­ for whatever it's worth, an international crime as well".

The former State Department aide's outburst came on the eve of a major speech on Iraq by Mr Bush, in which the President is expected to set out conditions for a reduction of US troop strength in Iraq.

Mr Bush said yesterday that there would be no immediate withdrawal: "We want to win, and I don't want the troops to come home without having achieved victory." The US "has sacrificed a lot" in Iraq, including the lives of more than 2,100 of its troops. "We're not going to cut and run, we will achieve our objective," he declared.

But for Col Wilkerson, the situation has been made far worse by poor post-war planning, and the abuse of some foreign detainees, which had blotted the reputation of the US around the world.

The retired US Army colonel told the BBC that more than 70 prisoners, " and up to 90, people are now telling me", had died in what he termed " questionable circumstances". There were two sides to the debate in government: one grouped around Gen Powell insisting that the Geneva Conventions must be respected; the other around the then Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

President Bush had sought a compromise, but, Col Wilkerson told the Associated Press in a separate interview, he was "too aloof, too distant from the details of post-war planning", allowing lower officials to exploit this "detachment" and make the wrong decisions.

The former Powell aide also cast strong doubt on the regime's explanation for the use of faulty intelligence to justify the invasion.

Until recently, Col Wilkerson said, he had tended to accept the White House explanation that ­ along with the intelligence services of Britain, Germany and other countries ­ the CIA and other US agencies had simply been fooled over Iraq's presumed weapons threat. "You begin to wonder, was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? I am beginning to have my concerns," Col Wilkerson said.

Colin Powell may have vanished from the scene; not so Lawrence Wilkerson. The man who was chief of staff to the former Secretary of State has now become the most vocal critic of Iraq policy from within the US administration.

Last month, Mr Wilkerson accused the Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, of operating a cabal that ran the war, steamrollering General Powell and anyone else who dared to counsel restraint. This week, Mr Wilkerson elaborated. He told the Associated Press that President Bush was "too aloof, too distant in post-war planning" and this allowed Messrs Cheney and Rumsfeld to make policy on the treatment of prisoners that has returned to haunt the administration. In an interview with the BBC yesterday, he went further still, blaming Mr Cheney, the most powerful Vice-President in modern US history, for creating the climate that led to the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and implying that Mr Cheney might be liable to charges of war crimes.

Whether or not Mr Wilkerson is speaking for, or with the tacit blessing of, his former boss scarcely matters. Mr Powell had his chance to influence events. Instead, he was bested in bureaucratic combat by the Cheney/ Rumsfeld "cabal", while his reputation has been sullied - probably irreparably - by the now-infamous speech to the United Nations in which he made a bogus case for war, based on false evidence about Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons. What matters is the light Mr Wilkerson throws on Mr Cheney's continuing malign influence on policy-making.

Mr Cheney has all along held two overriding beliefs. The first is in the supreme power of the presidency, a power that frees Mr Bush of the need to observe the constraints of international agreements. The second is that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States. Therefore all means to defeat it are legitimate. From this mindset stem most of the decisions that have stained America's reputation: the reckless treatment of pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the views of the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the prison abuse scandals in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib - even the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah.

Perhaps the most poignant of Mr Wilkerson's claims this week was his recollection of General Powell once screaming down a phone to the Defence Secretary as the international furore grew about the US treatment of prisoners: "Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?" Even if they understood, Donald and Dick evidently did not care.

In one sense, Mr Wilkerson's forays are part of a belated fightback by a defeated old guard with scores to settle. But they come as public opinion in America turns clearly against the war and questions the means employed to prosecute it. In recent weeks, the Senate has voted by overwhelming bipartisan margins to require the White House to give regular accounting of its policies, and to set explicit limits on interrogation techniques.

Amazingly, Mr Cheney is trying to reverse the latter vote. He is pleading for an exemption for the CIA, apparently not caring whether the rest of the world would thereby be convinced that the US government now sanctions torture. In the meantime, he defiantly insists that pre-war intelligence was properly used, accusing those who suggest otherwise of "reprehensible" attempts to "rewrite history". Some claim Mr Cheney has lost the President's favour, but there is scant sign of it. And until that happens, the world will see America less as a beacon of light than a harbinger of darkness.

On the morning of July 1, 2005, FBI agents raided the palatial southern California home of the ultra-hawkish congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. With search warrants in hand, the feds rummaged through Cunningham's $2.55 million mansion in the exclusive conclave of Rancho Santa Fe, outside San Diego, looking for evidence linking the 8-term Republican to Mitchell Wade, the founder and CEO of MZM, Incorporated, one of the Pentagon's top 100 contractors.

At the same time the FBI was searching through Cunningham's desk drawers, vaults and computers in California, other agents were executing a raid on the DC offices of MZM. Later that afternoon, FBI agents also rifled through a 42-foot yacht named the "Duke-Stir," docked on the Potomac River, where Cunningham resides, rent free, when he is in Washington.

The investigators were hunting for evidence that Cunningham, a former fighter pilot in Vietnam who claims to have been the inspiration for the Tom Cruise role in the movie "Top Gun," may have accepted bribes from Wade in exchange for helping MZM land a bevy of defense and intelligence contracts from the federal government.

The corruption probe was prompted by the disclosure that in 2003 Wade had purchased the congressman's old four-bedroom house in San Diego for princely sum of $1.7 million. Wade soon put his new house on the red hot San Diego real estate market, where it sat unsold for almost a year. He finally unloaded it for $950,000.

During that same period of time, the average prices of houses sold in San Diego County climbed by more than 25 percent and rarely stayed on the market for more than a few weeks. Yet, Wade took a $750,000 bath on the Cunningham deal. The federal agents wanted to know why.

The Duke denied any wrongdoing and could offer no explanation for the mysterious and sudden nosedive in the value of his old house. "My whole life I've lived above board," Cunningham pleaded. "I've never even smoked a marijuana cigarette."

The Duke may not have treated his lungs with ganja, but he did attend one of the most infamous orgies in Pentagon history, the 1991 Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas, the annual gathering of Navy flyers, Pentagon bigwigs, congressional kingpins and defense contractors. Over the course of that September weekend at the Vegas Hilton, at least 83 women were stripped, forced to run a gauntlet of drunken, groping pilots, and sexually molested, with some being forced to "ride the butt rodeo", a Tailhook euphemism for having a pilot bite your buttocks until you can shake yourself free. One investigator blamed the Tailhook scandal on the "Top Gun mentality" of the pilots and their superiors. Bring back some memories, Duke?

One female Navy commander later speculated that part of the vicious of the 1991 Tailhook orgy stemmed from the increasing hostility of the military and its backers to the increasing presence of women in positions which had traditionally been the exclusive domain of men. "This was the woman that was making you, you know, change your ways," she said. "This was the woman that was threatening your livelihood. This was the woman that wanted to take your spot in that combat aircraft."

For years after the event, Cunningham, though, referred to the "alleged misconduct" at Tailhook, claiming that the Navy flyboys were just engaging in a little benign steam-venting. He has also tried to block efforts by Congress to curb sexual harrassment in the military, rousing himself into passionate denunciations of such measures as "stinking of political correctness".

Cunningham claims that he had been trying to sell his San Diego house for some time. He said he told several people that his house was on the market and one day out of the blue he got a call from Wade, who, Cunningham claims, said, "Hey, I'll buy it!" The Duke said that the price of the house was established by a local real estate agency.

The problem is that the records don't exactly back up Cunningham's miraculous tale of his sudden enrichment. The congressman's house was sold without the aid of a realtor and it was never put on the Multiple Listings Service database of homes for sale. Moreover, Cunningham did not record his munificent windfall on his financial disclosure form, which every member of congress must file each year.

Duke Cunningham prefers to sleep not in the toney community of Potomac, Maryland, but on the Potomac River itself in a yacht. Perhaps Cunningham's preference for the fetid swamps and mosquito-clotted banks of the Potomac stems from his nostalgia for Nixon and the president's nightly sojourns from Great Falls to the Tidal Basin aboard the USS Sequoia.

In 1997, Cunningham purchased the 65-foot riverboat named the Kelly C from his pal Sonny Callahan, the former Republican congressman from Alabama, for $200,000. The flat-bottomed yacht, which is not deemed sea-worthy enough to venture out into the Chesapeake never mind the Atlantic, only occasionally puttered up and down the river where observers on the Georgetown tow-path could observe the former Navy aviator at the helm, dressed up, according to one longtime resident of M Street, like Admiral Halsey. Dockworkers at the Glen Cove Marina derided the Kelly C as merely a "big party barge."

In 2002, the Duke sold the Kelly C to a Long Island tycoon named Ted Kontogiannis for $600,000, snagging a cool $400,000 profit, even though the condition of the yacht had deteriorated to the point where the congressman himself had to pilot the boat to the shipyards of Consolidated Yachts to undergo a lengthy list of repairs. When the Duke dropped off the boat, he handed the owner of the shipyards an autographed glossy photo of himself adorned in his flight jacket.

For his part, Kontogiannis says the acquisition of the Kelly C was "a steal", although he has never taken the boat out of its slip and, in fact, never registered the sale of the boat with the Coast Guard, whose registry of ships still records the yacht as being owned by the congressman.

At the time, Kontogiannis bought the Kelly C, he was experience, what he calls, "a little problem." In fact, Kontogiannis had just been convicted on kickback and bribery charges involving his role in a bid-rigging scheme over contracts with the New York public school system and he was looking for a pardon from the Bush administration. Kontogiannis admits that he asked Duke Cunningham for help in finding a way to persuade Bush to expunge his conviction. According to Kontogiannis, the Duke put the convict into contact with a DC law firm and recommended the names of a couple of lawyers to press his case. Eventually, Kontogiannis said he declined to pursue the pardon because it involved "too much aggravation."

But the tycoon's favors for the Duke didn't end with the purchase of the congressman's party barge. Kontogiannis's daughter and nephew, who own a New York mortgage company, floated the congressman two loans totaling $1.1 million for the purchase of his Rancho Santa Fe mansion. Cunningham paid off one of the loans with the bloated proceeds from the sale of the Kelly C.

In the wake of the disposition of his riverboat, the Duke was not forced to seek cover in the Mitch Snyder Memorial Homeless Shelter. Instead, he made a pinpoint landing onto the deck of yet another yacht, named coincidentally or not, the Duke-Stir, and owned by his old pal, Mitchell Wade, CEO of MZN, Inc. Wade invited the congressman to live rent-free on the Duke-Stir. Since it's a crime for members of congress to live rent free on someone else's property, Cunningham has evaded this troublesome legality by paying $13,000 a year in dock fees, far below the going rent in the more habitable quadrants of the Washington metro area.

Wade and his company also helped to finance Cunningham's political campaigns. According to records from the Center for Responsive Politics, MZM's political action committee donated $17,000 to Cunningham's coffers from 2000 through 2004. Wade personally twisted the arms of his employees to extract donations for Cunningham. "By the spring of '02, Mitch was twisting employees' arms to donate to his MZM PAC," one former MZM employee told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "We were called in and told basically either donate to the MZM PAC or we would be fired."

But what did Wade and his firm get in return for the largesse they've shown the Duke? MZM is one of those obscure enterprises started up by former Pentagon staffers and military officers to feed off the defense budget. Along with Wade, a former Pentagon staffer, all of the other corporate officers at MZM joined the company after successful careers in the military. MZM vice-president Joseph Romano was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's technological assessment group. Another MZM vice president, James C. King, is a former Lt. General from the Army, who once headed the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Yet another vice president, Wayne Hall, is a retired Army general who commanded a military intelligence unit during the 1991 Gulf War. The lone exception is Sue Hogan, MZM's vice president for governmental relations. In her former life, she served as a top staffer on the Senate Appropriation's Committee's subcommittee on defense spending.

Unlike many such revolving door operations, MZM struggled in its formative years, rarely pulling in more than $20 million in revenues in a single year. Then came 9/11, Bush's wars, and the fruitful relationship with the Duke. In 2002, thanks to a flood of Pentagon and CIA contracts, MZM's fortunes took a sudden turn for the better. By 2004, the small firm was hauling in more than $166 million in defense contracts a year.

What kind of contracts did the Duke help MZM obtain? The congressman took refuge behind a veil of secrecy. "They are very, very classified," Cunningham said.

The details of the MZM contracts remain obscure, but a review of the firm's annual report shows that the work ranges from digital mapping, private intelligence operatives and interpreters to the production of psy-ops materials and "collections of foreign language vocal signals."

Cunningham discounts the allegation that he was doing any special favors for Wade or MZM. "The way it works here is: I support a lot of credible defense programs for the Air Force, Navy, ship building, ship repair or intelligence," Cunningham explained. " And they say, you know, 'Duke, these are good programs. This is what I want you to do.'"

Wade had a somewhat more succinct and instructive view of the impact of his political dispensations . According to a former MZM employee, Wade explained that he focused his lobbying efforts on a handful of influential members of congress that he had bankrolled such as Cunningham: "The only people I want to work with are people I give checks to. I own them."

The remarkable aspect of the Cunningham affair is its essential banality. The casual dispensation of political graft is the rule in Washington and has been since the days of the robberbarons. This is especially true when it comes to politicians, such as Cunningham, who are in a position to protect and advance the interests of the Pentagon's beefy portfolio of weapons contractors.

Cunningham was never considered a particularly adept politician. He was not a gifted orator like Robert Byrd. Not a slick operator like Trent Lott or Christopher Dodd. Not a master of the legislative parlor tricks in the mode of Pete Dominici or Ted Stevens. Indeed, Cunningham is a clumsy speaker burdened with a boorish personality. The Duke got by on implacable loyalty to his party and, more decisively, on blind obedience to his political patrons.

What political power he enjoyed came courtesy of the economic geography of his southern California district, which harbors a thicket of defense industry giants, from TRW and SAIC to Northrop Grumman and Titan, and military bases. Cunningham was a company man and DC is a new kind of company town. His guardianship of those weapons firms secured Cunningham a seat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, one of the most powerful enclaves on the Hill. With that seat, Cunningham became a mini-potentate in Congress and dozens of defense contractors made the annual Haj to his office to lay riches at his feet and requests on his desk.

As such, the Duke's travails serve as an edifying symbol for how completely Congress has been captured, from top to bottom and left to right, by the coterie munitions makers and weapons merchants that underwrite and direct the American political system. Some veterans of the Hill simply refer to incessant feeding of the Pentagon beast as "the Enterprise", the axiomatic function of their existence in Washington.

The Enterprise pivots on the annual disbursement of the $500 billion defense budget. In an era of shriveling federal spending on domestic social programs, the defense budget remains the most reliable pork barrel in town. Even the thawing of the Cold War and the death of the Soviet Union did little to inhibit the pace of Pentagon spending.

Indeed in July 2000, Admiral Jay Johnson pronounced, as he stepped down from his post as the Navy's top officer, that national security requires a defense expenditure of 4 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product. It became known as the 4 Per Cent Solution. A couple of weeks later, General James Jones, Commandant of the Marine Corps, told Defense Daily to call for a "gradual ramp up" in defense spending "to about 4 to 4.5 percent of the US gross domestic product." Two days after Jones's comments, Gen. Gordon Sullivan, formerly Army Chief of Staff and now president of the 100,000-strong Association of the US Army, confirmed the Pentagon's floor demand: "We must prepare for the future of the security of our nation. We should set the marker at 4 percent."

But what does 4 percent actually means in dollar terms? In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget projected GDP at $10.9 trillion rising to $13.9 trillion in 2007. Thus a military budget set at 4 percent of GDP in 2002 would amount to $438 billion, and in 2007 $558 billion. The combined spending of all putative foes of the United States-Russia, China and our old friends the rogue states, including Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Serbia, Cuba and Sudan-amounts to a little over $100 billion.

It is not well understood that though the number of ships, planes and troops available to guard the nation has declined sharply, the actual flow of dollars into the pockets of the Praetorians and their commercial partners has remained at cold war levels. It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the cold war, US military spending under George Bush I diminished slightly. Clinton reversed this trend with enough brio to allow Al Gore, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in the 1996 campaign, to declare that the Democratic bid to the Praetorians that year was far superior to that of the Republicans.

The spending spree hasn't abated since. But all that money did nothing to prevent the attacks of 9/11, in part because the prime arteries of that federal largesse where still pumping billions into the big ticket items of the Cold War arsenal such as Star Wars, Stealth bombers and fighters and Navy battle groups. After 9/11, these perverse spending habits simply got worse. All the old projects, designed to fight an enemy that no longer existed and useless against those who nearly destroyed the Pentagon itself, got funded almost without a question being asked.

During the peak of the Cold War and the Reagan arms build up, the annual Pentagon budget topped out at $453 billion (in 2004 dollars). In 2004, the Defense budget soared to over $500 billion--$47 billion more than the hey day of the Reagnites.

The peculiar consequence of the budgetary and appropriations process meant that there was not a dime to spare from the annual budget to fund the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those invasions, which may end up costing more than $850 billion, had to be financed off the books, through special appropriations, with little public debate and a wink-and-a-nod from the leadership of both parties. There is a calculated opacity to the war and defense appropriations process that is designed to frustrate outsiders.

That's because much of the real defense spending on the Hill happens after hours and is planted in the bewildering copse of congressional earmarks, obscure line items conference committee ad-ons and last minute riders that most members of congress don't even know how to interpret. And these covert addons have spiked since 9/11, rising from $4 billion a year in 2001 to $12 billion a year in 2005.

Unlike most agencies, the Pentagon is not bound by its budget. The more it spends, the more it gets. For example, the Pentagon told congress that the Iraq war would cost about $1.5 billion a month. It ended up costing between $5 and $8 billion a month, with no end in sight. The Pentagon has an apt catch-phrase for this bloody flood of spending. It's accountants call it the "burn rate."

The members of the Senate and House Armed Services and Defense Appropriations committees act as a kind of elite Praetorian Guard overseeing the interests of the Pentagon and his cadre of contractors. The prime prerequiste for induction into this legislative tribunal is a finely-tuned solicitousness to the desires of the weapons industry. And the faithful are richly recompensed for their labors.

Let's begin with Cunningham's political haul. The eight-term congressman has faced negligible opposition in a district that has been delicately gerrymandered to ensure the continuity of Republican stewardship. Even so, each year Cunningham amassed a staggering tranche of campaign slush without hardly breaking a sweat and the overwhelming amount of that loot originates with weapons and aerospace companies.

In the 2004 congressional election, Cunningham's opponent raised less than $100.000. By contrast, Cunningham heaped up $771,822 and had another $200,000 in reverse that had gone unspent from his previous campaign. His top PAC contributors were all Pentagon contractors, lead by Lockheed and Titan who chipped in $15,000 each, MZM with $12,000, General Dynamics contributed $11,000, while General Atomics, Northrop-Grumman and SAIC each pitched in $10,000.

Those corporate contributions are the financial unguents that lubricate the political machinery of the Hill. Between 1997 and 2004, the twenty largest Pentagon contractors lavished Washington's political elites with $33.6 million in campaign contributions. But this is just the icing on a very rich cake. Over the same period, those same companies invested $390 million in lobbying congress. The investment paid off handsomely, yielding those very weapons companies $558.8 billion in federal contracts.

It's fine to live on the dole of a defense company; just don't press the point by reposing for free on their yacht. That's the kind of exposure that might spoil the game for everyone. The profligacy of an individual member of congress must not be permitted to interfere with the grander profligacy of the munitions makers. In the end, the Duke was told that he should fall on his sword, like a true Praetorian, to protect the business of the Empire. In mid-July the congressman suddenly announced his retirement, saying he had decided to "conclude the public chapter of my life" and not seek re-election to a ninth term.

What Cunningham in his obduracy never realized was that he was just an interchangeable part, a legislative errand boy, fetching home pails of contracts every fall when the appropriations bills come due. No special talent required. Almost anyone could do it. In the end, the congressman was expendable, so that the Enterprise might endure forever. The Pentagon and its contractors and numberless parasites have many available to shoulder the Duke's duties.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror.

While President George W. Bush tells the American people that U.S. troops must stay in Iraq until they have “achieved victory,” Pentagon planners and intelligence professionals tell the White House the war cannot be won.

“The President’s speech tonight will be a con-job,” says a senior Pentagon analyst who asked not to be identified. “He will be attempting to sell a strategy that is not achievable and one that is not backed by the professionals who tell him otherwise.”

In fact, experts say Bush can no longer rally Americans to support his failed far in Iraq.

“The American people have turned against the war, and they're not turning back,” said political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. “The public is no longer with the President on this issue.”

But opposition to the President’s policies also grows in the private corridors of the Pentagon and in the intelligence community where professionals in the art of waging war say the battle for Iraq is lost.

“It’s over,” says a longtime analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. “It’s been over since we declared a victory we didn’t achieve and claimed to have accomplished a mission that was unfinished.”

Bitterness grows within the military and intelligence establishment over Bush’s unwillingness to listen to reason on Iraq. Analysts called to the White House to provide intelligence briefings on the situation in Iraq dread the trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where an honest assessment of the war brings anger and sharp rebukes from a President who doesn’t like to hear bad news.

“It’s a no-win situation,” says one longtime Pentagon operative. “If we provide an honest assessment of the situation the President blows his stack. He ignores our recommendations and then blames us when things go wrong.”

A record number of senior officials at both the Pentagon and CIA have left in recent months, saying they are unable to deal with what they call “the imperial Presidency of George W. Bush.”

Republicans also grow increasingly nervous over Bush’s stubbornness on Iraq and know the growing public opposition to the war is killing them politically.

“If elections for Congress were being held next Tuesday, Republicans would lose both houses. The GOP knows it,” says Sabato.

Other feel opposition to the war will continue to grow and, with it, increased demands that the U.S. withdraw..

"No matter how the questions are phrased, all the polls have logged increases in pro-withdrawal sentiment over the course of the war," says John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion, based at Ohio State University. And that sentiment is inextricably linked to the growing belief that the war itself has been a mistake.”

That belief the war itself has been a mistake is one shared by a growing number of those whose job it is to wage war – the pros at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community and the same pros that George W. Bush ignored in his headlong march into a losing war in Iraq.

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue

I read in the Drudge Report that Bush "has become isolated and feels betrayed by key officials." Maybe Cheney and his neocon protégés are really in the dog house these days. The report asserts that "Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes."

I read too on Capitol Hill Blue news service that presidential aides have become increasingly concerned about Bush's "short temper and tirades," directed especially at anyone who questions his war and his honesty. But he's also been exploding in cabinet meetings at his subordinates. Angry at his enemies, angry at his friends, he may be under stress and returning to his youthful habits. Check out this video clip of his appearance at Jerry Kilgore's campaign rally in Virginia awhile back.

No further comment on that clip, but I'm just wondering. Might the president be feeling so messed up on account of him feeling himself, you know----duped? Big time?

The president is of course not the most intelligent man to ever occupy the Oval Office. In debates or news conferences, in any unrehearsed unscripted situation, he is inarticulate, repetitious, incoherent, unfocused, lost, fourth-grade, apparently brain-fried. He famously avoids reading newspapers, has a poor memory for details, is unable to grasp nuance, mistrusts science and embraces religious fundamentalism. On the other hand, he is surrounded by people who are highly intelligent and sophisticated, and he has been uncommonly dependent upon them---especially Cheney and his neocon Machiavellian amoral warmongering staff.

Quite likely, the latter think of Bush the way Margaret Thatcher thought about Ronald Reagan. ("Poor dear," she remarked in 1988, "there's nothing between his ears.") But just as Thatcher found in the Gipper a staunch friend and ally, Bush's advisors may see in Dubya the perfect front man for their world-changing agenda. He doesn't know much about foreign countries, won't ask many questions, loves Israel as a matter of principle, thinks its existence fulfills Bible prophecy. The perfect patsy to get to say, "I know Ariel Sharon is a man of peace," "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," "Iraq has also provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training," "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories" and other such suckered nonsense.

But now, the majority of Americans think Bush's dishonest. 58% of those polled question his integrity. Maybe that explains the reported rages in cabinet meetings. Of course it's possible that Bush was in on the lies all along, as I've pretty much assumed to date. But maybe not. Maybe he really believed what he was told to say by trusted staff members, and has only gradually come to ask, "How'd they dare make me say all that bullshit, that makes me look like a liar?"

Cheney is out lecturing reliable neocon-friendly audiences that it's "dishonest and reprehensible" for anyone to suggest that any member the Bush administration "purposely misled the American people" before the war. It's a perfectly natural self-defense mechanism for the vice president---whom only 29% of Americans think honest at this point because he himself indeed purposely mislead the American people before the war---to bark in that fashion. Meanwhile, wouldn't it be nice for Bush to have the following conversation with his trusted spouse?

Laura: I was at the library today, reading this book about Leo Strauss.

Dubya: Who's that?

Laura: He's a philosopher who had an impact on Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Perle, Wurmserthose guys.

Dubya: Ok.

Laura: He divides society into three groups. The wise, the gentlemen, and the masses. He thinks most people are pretty dumb and need the wise to lead them.

Dubya: Well that makes sense.

Laura: The Wolfowitz-Perle guys think they're the wise ones. And they think you're a gentleman.

Dubya: I won't argue with that.

Laura: And the function of the gentleman is to convince the masses to support the decisions of the wise.

Dubya (exploding): Goddam it, look, nobody had to persuade me to go to war on Iraq! I wanted to myself!

Laura: Yes dear, I know you did. But these wise guys used what Strauss called "noble lies."

Dubya: Whadya mean?

Laura: Well, they think that if you said the truth---that we want to invade Iraq because of the oil, and for bases, and to make it a friend of Israel---people wouldn't agree with it. So instead, they said Iraq might stage a nuclear attack on New York, and they got you to say things about Niger uranium and centrifuges and mobile labs that just weren't true. So most people supported the war.

Dubya: Dick let them make me say that?

Laura: Yes, dear. Remember when you started saying that there was no evidence for a connection between bin Laden and Saddam?

Dubya: Yes.

Laura: But Dick kept saying it was true?

Dubya: I didn't notice.

Laura: Well he's been repeating the same thing over and over again. He thinks it's completely right to say whatever it takes to get people to want to conquer the Middle East.

Dubya: So now people think I'm a liar.

Laura: Yes, dear. As these investigations move forward I'm just afraid more and more folks might think that way.

Dubya: What can I do?

[Indeed, how does he get out of this mess? I think of Ronald Reagan, who finessed his way out of the Iran-Contra scandal by explaining that he wasn't a hands-on manager but rather delegated responsibility to trusted subordinates who let him down. Many believed and forgave him. But he was for many an endearingly doddering, if nothing-between-the ears, sort of president, and this one's a strutting punk with a murderous streak whose fratboy smirk has lost its charm. And an arms-for-hostages deal is nothing next to a bloody unwinnable war based on lies.]

Laura: You could give a speech, and confess the truth, say you made a mistake because of bad advice.

Dubya: But they're all in on it! All of them used me, made fun of me! Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith

Laura: They abused your trust, yes.

Dubya: Damn them all! Who can I trust?

In this coterie of women around the lonely president, Rice holds the greatest power. While a team-player, willing to use the "mushroom cloud" imagery concocted by the White House Iraq Group in September 2002 and to promote the centrifuges lie at the same time, Rice is not a neocon ideologue. She may wish to rein the crazies in. She's stated specifically that the U.S. seeks "policy change" rather than "regime change" in Syria, and that she will hold John Bolton, neocon ambassador to the UN and big-time disseminator of disinformation, "on a short leash."

Maybe she and the other ladies should do the same for Dubya. Handcuff him to the bed for a few days, for godsakes. Tell people he's choked on a pretzel, fainted again, and needs rest. Do NOT let Dick Cheney near him, lest he curse the man out so that the veep in turn lashes out wildly at Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy again. Do NOT let Rev. Franklin Graham in the room, lest he be shocked at Dubya's slurred and ungodlike speech. Do NOT let Patrick Fitzgerald get anywhere near the man until the wild glint disappears from his eyes, the impish grin disappears from his lips, the tell-tale tongue-in-jowl dry-mouth symptoms fade and he's ready to identify just one teeny-tiny mistake he's made in his presidency. Bring in almost Supreme Court justice Harriet Miers, and station her at the bedside, repeating, "You're not a dupe, not a dupe, not a dupe. You're the most brilliant man I've ever met!" He'll like that.

But what if he was used, unwittingly, his callous cruel arrogant nature exploited by those who really are Evil Incarnate, and who are going to make him go down in the "History" he alternately validates and despises as the worst and stupidest president ever? How painful for the spoiled brat, who as Texas governor mocked a born-again Christian death-row inmate, pursing his lips to the camera in mock desperation cracking that she'd pleaded, "Please, don't kill me!" before he happily decreed her death. How painful for a child of privilege accustomed to abusing everybody else to wake up and discover he's been had by people far more aware and intelligent than him.

Isolated and betrayed, this most powerful of men. May he withdraw further into himself, and those divine voices in his head telling him "Smite! Smite!" as out in the real world the crimes of his administration become more and more clear.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday verbally slapped a congressman from his Republican party for taking bribes, calling it "outrageous."

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California resigned on Monday after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for help in securing Defense Department contracts.

"Any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, must take their office seriously and the ethics seriously," Bush said to reporters during a trip to Texas.

"The idea of a congressman taking money is outrageous. And Congressman Cunningham is going to realize that he has broken the law and is going to pay a serious price, which he should," Bush said.

Cunningham, 63, an eight-term congressman and decorated Vietnam War pilot, admitted taking cash, antiques, a yacht, vacation expenses and money for his daughter's graduation party from defense contractors between 2000 and 2005. He faces up to 10 years in prison and is to be sentenced on February 27.

It was the latest scandal to hit Republicans, who control Congress.

U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, stepped down as House of Representatives majority leader when he was indicted in September on charges of breaking his state's campaign finance laws.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating stock sales by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican.

And former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby was charged last month with perjury in an investigation over the leaking of a CIA operative's identity.

When I left Kennett High School at 2:45 p.m. on November 22, 1963, I didn’t realize that I had stepped out of one historical epoch and into another. Media analysts have fixed 1963 as the year that television outstripped print media as the public’s principal source of information, and the Kennedy assassination has to have been the event that tipped the scales. Everyone I knew spent the next four days glued to the television as one bizarre incident followed another. After that my father and mother stopped arguing over whether to buy the Boston Globe or the Manchester Union Leader, and dinner became little more than an aggravating interruption between the nightly news and the Early Show.

Thus ended the age in which common people could effectively participate in public debate. It was the printing press that freed mankind from the dictatorship of priests and potentates, opening the way for the experiment in democracy, and Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of independent farmers who educated themselves on public issues through the printed page. Citizens could not only learn from that medium but take part in it, either through newspaper submissions or the production of their own pamphlets. Pamphleteers played a significant role in the American Revolution, and during the first century of American history an endless selection of small newspapers provided outlets for the most divergent opinions. Our national destiny was repeatedly decided by personal debate on the porch of many a general store littered with such newspapers.

That widespread public participation kept the ship of state on a fairly even keel. The course always veered a little to starboard, the helm needed frequent adjustment, and there were a number of harrowing collisions and near-misses, but the ship weathered every storm and always righted itself.

Unlike newspapers, television allows for virtually no public participation. Most citizens have no access to major television stations, unless to make fools of themselves as game-show contestants. The political demonstration was invented to focus television attention on popular issues, but in recent years the media moguls whose political sponsors have become the targets of those demonstrations either ignore them or actively underestimate their size. Equal-time rules for public rebuttal have been allowed to expire. Even when groups of citizens band together to buy a few seconds of air time on an important political issue, broadcasters who dislike the message can and do find pretexts for refusing to run those ads.

Public debate has deteriorated still further as newspapers try to recapture readership by imitating the worst aspects of television. Flashy graphics and short paragraphs catch the eye, but suppress concentrated thought on complicated issues. Following the lurid details of lachrymose personal tragedies only distracts the public from issues of crucial importance. Even the reawakened media that lambasted incompetent government officials after Hurricane Katrina gave too much attention to human-interest stories and too little to the insane development practices that invite such natural disasters everywhere—like the rampant habit of perching houses on steep hillsides, river banks, and filled wetlands.

The television addict has lost the ability to think independently, and even the casual viewer looks for little more than entertainment. The news programs that once informed the public have therefor been reduced to that level, providing coverage of fascinating but inane trivia that have no relevance to public policy. The difference between news and entertainment is often difficult to detect. Now viewers face the additional confusion of “fake news“ in the form of videotaped news releases provided by government agencies, amounting to infomercials on the administration agenda produced at great public expense.

Many stations—especially those owned by conglomerates deeply indebted to the Bush administration—simply run those videotapes unedited, leaving the distinct impression that they are real, independent news reports. Only in openly totalitarian regimes do ruling factions enjoy such cooperation in the dissemination of propaganda. The Third Reich might have come a lot closer to its thousand-year prediction with that much control over so seductive a medium.

Senate Bill 967, the Truth in Broadcasting Act, would force broadcasters to reject such disguised propaganda unless it prominently warns that the information was produced by the government. As I write this column the bill is being considered by the Commerce Committee. While I have no idea how the committee will deal with it, there is little doubt that such a corporation toady will do whatever he can to keep this public-interest legislation from passing. It is, after all, the 30-second television ad that keeps such undeserving incumbents in office.


William Marvel is a free-lance writer and U.S. Army veteran living in northern New Hampshire. His books include Andersonville: The Last Depot and Lee's Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox.

To anyone following events in the Middle East, President George W. Bush and his colleagues appear to be operating from a distant planet. As war continued to rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel swallowed up more Palestinian land, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked proudly of the progress being made in that part of the world. “Something very dramatic is changing in the Middle East,” she told reporters on Aug. 17. The president’s efforts and hers, she said, had had “a tremendous effect” in bringing these changes about.

While negotiations on the new Iraqi constitution were breaking down in bitter disagreement, Bush likened the dispute to America’s constitutional convention. When Shi’i and Kurds overrode Sunni objections and approved a charter that threatens the rights of women and secular Iraqis, Rice called their achievement “historic and in the best tradition of democracy.”

Statements by the president and his secretary of state on the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations seemed equally detached. Most Israelis regarded the Gaza settlements as an expensive burden, but Bush and Rice treated their evacuation as a major concession to peace on Israel’s part. Bush said Israel’s action was “step one in the development of democracy,” and it was now up to the Palestinian government to create a peaceful Palestinian state. Rice reiterated Israel’s claim that it had no obligation to make further concessions until the Palestinians disarmed Hamas.

David Akov, Israeli consul general for the Pacific Northwest, expressed the same views in an op-ed column for the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 26. Akov wrote, “Now, without an Israeli presence on the ground, Palestinians will have full responsibility for developments in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority has the chance to demonstrate its ability to govern and fulfill its commitments.”

Such statements ignore the fact that the colonization is over but the occupation is not. Ramzy Baroud, writing in the Jordan Times, referred to Israel’s intention to control Gaza’s borders, ports, and airspace, and concluded, “The same sorry ending is awaiting Palestinians: the lock, the key, the prison guard and the ever familiar scene of Palestinians being held captive at checkpoints.”

Sami Abdel-Shafi, a successful computer scientist who returned to Gaza from California in 2003, believes it is “an area with tremendous potential waiting to be tapped.” Gaza lies in a strategic geographic position, he noted, and residents are desperate for jobs, so Palestinians in the diaspora would be eager to invest money if it could be used effectively. Israel’s withdrawal, according to Abdel-Shafi, would give Palestinians “a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that we are good managers of our own affairs.” But he points out that such a prospect is not in the cards as long as Israeli border controls make it impossible to do business with the outside world, or even with the West Bank.

Gaza’s border with Egypt will in the future be patrolled by Egyptian rather than Israeli troops, but Israel will control the crossing points. The naval blockade that keeps Gaza fisherman close to shore will continue, and the fence along Gaza’s perimeter is being reinforced by a parallel fence containing electronic sensors and surveillance cameras. Israel will continue to control the movement of all goods and people in and out of the territory.

According to Israel’s Physicians for Human Rights, Israel also will be able to decide who will live and who will die. PHR’s latest report quotes Israel’s Disengagement Plan as saying, “the process of disengagement will negate the validity of the claims against Israel on the subject of her responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” For seriously ill Gazans this could be a death warrant if they are denied care in Israel. The report warns that after years of occupation during which students were forbidden to go to the West Bank for medical training, and hospital equipment was either destroyed or deteriorated, medical facilities in Gaza are dangerously inadequate. Gazans who need medical treatment will still have to go to Israel or Jordan to get it, and will still need Israel’s permission to do so.

The job of building a peaceful democratic enclave in territory surrounded by Israel would be difficult enough if the Gazans were starting with a working economy and infrastructure. Instead they must rebuild their institutions from scratch in one of the poorest, most densely populated areas in the world. During its 38 years of occupation Israel expropriated Gaza’s land and water and destroyed its public buildings, crops and orchards, along with thousands of homes. Generations of children in Gaza have been denied adequate schooling, and almost a third are severely undernourished. Sara Roy, an expert on Gaza’s economy, estimates that since 200l Israel has done more than $2.2 billion worth of physical damage to the territory.

In dismantling the settlements Israel will leave behind even more damage. The Palestinians agreed that the settlers’ homes should be demolished to make room for multi-family dwellings, but hoped that greenhouses, irrigation systems, and factories would be left. But according to Yonatan Bassi, head of Israel’s Disengagement Administration, “[The Israelis] are going to send the treads of the D-9 bulldozers over everything.” In a remarkably candid interview with Haaretz, reprinted by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Bassi said, “We are going to leave behind us an area that will look like an atom bomb was dropped on it. With monstrosities of the twisted steel of the demolished hothouses. With the jutting silhouettes of the destroyed houses...I think it is terrible. It is a nightmare. This is not what peace looks like: this is what war looks like.”
“We are going to leave behind us an area that will look like an atom bomb was dropped on it.”

With demands coming from Bush and Sharon that he maintain order in Gaza, President Mahmoud Abbas faces an enormous challenge. According to Sara Roy, Gazans will need 250,000 jobs,100 health care clinics, and hundreds of schools just to reach the standard of living of West Bank Palestinians. Meanwhile residents are impatient. Unemployed Gazans demanding jobs have tangled with security forces, and government workers have blocked traffic demanding higher pay. On Sept. 7 members of a group known as the Popular Resistance Committees assassinated Abbas’s security adviser, Moussa Arafat, charging him with corruption and threatening to kill more corrupt officials.

If the Palestinian Authority fails to produce significant improvements, the more militant Hamas is certain to do well in the January elections. Hamas provides needed social services to many Palestinians and is free of the corruption charges that taint the dominant Fatah party, but its election victory could end any hopes of negotiations with Israel. Both Sharon and his ultra right-wing challenger for head of the Likud party, Binyamin Netanyahu, brand all Hamas members as terrorists, and the Bush administration agrees. On the other hand, as long as Sharon is in office any negotiations would be a sham. In an Aug. 10 interview with The New York Times, Sharon repeated his by now familiar pledge. “The settlement blocs will continue to exist,” he said. “I will not negotiate on the subject of Jerusalem. The blocs will remain territorially linked to the state of Israel...There will be no return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees to Israel.”

Sharon is reinforcing his words with actions. The number of West Bank settlers has already increased by 12,800 this year, and is still growing. Israel is also extending the separation wall designed to make the settlements a permanent part of Israel. A section now under construction will cut deep into the West Bank, sealing off Palestinians in East Jerusalem and making it impossible for West Bank residents to move freely between Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Tens of thousands of Palestinians will suffer even greater hardship than before.

Sharon is also making sure that the cycle of violence continues. Since the February truce at Sharm el-Sheikh, Israeli forces have killed 77 Palestinians, 17 of them children. Palestinians killed 14 Israelis in the same period. On the same day the government announced it would seize more Palestinian land to expand the Beitar Illit settlement, an Israeli death squad killed five Palestinian men in Tulkarm while they were sitting outside a restaurant. Israel claimed they were members of Islamic Jihad, but three of them were unarmed teenagers. Less than a week later a Palestinian man blew himself up at a bus station in Beersheba, wounding nearly 50 people. Ignoring the connection between the two events, Sharon again accused Abbas of failing to end terrorism and again demanded that he disarm militant groups.

The evacuation from Gaza was an undoubted political success for the prime minister. The only serious casualties were four Palestinian workers who were gunned down by an Israeli reservist. But the way the evacuation was carried out illustrated the racism that underlies Israeli society and pervades media treatment of Israel. The Gaza settlers had knowingly moved onto land forcibly taken from the Palestinians. They had received generous subsidies from the government, and for 38 years enjoyed freedom of movement while their Palestinian neighbors remained locked behind roadblocks and checkpoints. When time for their removal came, unarmed soldiers in baseball caps helped pack their goods and move them to comfortable dwellings elsewhere.

The media nevertheless portrayed the evacuees as tragic victims, forced from their villages like characters in “Fiddler on the Roof.” No such sympathy, or even attention, was given to the more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza whose homes Israel has destroyed, and who were barely able to grab a few belongings before the bulldozers arrived.

Racism is also at the heart of the U.S. presence in Iraq. There is no better word for a mindset that assumes the right to take over another country by force, kill thousands of its citizens, and attempt to reshape its economy and government. American intervention was evident even in the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution. Washington pressured the negotiators to come up with a draft as quickly as possible, and the result was a hastily prepared document that has brought protests from many Iraqis, especially women’s groups and Sunnis. Although the charter bans laws that “contravene the principles of democracy” it gives clerics the right to adjudicate disputes over marriage, divorce, and inheritance. A constitution that Bush said was “good for all Iraqis” does not guarantee the legal rights of women.

Also missing from the present draft is a provision guaranteeing the Iraqi government authority over foreign troops stationed in Iraq and the right to reject permanent U.S. military bases. Within hours after the draft was completed, a top Air Force general made it clear that American air bases and pilots were in for a long stay. Gen. John P. Jumper told reporters at the Pentagon on Aug. 29 that the Iraqis would need U.S. air support until they can provide it themselves. “And that’s going to take a while,” he said. “We will continue with a rotational presence in that area more or less indefinitely.” Other American commanders say that even after some American combat troops are withdrawn, support troops will remain.

Sunnis object to a provision that bans former Ba’ath party members from holding public office, since under the former regime many Sunnis joined the party only to qualify for a job. Their strongest objection, however, is to a provision that divides Iraq into three semi-independent regions, with Kurds and Shi’i having autonomy in areas with the richest oil fields, and Sunnis left with the resource-poor Western provinces. Although the central government would control revenues from existing oil and gas deposits, income from newly developed fields would belong to the regional mini-states.

Because most of the oil in southern Iraq is still untapped, this last provision could prove a bonanza for the Shi’i. So it is not surprising that both deal breakers were pushed by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, who provided the Bush administration with much of the false information it used to justify going to war. Chalabi belongs to one of the wealthiest families in the south and is committed to privatizing Iraqi industry. Once the region gains control of its oil, his family is certain to become richer, and Chalabi himself even more powerful.

A referendum on the proposed draft is to be held on Oct. 15. If two-thirds of the voters in three provinces reject it, there will be an election in December for a new National Assembly, and that body will write a new constitution. But many Iraqis may not bother to vote.The bickering over the constitution took place inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone and had little to do with the life of most Iraqi citizens. Dexter Filkins of The New York Times reported on Aug. 14 that “Iraq has two parallel worlds: the world of the Green Zone and the constitution and the rule of law; and the anarchical, unpredictable world outside.” He described Baghdad as “a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a no-man’s-land, menaced by bandits and brigands.”

Ordinary Iraqis are aware that a new constitution, whatever its provisions, won’t clean up the sewage, turn on the lights, or provide more jobs. Nor is it likely to stop the killing. Hundreds of Iraqis die each month, either from insurgent attacks or as a result of American air strikes and gunfire. During the same week that Hurricane Katrina was forcing New Orleans residents to evacuate their city, 200,000 residents of Tal Afar were forced to leave home to escape American bombing. The U.S. military offensive turned Tal Afar into what one Iraqi described as “a city of ghosts.”

The nearly one thousand Shi’i Muslims who died on their way to the Kadhimiya shrine in Baghdad on Aug. 31 were also victims of this war. The pilgrims rushed to escape what they thought was a a suicide bomber and were crushed to death on a bridge narrowed by cement barriers designed to allow travelers to be searched for explosives.

The draft constitution endorsed by the Bush administration is less likely to improve conditions or bring peace than lead to a fragmented country dominated by self-interested politicians and Islamic clerics. Yet in a speech on Aug. 30 Bush told service members in San Diego that the United States “will stay on the offensive” in Iraq because the fate of democracy is at stake. The cause our troops are fighting for exists only in Bush’s head. The suffering caused by his policies, however, is only too real.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

Who launched the current FBI investigation of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Israel’s principal lobby in the United States? The original version had it that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was told about the investigation soon after President George W. Bush began his first term of office. That was in early 2001.

According to a story by Laura Rozen in The Nation of July 14, 2005, President Bush, after long refusing to meet with PLO chief Yasser Arafat, had decided to meet Arafat at the September 2001 opening session of the United Nations General Assembly “if progress were made in high level talks between Palestinians and the Israelis.” Citing a Sept. 9, 2001 article by Jane Perlez in The New York Times, Rozen said that, after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush/Arafat meeting never took place. Rice, reportedly concerned over the leak of sensitive administration intelligence in the Perlez article, then demanded an FBI investigation. This meant that the investigation began in early September 2001.

But from the Aug. 4 indictment of former AIPAC foreign policy director Steve Rosen and former AIPAC Iran specialist Keith Weissman, it now appears that Rosen has been under FBI surveillance since early 1999. Specifically, the indictment says, Rosen talked on April 13, 1999 with “Foreign Official 1,” an Israeli, disclosing “codeword protected intelligence.”

The indictment of Rosen and Weissman triggered a statement by “Mideast analyst” Kenneth Pollack that he is one of the two (U.S.) government officials referred to in the Rosen and Weissman indictment as “USGO-1”; the other official, “USGO-2”, was identified by “sources” as David Satterfield, a former deputy assistant secretary of state. Pollack—husband of CNN reporter Andrea Koppel and son-in-law of ABC’s Ted Koppel—formerly worked as a staffer on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. The Pollack-Satterfield story is carried in the Aug. 31 edition of Israel’s Jerusalem Post. Pollack denies giving AIPAC any classified information.

Presumably the Israel lobby’s political clout would preclude an FBI investigation of the AIPAC colossus unless it had the president’s approval. If the wording of Rosen’s indictment is correct, it means that the investigation was ongoing during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who was all but surrounded by Zionists. The fact that the investigation is continuing means that President Bush is aware of it and, so far, approving it.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush/Arafat meeting never took place.

Rosen is a very, very big fish in the Israel/AIPAC Fifth Column that subverts U.S. Middle East policy. He expanded AIPAC’s focus from the Congress to the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House—and to the Republican Party. According to The Washington Post of May 19, 2005, “For more than two decades Rosen has been the mainstay of AIPAC and the architect of the group’s ever-increasing clout. Though Rosen is listed below Executive Director Howard Kohr on AIPAC’s organizational chart, people familiar with AIPAC’s history say that Kohr is a protégé of Rosen’s and got that job with his help. Kohr declined to be interviewed about Rosen. ‘He [Rosen] is a quiet guy,’ said M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, another pro-Israel group, and a former AIPAC employee. ‘But everyone knows he’s the brains behind the outfit.’”

In the above-mentioned Nation article, Rozen spoke of a “chill” in the media world from the jailing of The New York Times’ Judith Miller, and the FBI investigation of AIPAC. “The danger,” Rozen wrote, “is that this would enable the Bush administration to shape policies with even less consultation from the public and Congress.” David Ignatius took up the same “chill” line in his Aug. 24 Washington Post op-ed.

The chill effect is based on a benevolent view of AIPAC as contributing to an open debate of American foreign policy formulation. Others view AIPAC as the “800-pound gorilla” that squeezes U.S. policy into a painfully narrow Zionist-centric focus of “Israel right-or-wrong,” and “America take the hindmost.”

This 800-pound AIPAC controls some three dozen misleadingly-named pro-Israel political action committees that can and do give $100,000 to a “good” electoral candidate or withhold any money at all from a “bad” candidate. Names such as Delaware Valley PAC, Florida Congressional Committee, Georgia Peach and St. Louisians for Better Government contain no hint of Israel-Firstism, but are all part of the Israel lobby. The definition of “good” or “bad” is based entirely on whether the candidate votes, or will vote, on issues important to Israel, as defined by AIPAC. The mildest criticism of Israel earns a “bad” record, and automatic opposition by AIPAC.

The 800-pound AIPAC generously offers to provide a senator or congressman with a “free” intern for his or her office who, of course, reports back to AIPAC any slippage in support for Israel. Any reluctance to accept an intern arouses suspicion that the elected official is a secret “anti-Semite.”
AIPAC’s Placement Service

This AIPAC works diligently to place neocons at the Pentagon, the White House (especially on the National Security Council staff) and State Department, and provides “experts” to testify on critical television programs. One such example is the placing of neocon Douglas Feith as under secretary of defense at the Pentagon. Feith created a private intelligence service, the office of Special Plans (OSP), which fed outlandish bits of intelligence to the White House. The OSP “proved” that Iraq had non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Feith finally has resigned his position.

Another example was the placing of the noisome neocon John Bolton as under secretary of state. Bolton is now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under an interim recess appointment.

The 800-pound AIPAC includes the Israel lobby’s hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, whose journalists never write a critical word about Israel, and which recently tried to bury a story about the FBI investigation of Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin by publishing it in the “Metro” section.

This AIPAC is like a parallel government in Washington—except that it fights any American effort that Israel wants fought. It is a parallel government whose spiritual heart is in Tel Aviv, not in Washington, DC. The trials of Franklin and former AIPAC honchos Rosen and Weissman, if they occur as scheduled in January 2006, may reveal the true subversive face of AIPAC—and, finally, make it possible for the U.S. to adopt Middle East policies that promote its own interests.

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

There are two memo's

We have had our suspicions (argued below) that the Times memo and the Mirror memo citing Bush's plans to bomb al-Jazeera are entirely different documents confirmed by Peter Kilfoyle MP, who has seen both documents.

He was naturally reticent, but when we aked Peter if the source for the Mirror article was related to the 'prosecution' of and Keogh and O'Connor over last years leak to the Times he said:

Wholly different sources. The Times used 'official' leaks; the current document remains top secret - they are livid it is out.

We have also had it confirmed that Keogh and O'Connor are only facing one set of charges, over one document.

If what was reported by the BBC on 17th November, prior to the Mirror story is correct:

That Keogh and O'Connor are being prosecuted over the leak of the document 'Iraq in The Medium Term' as published in the Times May 2004, and not for leaking the source of the Mirror article then the Bliar and his official spokesman would be leaving themselves wide open by describing the Mirror story as 'sub-judice'.

If the Mirror is correct in it's assertion that Keogh and O'Connor are being charged over the source of their story the transcript, then the story reported by the BBC about them being charged over the leaking of the 'Iraq in the Medium Term' memo was a construct, a 'beard' to cover up the existence of the document refered by the Mirror.

This means our government must have pre planned and disseminated the lie or spin if you prefer; that Keogh and O'connor were being prosecuted over the leaking of the 'Iraq in the medium term' memo.

To cover up the existance of the 'Lets bomb Al-Jazeera' transcript?

A plan derailed by the Mirror obtaining a copy and publishing it's story.

The BBC ran the story about Keogh and O'Connor's prosecution on the 17th of November.

The Mirror state they approached the Government with their story about Bush wanting to Bomb al-Jazeera 24 hours before publication, on the 22nd of November.

This was four days after we 'learned' via the BBC that Keogh and O'Connor were to be charged with the leak of the 'Iraq in the Medium Term' memo.

If this is the case, the Mirror story did not precipitate the lie spin that was reported either wittingly or unwittingly by the BBC on the 17th November, it exposed it.

If we accept Peter Killfoyle's word (and I do) that the Times article and the Mirror article are from different sources, then Keogh and O'Connor cannot be facing charges over both leaks.

Either way we are being told lies by our government, and either wittingly or unwittingly by the mainstream media.

Update from BedBlogger:

Some interesting snippets about the exceptional use of Official Secrets Act which reinforce the questions raised by this blog:

Firstly, from The Raw Story:

"A source familiar with the case told RAW STORY that while individual publications have been targeted by the Blair administration in the past, this case is particularly extraordinary because journalists by and large are allowed the public interest defense. Central to this case and series of events is the question of why The Mirror and other news organizations would accept this gag order.

"One key thing to remember is you don't have to have signed anything saying you would stick by the rules and not disclose or receive stuff," the source said. "If you knowingly received it you could be charged. But charging journalists would fall foul of the public interest defense, so although journalists are as liable to arrest as anyone else, the case would almost certainly fail if it could be shown to be in the public interest that the information be made public."


Secondly, from the Guardian article:

"A QC specialising in media law said: "If the material has already been published it's pretty hard to see how the subsequent publication of the same material will either amount to a disclosure - because how can you disclose something that's already been circulated? - or satisfy the test that the publication is damaging."


And as Christopher Reed says in a CounterPunch article:

"There is one more likely outcome in this outrageous affair. It is that the Blair government, in trying to banish from public consumption the ill-timed and appallingly judged remark of the world's most powerful commander-in-chief, will prolong its life — or even give it a new one.

Older commenators are recalling the absurdities of Britain's Spycatcher scandal of 20 years ago. In that case, a British ex-spy from MI5 called Peter Wright sought to publish a book in which he revealed embarrassing secrets of his former employers, who in turned sought urgently to prevent exactly that. To silence two newspapers that were revealing some of Wright's spicier stories, the attorney general invoked the Official Secrets Act. He spent much time, energy — and public money — in vain. The book was not only published but became a best-seller because of the publicity. Finally, the British government lost its case before the European Court of Human Rights.

Going back to the 1980s, official British brandishing of its oppressive Official Secrets Act has almost always ended in humiliation for its champions. The present case of Bush and the Arab TV Bombing seems likely to add to these fiascoes."

The Washington Post reports today:

The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts—including protecting military facilities from attack—to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines treason as follows:

Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.

If we are to believe this news item, the freshly minted and tasked CIFA will investigate people with questionable “allegiance” to the Bush administration. Princeton University’s WordNet defines allegiance as “the loyalty that citizens owe to their country (or subjects to their sovereign)” and a synonym is fealty, defined as fidelity owed by a vassal to a feudal lord.

Of course, we long ago issued a Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights precisely to throw off a tyrannical monarch. Now we have another one.

CIFA’s abilities would increase considerably under the proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential commission on intelligence chaired by retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The commission urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.

Be afraid. Laurence H. Silberman “is a long-time, right wing political activist closely tied to the neo-conservative network that led the pro-war propaganda campaign,” according to Jim Lobe. “In 1980, when he served as part of former Republican president Ronald Reagan’s senior campaign staff, he played a key role in setting up secret contacts between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Islamic government in Tehran, in what became known as the ‘October Surprise’ controversy.” In other words, Silberman is a criminal co-conspirator who helped Reagan fix the 1980 election by entering in an agreement with the Iranians (who were supposedly enemies of the United States) to not release the hostages (mostly CIA agents) until after the election. Silberman also served as deputy attorney general under Nixon. It should be remembered the Nixon White House targeted the civil rights and antiwar movements for disruption, using on-campus informants to infiltrate and in many cases to disrupt legal protests and activism (under the FBI’s COINTELRPO, members of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement were victims of targeted assassination; see COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story).

CIFA is little more than an excuse to get the military back in the business of “investigating” (subverting the Constitutional rights) of Americans. “The [Bush stacked] commission urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States,” including the threat of “treason” (not paying fealty to our feudal lord, George Bush, and criticizing his policies—note the accusation Dubya wanted to bomb Doha-based al-Jazeera for not censoring news and you get a pretty good idea what our ill-tempered monarch thinks of people who disagree with him).

Our new COINTELPRO, run by military intelligence and probably the CIA, will make the old COINTELPRO pale in comparison.

Addendum

It should be noted that the U.S. military is no stranger to domestic snooping and subversion of constitutional rights. “By the late 1960s, the direct political nature of military intelligence operations was quite explicit,” write Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, and Christine Marwick (The Lawless State: The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies, Penguin Books, 1976).

A telling indication of this was the February 1968 annex to the army’s Civil Disturbance Plan, where “dissident elements” and “subversives” were clearly identified as primary targets of surveillance. The activities of the peace movement were judged “detrimental” to the United States, and American antiwar activists were viewed as possible conspirators manipulated by foreign agents.

The Army created “master plan” operations code-named Cable Splicer and Operation Garden Plot. As for the latter, Harry Helms (Inside the Shadow Government: National Emergencies and the Cult of Secrecy, Feral House, 2003) writes

plans produced by the [Directorate of Military Support, established at the Pentagon under the Department of the Army] acquired the name “Operation Garden Plot,” first publicly uttered in 1971 when Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina), chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, held hearings about allegations of Army spying on U.S. civilians. The hearings revealed that the Army had indeed been keeping records on hundreds of thousands of American citizens connected with antiwar and radical politics, and that such activities were part of Operation Garden Plot. The Subcommittee also found that the Army had trained civilian law enforcement workers with simulated battles against rioters and large groups of protesters. It also found that Army units went on alert in May 1970 for possible response to campus demonstrations in the wake of the Kent State shootings.

Cable Splicer “was developed in a series of California meetings from 1968 to 1972, involving Sixth Army, Pentagon, and National Guard generals, police chiefs and sheriffs, military intelligence officers, defense contractors, and executives from the telephone company and utility companies. One meeting was kicked off by Governor Ronald Reagan,” writes Ron Ridenhour.

The participants played war games using scenarios that began with racial, student, or labor unrest, and ended with the Army being called in to bail out the National Guard, usually by sweeping the area to confiscate private weapons and round up likely troublemakers. These games were conducted in secrecy, with military personnel dressed in civvies, and using non-military transportation. Although the documents on Cable Splicer covered only four Western states, Brig. Gen. J. L. Jelinek, senior Army officer in the Pentagon’s National Guard Bureau, knew of “no state that didn’t have some form of this [civil disturbance control] exercise within the last year” under different code names.

It appears the military never actually stopped spying on Americans. “Several months ago the Army’s inspector general and the California State Senate launched investigations of a California National Guard intelligence unit that had ‘monitored’ an antiwar demonstration at the state capitol this past Mother’s Day, partly organized by Cindy Sheehan’s Gold Star Families for Peace,” John S. Friedman reported in September. “A report not yet publicly released by the inspector general found that there were other cases of domestic intelligence activity by the California Guard. Democratic State Senator Joseph Dunn, whose budget subcommittee oversees funding for the California Guard and who is conducting the state investigation, said financial improprieties may have occurred, as state and federal laws forbid such activities. Dunn told The Nation that he is looking into reports that the Guard in some ten other states, including New York, Colorado, Arizona and Pennsylvania, may have set up its own intelligence units and conducted similar monitoring of antiwar groups. Such controversial directives could be coming from the Pentagon, he speculated.”

Last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a request from the Pentagon to snoop on Americans (and of course subvert and possibly assassinate—as COINTELPRO did previously—those deemed a threat to the neocon master plan for world domination). According to the Christian Science Monitor, “the committee included two … controversial amendments in the [2006 intelligence spending authorization bill]: one that would allow intelligence agencies greater access to databases on US citizens, and one that would grant the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency the right not to disclose ‘operational files’ under the Freedom of Information Act.” In other words, the DIA does not want to be answerable to the American people, the same way Stalin or Stasi were not answerable to the people.

According to the Pentagon, it does not want to spy on “innocent” Americans, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Of course, this depends on the Pentagon’s definition of “innocent.” If the Pentagon’s past (and recent, in relation to Cindy Sheehan) activities are any indication, “innocent” Americans are those who do not criticize the government, who dutifully wave little plastic American flags made in China, and encourage their kids to become cannon fodder for the neocons.

Overview

We're here to talk about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have this peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country - everybody knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our ears a thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute the flag, you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you read the history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of democracy. And, of course, there's some truth to that. There are things you can do in the United States that you can't do many other places without being put in jail.

But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to describe because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are things that you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death squads in El Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the things that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy.

Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation's premier crime fighting agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always functioned primarily as America's political police. This role includes not only the collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups, but often times, counterintelligence operations to thwart those activities. The techniques employed are easily recognized by anyone familiar with military psychological operations. The FBI, through the use of the criminal justice system, the postal system, the telephone system and the Internal Revenue Service, enjoys an operational capability surpassing even that of the CIA, which conducts covert actions in foreign countries without having access to those institutions.

Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COunter INTELligence PROgrams (COINTELPRO's) of the period 1956-1971 were the first to be both broadly targeted and centrally directed. According to FBI researcher Brian Glick, "FBI headquarters set policy, assessed progress, charted new directions, demanded increased production, and carefully monitored and controlled day-to-day operations. This arrangement required that national COINTELPRO supervisors and local FBI field offices communicate back and forth, at great length, concerning every operation. They did so quite freely, with little fear of public exposure. This generated a prolific trail of bureaucratic paper. The moment that paper trail began to surface, the FBI discontinued all of its formal domestic counterintelligence programs. It did not, however, cease its covert political activity against U.S. dissidents." 1

Of roughly 20,000 people investigated by the FBI solely on the basis of their political views between 1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets of active counterintelligence measures per se. Taking counterintelligence in its broadest sense, to include spreading false information, it's estimated that about two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were never suspected of committing any crime.

The nineteen sixties were a period of social change and unrest. Color television brought home images of jungle combat in Vietnam and protesters and priests burning draft cards and American flags. In the spring and summer months of 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968, massive black rebellions swept across almost every major US city in the Northeast, Midwest and California. 2 Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and many others feared violent revolution and denounced the protesters. President Kennedy had felt the opposite: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

The counterculture of the sixties, and the FBI's reaction to it, were in many ways a product of the 1950s, the so-called "Age of McCarthyism." John Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the FBI, was a prominent spokesman of the anti-communist paranoia of the era:

The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify, the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life. 3

Throughout the 1960s, Hoover consistently applied this theory to a wide variety of groups, on occasion reprimanding agents unable to find "obvious" communist connections in civil rights and anti-war groups. 4 During the entire COINTELPRO period, no links to Soviet Russia were uncovered in any of the social movements disrupted by the FBI.

The commitment of the FBI to undermine and destroy popular movements departing from political orthodoxy has been extensive, and apparently proportional to the strength and promise of such movements, as one would expect in the case of the secret police organization of any state, though it is doubtful that there is anything comparable to this record among the Western industrial democracies.

In retrospect, the COINTEPRO's of the 1960s were thoroughly successful in achieving their stated goals, "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the enemies of the State.



Victimization

The most serious of the FBI disruption programs were those directed against "Black Nationalists." Agents were instructed to undertake actions to discredit these groups both within "the responsible Negro community" and to "Negro radicals," also "to the white community, both the responsible community and to `liberals' who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes..."

A March 4th, 1968 memo from J Edgar Hoover to FBI field offices laid out the goals of the COINTELPRO - Black Nationalist Hate Groups program: "to prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups;" "to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement;" "to prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups;" "to prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability;" and "to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth." Included in the program were a broad spectrum of civil rights and religious groups; targets included Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Elijah Muhammad.

A top secret Special Report 5 for President Nixon, dated June 1970 gives some insight into the motivation for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther party. The report describes the party as "the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States." Its "hard-core members" were estimated at about 800, but "a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 per cent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, incuding 43 per cent of blacks under 21 years of age." On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, counterintelligence operations were carried out to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political force.

Another memorandum explains the motivation for the FBI operations against student protesters: "the movement of rebellious youth known as the 'New Left,' involving and influencing a substantial number of college students, is having a serious impact on contemporary society with a potential for serious domestic strife." The New Left has "revolutionary aims" and an "identification with Marxism-Leninism." It has attempted "to infiltrate and radicalize labor," and after failing "to subvert and control the mass media" has established "a large network of underground publications which serve the dual purpose of an internal communication network and an external propaganda organ." Its leaders have "openly stated their sympathy with the international communist revolutionary movements in South Vietnam and Cuba; and have directed others into activities which support these movements."

The effectiveness of the state disruption programs is not easy to evaluate. Black leaders estimate the significance of the programs as substantial. Dr. James Turner of Cornell University, former president of the African Heritage Studies Association, assessed these programs as having "serious long-term consequences for black Americans," in that they "had created in blacks a sense of depression and hopelessness." 6

He states that "the F.B.I. set out to break the momentum developed in black communities in the late fifties and early sixties"; "we needed to put together organizational mechanisms to deliver services," but instead, "our ability to influence things that happen to us internally and externally was killed." He concludes that "the lack of confidence and paranoia stimulated among black people by these actions" is just beginning to fade.

The American Indian Movement, arguably the most hopeful vehicle for indigenous pride and self-determination in the late 20th century, was also destroyed. As AIM leader Dennis Banks has observed:

"The FBI's tactics eventually proved successful in a peculiar sort of way. It's remarkable under the circumstances - and a real testament to the inner strength of the traditional Oglalas - that the feds were never really able to divide them from us, to have the traditionals denouncing us and working against us. But, in the end, the sort of pressure the FBI put on people on the reservation, particularly the old people, it just wore 'em down. A kind of fatigue set in. With the firefight at Oglala, and all the things that happened after that, it was easy to see we weren't going to win by direct confrontation. So the traditionals asked us to disengage, to try and take some of the heaviest pressure off. And, out of respect, we had no choice but to honor those wishes. And that was the end of AIM, at least in the way it had been known up till then. The resistance is still there, of course, and the struggle goes on, but the movement itself kind of disappeared." 7

The same can be said for socialist movements targeted by COINTELPRO. Alone among the parliamentary democracies, the United States has no mass-based socialist party, however mild and reformist, no socialist voice in the media, and virtually no departure from Keynesian economics in American universities and journals. The people of the United States have paid dearly for the enforcement of domestic privilege and the securing of imperial domains. The vast waste of social wealth, miserable urban ghettos, the threat and reality of unemployment, meaningless work in authoritarian institutions, standards of health and social welfare that should be intolerable in a society with such vast productive resources -- all of this must be endured and even welcomed as the "price of freedom" if the existing order is to stand without challenge.



COINTELPRO Techniques

From its inception, the FBI has operated on the doctrine that the "preliminary stages of organization and preparation" must be frustrated, well before there is any clear and present danger of "revolutionary radicalism."

At its most extreme dimension, political dissidents have been eliminated outright or sent to prison for the rest of their lives. There are quite a number of individuals who have been handled in that fashion.

Many more, however, were "neutralized" by intimidation, harassment, discrediting, snitch jacketing, a whole assortment of authoritarian and illegal tactics.

Neutralization, as explained on record by the FBI, doesn't necessarily pertain to the apprehension of parties in the commission of a crime, the preparation of evidence against them, and securing of a judicial conviction, but rather to simply making them incapable of engaging in political activity by whatever means.

For those not assessed as being in themselves, necessarily a security risk, but engaged in what the Bureau views to be politically objectionable activity, those techniques might consist of disseminating derogatory information to the target's family, friends and associates, visiting and questioning them, basically, making it clear that the FBI are paying attention to them, to try to intimidate them.

If the subject continues their activities, and particularly if they respond by escalating them, the FBI will escalate its tactics as well. Maybe they'll be arrested and prosecuted for spurious reasons. Maybe there will be more vicious rumors circulated about them. False information may be planted in the press. The targets' efforts to speak in public are frustrated, employers may be contacted to try to get them fired. Anonymous letters have been sent by the FBI to targets' spouses, accusing them of infidelity. Others have contained death threats.

And if the subject persists then there will be a further escalation.

According to FBI memoranda of the 1960s, "Key black activists" were repeatedly arrested "on any excuse" until "they could no longer make bail." The FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts, to frame COINTELPRO targets for crimes they knew they did not commit. In some cases the charges were quite serious, including murder.

Another option is "snitch jacketing" - making the target look like a police informant or a CIA agent. This serves the dual purposes of isolating and alienating important leaders, and increasing the general level of fear and factionalism in the group.

"Black bag jobs" are burglaries performed in order to obtain the written materials, mailing lists, position papers, and internal documents of an organization or an individual. At least 10,000 American homes have been subjected to illegal breaking and entering by the FBI, without judicial warrants.

Group membership lists are used to expand the operation. Anonymous mailings of newspaper and magazine articles may be mailed to group members and supporters to convince them of the error of their ways. Anonymous or spurious letters and cartoons are sent to promote factionalism and widen rifts in or between organizations.

According to the FBI's own records, agents have been directed to use "established local news media contacts" and other "sources available to the Seat of Government" to "disrupt or neutralize" organizations and to "ridicule and discredit" them.

Many counterintelligence techniques involve the use of paid informants. Informants become agents provocateurs by raising controversial issues at meetings to take advantage of ideological divisions, by promoting emnity with other groups, or by inciting the group to violent acts, even to the point of providing them with weapons.

Over the years, FBI provocateurs have repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, attacks on police, bombings, and so on, following an old strategy of Tsarist police director TC Zubatov: "We shall provoke you to acts of terror and then crush you."

A concise description of political warfare is given in a passage from a CIA paper entitled "Nerve War Against Individuals," referring to the overthrowing of the government of Guatemala in 1954:

The strength of an enemy consists largely of the individuals who occupy key positions in the enemy organization, as leaders, speakers, writers, organizers, cabinet members, senior government officials, army commanders and staff officers, and so forth. Any effort to defeat the enemy must therefore concentrate to a great extent upon these key enemy individuals.

If such an effort is made by means short of physical violence, we call it "psychological warfare." If it is focussed less upon convincing those individuals by logical reasoning, but primarily upon moving them in the desired direction by means of harassment, by frightening, confusing and misleading them, we speak of a "nerve war". 8

The COINTELPROs clearly met the above definition of "nerve wars," and, in the case of the American Indian Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the FBI conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with death squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala in more recent years.

The full story of COINTELPRO may never be told. The Bureau's files were never seized by Congress or the courts or sent to the National Archives. Some have been destroyed. Many counterintelligence operations were never committed to writing as such, or involve open investigations, and ex-operatives are legally prohibited from talking about them. Most operations remain secret until long after the damage has been done.



Murder and Assassination

Among the most remarkable of the COINTELPRO revelations are those relating to the FBI's attempts to incite gang warfare and murderous attacks on Black Panther leaders. For example, a COINTELPRO memo from FBI Headquarters mailed November 25, 1968, informs recipient offices that:

a serious struggle is taking place between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the US [United Slaves] organization. The struggle has reached such proportions that it is taking on the aura of gang warfare with attendant threats of murder and reprisals.

In order to fully capitalize upon BPP and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension in the ranks of the BPP, recipient offices are instructed to submit imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP. 9

According to the national chairman of the US organization, who became a professor at San Diego State, the US and the Panthers had been negotiating to avoid bloodshed: "Then the F.B.I. stepped in and the shooting started."

A series of cartoons were produced in an effort to incite violence between the Black Panther Party and the US; for example, one showing Panther leader David Hilliard hanging dead with a rope around his neck from a tree. The San Diego office reported to the director that:

in view of the recent killing of BPP member SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US. This cartoon, or series of cartoons, will be similar in nature to those formerly approved by the Bureau and will be forwarded to the Bureau for evaluation and approval immediately upon their completion.

Under the heading "TANGIBLE RESULTS" the memo continues:

Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.

Between 1968-1971, FBI-initiated terror and disruption resulted in the murder of Black Panthers Arthur Morris, Bobby Hutton, Steven Bartholomew, Robert Lawrence, Tommy Lewis, Welton Armstead, Frank Diggs, Alprentice Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, John Savage, Sylvester Bell, Larry Roberson, Nathaniel Clark, Walter Touré Pope, Spurgeon Winters, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Sterling Jones, Eugene Anderson, Babatunde X Omarwali, Carl Hampton, Jonathan Jackson, Fred Bennett, Sandra Lane Pratt, Robert Webb, Samuel Napier, Harold Russell, and George Jackson.

One of the more dramatic incidents occurred on the night of December 4, 1969, when Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot to death by Chicago policemen in a predawn raid on their apartment. Hampton, one of the most promising leaders of the Black Panther party, was killed in bed, perhaps drugged. Depositions in a civil suit in Chicago revealed that the chief of Panther security and Hampton's personal bodyguard, William O'Neal, was an FBI infiltrator. O'Neal gave his FBI contacting agent, Roy Mitchell, a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which Mitchell turned over to the state's attorney's office shortly before the attack, along with "information" -- of dubious veracity -- that there were two illegal shotguns in the apartment. For his services, O'Neal was paid over $10,000 from January 1969 through July 1970, according to Mitchell's affidavit.

The availability of the floor plan presumably explains why "all the police gunfire went to the inside corners of the apartment, rather than toward the entrances," and undermines still further the pretense that the barrage was caused by confusion in unfamiliar surroundings that led the police to believe, falsely, that they were being fired upon by the Panthers inside. 10

Agent Mitchell was named by the Chicago Tribune as head of the Chicago COINTELPRO directed against the Black Panthers and other black groups. Whether or not this is true, there is substantial evidence of direct FBI involvement in this Gestapo-style political assassination. O'Neal continued to report to Agent Mitchell after the raid, taking part in meetings with the Hampton family and their discussion with their lawyers.

There has as yet been no systematic investigation of the FBI campaign against the Black Panther Party in Chicago, as part of its nationwide program against the Panthers.

Malcolm X was supposedly murdered by former colleagues in the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a result of the faction-fighting which had led to his splitting away from that movement, and their "natural wrath" at his establishment of a separate mosque, the Muslim Mosque, Inc.

However, the NOl factionalism at issue didn't just happen. It had been developed by deliberate Bureau actions, through infiltration and the "sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization," rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes. 11 The Chicago Special Agent in Charge, Marlin Johnson, who also oversaw the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, makes it quite obvious that he views the murder of Malcolm X as something of a model for "successful" counterintelligence operations.

"Over the years considerable thought has been given, and action taken with Bureau approval, relating to methods through which the NOI could be discredited in the eyes of the general black populace or through which factionalism among the leadership could be created. Serious consideration has also been given towards developing ways and means of changing NOI philosophy to one whereby the members could be developed into useful citizens and the organization developed into one emphasizing religion - the brotherhood of mankind - and self improvement. Factional disputes have been developed - most notable being Malcolm X Little." 12

In an internal FBI monograph dated September 1963 found that, given the scope of support it had attracted over the preceding five years, civil rights agitation represented a clear threat to "the established order" of the U.S., and that Martin Luther "King is growing in stature daily as the leader among leaders of the Negro movement ... so goes Martin Luther King, and also so goes the Negro movement in the United States." This accorded well with COINTELPRO specialist William C. Sullivan's view, committed to writing shortly after King's landmark "I Have a Dream" speech during the massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., on August 28 of the same year:

We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security ... it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.

The stated objective of the SCLC, and the nature of its practical activities, was to organize for the securing of black voting rights across the rural South, with an eye toward the ultimate dismantlement of at least the most blatant aspects of the southern U.S. system of segregation. Even this seemingly innocuous agenda was, however, seen as a threat by the FBI. In mid-September of 1957, FBI supervisor J.G. Kelly forwarded a newspaper clipping describing the formation of the SCLC to the Bureau's Atlanta field office - that city being the location of SCLC headquarters - informing local agents, for reasons which were never specified, the civil rights group was "a likely target for communist infiltration," and that "in view of the stated purpose of the organization you should remain alert for public source information concerning it in connection with the racial situation." 13

The Atlanta field office "looked into" the matter and ultimately opened a COMINFIL (communist-inflitrated group) investigation of the SCLC, apparently based on the fact that a single SWP member, Lonnie Cross, had offered his services as a clerk in the organization's main office. 14 By the end of the first year of FBI scrutiny, in September of 1958, a personal file had been opened on King himself, ostensibly because he had been approached on the steps of a Harlem church in which he'd delivered a guest sermon by black CP member Benjamin J. Davis. 15 By October 1960, as the SCLC call for desegregation and black voting rights in the south gained increasing attention and support across the nation, the Bureau began actively infiltrating organizational meetings and conferences. 16

By July of 1961, FBI intelligence on the group was detailed enough to recount that, while an undergraduate at Atlanta's Morehouse College in 1948, King had been affiliated with the Progressive Party, and that executive director Wyatt Tee Walker had once subscribed to a CP newspaper, The Worker. 17

Actual counterintelligence operations against King and the SCLC seem to have begun with a January 8, 1962 letter from Hoover to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, contending that the civil rights leader enjoyed a "close relationship" with Stanley D. Levison, "a member of the Communist Party, USA," and that Isadore Wofsy, "a high ranking communist leader," had written a speech for King. 18

On the night of March 15-16,1962, FBI agents secretly broke into Levison's New York office and planted a bug; a wiretap of his office phone followed on March 20. 19 Among the other things picked up by the surveillance was information that Jack ODell, who also had an alleged "record of ties to the Communist party," had been recommended by both King and Levison to serve as an assistant to Wyatt Tee Walker. 20 Although none of these supposed communist affiliations were ever substantiated, it was on this basis that SCLC was targeted within the Bureau's ongoing COINTELPRO-CP,USA, beginning with the planting of five disinformational "news stories" concerning the organization's "communist connections" on October 24, 1962. 21 By this point, Martin Luther King's name had been placed in Section A of the FBI Reserve Index, one step below those individuals registered in the Security Index and scheduled to be rounded up and "preventively detained" in the event of a declared national emergency; Attorney General Kennedy had also authorized round-the-clock surveillance of all SCLC offices, as well as King's home. 22 Hence, by November 8,1963, comprehensive telephone taps had been installed at all organizational offices, and King's residence. 23

By 1964, King was not only firmly established as a preeminent civil rights leader, but was beginning to show signs of pursuing a more fundamental structural agenda of social change. Meanwhile, the Bureau continued its efforts to discredit King, maintaining a drumbeat of mass media-distributed propaganda concerning his supposed "communist influences" and sexual proclivities, as well as triggering a spate of harassment by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). 24 When it was announced on October 14 of that year that King would receive a Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for his work in behalf of the rights of American blacks, the Bureau - exhibiting a certain sense of desperation - dramatically escalated its efforts to neutralize him.

Two days after announcement of the impending award, COINTELPRO specialist William Sullivan caused a composite audio tape to be produced, supposedly consisting of "highlights" taken from the taps of King's phones and bugs placed in his various hotel rooms over the preceding two years.

The result, prepared by FBI audio technician John Matter, purported to demonstrate the civil rights leader had engaged in a series of "orgiastic" trysts with prostitutes and, thus, "the depths of his sexual perversion and depravity." The finished tape was packaged, along with an accompanying anonymous letter (prepared by Bureau Internal Security Supervisor Seymore F. Phillips on Sullivan's instruction), informing King that the audio material would be released to the media unless he committed suicide prior to bestowal of the Nobel Prize.

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure that they don't have one at this time that is any where near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. ...

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. [sic]. 25

Sullivan then instructed veteran COINTELPRO operative Lish Whitson to fly to Miami with the package; once there, Whitson was instructed to address the parcel and mail it to the intended victim. 26 When King failed to comply with Sullivan's anonymous directive that he kill himself, FBI Associate Director Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach attempted to follow through with the threat to make the contents of the doctored tape public:

The Bureau Crime Records Division, headed by DeLoach, initiated a major campaign to let newsmen know just what the Bureau [claimed to have] on King. DeLoach personally offered a copy of the King surveillance transcript to Newsweek Washington bureau chief Benjamin Bradlee. Bradlee refused it, and mentioned the approach to a Newsday colleague, Jay Iselin. 27

Bradlee's disclosure of what the FBI was up to served to curtail the effectiveness of DeLoach's operation, and Bureau propagandists consequently found relatively few takers on this particular story. More, in the face of a planned investigation of electronic surveillance by government agencies announced by Democratic Missouri Senator Edward V. Long, J. Edgar Hoover was forced to order the rapid dismantling of the electronic surveillance coverage of both King and the SCLC, drying up much of the source material upon which Sullivan and his COINTELPRO specialists depended for "authenticity."

Still, the Bureau's counterintelligence operations against King continued apace, right up to the moment of the target's death by sniper fire on a Memphis hotel balcony on April 4, 1968. 28 By 1969, "[FBI] efforts to 'expose' Martin Luther King, Jr., had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year." 29

Those seeking independence for Puerto Rico were similarly attacked. The Bureau considered independentista leader Juan Mari Bras' near-fatal heart attack during April of 1964 to have been brought on, at least in part, by an anonymous counterintelligence letter:

[deleted] stated that MARI BRAS' heart attack on April 21, 1964, was obviously brought on by strain and overwork and opinioned that the anonymous letter certainly did nothing to ease his tensions for he felt the effects of the letter deeply. The source pointed out that with MARI BRAS' illness and effects of the letter on the MPIPR leaders, that the organization's activities had come to a near halt.

[paragraph deleted]

It is clear from the above that our anonymous letter has seriously disrupted the MPIPR ranks and created a climate of distrust and dissension from which it will take them some time to recover. This particular technique has been outstandingly successful and we shall be on the lookout to further exploit the achievements in this field. The Bureau will be promptly advised of other positive results of this program that may come to our attention. 30

The pattern remained evident more than a decade later when, after reviewing portions of the 75 volumes of documents the FBI had compiled on him, Mari Bras testified before the United Nations Commission on Decolonization:

[The documents] reflect the general activity of the FBI toward the movement. But some of the memos are dated 1976 and 1977; long after COINTELPRO was [supposedly] ended as an FBI activity ... At one point, there is a detailed description of the death of my son, in 1976, at the hands of a gun-toting assassin. The bottom of the memo is fully deleted, leaving one to wonder who the assassin was. The main point, however, is that the memo is almost joyful about the impact his death will have upon me in my Gubernatorial campaign, as head of our party, in 1976. 31

When Mari Bras suffered from an attack of severe depression the same year, the San Juan Special Agent in Charge noted in a memo to FBI headquarters that, "It would hardly be idle boasting to say that some of the Bureau's activities have provoked the situation of Mari Bras." Given the context established by the Bureau's own statements vis a vis Mari Bras, it also seems quite likely that one of the means by which the FBI continued to "exploit its achievements" in "provoking the situation" of the independentista leader was to arrange for the firebombing of his home in 1978.

Lethal COINTELPRO operations against the independentistas continued well into the 1980s. As Alfredo Lopez recounted in 1988:

[O]ver the past fifteen years, 170 attacks - beatings, shootings, and bombings of independence organizations and activists - have been documented ... there have been countless attacks and beatings of people at rallies and pickets, to say nothing of independentistas walking the streets. The 1975 bombing of a rally at Mayaguez that killed two restaurant workers was more dramatic, but like the other 170 attacks remains unsolved. Although many right-wing organizations claimed credit for these attacks, not one person has been arrested or brought to trial. 32

A clear instance of direct FBI involvement in anti-independentista violence is the "Cerro Maravilla Episode" of July 25,1978. On that date, two young activists, Arnaldo Dario Rosado and Carlos Soto Arrivi, accompanied a provocateur named Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, were lured into a trap and shot to death by police near the mountain village. Official reports claimed the pair had been on the way to blow up a television tower near Cerro Maravilla, and had fired first when officers attempted to arrest them. A taxi driver who was also on the scene, however, adamantly insisted that this was untrue, that neither independentista had offered resistance when captured, and that the police themselves had fired two volleys of shots in order to make it sound from a distance as if they'd been fired upon. "It was a planned murder," the witness said, "and it was carried out like that." What had actually happened became even more obvious when a police officer named Julio Cesar Andrades came forward and asserted that the assassination had been planned "from on high" and in collaboration with the Bureau. This led to confirmation of Gonzalez Molave's role as an infiltrator reporting to both the local police and the FBI, a situation which prompted him to admit "having planned and urged the bombing" in order to set the two young victim up for execution. In the end, it was shown that:

Dario and Soto [had] surrendered. Police forced the men to their knees, handcuffed their arms behind their backs, and as the two independentistas pleaded for justice, the police tortured and murdered them. 33

None of the police and other officials involved were ever convicted of the murders and crimes directly involved in this affair. However, despite several years of systematic coverup by the FBI and U.S. Justice Department, working in direct collaboration with the guilty officers, ten of the latter were finally convicted on multiple counts of perjury and sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 30 years apiece. Having evaded legal responsibility for his actions altogether, provocateur Gonzalez Molave was shot to death in front of his home on April 29,1986, by "party or parties unknown." This was followed, on February 28,1987, by the government's payment of $575,000 settlements to both victims' families, a total of $1,150,000 in acknowledgment of the official misconduct attending their deaths and the subsequent investigation(s).

Despite tens of thousands of pages of documentary evidence, the idea that the Bureau would utilize private right-wing operatives and terrorists is a chilling, alien concept to most Americans. Nevertheless, the FBI has financed, organized, and supplied arms to right-wing groups that carried out fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings. 34

This was the case during the FBI's COINTELPRO in South Dakota in the 1970's against the Oglala Sioux Nation and the American Indian Movement. Right-wing vigilantes were used to disrupt the American Indian Movement (AIM) and selectively terrorize and murder the Oglala Sioux people 35, in what could only be described as a counter-insurgency campaign. During the 36 months roughly beginning with the 1973 seige of Wounded Knee and continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on or in locations immediately adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others suffered violent physical assaults. As Roberto Maestas and Bruce Johansen have observed:

Using only these documented political deaths, the yearly murder rate on Pine Ridge Reservation between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was 170 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit, the reputed "murder capital of the United States," had a rate of 20.2 in 1974. ... The political murder rate at Pine Ridge between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was almost equivalent to that in Chile during the three years after the military coup supported by the United States deposed and killed President Salvador Allende. 36

To commemorate the 1890 massacre of Wounded Knee, in which 300 Minnecojou Lakota were slaughtered by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, hundreds of Native Americans from reservations across the West gathered in Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, during the winter of 1972-73. 37

This situation was already tense due to a series of unsolved murders on the reservation, and a struggle between the administration of the Oglala Sioux tribal president, Dick Wilson, and opposition organizations on the reservation, including AIM. Wilson had been bestowed with a $62,000 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) grant for purposes of establishing a "tribal ranger group" - an entity which designated itself as "Guardians Of the OgIala Nation" (GOONs). Wilson's "goon squads" patrolled the reservation, unleashing a reign of terror against Wilson's enemies. When victims attempted to seek the protection of the BIA police, they quickly discovered that perhaps a third of its roster - including its head, Delmar Eastman (Crow), and his second-in-command, Duane Brewer (OgIala) - were doubling as GOON leaders or members. For their part, BIA officials - who had set the whole thing up - consistently turned aside requests for assistance from the traditionals as being "purely internal tribal matters," beyond the scope of BIA authority.

On Feb 28th, 1973, residents of Wounded Knee, South Dakota found the roads to the hamlet blockaded by GOONs, later reinforced by marshals service Special Operations Group (SOG) teams and FBI personnel. By 10 p.m., Minneapolis SAC Joseph Trimbach had flown in to assume personal command of the GOONs and BIA police, while Wayne Colburn, director of the U.S. Marshals Service, had arrived to assume control over his now reinforced SOG unit. Colonel Volney Warner of the 82nd Airborne Division and 6th Army Colonel Jack Potter - operating directly under General Alexander Haig, military liaison in the Nixon White House - had also been dispatched from the Pentagon as "advisors" coordinating a flow of military personnel, weapons and equipment to those besieging Wounded Knee. As Rex Weyler has noted:

Documents later subpoenaed from the Pentagon revealed that Colonel Potter directed the employment of 17 APCs [armored personnel carriers], 130,000 rounds of M-16 ammunition, 41,000 rounds of M-40 high explosive, as well as helicopters, Phantom jets, and personnel. Military officers, supply sergeants, maintenance technicians, chemical officers, and medical teams remained on duty throughout the 71 day siege, all working in civilian clothes [to conceal their unconstitutional involvement in this "civil disorder"]. 38

On March 5, Dick Wilson - with federal officials present - held a press conference to declare "open season" on AIM members on Pine Ridge, declaring "AIM will die at Wounded Knee." For their part, those inside the hamlet announced their intention to remain where they were until such time as Wilson was removed from office, the GOONs disbanded, and the massive federal presence withdrawn.

Beginning on March 13, federal forces directed fire from heavy .50 caliber machineguns into the AIM positions. The following month was characterized by alternating periods of negotiation, favored by the army and the marshals - which the FBI and GOONs did their best to subvert - and raging gun battles when the latter held sway. Several defenders were severely wounded in a firefight on March 17, and on March 23 some 20,000 more rounds were fired into Wounded Knee in a 24-hour period.

The FBI's "turf battle" with the "soft" elements of the federal government rapidly came to a head. On April 23, Chief U.S. Marshal Colburn and federal negotiator Kent Frizzell were detained at a GOON roadblock and a gun pointed at Frizzell's head. By his own account, Frizzell was saved only after Colburn leveled a weapon at the GOON and said, "Go ahead and shoot Frizzell, but when you do, you're dead." The pair were then released. Later the same day, a furious Colburn returned with several of his men, disarmed and arrested eleven GOONs, and dismantled the roadblock. However, "that same night... some of Wilson's people put it up again. The FBI, still supporting the vigilantes, had [obtained the release of those arrested and] supplied them with automatic weapons." The GOONs were being armed by the FBI with fully automatic M-16 assault rifles, apparently limitless quantifies of ammunition, and state-of-the-art radio communications gear. When Colburn again attempted to dismantle the roadblock:

FBI [operations consultant] Richard [G.] Held arrived by helicopter to inform the marshals that word had come from a high Washington source to let the roadblock stand ... As a result the marshals were forced to allow several of Wilson's people to be stationed at the roadblock and to participate in ... patrols around the village. 39

On the evening of April 26, the marshals reported that they were taking automatic weapons fire from behind their position, undoubtedly from GOON patrols. The same "party or parties unknown" was also pumping bullets into the AIM/ION positions in front of the marshals, a matter which caused return fire from AIM. The marshals were thus caught in a crossfire. At dawn on the 27th, the marshals, unnerved at being fired on all night from both sides, fired tear gas cannisters from M-79 grenade launchers into the AIM/ION bunkers. They followed up with some 20,000 rounds of small arms ammunition. AIM member Buddy Lamont (Oglala), driven from a bunker by the gas, was hit by automatic weapons fire and bled to death before medics, pinned down by the barrage, could reach him.

When the siege finally ended through a negotiated settlement on May 7, 1973, the AIM casualty count stood at two dead and fourteen seriously wounded. An additional eight-to-twelve individuals had been "disappeared" by the GOONs. They were in all likelihood murdered and - like an untold number of black civil rights workers in the swamps of Mississippi and Louisiana - their bodies secretly buried somewhere in the remote vastness of the reservation.

Of the 60-plus murders occurring in an area in which the FBI held "preeminent jurisdiction," not one was solved by the Bureau. In most instances, no active investigation was ever opened, despite eye-witnesses identifying members of the Wilson GOON squad as killers.

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Gerald Heaney, after reviewing numerous court transcripts and FBI documents, concluded that the United States Government overreacted at Wounded Knee. Instead of carefully considering the legitimate grievances of Native Americans, the response was essentially a military one.

While Judge Heaney believed that the "Native Americans" had some culpability in the firefight that day, he concluded the United States must share the responsibility. It never has. The FBI has never been held accountable or even publicly investigated for what one Federal petit jury and Judge Heaney concluded was complicity in the creation of a climate of fear and terror on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Other AIM casualties include Richard Oaks, leader of the 1970 occupation of Alcatraz Island by "Indians of All Tribes," who was gunned down in California the following year. Larray Cacuse, a Navajo AIM leader, was shot to death in Arizona in 1972. In 1979, AIM leader John Trudell, preparing to make a speech in Washington, was told by FBI personnel that, if he gave the speech, there would be "consequences." Trudell not only made his speech, calling for the U.S. to get out of North America and detailing the nature of federal repression in Indian country, he burned a U.S. flag as well. That night, his wife, mother-in-law, and three children were "mysteriously" burned to death at their home on the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada.


Agents Provocateurs

Many details are now available concerning these extensive campaigns of terror and disruption, in part through right-wing paramilitary groups organized and financed by the national government, but primarily through the much more effective means of infiltration and provocation of existing groups. In particular, much of the violence that occurred on college campuses can be attributed to government provocateurs.

The Alabama branch of the ACLU argued in court that in May 1970 an FBI agent "committed arson and other violence that police used as a reason for declaring that university students were unlawfully assembled" -- 150 students were arrested. The court ruled that the agent's role was irrelevant unless the defense could establish that he was instructed to commit the violent acts, but this was impossible, according to defense counsel, since the FBI and police thwarted his efforts to locate the agent who had admitted the acts to him. 40

William Frapolly, who surfaced as a government informer in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, an active member of student and off-campus peace groups in Chicago, "during an antiwar rally at his college, ... grabbed the microphone from the college president and wrestled him off the stage" and "worked out a scheme for wrecking the toilets in the college dorms...as an act of antiwar protest." 41

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle, where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombings of university and civic buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush. 42

In another case, an undercover operative who had formed and headed a pro-Communist Chinese organization "at the direction of the bureau" reports that at the Miami Republican convention he incited "people to turn over one of the buses and then told them that if they really wanted to blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the gas tank and light it." They were unable to overturn the vehicle. 43



The Ku Klux Klan

During the 1960's, the FBI's role was not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror.

Church Committee hearings and internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants. 44 However, Bureau intelligence "assets" were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964. 44

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. 45 Needless to say, the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan's fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator's loyalty and commitment.

Unlike slick Hollywood popularizations of the period, such as Alan Parker's film, "Mississippi Burning," the FBI was instrumental in building the Ku Klux Klan in the South,

"...setting up dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than 'blow his cover.' One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, 'We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.'" 46

Throughout its history, the Klan has had a contradictory relationship with the national government: as a defender of white privilege and the patriarchal status quo, and as an implicit threat, however provisional, to federal power. Depending on political conditions in society as a whole, vigilante terror can be supplemental to official violence, or kept on the proverbial shortleash. 47 As a surrogate army in the field of terror against official enemies, the Klan enjoys wide latitude. But when it moves into an oppositional mode and attacks key institutions of national power, Klan paramilitarism - but not its overt white supremacist ideology - is treated as an imminent threat to the social order, suppressed, but never destroyed, unlike other COINTELPRO target groups.

These roles are not mutually exclusive. As anti-racist researcher Michael Novick warns: "The KKK and its successor and fraternal organizations are deeply rooted in the actual white supremacist power relations of US society. They exist as a supplement to the armed power of the state, available to be used when the rulers and the state find it necessary." 48

The Klan's "supplemental" role, particularly as a private armed force sporadically deployed to arrest the development of movements for Black freedom, is best considered by comparison to other Bureau operations. Unlike other COINTELPROs, the "Klan - White Hate Groups" program was of a different order entirely. Senior FBI management and a majority of agents in the field endorsed the Klan's values, if not the vigilante character of their tactics; from militaristic anti-communism to extreme racial hatred; from ultra-nationalism to misogynist puritanism. 49

This was evident during the civil rights struggles of the sixties, when Freedom Riders and local community activists directly confronted hostile police forces - many of whom were openly allied with the Klan. Despite clear jurisdictional authority to enforce federal law, the FBI consistently refused to protect civil rights workers under attack across the South. More than once, the Bureau refused to warn those under imminent threat of violence.

FBI inaction in the area of civil rights enforcement wasn't simply a matter of what the Pike Committee of the House of Representatives dubbed "FBI racism." Rather, FBI bureaucratic lethargy, when it came to protecting Black lives, underscored its mission against subversion for constituents whose privileges and power were threatened by a militant movement for Black rights. 50

Strikingly different from anti-communist COINTELPROs that enmeshed broad social sectors in a web of entanglements, FBI monitoring of the Klan was strictly confined to the organization itself. No serious efforts were made to explore the supplemental role of White Citizens' Councils, many of which were active Klan fronts, let alone investigate the obvious and widespread police complicity in racist violence. 51 Bureau surveillance of the Klan was purely passive, hardly the directed aggression reserved for left-wing targets.

In May, 1961, as civil rights activists turned up the heat, the FBI passed information to the Klan about Freedom Rider buses on their way to Birmingham, Alabama. A police sergeant, Thomas Cook, attached to the Birmingham police intelligence branch was plied with reports by Bureau informants. A Klan member himself, Cook furnished this information to Robert Shelton's Alabama Knights and arranged several meetings to discuss "matters of interest." Cook supplied Klan leaders with the names of "inter-racial organizations," the location of meetings, and the membership lists of civil rights groups for circulation in Klan publications. FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe wrote a confidential memo to the Birmingham Special Agent in Charge (SAC) stating that Cook had handed over inter-office intelligence memos on civil rights activists during a Klan meeting. Rowe insisted that Cook not only gave him relevant information that police had in their files, but urged Rowe to "help himself to any material he thought he would need for the Klan." 52

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Birmingham SAC called Cook and informed him of the progress that Freedom Rider buses had made and when they were scheduled to arrive in the city. According to Rowe, Cook and Birmingham's public safety director, arch-segregationist Eugene "Bull" Connor conspired with Klan leaders and directly organized physical attacks on Freedom Riders when the buses reached their destination. According to one FBI memo, Connor declared: "By God, if you are going to do this thing, do it right." 53

In consultation with Shelton's group, Birmingham police agreed not to show up for 15 or 20 minutes after the buses pulled in, to give Klansmen sufficient time to carry out their attack. Assailants were promised lenient treatment if through some fluke, they managed to get arrested. During a planning meeting that finalized logistical details, Grand Titan Hubert Page advised Klansmen that Imperial Wizard Shelton had spoken with Detective Cook, and was informed that Freedom Rider buses were scheduled to arrive at 11:00 am.

Earlier that day, the KKK intercepted another bus on its way to Birmingham, beating the passengers and setting the vehicle ablaze. As agreed during consultations with Klan leadership, when the buses arrived no police were present at either of Birmingham's bus terminals, but 60 Klansmen - including Rowe - were waiting. Klansmen attacked civil rights workers, reporters and photographers, viciously beating anyone within reach with chains, pipes and baseball bats.

According to ACLU attorney Howard Simon, "We found that the FBI knew that the Birmingham Police Department was infiltrated by the Klan, that many members of the police department were Klan members, that they knew a person in intelligence was passing information directly to leaders of the Klan, and they also knew their undercover agent had worked out an agreement with the police department to stay away from the terminals. They knew all that and still continued their relationship with the police department." 54

Though the Bureau claimed that its "Klan - White Hate Groups" COINTELPRO was launched in order to stifle white supremacist activities, the historical record proves otherwise. The more well known, but by no means only examples of Klan terror during the period - the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four black children; the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in Mississippi: and the 1965 assassination of Viola Liuzzo and her companion near Selma, Alabama, point to knowledge of the crimes, and complicity in subsequent cover-ups by FBI officials.

Bureau informant Gary Thomas Rowe was a central figure in some of the most publicized crimes of the period, indulging in freelance acts of racist terror. He was suspected of involvement in firebombing the home of a wealthy Black Birmingham resident, the detonation of shrapnel bombs in Black neighborhoods and the murder of a Black man during a 1963 demonstration. He became a prime suspect in the Birmingham church bombing after he failed two polygraph tests. His answers were described by investigators as "deceptive" when he denied having been with the Klan group that planted the bomb. 55

Despite enough evidence to open a preliminary investigation, the FBI refused, covering-up for Rowe even when another informant, John Wesley Hall, named him as a member of a three-man Klan security committee holding veto power over all proposed acts of violence. Years later, an independent inquiry uncovered evidence that Hall became a Bureau informant two months after the bombing and despite the fact that a polygraph test convinced the Alabama FBI that he was probably involved in the attack himself, Hall admitted to having moved dynamite for the plot's ringleader, Robert E. Chambliss, a Klan member since 1924. Even though court testimony and a wealth of evidence linked Hall, Rowe and other members of the Alabama Knight's to the bombing, the suspects were convicted on a misdemeanor charge - "possession of an explosive without a permit." It took more than a decade and three bungled investigations to finally convict Chambliss of the crime. 56

In July 1997, almost 35 years after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the FBI re-opened its investigation based on "new information." However, mainstream news accounts failed to report the pivotal role played by Bureau informants. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a target of a 1963 Klan assassination plot, believes he knows why only one man was convicted for the bombing. "It is well known," the 75-year old civil rights leader said, "there was collusion all along between the FBI, local law enforcement and the Klan." Rev. Shuttlesworth should know: Bureau informant John Wesley Hall was the man who proposed killing the minister. 57

New light was shed on Rowe's privileged position as an FBI provocateur tasked to "disrupt and neutralize" the civil rights struggle. During a subsequent investigation into the murder of Viola Liuzzo, evidence surfaced that it was Rowe who actually fired the fatal shots that took her life. But instead of prosecuting Rowe, the Bureau placed him in a federal witness protection program. 58

In 1978, Rowe was indicted by an Alabama grand jury as Liuzzo's killer. But complicity in shielding Rowe and the Bureau from exposure came to light when the contents of a J. Edgar Hoover memo to President Lyndon Johnson became public. Hours after the killings Hoover wrote: "A Negro man was with Mrs. Liuzzo and reportedly was sitting close to her." In a subsequent memo to aides, Hoover said he informed the President that "she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car, that it had the appearance of a necking party." 59 While providing a glimpse into the pathological nature of Hoover's racism and misogyny, the Director fails to enlighten us as to the mechanics of a "necking party" during a 100 mph car chase in the dead of night, a "party" by terrorized individuals fleeing armed Klan thugs intent on killing them in cold blood. However twisted, Hoover's slander was calculated to establish a motive; one that would "justify" Mrs. Liuzzo's murder on grounds of breaking one of nativism's primal laws: the prohibition against sex between the races.

On November 3, 1979, a posse organized by Klansmen and neo-Nazis murdered five members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in broad daylight. The CWP had organized a "Smash the Klan" demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina among the city's mostly black and working class mill workers. CWP members included union organizers and activists who had upset "the fundamental order of things." 60

An essential component for the operation, organized by night-riding Klansmen, was U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) agent, Bernard Butkovich. The BATF agent, a Vietnam veteran and demolitions expert undercover in the local branch of the American Nazi Party, helped the Klan obtain automatic weapons, and also in making their escape. 61

The posse had been organized and led by an FBI infiltrator, Edward Dawson. Dawson was also a paid informant for the Greensboro Police Department. 62 Dawson reported to his handlers that eighty-five Klansmen meeting in nearby Lincolnton had expressed their intent to counter-demonstrate on November 3. 63

The night-riders had stated they intended to arm themselves for their counter-demonstration and that Klan leader, Grand Dragon Virgil Griffin, was actively calling out Klansmen from other states to participate. It was also rumored that neo-Nazis from the Winston-Salem area had obtained a machine gun and other weapons. Dawson reported to Greensboro detective Jerry Cooper that Klansmen and neo-Nazis were assembling at the home of a local Klan member and that they were armed. 64

The police/FBI informant had received a copy of the parade route the day before the CWP-initiated march; a map had been supplied by Detective Cooper. Dawson had driven over the parade route three hours earlier with a contingent of out-of-town Klansmen. Dawson also alerted Cooper that the Klansmen and neo- Nazis possessed three handguns and nine long-barrelled rifles, including automatic weapons supplied by BATF agent Bernard Butkovich. 65

Prior to the beginning of the CWP's march and demonstration, Cooper and other police officials drove by the house where the Klansmen and neo-Nazis were assembling. They jotted down license plate numbers and then declared a lunch break -- at approximately 10 a.m. 66 Less than an hour later, Cooper, trailing behind the Klan caravan reported, "shots fired" and then "heavy gunfire." The tactical squad assigned to monitor the march were still out to lunch. 67

Two other officers, responding to a domestic disturbance call, noted the absence of patrol cars usually assigned to the area. They arrived at the Morningside projects, the site of the CWP march. Officer Wise later reported having received a most unusual call from the police communications center. The officers were asked how long they anticipated being at their call; they were subsequently advised to "clear the area as soon as possible." 68

Moments later, five demonstr

Nov. 29, 2005 - President George W. Bush, who has been talking tough on the subject of illegal immigration in recent days, appeared to reverse course today, announcing a guest-worker program that allows illegal immigrants to work inside the White House itself.

Recognizing that his new plan was likely to draw the ire of conservatives and other foes of illegal immigration, Bush said that the guest workers' duties in the White House would be limited: "They will mainly be responsible for leaking classified information to the press."

According to White House insiders, using illegal immigrants to perform leaking functions that were formerly the responsibility of White House aides has several advantages. Principally, after leaking the information to reporters, the guest workers can sneak over the border back to their country of origin before being subpoenaed, indicted or summoned to testify before Congress.

But several White House aides were angered by the president's guest-worker program, arguing that leaking was an American job that should be performed only by Americans.

Several prominent leakers within the White House inner circle were considering strategies to combat the guest-worker program, including organizing a leakers' union in the White House that would prevent illegal immigrants from joining.

But despite the complaints, one aide said that the president was unlikely to terminate his guest-worker program any time soon: "He seems to like having other people around the White House who don't speak English as their first language."

Elsewhere, "American Idol" signed up for six more seasons, confirming reports that appeared in the Book of Revelation.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

US President George Bush is set to unveil what he is calling a "strategy for victory" in Iraq, hoping to convince a sceptical US public two-and-a-half years after the invasion that he has a plan to bring American troops home.

Bush was to reveal the blueprint at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, at a time when his poll numbers have sunk to their lowest and more and more Americans want him to chart a course for a quick US withdrawal.

Ahead of the speech, news of another attack in Iraq served as a reminder of the daily security troubles the country still faces.

In the latest incident early on Wednesday nine Iraqis employed on a US base were shot dead as they boarded a minibus in the village of Abu Saida, northeast of Baquba, police said.

Commenting on the president's Annapolis speech, White House spokesman Scott McClellan described it as "an unclassified version of the plan that we've been pursuing in Iraq".

He said the Pentagon hoped to have enough self-sufficient Iraqi troops to reduce the US presence in the war-torn country in 2006.

That raises the possibility of troop reductions ahead of the November US congressional elections in early November, over which the increasingly unpopular war looms large.

Bush, who has rejected calls from opposition Democrats for a timetable for withdrawal, told reporters: "The people don't want me making decisions based upon politics; they want me to make decisions based upon the recommendation from our generals on the ground."

Mistake

"We've heard some people say, pull them out right now. That's a huge mistake," he said on a visit to El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday.

"It would be a terrible mistake. It sends a bad message to our troops, and it sends a bad message to our enemy, and it sends a bad message to the Iraqis."

According to White House officials Bush's speech on Wednesday at the US Naval Academy will be the first of a series of speeches on his administration's plan for victory in the run-up to the 15 December elections in Iraq.

The Bush administration has been mounting a growing counter-attack in recent weeks following calls from domestic political opponents calling for a speedy timetable for withdrawing US troops.

Speaking on Tuesday Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that while the time had come to wean the Iraqis of their reliance on American support for security, a rapid pullout of US forces would not work.

"Quitting is not an exit strategy", he said.

More than 2100 US troops have died, and nearly 16,000 others have been wounded since US-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein.

Kidnapping

In a separate development on Wednesday a Christian peace group said it blamed the US and Britain for the kidnapping of four of its activists in Iraq, saying their capture was the direct result of the occupation of Iraq.

After a months long hiatus in the abduction of foreigners, video footage broadcast on Tuesday showed the four held captive by masked, armed men.

Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group that has had activists in Iraq since October 2002, said it was saddened by the footage of their workers, who they said were working against the occupation of Iraq.

"We are angry because what has happened to our teammates is the result of the actions of the US and UK government due to the illegal attack on Iraq and the continuing occupation and oppression of its people," the group said.

Those abducted were listed as American Tom Fox, 54, Briton Norman Kember, 74, and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32.

Two senior Army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the turmoil that would be unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq offer a bleak assessment in a new study of what now lies ahead in that bloodied land.

They advise, however, against setting a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal — unless Washington finds the situation "irredeemable."

A timetable "is an excuse for allowing the system to collapse," the Army War College's W. Andrew Terrill and Conrad C. Crane write.

Political pressure is building in Washington for a concrete plan to extricate U.S. forces from Iraq. On Tuesday, on the eve of an important address on Iraq at the U.S. Naval Academy, President Bush told reporters he wants the troops home, "but I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory."

In a February 2003 report, a month before the U.S. invasion, Crane and Terrill had warned that the United States might "win the war but lose the peace" if it attacked Iraq. They suggested armed resistance to an occupation would grow, a harsh American response would further alienate Iraqis, and establishing political stability would prove difficult — all predictions that were borne out.

They warned in particular against disbanding the pre-invasion Iraqi army, a step that was nonetheless taken and is now viewed as a blunder that fed the anti-U.S. insurgency.

In their new 60-page report, veteran Middle East scholar Terrill and Crane, director of the Army Military History Institute, say a U.S. troop presence in Iraq probably cannot be sustained more than three years further. Meantime, they write:

_"It appears increasingly unlikely that U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces will crush the insurgency prior to the beginning of a phased U.S. and coalition withdrawal."

_"It is no longer clear that the United States will be able to create (Iraqi) military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long U.S. forces remain."

_And "the United States may also have to scale back its expectations for Iraq's political future," by accepting a relatively stable but undemocratic state as preferable to a civil war among Iraq's ethnic and religious factions.

"U.S. vital interests have never demanded a democratic state in Iraq before 2003," they note.

As for Iraqi security forces, Terrill and Crane reason it may prove difficult to build "multiethnic and multisectarian" police and military units, and suggest factional militias may come to the fore instead.

The Army scholars devote their closest analysis to the current debate over whether Washington should set a predetermined, step-by-step schedule for a troop pullout. They see "catastrophic" dangers in that approach.

For one thing, they say, as soon as a timetable is announced, some Iraqis cooperating with the Americans "will calculate that U.S. protection is a declining asset" and ally themselves with the insurgents, or seek protection of a militia. For another, the insurgents might do what the North Vietnamese did in 1973: bide their time, build up their forces, and attack all-out once the Americans leave.

Thirdly, with an inflexible timetable, "the United States may end up abandoning a potentially hopeful situation and instead allowing that nation to plunge into civil war."

They see one circumstance in which a timetable is useful, if "the Iraqi government may have only a small chance to survive, but the U.S. leadership does not wish to announce publicly that we have basically given up on Iraq."

Mosinee - Gary Olson is a 52-year-old grandfather, a retired U.S. Army veteran - and soon to be a soldier again, thanks to the need for troops in Iraq.

Olson was ordered to report for duty Dec. 4 in Fort Jackson, S.C.

"They're just looking for bodies to fill in. I have been out cold turkey for 13 years," Olson said. "My philosophy is this: I'm going to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. If I have to go, I have to go."

Sally Olson, his wife of 33 years, said that she was shocked by the orders and figured the chances of it happening were "slim to none" when he took early retirement more than a decade ago.

"Why don't they just go to the draft if they are getting this desperate for people?" she asked. "In a couple of months, he will be 53."

Sally Olson said she disagrees with President Bush that the war in Iraq was justified.

Gary Olson said when his wife showed him the large brown envelope the Army sent last month, he knew without even looking inside that it contained his orders because two years ago he declined the military's invitation to voluntarily come out of retirement.

The Army told Olson, a sergeant first class mechanic when he retired, to prepare for 18 months away from home after he passes his physical.

Maj. Elizabeth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon, said since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the military has called to duty about 6,500 retired soldiers on individual ready reserve because they have some specific, needed skills.

The Army has about 115,000 soldiers on individual ready reserve, she said.

Olson thought his days as a soldier were done when he accepted early retirement from the Army in 1992 as the military sought to downsize after Operation Desert Storm. A condition of the deal was Olson, who had spent 17 years in the Army, had to remain on ready reserve until age 60, he said.

Olson makes windows at a factory in Mosinee and hasn't worked as a mechanic since he retired from the Army, he said.

He now has three grandchildren, ages 1, 2 and 7, who all live nearby.

Sally Olson said the news of her husband's return to the Army hit the 7-year-old grandson hard.

"He said, 'Why does Papa have to go?' And we told him they need Papa to come back and help some more and finish a job that is not quite done," she said.

Then the grandson asked if his grandpa was going to die, Sally Olson said, fighting back tears. "We just said, 'There is always a chance of being hurt. You say your prayers and hope everything is OK.' "

Gary Olson said he does not fear going to Iraq, where more than 2,050 troops have been killed since the war began. He's concerned about his wife and family. "The wife, she's pretty upset," he said.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq? [...]

When Westhusing entered West Point in 1979, the tradition-bound institution was just emerging from a cheating scandal that had shamed the Army. Restoring honor to the nation's preeminent incubator for Army leadership was the focus of the day.

Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West Point's strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal - or tolerate those who do.

Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets' problems. He remembered him as "introspective."

Westhusing graduated third in his class in 1983 and became an infantry platoon leader. He received special forces training, served in Italy, South Korea and Honduras, and eventually became division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

He loved commanding soldiers. But he remained drawn to intellectual pursuits.

In 2000, Westhusing enrolled in Emory University's doctoral philosophy program. The idea was to return to West Point to teach future leaders.

He immediately stood out on the leafy Atlanta campus. Married with children, he was surrounded by young, single students. He was a deeply faithful Christian in a graduate program of professional skeptics.

Plunged into academia, Westhusing held fast to his military ties. Students and professors recalled him jogging up steep hills in combat boots and camouflage, his rucksack full, to stay in shape. He wrote a paper challenging an essay that questioned the morality of patriotism.

"He was as straight an arrow as you would possibly find," said Aaron Fichtelberg, a fellow student and now a professor at the University of Delaware. "He seemed unshakable."

In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.

"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.

As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.

But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.

"He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."

"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.

Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.

U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."

However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations.

"As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.

The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report.

"This is a mess... dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.

The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain.

"The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.

By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.

His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.

Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.

His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death.

"I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."

Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.

On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.

That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.

At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.

Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.

"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."

The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.

"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."

Comment: Huh?! Anyone with 30 years of military and law enforcement training knows darn well that guns do not generally "go off" when they are "bumped"...

After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note.

Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored."

"Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

Comment: Gee, can you tell she is a military psychologist?

One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."

Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.

Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.

Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing - father, husband, son and expert on doing right - could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.

In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:

"Iraq."

HADITHA, Iraq, November 29, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Grinned US soldiers were dancing around bodies of Iraqi civilians killed during a US-led onslaught on the western city of Haditha, residents said on Monday, November 29.

"I saw US soldiers laughing and dancing around the bodies of civilians killed in cold blood" a resident identified as Goma Al-Hadithi told the London-based Al-Quds Press news agency.

Occupation troops have killed in cold blood children, women and elderly in their house-to-house pre-dawn raids, he charged.

Al-Hadithi recalled that a week ago American troops bombarded several houses, killing four entire families just to avenge a nearby attack on a Humvee that left one of their fellow soldiers dead.

"They then lifted some 40 bodies from pools of blood and throw them in the yard of the Haditha hospital."

Hadithi, a former army officer, further charged that US troops once ordered five youths to lie prone on the ground before shooting them for no apparent reason.

US troops have been launching for months a series of offensives on Sunni towns in the Anbar province on the Euphrates to quell what they call raging "insurgency".

Haditha lies at the edge of Anbar, the heartland of the resistance operations.

Operation Rivergate focused on Haditha and two nearby towns in the Euphrates valley.

Scorched Earth

The Rivergate offensive, which started on the first day of Ramadan on October 5, has left the Iraqi city in ruins and destroyed its two main bridges, leaving large parts practically inaccessible.

"People were taking pains in ferrying their wounded relatives to the hospital through boats," Al-Hadithi said. "One of my neighbors died because we could not take him to hospital."

He accused the US occupation troops of adopting a scorched-earth policy in Haditha.

"The bombardment and air strikes were so intense that buildings were leveled to the ground and dozens were trapped under the rubble due to the crippling curfew from 18:00 pm to 08:00 am."

The curfew has also banned students from going to their schools, putting their academic ambitions on hold.

"The US blockade has closed almost all schools," Um Mohammad, a teacher said with her voice breaking.

"Dozens of university students have to walk some 10 kilometers on foot every day to reach their universities outside the city."

American troops have further imposed a media blackout, denying reporters access to the ghost city.

"This is the first time I see a reporter in Haditha since the US launched its offensive," an elderly resident told Al-Quds Press's correspondent.

Human Rights Watch revealed in September that US troops routinely subjected Iraqi detainees to severe beatings and other cruel and inhumane treatment as a "way of sport" or just to "relieve stress".

Far in Afghanistan, two US soldiers were reprimanded on Sunday, November 28, for burning two dead Taliban bodies.

The two soldiers responsible for recording a message boasting about the act of the burning and broadcasting it on loudspeakers will face non-judicial punishment, which may include a loss of pay or demotion in rank.

It is possible Norman Kember is a spy, as charged by the Swords of Righteousness brigade in Iraq. However, considering the work of the Christian Peacemaker organization and the fact Kember is 74 years old, it is unlikely he is a spy. Kember and three other Christian peace activists were abducted by the unknown terrorist group and a videotape of them was released yesterday. “Family and friends of Mr. Kember, a grandfather who lives with his wife Pat in Pinner, north-west London, appealed to the kidnappers to release him last night,” reports the Guardian.

“The Rev Alan Betteridge, from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which Mr. Kember is a member, said he was a ‘genuine peace activist’… Mr. Kember, who campaigned against the war in Iraq, was seized on Saturday from a mosque he was visiting in a Sunni area of western Baghdad with the three other hostages. It has been reported that they were talking to Muslim clerics about the abuse of Sunni detainees,” more than enough reason for Kember to be abducted by black op “insurgents” who ” just grabbed” the name Swords of Righteousness “out of the air, a tactic which goes back to Beirut,” according to the Guardian. It should be remembered that the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was also kidnapped as she prepared to interview survivors of Fallujah, now admitted to have been attacked with chemical weapons and a napalm derivative.

One look at the CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) in Iraq website and it becomes obvious who abducted Kember and his associates and why. CPT has worked as “an alternative voice to the reporters ‘embedded’ with Coalition forces,” have used “their bodies to protect critical civilian infra-structure such as water treatment facilities, electrical plants, and hospitals,” have documented “abuse of detainees by Coalition forces,” and “have ventured forth in response to urging from Iraqi human rights workers in Karbala.” No doubt all of this Christian activity sincerely upsets the Pentagon and the Bushcons.

In December, 2004, CPT was “compelled” to “severely curtail its size and visibility” due to kidnappings of foreign aid workers. It appears the Swords of Righteousness brigade, unheard of before Kember and the three other CPT members were snatched, was created in order to deliver a coup de grâce to CPT, a sincerely Christian organization initiated “by Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers with broad ecumenical participation.”

CPT’s ministry is a “Biblically-based and spiritually-centered peacemaking” effort that “emphasizes creative public witness, nonviolent direct action and protection of human rights,” that it to say it is diametrically opposed to the Bushian version of Christianity—a Manichean, Christian Zionist, Islamophobic, misanthropic, and paranoid non-religion designed to punish Arabs and Muslims the same way Likudite Zionists have punished (and methodically continue to commit slow genocide) against the Palestinians and other Arabs considered to be sub-human and thus expendable. In fact, the Bushian Christian Zionists have embraced Zionist brutality in their quest (or rather modern-day Crusade) to support their idealized version of Israel as portrayed in their take on the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ (in the Christian Zionist political-religious take on the Second Coming and premillennialism, the Jews of Israel either accept Jesus as their savior or burn in the fires of Hell with the rest of us—of course, the Israeli Zionists rightly believe the dominionist Christian Zionists are bonkers, but being opportunists can’t help themselves). Of course, the Bush neocons, primarily Straussian and Zionist, don’t actually believe in God or anything else except taking over the world and making sure a couple million Israelis rule over 187,258,006 (as of 2005) Arabs and Middle Eastern Muslims.

It makes absolutely no sense for the Iraqi resistance to kidnap Kember and his associates. Kember worked directly with the Iraqi people and chances are slim to none he had any significant contact with the legitimate Iraqi resistance. It is absurd to think the Iraqi resistance—a movement drawing operational strength from its decentralized and secretive “cell” structure—would compromise itself by dealing with CPT or any other organization and thus possibly falling victim to spying. On the other hand, it is safe to assume if there were indeed spies in CPT—military intelligence spies working for the Pentagon or Iraqi intelligence (the two are interdependent and mutually inclusive).

Unfortunately, it does not look good for Kember and his hapless associates. Lately the Pentagon has suffered from devastating public relations—from revelations concerning the weapons of mass destruction attacks on Fallujah to emerging details about Bush’s airborne “frequent flier miles” rape and torture gulag to the commonly held belief the traitorous neocons lied the United States into a disastrous invasion and occupation—and in order to set things right “on the ground” in Iraq (in preparation for a new round of Vietnam-styled “rolling thunder” bombing campaigns and black op terror and assassination programs), do-gooders such as Kember and the CPT have to be run out of Iraq.

The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on "route Irish", a road that links the airport to Baghdad.

The road has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous in the world because of the number of suicide attacks and ambushes carried out by insurgents against coalition troops. In one four-month period earlier this year it was the scene of 150 attacks.

In one of the videoed attacks, a Mercedes is fired on at a distance of several hundred yards before it crashes in to a civilian taxi. In the last clip, a white civilian car is raked with machine gun fire as it approaches an unidentified security company vehicle. Bullets can be seen hitting the vehicle before it comes to a slow stop.

There are no clues as to the shooter but either a Scottish or Irish accent can be heard in at least one of the clips above Elvis Presley's Mystery Train, the music which accompanies the video.

Last night a spokesman for defence firm Aegis Defence Services - set up in 2002 by Lt Col Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer - confirmed that the company was carrying out an internal investigation to see if any of their employees were involved.

The Foreign Office has also confirmed that it is investigating the contents of the video in conjunction with Aegis, one of the biggest security companies operating in Iraq. The company was recently awarded a £220 million security contract in Iraq by the United States government. Aegis conducts a number of security duties and helped with the collection of ballot papers in the country's recent referendum

Lt Col Spicer, 53, rose to public prominence in 1998 when his private military company Sandlines International was accused of breaking United Nations sanctions by selling arms to Sierra Leone.

The video first appeared on the website www.aegisIraq.co.uk. The website states: "This site does not belong to Aegis Defence Ltd, it belongs to the men on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company." The clips have been removed.

The website also contains a message from Lt Col Spicer, which reads: "I am concerned about media interest in this site and I remind everyone of their contractual obligation not to speak to or assist the media without clearing it with the project management or Aegis London.

"Refrain from posting anything which is detrimental to the company since this could result in the loss or curtailment of our contract with resultant loss for everybody."

Security companies awarded contracts by the US administration in Iraq adopt the same rules for opening fire as the American military. US military vehicles carry a sign warning drivers to keep their distance from the vehicle. The warning which appears in both Arabic and English reads "Danger. Keep back. Authorised to use lethal force." A similar warning is also displayed on the rear of vehicles belonging to Aegis.

Capt Adnan Tawfiq of the Iraqi Interior Ministry which deals with compensation issues, has told the Sunday Telegraph that he has received numerous claims from families who allege that their relatives have been shot by private security contractors travelling in road convoys.

He said: "When the security companies kill people they just drive away and nothing is done. Sometimes we ring the companies concerned and they deny everything. The families don't get any money or compensation. I would say we have had about 50-60 incidents of this kind."

A spokesman for Aegis Defence Services, said: "There is nothing to indicate that these film clips are in any way connected to Aegis."

Last night a spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "Aegis have assured us that there is nothing on the video to suggest that it has anything to do with their company. This is now a matter for the American authorities because Aegis is under contract to the United States."

It should come as no surprise murderous yahoos working for Aegis Defense Services randomly shoot up innocent Iraqis, as a video currently posted on the Prison Planet site reveals. “The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis,” reports the London Telegraph.

Aegis is run by a former British soldier and a one-time member of the Scots Guards, Tim Spicer, who made a sum of money violating a UN arms embargo in Sierra Leone and touching off a coup in Papua New Guinea. Spicer is apparently so good at what he does—apparently including randomly murdering Iraqis—the Pentagon awarded him a $293 million contract to have his hired thugs act as bodyguards (or maybe we should call them what they are—spree killers).

Spicer has a bad habit of rubbing elbows with cutthroat psychopaths. For instance, in Belfast in 1992, two men under Spicer’s command killed an unarmed teenager and father of two children, Peter Mc Bride. Mark Wright and James Fisher were charged with the murder and sentenced to life, but thanks to campaign led by the Daily Mail and with help from the British Ministry of Defense, the men were released after serving three years (see Brief introduction to the case of Peter McBride September 1992 - April 2005 and Barry McCaffrey reporting for the Irish News). A British Army review board eventually reinstated Wright and Fisher, probably because they really have no problem with their soldiers killing unarmed Irish civilians.

According to one Dr. Alexander von Paleske, head of the department of oncology at the Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, Botswana, Spicer “worked with Anthony Buckingham, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, in a company called Sandline,” according to Ray O’Hanlon of the Irish Echo. “Buckingham’s worldwide business dealings included an oil deal with the now unemployed Saddam Hussein,” von Paleske wrote for the Zimbabwe newspaper the Standard last year. As it turns out, Spicer worked with Buckingham in a company called Sandline, a PMC, or “Private Military Company,” and Sandline was neck-deep in the coup in Papua New Guinea in 1997.

Enter the “honorable sir” Mark Thatcher, the rich playboy who “is suspected by South African police as being a moneyman behind the alleged plot to overthrow the Equatorial Guinea regime.” So outraged are the bluebloods in Britain, Gordon Prentice, a Member of Parliament, has demanded “sir” Mark be stripped of his baronetcy. Had a commoner been convicted of such a crime, no doubt he would be wasting away in a jail cell somewhere in Africa. Due to his station and a plea bargaining agreement, Thatcher pleaded guilty to negligence, was fined $500,000, and received a three year suspended sentence (meanwhile, British SAS officer Simon Mann, suspected of leading the mercenaries, was jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe for illegally trying to buy weapons). “Both Thatcher and Spicer belonged to a gang of English white guys out to plunder Africa,” Sean Mc Manus, President of the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus, commented earlier this year.

Now Tim Spicer is plundering the American taxpayer while his goons shoot up Iraqi cars with Elvis Presley’s Mystery Train playing in the background. As noted at the outset, it should come as no surprise high-paid mercenaries are killing innocent Iraqis. “Foreign mercenaries make up the third biggest ‘coalition partner’ in Iraq after the United States and Britain,” writes Aaron Glantz. “Many of them are from former secret police agencies of since-overthrown police states like Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid South Africa. These mercenaries guard contractors working for international firms like Halliburton and Bechtel.” In fact, these mercenaries are so out of control they not only shoot Iraqis, but take pot shots at U.S. troops, according to Iraq’s interior ministry. “The marines say one of their combat teams came under fire from guards in a convoy of four-wheel-drives belonging to Zapata Engineering, a firm based in North Carolina that is involved in reconstruction projects,” the UK Telegraph reported. “The Zapata employees have admitted firing at civilian vehicles but deny targeting marines.”

In other words, according to Zapata Engineering, it’s okay to kill innocent Iraqi civilians. “The Army Corps of Engineers says that Zapata is doing an outstanding job on a dangerous and urgently needed mission,” Kevin Begos and Phoebe Zerwick wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal on February 13th, 2005. “But the shift to private contractors has raised complicated questions about accountability.”

Obviously, if there was accountability, the sadistic goons of Aegis wouldn’t be killing Iraqi motorists and Tim Spicer wouldn’t be pocketing $293 million of American taxpayer money.

It can be argued, however, Spicer and crew are doing precisely what the Pentagon hired them to do—kill and terrorize Iraqis and send them a message: resistance to the Bush Borg Hive of Faux Democracy will not be tolerated.

I felt that I must put the record straight, as so many lies have been written and spoken about this murder.

What follows is the only true account of what really happened on the night of Wednesday/Thursday, July 13/14, 2005 at my home in Sharra’ Imreij—a quiet street of villas in the leafy Nablus residential neighborhood of Raffidiya—a happy place where I have lived contentedly for months. Its peace was shattered on an idyllic summer evening by up to 100 Israeli “soldiers” who, without warning, attacked my small villa, brutally murdered an unarmed man within minutes, and abducted a student to the dreaded Petakh Tikfah torture center.

At the moment of the attack by Israelis dressed as Palestinians, who poured out of unmarked vehicles bearing Palestinian license plates, there were many people in the street, including groups of children. Some were playing, some sitting and talking, on one of the lovely, cool eventides which have usually followed the exceptionally hot days of this particular July.

11 p.m. [all times may be plus or minus five minutes]: I had been out walking, and returned home to continue chronicling the story of a member of the resistance, Muhammad “Niinu” Al-’Assi. Our interpreter was Mutassim Adel ‘Ayl, a student with an exceptionally deep understanding of English who has fulfilled the role of interpreter for me on many occasions. I am a very close friend of both families, having known Mutassim for nearly three years and Niinu’s sisters for more than two years, since the murder of a second brother, Faaris. Niinu was incarcerated at that time, and we met in November 2004.

Contrary to the wild stories in the press, we three were the only people in the home, and we were talking in the reception hall off the veranda. We actually were discussing Niinu’s need for a hearing aid, since he had lost all hearing in his left ear, and 50 percent in his right, as a result of a June 14, 2004 Israeli missile attack on the car in which he was traveling with a close friend, the esteshaad (hero) Khalil Marshoud. Khalil and the taxi driver were killed, and Niinu grievously injured. On this very day Niinu had said he would announce his engagement and, to his joy, Mutassim had arranged funding for him to get the precious hearing device.

11:15 p.m.: Suddenly we heard an unusually large motor stopped in the street. I went to look out the window, and saw a huge, very long white truck or bus (I could see only the roof) outside the gates, and the street full of Israeli soldiers dressed as Palestinians. Shooting and shouting erupted.

11:16 p.m.: There were prolonged volleys of Israeli shooting in all directions, and much shouting and screaming by the Israelis, via a megaphone, at fleeing children. I froze—“Oh my God! Special Forces”—but did not yet realize that my house was the target. Having witnessed firsthand the carnage they cause, however, I was absolutely terrified.

As I turned from the window, I caught just a glimpse of Muhammad as he ran out the side door, barefoot, wearing shorts and undershirt, into the garden on the left of the house. (Since we never walk on indoor floors wearing outdoor shoes, we were all barefoot, in fact.) Muhammad had no weapon, not even a handgun. Why would he? He had come to tell a story. The Israelis easily could have arrested him as he ran out the door—but they wanted him dead.
Mattloubiin and Muttaradiin

There are two categories of men hunted by the Israelis, al-mattloubiin and al-muttaradiin. The former generally are “wanted” for capture, although they often are killed. The names on the list change: it is possible for men to be on it for many years, constantly harassed and chased and repeatedly injured; they can even “drop off” the list when it grows too long. The muttaradiin (assassination) list, apart from being illegal, is different. Like the foxes Tony Blair has worked so hard to save in the UK, muttaradiin are for hunting to death and killing. Israeli vengeance is unrelenting and forever, and once a man or boy is on the list the only way off it is into the ground.

Because “Niinu” Al-’Assi was muttaarad—that is, on the illegal Israeli assassination list—there could be no escape for him, whatever he did. The Israelis were determined to kill him.

Mutassim Adel ‘Ayl is neither muttaarad nor mattloub. He is just a student—but then, scores of students around Nablus have been murdered, and hundreds incarcerated, on the road to learning.

Someone—a collaborator, that most despised of people bred by occupation—had called the Israelis to tell them that Niinu was in the house. The Israelis do not mount a big operation like this unless they are quite certain of a kill. Like most of his fellow traitors, this collaborator will be found out, and will pay the ultimate penalty for his crime.

There were no warnings. I heard none, nor did Mutassim. He was slumped down on a sofa, muttering, “What can we do?”

“Nothing,” we despaired.

All the lights in the house were on, so while Mutassim was putting on his cargo pants, shirt, boots and socks I crawled under the line of fire to turn off at least those in the three front windows and the veranda. With them on, we were sitting ducks.

In a minute, four or five jeeps, a troop carrier, and a prison van arrived with much shooting and noise in the street, and the so-called “special forces” withdrew very quickly. They do not wish to be photographed, of course, and as soon as the legal, uniformed soldiers come they melt away as though they had never existed.

The Israelis used powerful beams of light to look for Muhammad, who was clearly caught in them several times. The soldiers saw that he was unarmed, and how he was dressed. They could have arrested him at any time without harm to themselves. Instead dozens of “soldiers,” with at least four dogs, were trampling over my beautiful, peaceful, tree-filled garden, firing their M16 assault rifles at Muhammad. The bursts of gunfire were coming from all directions.

About a minute after Niinu ran out the door there was sustained firing from the road at the rear of the house. I believe Niinu ran up the terraces to the rear wall and road and, finding that way closed as well, must have run back and to the other side of the house—because, in the glare of the Israelis’ brilliant lights, from a side window I saw him jump onto the garden wall. There he was cut down by multiple M16 bullets just above the ankle on the inside of his left leg, shattering bone, flesh and tendons—virtually severing his foot. Other bullets slammed into his body—at least one grievously wounded him in the groin, causing blood to pour from the severed artery, while three struck his right leg.

Wounded, but not fatally, Muhammad jumped down into the adjacent garden. His shattered leg folded under him, and he dragged himself about 20 feet to a small wall, where he collapsed onto his back. He could have been arrested here, too. Clearly, escape no longer was a possibility.

I repeat, because this is important: These shots did not kill him. He still could have been arrested at any time.

11:30 p.m.: An Israeli soldier then proceeded to fire multiple shots from hisM16 into Muhammad’s head at very close range—“much less than 10 meters,” according to the pathologist—causing severe injury and instant death. The scalp and bone of the crown above Niinu’s right eye and behind were completely destroyed, and most of his brain was blown onto the garden. Dr. Samiir Abu Zaghour surmised that the soldiers fired between four and seven bullets into Muhammad’s defenseless head, but he could not be sure, because the horrifically damaged head did not hold the bullets, which had fallen somewhere with the brain. In pathology, the term used to describe an injury so massive that a part of the body—for example the skull, bone and brain—is completely destroyed is “crush injury.”

Contrary to subsequent Israeli army reports that its soldiers had “warned militants in the house” and attacked “some hours later,” Niinu was dead only 10 to 12 minutes after the uniformed Israeli soldiers arrived.

Niinu al-’Assi had a very beautiful, level gaze emanating from large, wide-set eyes. At the moment of his death his eyes were wide open, looking straight into the eyes of his executioner, a small smile parting his lips over very white teeth. Without screaming or pleading, he met his death with supreme courage, asking for no mercy; not with hatred, anger and fear, but with the quiet softness of the love in which he had lived.

But it was not over. While looking into the direct, clear gaze of Niinu’s lifeless eyes, an Israeli officer found in himself enough hatred to fire seven more bullets from his handgun into Muhammad’s right rib-cage and upper-arm (already defiled by the scars, shrapnel and proudflesh of previous attacks). Two more bullets were found in Niinu’s back. The entry wounds are tiny, indicating extremely close range—the X-rays showed the bullets in his body beside many bright pieces of shrapnel, the remnants of the extensive surgery following his miraculous escape from the earlier missile attack.

With that smile, and his soft eyes still open—we could not close them—Niinu’s body now lies in the earth of the beautiful, tragic maqbarra of Mukhayyam Balaata, the Cemetery of Balata Refugee Camp. Beside him lie family martyrs—his younger brother Faris, and older brother Khaled—and around him the hundreds of his beloved friends, the shuhadda (martyrs) who have given their lives for Palestine in this intifada and before.

My pictures show what seem to be several other points of entry of bullets in Muhammad’s body, along with extensive, parallel abrasions, indicating that he was dragged some distance over a hard surface. No report on these exists, for there really was no purpose to be served by further disturbing the “soft flesh of the young fighter” (Fadwa Tuqaan) to investigate any more wounds. He had suffered enough.

12:15 a.m.: Not content with the execution-style killing of Muhammad, the Israelis then dragged to the street the body of this unarmed man, murdered in cold blood as he lay looking up at his killer. Dumping his body into a vehicle in an inhuman fashion, they took Niinu away, even though there were two ambulances outside my house—one driven by the brave Tony Ghratiit (Red Crescent), the other by the fearless Jareer Kanadillo (Palestine Medical Relief Society)—as well as doctors, including the courageous PMRS manager, Dr. Ghassan Hamdan. Some five hours later, the Israelis dumped Muhammad’s body back in Nablus. It is hard to see any reason for, or to excuse, this utter inhumanity.
The House is Besieged

The Israelis now turned their attention to my house, where, for the past hour, Mutassim and I had huddled together in a corner of the front bedroom, hoping we were out of the line of fire, our arms around each other for comfort. All the time we felt that we, too, would die here. I could hear Mutassim’s rapid, heavy heart beat on my ribs, and I’m sure he could feel mine.

There was intensified shooting from all sides, coupled with the explosions of grenades and “sound-bombs” all around the house, in addition to hundreds of rounds of M16 fire. Sound bombs are terrifying, as they mimic real bombs exactly, and cause multiple reverberations and explosions—especially when detonated from several sides—as well as severe nerve damage to the ears. Afterward I found the remains of four such bombs and one grenade in the garden—there may well have been more.

1 a.m.: By megaphone we were told to “come out or we will bomb the house.” We could hear a helicopter attack gunship, and it was not my house, so we agreed that we had to go out—and, in any case, if it was a choice between “death by crushing” or “death by shooting,” we definitely preferred the latter. This was the only warning we were given throughout the entire ordeal.

I knew that the moment Mutassim emerged the Israelis would kill him on sight, but felt that they might not be so ready to murder a sahaffiyya ajnabbiya—a foreign woman journalist—so I emerged first, repeatedly calling out, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I am a journalist.” I told them clearly, slowly and calmly that I was going to put on the veranda light and pull the screen aside, and asked them again not to shoot. Holding my hands vertically, palms facing the soldiers, I also took the precaution of raising my blouse up to my bra—as the Israelis seem to believe that everyone here sleeps wearing a commando belt.

Neither I nor Mutassim had committed a crime—other than being alive, that is. But here we were, two innocent human beings pleading for our lives with a hundred gunmen pointing their assault rifles at us!

When I felt confident that the soldiers had understood, I asked Mutassim to join me, but stand behind.

Hand in hand, we walked down the path and the steps. When I was unable to locate the correct key to the gates, Mutassim calmly took the ring from me and unlocked them.

With the exception of one family from the house next door, all the neighbors had been ordered into the street, The soldiers gestured to us to walk slowly forward, with our shirts pulled up to the neck. It doesn’t feel great walking like that up a street filled with people, believe me.

1:15 a.m.: An Israeli grunted something from the other end of an M16. I think he asked if I was English, and I replied with an emphatic “No.” (I am Welsh.)

“You don’t speak English?” he repeated.

But I didn’t need it anyway. Rapping out “there” and pointing to a “stalls seat” on the tarmac with his multi-purpose M16 rifle, he indicated that I should sit in the street with two of my neighbors, Suhayla and her daughter, a Christian family, from the basement flat in the Jaaber house next door.

Just as no one warned Muhammad or verified his identity, no one asked me my name or Mutassim his, or asked for ID. They just blindfolded Mutassim, pulled a hard plastic electrical cable tie painfully tight around his wrists, took him to the garden next door where Muhammad had been murdered, and manacled Mutassim’s ankles. That was all I could see. Like Muhammad, Mutassim did not beg or plead. He stood strong and proud and dignified, and he walked tall.

Taking their dogs, most of the soldiers, then went into my garden and surrounded my house, approaching it as though they believed it contained one of Israel’s 400 nuclear missiles ready to fire. After a while they all entered and ransacked my simple possessions.

1:45 a.m.: Having found nothing—since, of course, there was nothing there to find—they came out without speaking and hung about until 2:15, when the troop carrier returned. The soldiers all got in, putting Mutassim in the prison van and telling me, “You can enter house after five minutes.”

Then they all drove off, leaving more lives destroyed, more families devastated, more murder and mayhem, and an even more determined resistance in their wake.

As for the “soldier” who, at point-blank range, first pumped the bullets into Muhammad’s head as he lay grievously wounded, and the officer who later emptied his handgun into the soft flesh of the already dead young fighter, I cannot but wonder what will they see when they look into a mirror. Will they forever see the wide hazel eyes which continued to look into theirs for long after Niinu had left this life? Will they, and the rest of them, hear in their dreams the sickening squelches of Muhammad’s brain and lung, and duck from the sprays of blood? How will they be able to live with these pictures and sounds?

“Look upon your works, O Ye Israel and despair!” I pity your inhumanity.

Afterword: Since that night, two of Mutassim’s brothers, Ala’a and Dia’a, and Niinu’s cousin Tareq have been arrested in separate invasions of Balaata Refugee Camp, and both family homes have been ransacked and damaged by Israeli occupation forces.

Anne Gwynne, an elected member of the International Federation of Journalists and the National Union of Journalists (UK), writes from occupied Nablus. She can be contacted at . More photographs of Niinu in life and in death can be viewed at .

Ashkenazi Jews are genetically intellectually superior to everyone else.

This is the conclusion of a recent "scientific" study entitled "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" that triggered several articles in popular publications such as New York Magazine, The New York Times and the Economist. In this study, Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending of the University Of Utah's anthropology department suggest a genetic explanation to account for this remarkable intellectual achievement.

They base their hypothesis on four observations. First, that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic grouping. Second, Ashkenazim have a very low inward gene flow (low intermarriage).

Third, historic restrictions on professions allowed to Jews, such as money-lending, banking and tax farming, in which higher intelligence strongly favored economic success, in turn led to increased reproductive success. Low intermarriage acted as a selective process genetically favoring these abilities.

Fourth, genetic mutations responsible for diseases commonly found in Ashkenazi Jews, such as Tay-Sachs, are responsible for improved intelligence.

My initial reaction to a theory like this is suspicion laced with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Undoubtedly Ashkenazim have made a disproportionate contribution to Western intellectual and cultural life - think Freud, Einstein, Mahler, or Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, to name but a few. But saying that Ashkenazi genes are different calls into question the motivation behind the research.

SHOULD 'RACE' be dignified as a subject of scientific study? To refuse to investigate a subject, however objectionable, would in itself be unscientific. Yet the attention of the scientific community alone lends it credibility. This study is to be published in The Journal of Biosocial Science in 2006 by Cambridge University Press.

The paper drew considerable criticism for both its aims and methods from geneticists, historians, social scientists and other academics as "poor science" - condemning its polemical style and the lack of usual rigor and dispassion of scientific texts.

But what do we do with the conclusions of the thesis? Maybe file them with Jewish conspiracies such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Claiming we are a race genetically differentiated from the rest of humanity could provide excellent material for anti-Semites. It could share a shelf with other "scientific" works on race and intelligence such as those of Arthur Jensen or The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein - which questioned affirmative action in the US, claiming that African-Americans are genetically inferior in intellectual abilities.

Is the Harpending and Cochran study any less odious for the fact that it portrays Jews in a positive light?

JUDAISM HAS never advocated Jewish racial superiority. Indeed, the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38a) explains that Adam, the biblical first man, was created singly as the common forebear of all mankind so that future families would not quarrel over claims of superiority in their respective ancestry.

If racial purity was important the Jewish people would not have accepted converts, or would maybe maybe reconsider the status of their offspring. Yet we have the biblical story of Ruth, a convert who is not only accepted into the Jewish people, but whose descendents include King David and, ultimately, the Messiah.

Down the centuries, reluctance to accept converts was based on concerns about the smooth transmission of family traditions, religious observances, history and culture, and not the watering-down of blood, diluting DNA, or contamination of the Jewish gene pool.

Being "the chosen people" does not make Jews superior either. The idea of chosenness first appears in the book of Exodus (19:5-6) where, contingent on complying with and keeping the Divine covenant, the Jewish people is singled out to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

In the words of Henri Atlan: "Election does not imply superiority or inherent sanctity, since the correct reading of the Bible in fact implies conditional chosenness. The election is one of duty, not of rights or attributes."

IF JEWS aren't racially superior, then, how does one account for the undeniably disproportionate achievements of Jews (numbering 0.2% of the world population) at winning Nobel prizes, for example?

There is a "self-fulfilling prophecy" explanation. Nobel prizes are awarded according to a set of culturally-rooted values - extolling the virtues of Western civilization and rewarding its paradigms, we should bear in mind that Judaism made a significant contribution to that civilization.

Jews have always been literate, and historically the professional restrictions on Ashkenazi Jews encouraged them to promote "exile-proof" skills. They valued and encouraged learning, hard work and achievement. These were a cultural legacy, not innate qualities.

If race is the source of those achievements, where does hard work or personal endeavor enter the equation? If I am an Ashkenazi Jew, is it my destiny to achieve?

And what do we do with this within the Jewish world? We really don't need another source of divisiveness along the Ashkenazi/Sephardi rift.

My own view as an educator is that everyone has the same intellectual potential, regardless of lineage. Psychologists maintain that the average person uses only 5-7% of that potential. Differing levels of achievement among people are accounted for by the amount of their potential they have managed to exploit.

If there is any common factor accounting for the achievement of some exceptional Ashkenazi Jews it may be their cultural legacy that has enabled them to make more of themselves. Their achievements are not predestined by an accident of birth.

The writer, a member of Kibbutz Alumim, is senior educator in Melitz Centers for Jewish-Zionist Education.

In a flurry of activity on both sides of the Atlantic, several so-called revisionists have been arrested on Holocaust denial charges in recent weeks.

Three revisionists — Germar Rudolph, Ernst Zundel and Siegfried Verbeke — have been extradited to Germany. But the most visible case involves far-right British historian David Irving, who was arrested November 11 in Vienna, Austria, on 16-year-old charges that he publicly denied aspects of the Holocaust — a crime in Austria.

Jewish communal leaders, including Shimon Samuels, international relations director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, praised the moves. Samuels said that they were part of an overall trend in Europe toward greater attempts to atone for the Holocaust.

"There is a drive toward transparency that is very healthy in Europe," he said. "Unlike in America, there is not much difference in Europe between hate speech and hate crime. And there seems to be a new willingness to use those laws when it comes to Holocaust denial."

Holocaust revisionists, meanwhile, were slamming the crackdown efforts, saying they were part of a Jewish conspiracy to prevent open debate.

"As the new owner of Germar Rudolf's publishing company, I wish to express my outrage that the Holocaust, unlike any other historical event, is not subject to critical revisionist investigation," said Michael Santomauro, who runs a Web site dedicated to Holocaust denial and to attacks against Jewish communal leaders and organizations. "Furthermore I deplore the fact that many so-called democratic states have laws that criminalize public doubting of the Holocaust. It is my position that the veracity of Holocaust assertions should be determined in the marketplace of scholarly discourse and not in our legislature's bodies and courthouses."

The charges against Irving, filed by Austrian prosecutors, were based on two 1989 speeches in which he denied the existence of the gas chambers. If convicted, Irving could face up to 20 years in prison.

Irving is the author of nearly 30 books. One of them, "Hitler's War," challenges the fact that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. He once famously insisted that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the systematic slaughter of the Jews, and he has been quoted as saying there is "not one shred of evidence" that the Nazis carried out their "final solution" on such a scale.

In 2000, Irving lost a libel case he brought against historian Deborah E. Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. The British court ruled that Irving was antisemitic and racist and that he misrepresented historical information.

In addition to Irving's arrest, Rudolph, 41, was sent from Chicago this month to his native Germany, where he was wanted on a 1995 conviction of inciting racial hatred for disputing the deaths of thousands of Jews held captive at a concentration camp. Rudolph was sentenced to 14 months in prison for publishing a report disputing the deaths of thousands of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, according to a statement by the Department of Homeland Security. Rudolph, a former chemist, claimed in his report that since he had failed to find traces of Zyklon B on the bricks of gas chambers, mass gassings of Jews could not have occurred at Auschwitz.

After his conviction, he fled Germany and lived in Spain, Great Britain, Mexico and the United States, according to the DHS press release. He was arrested in Chicago October 19 after a background check by immigration officials, and deported November 14 to Germany.

Earlier this year, Canada deported Ernst Zundel, 66, to Germany, where a state court is hearing charges of incitement, libel and disparaging the dead. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in jail if convicted. Also, in October a Dutch court agreed to extradite Siegfried Verbeke — a co-founder of the Belgian extreme-right Vlaams Blok party, now called Vlaams Belang — to Germany, where he faces charges of racism and xenophobia and publicly doubting the Holocaust. He is looking at 14 months in prison.

Verbeke was convicted on charges of Holocaust denial and racism in Belgium in 2003 and sentenced to a one-year jail term. However, Belgian authorities refused to extradite him to Germany. After his arrest in Amsterdam this past August, he faced similar charges in the Netherlands for having questioned the veracity of Anne Frank's diary. But the proceedings were suspended and Verbeke was sent to Germany in early October.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended her vote to authorize war in Iraq amid growing unease among liberal Democrats who could determine the potential 2008 presidential candidate's future.

"I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war," the New York senator said in a lengthy letter to thousands of people who have written her about the war.

At the same time, she said the United States must "finish what it started" in Iraq.

Clinton and other hawkish Democrats have come under criticism from liberal anti-war activists, many of whom will hold sway over presidential primary contests. The former first lady, who is up for re-election in 2006, would likely be an early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination should she decide to seek it.

The 1,600-word letter was sent, mainly through e-mail, on Tuesday - a day before President Bush was to deliver a speech on his Iraqi policies. The president's approval ratings plummeted in recent months as the U.S. death toll and anti-war sentiments grew.

The debate has also put Clinton in a tight spot: generally viewed as pro-military, the former first lady is the most-watched member of a party that is increasingly turning against the war.

In her letter to voters, the senator cited prewar assurances from the White House that the United States would use the United Nations to resolve the issue of Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

"Based on the information that we have today, Congress never would have been asked to give the president authority to use force against Iraq," she said. Clinton stopped short of saying her vote was a mistake, the political path chosen by two other potential Democratic candidates - former vice presidential candidate John Edwards and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

"Given years of assurances that the war was nearly over and that the insurgents were in their 'last throes," this administration was either not being honest with the American people or did not know what was going on in Iraq," she wrote.

Clinton's allies billed the letter as her most comprehensive statement on the war to date.

"It is time for the president to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor," she wrote.

Clinton, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said earlier this month it would be a "big mistake" for U.S. troops to pull out immediately. She stuck with that line Tuesday. "America has a big job to do now. We must set reasonable goals to finish what we started and successfully turn over Iraqi security to Iraqis," she wrote.

The Bush administration pledged yesterday to respond to a formal inquiry from the European Union over reports of covert CIA prisons for al Qaeda captives in Eastern Europe, acknowledging for the first time that the controversy over the secret prison system has upset European allies.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, writing on behalf of the European Union, sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a letter yesterday seeking "clarification" about the matter, the British Embassy said. Franco Frattini, the union's top justice official, warned Monday that any E.U. country discovered to have hosted CIA prisons will face "serious consequences," including losing its E.U. voting rights.

The controversy over the prisons has threatened to overshadow Rice's planned five-day trip to Europe next week, and she used a meeting yesterday with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's new foreign minister, to respond to the growing clamor for answers.

"The United States realizes that these are topics that are generating interest among European publics as well as parliaments, and that these questions need to be responded to," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters, adding, "These are certainly legitimate questions."

McCormack said Rice assured Steinmeier that the United States has not violated either its own laws or international treaties, but he sidestepped questions about whether the prisons -- the existence of which he did not confirm or deny -- violate European laws. Intelligence officials and legal experts have said that the CIA's internment practices would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries.

The Washington Post reported early this month that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe as part of a covert prison system that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe. The Post did not identify the Eastern European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials, who said the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and make them targets of retaliation.

The report spawned a frenzy of investigations and news reports in Europe, dismaying administration officials who have painstakingly tried to repair U.S.-European relations this year after they ruptured over the Iraq invasion. "There is a tone in a European press, an anti-American sentiment, that I have not seen in a year," said one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

McCormack stressed to reporters that questions about the prisons should be viewed in a "larger context" of the battle against terrorist networks: "The terrorists know no boundaries. They know no regulations or rules or they don't comply with any laws."

After the Post report, Human Rights Watch cited flight records of aircraft allegedly linked to the CIA to suggest that facilities in Poland and Romania were used. Poland is an E.U. member and Romania is a candidate for admission; both countries have denied they housed secret CIA prisons.

An investigator for the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights body, reported last week that he had received the information from Human Rights Watch. The investigator, Dick Marty, proposed to visit suspected sites, examine satellite imaging and analyze aircraft movements.

Rice will visit Germany, Romania, Ukraine and NATO headquarters in Brussels, and U.S. officials expect questions about the prisons to dog her at every stop.

European commentators have questioned how the United States can celebrate democracy in Ukraine when reports about the prisons appear to undermine its own traditions of freedom. In Romania, Rice will sign a bilateral defense cooperation agreement, formally permitting U.S. troops to use Romanian bases as part of a redeployment of forces in Europe.

Straw's letter was not publicly released. The United Kingdom holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, and a British Embassy spokesman said Straw wrote the letter at the request of several European delegations. The letter seeks "clarification on the allegations that the CIA has terror camps in Eastern Europe," said the spokesman, who under British tradition was not identified. "They remain allegations, but nevertheless it is right to ask the United States for more information."

Rice and Steinmeier also discussed reports of transport flights for al Qaeda suspects by CIA aircraft in German airspace, McCormack said. German media have reported that some CIA planes landed at six German airports, a potential embarrassment for the government of Germany's new chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has hoped to improve relations with the United States.

U.S. officials are also keen to build ties after experiencing a rocky relationship with Gerhard Schroeder, Merkel's openly anti-Bush predecessor. Hours after Steinmeier's visit with Rice, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick flew to Berlin for two days of talks with top officials in the new government, including Merkel. Rice also will meet with Merkel in Berlin next week.

George W. Bush has made a concerted effort to reassert presidential prerogatives and extend the power of the Oval Office eroded since Watergate. Like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Bush has skirted the law, sacrificed transparency for secrecy, and undermined democratic deliberative processes in favor of imperial fiat. Unlike his forebears, however, Bush lacks the brilliance and character necessary to make sound judgments and forge successful policies. The result has been the worst of all worlds: Bush has damaged America’s deliberative institutions while simultaneously weakening America through a series of disastrous executive decisions.

An excellent exegesis of the Bush administration’s excesses and deficiencies is provided by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former deputy to Colin Powell at the State Department, in a recent talk given before the New America Foundation. Wilkerson joins a growing chorus of traditional conservatives and establishment insiders, like former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who are taking the Neoconservative cabal in the White House to task for leading America into a series of foreign and domestic disasters.

What is missing in the Bush Administration, Wilkerson argues, is any meaningful process in which dissenting views are aired, debated, and weighed before they get to the president. Thus, President Bush rarely, if ever, gets a comprehensive overview of the problems at hand or a meaningful choice of options. Wilkerson blames former Nation Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice for failing to be an honest, impartial, and independent broker for the president. Rice, Wilkerson contends, sacrificed her objectivity to ingratiate herself with the President, in effect telling the President what he wanted to hear from the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Libby-Wolfowitz cabal, but failing to convey dissenting opinions from other factions in the White House, such as Colin Powell’s at the State Department. The result was an institutional breakdown (reflected in the fact that then Secretary of State Colin Powell was informed of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq only after it had been made).

The decision to invade Iraq is also symptomatic, Wilkerson argues, of a more systemic breakdown: more specifically, the almost complete abdication of Congressional deliberation in crafting, reviewing, and approving foreign policy directives. During the 1950’s, for instance, Dwight Eisenhower followed Congress’s lead by implementing the National Security Act that the legislative branch had developed. Eisenhower reasoned that his role as chief executive was to implement the policies fashioned by the most representative and accountable branch of government.

As a bona fide commander-in-chief (who had planned and implemented D-Day), Eisenhower knew the importance of developing and utilizing effective decision-making procedures. To this end, Eisenhower encouraged competing teams to develop alternative solutions to specific problems, thus avoiding the pitfalls of “groupthink” and the tendency to overlook novel problem-solving approaches. Clinton used a variation of this approach, insisting that at least one top-level administration figure give him the contrary side of any argument or policy he was considering. This reinforced Clinton’s tendency to flip-flop and be indecisive on occasion, but it was an important discipline that probably helped inoculate the Clinton Administration from making reckless decisions.

The Bush Administration has taken a diametrically opposed approach to decision making, a tack one could dub “imperial expediency.” According to this philosophy -- taught at Harvard Business School where Bush got his MBA -- leaders must act decisively and without reservation in order to inspire followers. Even if a decision is wrong, it is best to display no regrets or second-guessing lest the troops lose confidence. The worst a leader can do is to act like Hamlet.

Expediency, however, is only a virtue if one is proceeding in the right direction. And Wilkerson identifies another drawback of this approach. Bureaucracies, particularly government bureaucracies, are most effective when they have participated in the process of making decisions they are charged with carrying out. When orders are handed down from on high, bureaucracies that have had little input in shaping decisions invariably have little stake in seeing them succeed. Thus, imperial expediency carries a double risk: it lacks self-correction mechanisms, and courses of action settled on are inherently more brittle.

The capacity for self-correction is not a characteristic one associates with the Bush Administration. Indeed, a willful disregard for advice and opinions independent of the administration’s narrow circle is their hallmark. Even the views of establishment Republicans, like Brent Scowcroft, have been summarily dismissed with barely contained disdain. For example, Scowcroft, who served under the first President Bush, and who very much represents traditional mainstream conservatism, wrote an Op-Ed for the Washington Post shortly before the invasion of Iraq that warned -- presciently in retrospect -- of the perils the administration faced if it pursued its ambitious agenda of attempting to remake the Middle East beginning with Iraq. Scowcroft’s comments were greeted with the same derision that the administration reserved for critics of its decision to unilaterally scrap the Kyoto accords or the ABM treaty; in other words, criticism was interpreted as disloyalty.

Wilkerson points to the Bush Administration's lack of grace as a further factor in its record of failure. No one likes a bully, and the Bush Administration’s gracelessness on a range of issues -- the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld’s dismissal of “Old Europe,” Bush’s assertion that the U.N. was irrelevant, and the needlessly insulting rhetoric about America’s right to unilaterally scrap international treaties it didn’t like -- engendered a worldwide opposition to the Bush Administration’s policies.

Bush has portrayed himself as a “gut player,” someone who relies on intuition and instinct rather than intellect or reason. The results are as predictable as they are miserable. Without rational decision-making procedures with attendant checks and balances, the United States has essentially left its fate in the hands of a small cabal of irrational decision makers. No wonder it is madness to stay in Iraq and madness to leave Iraq.

If you have any doubt regarding the later course, Wilkerson offers a sobering assessment of the repercussions that would follow a precipitous withdrawal of American forces from Iraq that left the country as a failed state and a breeding ground for jihadists. Wilkerson argues that the United States would almost certainly require 5 million men under arms within a decade in order to deal with the chaos in the Middle East and secure the region's oil reserves.

Staying the course in Iraq, needless to say, is hardly more reasonable: a steady erosion of American blood and treasure in an inconclusive and unsustainable contest that will undermine America’s soft and hard power. This Catch-22 is symptomatic of an institutional pathology that infects the Bush Administration, concrete evidence that the Bush Administration left its senses long ago. But unlike the proverbial lunatics running the asylum, they’re running the world.

Note: Scott D. O’Reilly is an independent writer with degrees in Philosophy and Psychology who has been published in The Humanist, Philosophy Now, Think, and The Philosopher’s Magazine.

The September 11 attack, the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the USS Liberty, the sex slave trade, the raping of children at Boystown, and other horrendous crimes would have been exposed long ago if it were not for their suppression of people such as myself, John DeCamp, Michael Collins Piper, and who knows how many hundreds of other people.

They are criminals,not executives.

The people who control the media are often describes as "executives", but they should be referred to as "criminals" because they are deceiving us with propaganda; providing entertainment and sexual titillation to distract us; and suppressing people who try to expose their crimes.

Many people on the Internet refer to this group as "The Powers That Be" (TPTB), but they are not powerful. They should be described as Criminals On The Loose (COTL).

They only have control over our media because so many people allow them to have control. It would not be difficult for us to get them out of our lives, clean up our history books, and provide ourselves with more serious news organizations.

The media criminals distort our view of the world.

By getting control of the information we are exposed to, they can distort our perception of the world.

For example, there are still people all over the world they don't know what Building 7 is, let alone that it crumbled into a pile of rubble for no apparent reason on September 11.

The September 11 attack would have been exposed years ago if it were not for these media criminals. These people are collaborators in these crimes.

What effect do they have on children?

These media criminals provide infantile and psychotic entertainment in their television shows, newspapers, magazines, movies, and other forms of propaganda. Diarrhea, bathrooms, and sex a common subject.

They often portray drunks as amusing people. The slurring of words and staggering as they walk is treated as family entertainment.

They promote the musicians and actors who encourage violence, drug abuse, sexual perversion, neurotic attitudes, or psychotic behavior.

Throughout most of human existence, children grew up around their parents, neighbors, and other children. Today they are growing up around selfish, immoral business executives you are trying to manipulate them into purchasing products; who titillate them with diarrhea jokes, sexual titillation, and slurring alcoholics; and who offer them role models who I would classify as psychotic. How can anybody justify this type of childhood?

The media criminals are protecting pedophiles.

Have you ever seen the New York Times or a television show give a book review on John deCamp's The Franklin Coverup?

And when will the reporters investigate these accusations about Woody Allen?

Or the Friedmans?

Or any of the other thousands of people accused of raping children, selling sex slaves, or offering sex with animals?

There is no possible way that the sex slave trade, the kidnapping and raping of children, and other forms of perversion could be occurring on such a large scale around the world without support from the government, and without the media to suppress evidence of the crimes.

It's OK to complain about the media

Because most of the media criminals are Jewish, I am sometimes criticized as an anti-Semite for complaining about them. So let me point out that there are Jews who also complain about them. This is not an issue of religion, nor of Jews. It is an issue of crime.

For example, the following excerpts are from a book by Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry:

The New York Times serves as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust industry.
...
For frequency of coverage, the Holocaust places a close second to the daily weather report. Page xvi

Hardly a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New York Times. Page 143

Finkelstein also complains that some of the books that are promoted by the media criminals are blatant frauds:

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski

The first major Holocaust hoax was The Painted Bird, by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski. Page 55

Jerzy Kosinski bio info

Fragments, by Binjamin Wilkomirski

Fragments was widely hailed as a classic of Holocaust literature. It was translated into a dozen languages and won the Jewish national book award, the Jewish quarterly prize, and he Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah.
...
Half fruitcake, half mountebank, Wilkomirski, it turns out, spent the entire war in Switzerland. He is not even Jewish. Page 60

Some info on-line about this book.

Which book gets into Barnes & Noble and other large distributors? Which book gets a favorable review by the New York Times, Scientific American, or Newsweek?

The books that are promoted are the ones that the media criminals approve of. This is why you cannot find my book in the national bookstores, and it will never be given a review by the New York Times.

The media criminals are not providing us with "news". They are not providing us with book reviews, either. Rather, they are providing us with propaganda to promote their particular view of the world, and to cover up their crimes.

Is anybody really "Self Hating"?

Finkelstein's mother and father were inmates in the Nazi prison camps, so it is difficult to accuse him or his parents of being "anti-Semites". He is instead described as a "self hating" Jew. But how is describing someone as a "self hating" Jew any more sensible than describing somebody is a "do-do head"?

Here is the list of "Self Hating, Israel Threatening" Jews.

The list is alphabetical, so look under the category of F to find Norman Finkelstein.

The media criminals decided to label Finkelstein as a "self hating Jew" rather than a "hero" or a "crime fighter" or a "professor who wants accurate history books".

What are the goals of the media criminals?

The American and European media spend a lot of time promoting the hatred Arabs, and they spend lots of time promoting pity for the innocent and superior Jews. Therefore, I would say that the primary goal of the media criminals is the creation of Israel.

There are probably lots of other reasons that they provide deceptive news reports, such as supporting their friends in the defense, banking, and oil industry.

They may be encouraging immorality in order to break down American and European nations, which would make it easier for them to get even more control over us.

The reason they encourage crummy school courses may be to produce a generation of ignorant and badly behaved children. This helps weaken the nation, making it easier for a small group to get more control of it.

Don't dismiss the role Israel has played in the 20th century

Many people promote the idea that the Vatican is trying to take over the world, or that some mysterious group of people called "neocons" or "illuminati" are trying to get control.

However, most of the wars and chaos of the 20th century seem to have been intended to help Israel and to destroy America, Europe, and Russia.

Finkelstein also believes the support of Israel is one of the reasons they lie about the Holocaust:

Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies. Page 149
An article with this and other quotes.

Some Vatican officials, some secret societies, some oil company executives, and other people may be assisting the Zionists in their wars and corruption, but I would say the Zionists are the masterminds, and the other people are their Useful Idiots. [...]

The media criminals are constantly promoting the idea that Arab terrorists are about to destroy America and Europe, and that Nazis are hiding everywhere.

For example, the media is creating the impression that Jose Padilla is a member of some dangerous, world-wide terrorist network. However, if there was serious evidence that Padilla is part of a terrorist network, why is the government just letting him sit in jail? Why not expose the network, arrest the terrorists, and put an end to them?

The news reports about Padilla are vague, as they are with Osama and other terrorists.

There is a lot of evidence that most of the Nazis and Arab terrorists are actually Zionists, or idiots that the Zionists promote to create the impression that these terrorists exist.

Even more amazing are the remarks that come from the Zionists. Here is one attributed to Theodor Herzel:

“It is essential that the sufferings of Jews.. . become worse. . . this will assist in realization of our plans. . . I have an excellent idea. . . I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth. . . The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends”.

The purpose of this deception is to create anti-Semitism, hatred of Arabs, and paranoia of Nazis.

The media criminals often grossly exaggerate a person's involvment in terrorism in order to create this fear that Arab terrorists and Nazis are dangerous threat. Jose Padilla is one example.

For another example, the media criminals describe the Olsen Twins as "white supremacists" or "Nazis". The headline in an ABC News article about them is:

"Young Singers Spread Racist Hate"

We are supposed to believe that these girls are just two of countless numbers of Nazis ready to jump out of the bushes and attack innocent Jews, blacks, and other people.

However, there are people of every race, nationality, and religion who boast of their superiority. There are also women boasting about their superiority over men, and men boasting about their superiority over women. There are Democrats who believe they are superior to Republicans, and Republicans who believe they are superior to Democrats. There are people in New York City boasting that they live in the greatest city in the world. Many of them have bumper stickers and other signs that proclaim "I love New York".

This attitude of "pride" or "superiority", or whatever you want to call it, is a problem that all humans suffer from. However, when a person of German ancestry displays even a little bit of pride, he is labeled a "white supremacist who spreads racist hate".

The media criminals are not providing us with an intelligent analysis of the world or its problems. If we had a respectable media, we would be told that all humans suffer from this problem. Arrogance is not restricted to Germans. In fact, it is not even restricted to adults; many children believe they are superior to adults.

Jews who behave in a similar manner, or worse, are not described as "Jewish supremacists", nor are they described as "spreading racist hate"; rather, they are given headlines such as:

Smart Jews

Are Jews Smarter?

It Jews can behave in such an arrogant manner, why can't Germans, little girls, and Arabs? Why don't the Jews set a good example for us dumb goys?

Are you supporting these media criminals?

Most of our friends, relatives, and neighbors are supporting the media criminals financially by purchasing their deceptive publications and Hollywood movies.

Each of us has a choice in regards to the publications we support. We can read articles such as this one, or we can buy a Newsweek magazine or a New York Times newspaper.

We can listen to a radio show such as The French Connection with Daryl Bradford Smith, or we can turn on the television and watch the ABC Evening News.

Nobody is forcing any us to do anything. However, most people are choosing to watch the deceptive news, and read the deceptive publications.

Tell your friends and relatives that if they support criminals, they should expect more crime. If they want a better world, they have to support people who are respectable.

Brigham Young University (BYU) issued a public statement this week, discrediting and distancing itself from physics Professor Steven E. Jones for publicly claiming the WTC was brought down by explosives not jet fuel like the government contends.

Jones, a tenured BYU professor, went public two weeks ago after releasing a 19 page academic paper, essentially showing how the laws of physics do not support the WTC’s freefall and, consequently, the official government story.

While expressing doubt about the government’s version of 9/11, he called for an independent investigation concerning the strange collapse of the towers and Building No. 7, something the 9/11 Commission failed to do and something the Bush administration adamantly opposes.

However, Jones’ notoriety turned out to be short lived as only days after giving numerous press interviews, including a six-minute spot on MSNBC, BYU officials twisted his arm and convinced him to stop appearing publicly.

Critics quickly pointed out that Jones must have been ‘silenced quickly’ after the Bush administration pressured BYU to end any further embarrassment while, at the same time, reminding officials about the numerous government grants swinging in the balance.

But before the situation turned ugly, Jones himself tried to immediately end the controversy, claiming all parties reached an amicable agreement without anybody strong arming anybody.

“I want to thank everyone for the attention, but it is best that I limit my appearances at this time,” said Jones in a telephone conversation from his BYU office only five days after first appearing publicly about his controversial 9/1 statements. “University officials and I have come to an understanding that in the best interest for all parties involved, it is better that I limit my speaking on 9/11 to academic peer reviews.”

Even though all parties appeared to be on the same “closed mouth” page, BYU this week BYU came out with an official statement, distancing itself from its professor and even finding a way to politely criticize him for the methods he used in researching his 9/11 paper, adding his techniques may have not been up to high standards usually attached to other BYU academic work.

The paper now openly questioned by BYU officials is entitled “Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse” and has been accepted for academic publication included in the book “The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Research in Political Economy, Volume 23.”

Finding a way to discredit Jones in a subtle way, BYU issued the following public statement about Jones’ controversial 9/11 views:

“Brigham Young University has a policy of academic freedom that supports the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge and ideas. Through the academic process, ideas should be advanced, challenged, and debated by peer-review in credible venues. We believe in the integrity of the academic review process and that, when it is followed properly, peer-review is valuable for evaluating the validity of ideas and conclusions.

“The university is aware that Professor Steven Jones' hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones' department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review.”

Jones was unavailable for comment as he is no longer talking openly with the media, but when he did talk it created a stir which even was addressed on MSNBC by conservative talk show host, Tucker Carlson.

Jones made a brief six minute appearance, saying publicly afterwards he was unhappy by the “one-sided presentation” siding with the government as well as Carlson’s failure to show the video clip of Building No. 7 freefalling to the ground as requested by Jones during the show.

“I asked three times to play the clip of Building No. 7 falling but they wouldn’t do it,” said Jones after the appearance with Carlson, a well-known Bush administration mouthpiece who slanted Jones’ story in favor of the government, as expected.

Not only did Carlson refuse to address key visual evidence clearly showing a freefall of the WTC, he also issued a statement telling Jones and others who think the government may have been complicit in 9/11 to leave the country, an analysis completely lacking sensibility and bordering on outright insanity.

Responding to a caller about pre-positioned explosives detonated in all three buildings at Ground Zero, Carlson said:

“If you really believe the U.S. government killed 3000 of its own citizens for no reason and lied about it and invaded Afghanistan as a result of something it did, you ought to leave the country… because that’s so terrible… so evil, that your tax dollars go in to support it make you complicit in it… if you really believe that, you ought to leave…”

Besides the MSNBC appearance, Jones previously granted one of his first interviews to the Arctic Beacon and American Free Press, also making one of his only radio appearances before going silent on Greg Szymanski’s radio show, “The Investigative Journal,” on the Republic Broadcasting Network. For a replay of the hour-long radio interview go to www.rbnlive.com (archives page) and for a feature article on Jones go to www.arcticbeacon.com.

Before ending his media appearances, Jones tried to explain why he wrote his paper:

“I wanted to limit my discussion to my expertise and that is why I talked mainly about the physics of the freefall of the towers and Building 7,” said Jones, adding he did criticize the so-called “pod theory” or the theory that a “drone plane” was used to crash into the towers.

In his paper, Jones stayed away from commenting on most other aspects of 9/11 except for the freefall of the towers and the limited criticism of the “pod theory.”

“I did receive emails about why I did that (criticized the pod theory) and even told Morgan Reynolds, I really felt it was important to stick with the issues of 9/11 that are the most obvious and the easiest to prove. That is why I wanted to limit my discussion, but in further papers I plan to address other 9/11 issues. Also, I feel the 9/11 community needs to work together and not be splintered by constantly arguing among ourselves over conflicting theories that may take away from the ones we can conclusively prove.”

Jones literally shocked the “Red State” of Utah and the conservative world when he released his 19 page critical paper basically ripping apart the official 9/11 story, limiting his discussion to his expertise in physics and the virtual impossibility of the towers falling from merely jet fuel as the government contends.

Jones earlier said he first presented his explosive conclusions at Brigham Young University (BYU) on September 22, to 60 people from the BYU and Utah Valley State College faculties, including professors of Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mathematics and Psychology.

After presently scientific arguments in favor of the controlled demolition theory, Jones said everyone in attendance from all backgrounds, conservative and liberal, were in total agreement further investigation was needed.

Jones added that the contingent of faculty members at the September seminar were all in agreement that the government needed to “come clean” and release more that 6,900 photographs and close to 7,000 segments of video footage, now being held from independent investigation by the FBI and other agencies.

In Jones’ 9,000 word paper, his conclusions why the towers most likely were brought down by a controlled demolition can be summed up as follows.:

• The three buildings collapsed nearly symmetrically, falling down into their footprints, a phenomenon associated with "controlled demolition" — and even then it's very difficult, he says. "Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC-7 and the Towers when 'toppling over' falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan?" Jones asks. "And where would they obtain the necessary skills and access to the buildings for a symmetrical implosion anyway? The 'symmetry data' emphasized here, along with other data, provide strong evidence for an 'inside' job."

• No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns, he says.

• WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. "Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?" he asks. "That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors — and intact steel support columns — the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. . . . How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?" The paradox, he says, "is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses." These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST nor the 9/11 Commission, he says.

• With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattering concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling, he says. "How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing — and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon."

• Horizontal puffs of smoke, known as squibs, were observed proceeding up the side the building, a phenomenon common when pre-positioned explosives are used to demolish buildings, he says.

• Steel supports were "partly evaporated," but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel — and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in any given location, he says.

• Molten metal found in the debris of the World Trade Center may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite, he says. Buildings not felled by explosives "have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal," Jones says.

• Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck, he says.

RALEIGH, N.C. Nov 28, 2005 — One of the nation's leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide against selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law.

Diebold Inc., which makes automated teller machines and security and voting equipment, is worried it could be charged with a felony if officials determine the company failed to make all of its code some of which is owned by third-party software firms, including Microsoft Corp. available for examination by election officials in case of a voting mishap.

The requirement is part of the minimum voting equipment standards approved by state lawmakers earlier this year following the loss of more than 4,400 electronic ballots in Carteret County during the November 2004 election. The lost votes threw at least one close statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months.

About 20 North Carolina counties already use Diebold voting machines, and the State Board of Elections plans to announce Thursday the suppliers that meet the new standards. Local elections boards will be allowed to purchase voting machines from the approved vendors.

"We will obviously have no alternative but withdraw from the process," said Doug Hanna, a Raleigh-based lawyer representing North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold.

David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said the company was reviewing several options after Monday's ruling. "We're going to do what is necessary to provide what is best for our existing clients" in North Carolina, he said.

The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system," as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software.

That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows.

The film is shaky, its pixillated frames jarring as it scans across the contents of the makeshift morgue. A leg, a dark mound of pubic hair, a heavily burned head, a broad chest that must for years have seemed invulnerable. About 60 bodies are heaped without decency or clothing on the floor of the refrigerated wagon, their blank faces caught by the mobile phone's camera.

"It looks like something from Treblinka," says Raya, whose son Vyacheslav, 30, a former Russian special forces soldier, lies among the dead. "I looked for him for a week before I found him there."

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Yet the authorities say these are not the bodies of victims but of "terrorists", some of at least 92 men shot dead by special forces when they staged one of the biggest uprisings in Russia since the second Chechen war in 1999. On October 13, about 200 men in the sleepy southern spa town of Nalchik staged simultaneously eight armed attacks on police stations, the headquarters of the security and prison services.

The attacks failed spectacularly. Groups of about eight to 10 men, many from the town's educated, young middle classes, appeared hopelessly ill-trained to face Russia's souped-up special forces. One witness who watched the storming of the security services building recalls hearing them shouting frantically at each other: "How do you reload a grenade launcher?"

Officials say that the attacks began when police unearthed an arms dump meant to supply a larger uprising in early November, and the militants decided to go for broke, summoned by just a phone call from the underground Islamic groups that they had joined.

Police responded with brutal efficiency and the insurgency was over within hours. In total, officials said, 33 police and 12 civilians died, far fewer casualties than after previous attacks by Islamic militants in the region. But the violence had one undeniable consequence: Russia had lost the control and the cooperation of yet another town in the troubled north Caucasus.

In mid-2002, when I first came to the region, extremist and separatist violence was limited to the grey ruins of Chechnya, crippled by two separatist wars in the 90s. But by 2003, the violence had begun to spread to neighbouring Ingushetia, then further west to the tiny town of Beslan in September last year. By the end of this year, months of violence in Dagestan, to Chechnya's east, and the Nalchik attacks in the previously dozy republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, proved conclusively that the Kremlin had failed to keep a lid on the violent radicalisation of an entire region. Moscow may blame foreign fundamentalism for infecting its southern flank, but it is clear that Europe now has its own indigenous Islamist movement with militant teeth, what one analyst close to the Putin administration has called a "Russian Hamas". Extremists within the movement advocate establishing by force an Islamist caliphate across the north Caucasus.

Last Sunday, Russia attempted to complete the political solution it has imposed on the republic by holding parliamentary elections, a final bid to convince the outside world that the conflict is ebbing rather than intensifying. Ahead of the vote, I travelled from Nalchik in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria through five other republics to see how and why Islamic radicalism began to captivate the north Caucasus.

The growing power of the jamaats

The bodies of the dead of Nalchik will not be returned to their relatives. Russian anti-terrorist laws forbid it, but critics say the move is designed to thwart the Muslim imperative to bury the dead within 24 hours.

Raya's son Vyacheslav had wanted to be a policeman when he left the elite Russian special forces. "He tried to join, but I did not have the money to pay the bribe needed to get a job there," she says. "Nobody needs people like him, who don't smoke, drink or pay bribes. All he wanted to do was live cleanly and honestly." She says her son joined a local "jamaat", or council, a strict Islamic group which claims to offer an alternative system of justice to the corruption of the local authorities.

Raya's membership of the jamaat and regular attendance at a mosque attracted the attention of the local police, says his mother. He was arrested twice, she says, once as he left prayer. "They beat him, once on the kidneys so badly that he could not work [as a builder] for a week. After you go through that, you are ready to do anything."

Tales of police abuse are echoed by others. Fatima Mamayeva's husband, Timur, is now on a police wanted list for suspected involvement in the uprising; earlier this year, he was arrested and heavily beaten four times. "They put a plastic bag over his head to partially suffocate him." She says police recently joked to her that she will have to take revenge as a "shakhidka", or female suicide bomber.

Another suspect is Rasul Kudayev, a former wrestling champion whom the Russian authorities cite as proof of the international connection to the militants. Kudayev was arrested in Afghanistan by US troops in 2001 and held in Guantánamo Bay. In May 2004, he returned home to Nalchik, telling his family he had been given mysterious coloured pills and subjected to extreme temperatures, irritant gels and stress positions. He told them that local police continued to harass him for months and then accused him of attacking a police checkpoint on October 13. They arrested him 10 days later. His lawyer, Irina Komissarova, says that when she saw him on October 26 he had to be carried into the room and had clearly been beaten.

One woman, Ira, had two sons who died in the arrests, Rustam, 25, and Ansur, 21. She says they were both graduates with no history of arrest. "If they are guilty, then they are guilty, but how can they be terrorists? They attacked government buildings and police."

The mobile phone film of the morgue is circulating, and fuelling their anger. "What do you think is going to happen next if we can't get the bodies?" says Rustam, hinting at further insurrection. "What would you want to do?"

Poverty and religion

Moscow's bid to master the predominantly Muslim Caucasus is a centuries-old and turbulent enterprise, born in tsarist times of an imperial need to "civilise" a neighbouring people. But since the fall of the proudly secular Soviet Union, corrupt local government and intense poverty have been the catalyst of an Islamic revival in the north Caucasus.

The Kremlin has often played down social decline in this tinderbox region. But in June this year, Putin's envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitri Kozak, wrote a report for his boss that said intense local corruption, unemployment and police abuses were bolstering the role "extremist groups" and "Sharia enclaves" were playing in the region. Poverty hasn't helped; over the past three years, the United Nations Development Programme in Moscow has noted, living standards have risen across Russia but remained the same in the north Caucasus. In this climate, anger has grown, and the response from Moscow has been brutal, the practical application of Putin's famous promise to "kill the terrorists in the outhouse". All of which has made the Islamist alternative appear more attractive.

Rasul is a senior figure in the Kabardino-Balkaria jamaat. Young, well shaven and liberally doused in aftershave, Rasul is the only one of three deputies to the jamaat's head - a fugitive ideologist called Musa Mukhozhev - who is not on the run or believed to be dead.

Rasul spent three and a half years at a retreat in Saudi Arabia, where he learned Arabic. His jamaat, which forms smaller deputy councils in each village, requires that its members go to the mosque as often as possible to pray. "The jamaat is never supposed to do anything against the local government," he says. "We go to the local administration and say that we have a group of young, physically fit volunteers who are ready to help people with any problem." He says the groups, which are often led by a young man rather than a village elder, follow a contemporary take on sharia law that bans drinking and frowns upon smoking and premarital sex. Suspected criminals are called to make amends before their peers and are threatened with expulsion from the jamaat, he says. Would the group ever use violence to further its ends? "Yes. When we have to."

Rasul blames the Nalchik attacks on a months-long crackdown by police against suspected radicals. "They started arresting the youth in the villages," he says. "They were shaving crosses in their heads." He says many were tortured: a 28-year-old had a bottle inserted in his rectum and had to go to hospital to have it removed; people were battered on the kidneys; fingers were slammed in doors. A spokeswoman for the Kabardino-Balkaria police denied all accusations of torture and said such "rumours" are distributed by those interested in "destabilising the republic".

Rasul says most participants in the October 13 violence were "well connected" to local jamaats. "There is not one person who took part in that who was not beaten by the police," he claims. "If the torture continues then it [the conflict] will become more radical. If they keep beating our sisters and parking armoured personnel carriers near our houses, then the 4,800 men left in the jamaats will not listen to Musa [Mukhozhev, their leader]. They will not listen to anyone."

A lockdown now chokes Nalchik. Thousands of Russian troops, drafted in from across Russia's south, stand on street corners and sleep in school gyms, where six-year-olds now go to school next to men with AK47s. One senior Russian ministry of interior officer says: "Chechnya is now in the 10th stage [of insurgency]. They are getting cleverer and cleverer. But this place is in stage one. We have to take hardcore measures; it will die down and we can go home."

Back to Chechnya

To reach Chechnya, I have to pass through the republics of North Ossetia and Ingushetia. The former is home to Beslan, where at least 32 gunmen held a school hostage last September, killing 331, roughly half of whom were children. In 2002, the United Nations rated Ingushetia as the second worst place to live in Russia (after the remote republic of Tyva, just north of Mongolia). Since then it has also begun to resemble a conflict zone. In June last year, militants took over the capital Nazran for a night, killing up to 100 local police.

Chechnya's own capital, Grozny, is a city ground down to a dusty despair. When I arrived, prior to the elections on Sunday, it was under a deep fog. The vote marked an almost surreal attempt to impose some common ground on the warring factions among Chechen society, whose internecine violence is proving such a powerful recruiting tool for Islamic militants. The pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, won nearly two-thirds of the votes, amid widespread accusations of serious electoral fraud.

In March 2003, the Kremlin handed over control of Chechnya to a loyal group of Chechens headed by the mayor of Grozny, Akhmed Kadyrov. Installed as president in October that year, he and his son Ramzan, 28, began buying up an impressive army of former militants and mercenaries that became known as the "Kadyrovtsi" - Kadyrov's people.

The Kremlin gave these pro-Russian Chechens the task of suppressing fellow Chechen separatists and militants, thus turning Chechen against Chechen. The Kadyrovtsi, who quickly earned the Russian military's brutal reputation, have gradually become the republic's new caretakers.

There are now four main groupings among the pro-Russian Chechens, some more orderly than others. On June 4, a unit from one of the battalions carried out an operation on the border between Chechnya and Dagestan. Just after 4pm, 300 masked troops burst into the village of Borozdinovskaya and, in an uncomfortable echo of the Beslan massacre, herded its men into the school, where they were held, say witnesses, for nine hours. Eleven men were led away and have not been heard of since.

It's a familiar equation, one that Zerem, a senior commander in another unit, says makes the militants even more popular. "All the time we are bickering among ourselves, they get stronger and stronger," he says, pointing to a region on a map of Chechnya on the wall of his Grozny office. With his finger he draws an oval around four villages in the south: the volatile Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt regions. In this region, Zerem says, the militant leader Doha Umarov commands 200 men out of a scattered force of about 3,000 Islamic militants.

Zerem says this year eight men have left his home village to join the Islamists. "The militants are agitating very strongly right now. They have a recruiter in every village. The government is paying no attention to the youth at the moment, and if someone is beaten, let's say by federal troops, he will join the militants to take revenge."

Dagestan

High in the hills of the mountains above the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala, about four hours' drive from Grozny, is the village of Ghimri. A ramshackle tunnel bores through the mountains for the last three miles, leading out on to what seems like a different country, the green star and crescent flags of Islam peppering the unrefined beauty of the landscape.

The local school teaches Arabic, women cover their hair, arms and legs, and in rare cases, their faces. When someone was last caught drinking two years ago, they got 40 lashes. Local criminals are asked to repent before their peers at the local mosque. Most residents claim the village adheres to some form of sharia law; whether it adheres to Russian law is open to question. In May three men shot dead a local police chief who was trying to stop them blowing up the tunnel to the village. They hid in Ghimri, the village refused to give them up and the police dared not enter.

Outside the mosque, Magomed-Ali, 17, says: "We have sharia here. Theft does not occur. People do not drink. Some smoke, but only a bit." The town has its own jamaat that works alongside (some say above) the local administration.

Habib, 27, moved here after finishing his Islamic studies in Syria in 2001. "Each person has their own path and we have ours here," he says. "You know the situation. Our youth talk about jihad. I have my children, my family and we all fulfil what we can of our Islamic obligations."

Habib expresses concern that the federal authorities might move to reassert secular control over the village. "Who wants their home destroyed?" he asks. He is right to be concerned. The town of Karamakhi , a mucky cabbage plantation a few hours drive from Ghimri, renounced Russian rule and declared itself under sharia law in 1998. By September the next year, Putin's military had removed many of the roofs from the village's houses, leaving its 5,000 residents to live among the ruins. According to Ibadullah Mukayev, now the head of the local administration, at least 50 residents were killed. "People saw how bad it was," says Mukayev, "what happened to their homes. If you go against Russia, where do you go?"

But Dagestan retains active, extremist local jamaats. Explosions and gunfights have claimed the lives of police and militants almost every second day since January. In Makhachkala, I am given a propaganda video made by local young "mujahideen" by a militant sympathiser who gives his name only as Abdul. The son of a well-known Islamic ideologist in the region, he begins the now familiar justification. He was himself tortured by the police two years ago, he says. "They picked me up off the street, and knew who I was. They beat me with telephone cables, batons. They put a gas mask on my head and beat my chest. I weighed 70 kilograms when I went in, and 47 when I came out two months later." He lists other torture methods he has heard of: objects violently inserted into the anus, women and children raped in front of male relatives. The Dagestani police deny all allegations of torture.

Like Rasul in Nalchik, Abdul is a meek young man reeking of aftershave. Yet his rhetoric becomes less gentle when he speaks of what should follow. "The reaction of any man to this is to take up arms and get revenge. The jamaat provides a focus for the soul, and our members are not the unemployed or discontented, but the educated and middle class. We have lost 40 Dagestani members of the jamaat so far this year against the police. The aim of the jamaat is to create a united Islamic caliphate in the north Caucasus and live as is written in the Koran. Will the fight be difficult? Yes. It is written that it should be."

Civilian casualties are an "unintentional consequence" of jihad, he says. As we pass a checkpoint, he winds up the window between him and the police officer outside and continues with an ominous confidence.

"No part of this jamaat is underground. We can all go where we want, rent a flat, raise a family, travel to Moscow." He mocks police incompetence: "They do not know who we are." Then he shakes my hand in parting, courteous and demure. "Assalam alaikum," he says. Peace be with you.

Lee Yoon-hyung was young, beautiful, clever, and rich beyond belief. An heiress to the family that controls South Korea's Samsung Group, she loved fine art and racing cars. She had recently moved to New York and had everything to live for. But then, 11 days ago, she hanged herself in her Manhattan apartment.

It sounds like the classic tale of the poor little rich girl - particularly in the light of reports that 26-year-old Lee had been forbidden by her father, the Samsung chairman, Lee Kun-hee, to marry the man she loved.

But the story of her demise is not quite so straightforward, and its gradual unravelling in recent days has cast a harsh light on the secretive family that controls huge swathes of South Korea's business interests. Best known in the West for its electronics arm, Samsung is the world's largest manufacturer of computer memory chips and is South Korea's biggest and most powerful conglomerate. Lee Kun-hee is one of the richest men in a country that is often dubbed the Republic of Samsung.

His son and three daughters were well provided for. Lee Yoon-hyung, although not directly involved in the company, had a personal fortune of more than £100m. After graduating in French literature from Ewha Women's University in Seoul last year, she moved to the US to study arts management at New York University. Early last week newspapers in South Korea, typically quoting officials rather than the Samsung family, carried prominent articles announcing her death in a car crash. One official told the press that she had been "pronounced medically dead" following the accident. The South Korean newspaper, JoongAng Daily, reported that she died soon after being taken to hospital, and that a "simple, Buddhist-style" funeral took place in Manhattan on Monday. The Korea Herald quoted yet another Samsung representative saying that the company did not feel obliged to provide more details, adding: "We want to avoid unnecessary rumours that may circulate."

But when the affair was delved further into, it began to look somewhat murky. Three reporters from The Korea Times, a New York-based newspaper, quickly uncovered curious inconsistencies in Samsung's account. It was not clear, for instance, where the accident happened - according to some reports, it took place in the city; according to others, it happened on the outskirts. There were no witnesses, other details were shrouded in vagueness and most crucially, the New York Police Department had no record of a fatal car crash involving Lee.

It wasn't until a week later that the true circumstances of her death were revealed: on Saturday 19 November, Lee hanged herself with an electrical cord in her East Village apartment, by attaching the cord to a door. Her boyfriend, Soobin Shin, and a friend of his, had discovered her body at 3am.

Confronted with this evidence gathered from the police and the city medical examiner's office, Samsung finally confirmed the suicide but simultaneously denied that it had sought to mislead the public. A spokesman in Seoul, Yim Jun-seok, said that, early on, it too had believed that she died in an accident. "At the time the story initially broke, we had an insufficient amount of information," he explained. The company said that, when it learnt the truth, it did not correct the erroneous reports because it regarded the death as a personal matter. "To preserve the dignity of the deceased and out of respect for the bereaved, it was not our place to correct the press reports," the spokesman said. "It was a tragic incident and the family was already suffering."

Few people had any inkling of the acute unhappiness that drove a young woman with a promising future to take her own life. Lee was the most outgoing of the four Samsung heirs, as her elder siblings, her brother, Lee Jae-yong, and two sisters, Lee Pu-jin and Lee Seo-hyun, preferred to keep a low profile. She was one of South Korea's five wealthiest women, with three of the others being her mother and sisters. Her self-confidence and charm were evident in her personal website, called Pretty Yoon Hyung, which since 2003 had detailed her life of privilege. Eventually she was forced to close it down because it grew so popular, but even so her fans created another site devoted to her.

In Korea, she was always accompanied by at least two bodyguards and, after she moved to New York, a driver on 24-hour call escorted her around the city in her limousine. When she enrolled at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, she took a luxurious apartment in Astor Place, in the bohemian East Village. She apparently hoped that she would eventually take over the running of Samsung's cultural foundation, and had already amassed an impressive personal art collection.

But her glamorous lifestyle, it seems, was a façade. A doorman at her building told reporters that she sometimes stayed in her apartment for a week at a time. It is not clear whether she left a suicide note, but a source close to her suggested that she had been suffering from loneliness and depression during her time in the US. This has been partly attributed to the fact that Lee was pining for a boyfriend in Korea whom she had wished to marry. But her plans were thwarted by her parents, who considered him too lowly a match, and the couple broke up.

Since September, Lee's 64-year-old father had also been in the States receiving post-operative treatment for lung cancer. But although he and Lee's mother, Hong Ra-hee, flew to New York, they did not attend her funeral, as it is customary in Korea for the parents not to attend the funeral of an unmarried child. After Samsung eventually confirmed the suicide, a company spokesman said she had been worried about her father's health and upset by the fact that he was facing a "difficult time" in South Korea.

The secretive way in which Lee Yoon-hyung's death has been handled is said to be typical of a company notorious for its furtive business dealings. Originally founded by her grandfather, in the 1930s, as a small family business exporting fish and vegetables, last year the group's sales were equivalent to one-sixth of the country's annual gross domestic product. But, recently, the company has been embroiled in a string of scandals, ranging from alleged corruption to financial irregularities. Samsung recently pleaded guilty in the US to taking part in a scheme to fix the price of flash-memory chips (sold to Apple at below market prices for use in the iPod Nano music player) and agreed to pay a $300m fine.

Last month two company executives were given suspended jail terms over a deal that helped Lee Kun-hee's children buy a majority stake in an affiliate, through bonds acquired at below market prices in order to transfer corporate control to Lee Yoon-hyung and her siblings. Lee Kun-hee's departure for the US coincided with a request from a parliamentary committee for him to testify about alleged irregularities at a former Samsung automobile unit, and South Korean prosecutors are also investigating allegations that the company provided illegal funds to presidential candidates.

While suicide carries a stigma in South Korea, Yongil Shin, one of the Korea Times reporters assigned to investigate Lee's death, said he was pleased that the truth had emerged. He told The New York Times: "The truth about the death itself, how she died; you owe it to the person, really, to have the correct story out."

An upsurge in fundamentalism is seriously threatening the role of science in shaping the modern world, Britain's most senior scientist will warn today.

In a valedictory speech to mark the end of his five year presidency of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will claim that fundamentalist thought in all its guises, from religious beliefs to the ideologies of green lobby groups, is skewing debates over some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, such as climate change and emerging diseases.

Such is the influence of groups that ignore or misinterpret scientific evidence, that the core values that underpinned the Enlightenment and led to "free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited questioning and inquiry, individual liberty and separation of church and state" are being eroded, Lord May believes.

In his address to the society, titled Threats to Tomorrow's World, Lord May will criticise groups for putting their own traditions, unsupported beliefs and dogmas above scientific evidence. "Fundamentalism doesn't necessarily derive from sacred texts. It's where a belief trumps a fact and refuses to confront the facts.

"All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding," he will say.

The problem is most prominent in the debate over climate change, Lord May claims, comparing the climate change denial lobby, which is "funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars" by the petroleum industry, with the tobacco lobby, which continues to deny that smoking causes lung cancer. The green groups were not spared criticism."We need to recognise that on the one hand there are huge problems with nuclear energy, while on the other hand there are huge problems with putting carbon into the atmosphere." It was hard to see renewable energy replacing nuclear power "on the timescale we need."

Lord May is particularly critical of the Catholic church and its comments on the use of condoms, which are proven to reduce the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. "The Vatican in particular promotes abstinence outside marriage, and condemns condom use. This disapproval, for all its putative high-mindedness, simply is not an effective strategy for preventing dissemination of HIV."

The speech warns of the emerging problem of creationism being taught in school science lessons as a theory on equal footing with evolution. Lord May called on scientists to be more proactive in making their voices heard.

"Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason. The scientific community should be energetically engaging the political process in all the avenues that can be pursued." He urged scientists to be "more energetic as citizens and getting out there and trying to convince people".

Lord May, an Oxford University professor of zoology, stands down as president of the Royal Society today, making way for Professor Sir Martin Rees, the Cambridge University-based Astronomer Royal.

Anyone willing to fork out €14,000 (£9,600) for a Paris hotel room is, on balance, unlikely to lose much sleep over the claim that they may have paid marginally over the odds. But lesser mortals learned yesterday that six super-deluxe hotels in the French capital were guilty of regularly exchanging confidential price information. In other words, operating a cartel.

France's competition watchdog on Monday imposed fines ranging from €55,000 to €248,000 on the half-dozen obscenely opulent and staggeringly expensive hotels known as the Palaces of Paris: the Bristol, Crillon, George V, Meurice, Plaza Athénée, and Ritz.

"It's the first time in France that this jurisprudence on exchanging information has actually been applied," said a competition council spokesman. "They basically agreed among themselves an average room price and occupancy rate. We consider it quite a big deal."

The heaviest fine was inflicted on the Crillon, the magnificent 18th-century neo-classical colossus overlooking the Place de la Concorde. With its cheapest room costing €500 a night (in low season) and its most expensive suite, the Bernstein, €8,000, its guests have included: the Emperor Hirohito and King George V; US presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Nixon, Clinton and Bush; Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna.

The Ritz on the Place Vendôme, where rooms range from €610 to €8,500, breakfast costs €62 and past clients include King Edward VII and Lady Diana, was fined €104,000. Plaza Athénée, whose 450 sq metre (5,000 sq ft) Royal suite costs €14,000 a night, was fined €106,000.

The watchdog report, which followed a 2001 French television documentary, said the six hotels were a distinct, "oligopolistic" market and the exchange of information would falsify competition.

It said representatives of the hotels met regularly and exchanged mails frequently. Among evidence cited was a 2001 email sent by a George V manager to his rivals: "Please find enclosed our results. We await yours with interest." Attached was a table detailing the hotel's room occupancy rate and average room price.

According to the report, the average price of a room in the six hotels between 1999 and 2001 was €700 a night while an average suite cost €6,000.

France can be pleased about one thing, however: 90% of clients were foreign.

France's lower house of parliament has voted in favour of a new terrorism law that is set to allow greatly increased video surveillance of public places.

The bill, drawn up after the London transport bombings, was supported on Tuesday by the 373 deputies of the ruling centre-right UMP and its ally the UDF. The 27 deputies from the Communist and Green parties voted against and the main opposition Socialists abstained.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told parliament the law would "equip France with a more effective arsenal to prevent terrorist acts" and would give "the law enforcement authorities greater means to avoid a catastrophe".

He welcomed lawmakers' decision to "stand by a policy that is intransigent towards and against terrorists".

The bill is set to be put before the Senate in mid-December.

British influence

Sarkozy, who drew up the legislation after the attacks on London's transport network in July, in which 56 people died, was reportedly impressed by British investigators' use of video footage to identify the perpetrators.

The law would make it possible to install video cameras on the public transport system, in places of worship and in shops.

It would also give police wider access to telephone and computer data as well as to previously confidential customer information from rail, maritime and air transport companies.

Longer prison terms would be introduced for convicts in terrorism cases and the maximum period for which a suspect can be held without charge would be increased from four to six days.

France lifted its terrorism alert level to "red", the third highest on a four-colour scale, after the London bombings.

Gold for immediate delivery touched $497.02 on Nov. 25, the highest intraday price since December 1987, as Japanese investors bought bullion to hedge against inflation and jewelers in Asia and Europe stocked up. Lassonde's prediction surpasses a Merrill Lynch & Co. forecast in July that gold may rise to $725 by 2010 because of rising demand from China.

"When any of these markets get momentum behind them, you tend to find some pretty outrageous calls," said Mark Pervan, head of resources research at Daiwa Securities SMBC Australia in Melbourne. "There's going to be a lot of gold calls made in this environment, it's similar to the oil market about six months ago when people" were saying oil may reach $100 a barrel, he said.

Gold may top a record $873 during the next three years because the U.S. will be unable to check inflation caused by rapid growth in China and India, William Gary, a publisher of newsletters with subscribers that include hedge fund Tudor Investment Corp., forecast last month.

China, India

Some investors buy gold to hedge against accelerating inflation. Gold futures surged to $873 an ounce in 1980, when U.S. consumer prices rose more than 12 percent from the previous year. Gold last climbed above $500 an ounce on Dec. 11, 1987.

"Everybody thinks inflation is going to stay at 2 percent, I don't believe it," said Lassonde. "There has been way too much money printing in the world for that to happen."

Inflation, excluding food and energy, will probably rise 2.4 percent by the fourth quarter next year from this quarter, up from a 2.1 percent gain a year earlier, a survey by the National Association for Business Economics found.

Newmont said Oct. 26 third-quarter profit fell 2.3 percent to $126 million as output dropped 6.8 percent, eroding the benefit of rising gold demand and prices.

Worldwide gold production last year had the largest decline in 39 years, Lassonde said. Demand in India, the world largest consumer, rose 47 percent last fiscal year, and 14 percent in China, the world's fastest growing economy, he said.

The decline in output will continue "for at least another couple of years simply because the industry didn't put money back into the ground when the gold price was very low," Lassonde said. "On the other side demand is just surging everywhere. It is driven mostly by Asia, China and India." [...]

At 4 a.m. EST, Epsilon had top sustained winds of near 50 mph. It could strengthen over warm ocean waters before hitting cooler waters that should cause it to weaken, forecasters said. Surf conditions in Bermuda could become dangerous during the next few days, they said.

It was centered about 725 miles east of Bermuda and about 1,520 miles west of the Azores Islands. It was moving west at about 7 mph.

The Atlantic hurricane season lasts for six months.

FRANKFURT - Germans value letters attached to their name more than money, love or having children with nine out of ten rating a good qualification as their most important aim in life, a survey showed Wednesday.

In Germany even minor academic degrees appear on business cards and doctorate titles adorn many letter boxes.

According to a survey of 1,000 people by insurer Allianz just eight in ten Germans said finding love for life was their top priority and even fewer rated financial security as their number one goal.

Perfect bliss may be to have a title that runs longer than the length of a name, such as that of "Uni.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Horst Wildemann" at Munich's Technical University

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books have sought to explore the truth behind the official version of events that day - yet to date, none of these publications has provided a satisfactory answer as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately responsible for carrying them out.

Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11: The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks played out.

9/11: The Ultimate Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September 11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to keep us confused and distracted to the reality of the man behind the curtain.

Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the present day.

For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover their tracks, 9/11: The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's true implications are for the future of mankind.