How Bush's Torture Train Went off the Rails: An Exegesis of Evil in Numerous Parts

Let us now consider how George W. Bush's future as a free man hangs so precariously by a slender thread.

Back in the happy-go-lucky days after September 11, when Bush could get away with nearly anything he wanted (and he wanted to get away with a lot), his naturally malevolent character motivated him to seek ways to violate the Geneva Conventions. It never mattered to George whether torture is "effective" or "productive." It doesn't matter to him whether it produces false or misleading evidence, as it undoubtedly does and has. His motivations were always malicious, and the whole giant barge of baloney floated under the "ticking time bomb" theory of justification was always way, way beside the point.

No, George wanted legal license to make certain various Sons of Allah, more or less snagged at random, suffer in ways that the civilized world prohibits, simply because Bush does not like the constraints of civilization. Why he doesn't is again entirely beside the point.

Thus it was that Bush commissioned his crack team of Inquisitors to research the law of torture and abuse and find legal loopholes that would permit him to violate the Geneva Conventions. Preferably with complete impunity. Alberto Gonzalez, at that time White House Counsel, was naturally eager to help. He had helped Bush set an American record for executions in Texas while George was Governor, and established an unblemished standard of never, ever granting clemency to any condemned convict, including the retarded and the patently insane. Gonzales, sensing the gravity (and the opportunity) of the mission, retained the help of John Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley's Boalt Hall (the institution which has also spawned Phillip Johnson, the creationist apologist). Not surprisingly, Gonzalez and Yoo (and others eager to help, of course) found "the way forward." The al-Qaeda flotsam and jetsam falling into American hands in the mountains and poppy fields of Afghanistan weren't really humans at all. They were a kind of homo sapiens sub species known as "enemy combatants."

Bush was exultant. Waterboarding; beatings; mock executions; insanely loud music played in confined quarters for interminable periods; stress positions; the homoerotic fun of group nudity and sodomy; incarceration in dungeons and other shitholes; hypothermia; starvation and dehydration; fear, terror and intimidation. Even the occasional, lamentable death (46 at last count). All were now within the Administration's scaly grasp. What a great day for America. And on the surface of things, Bush seemed to have a pretty good case for his end-run around the norms of civilization. What law protected these untermenschen, if Article 3 read as follows?

Art 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following
provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

So far, so good, thought Bush & the Gang. Maybe the Taliban prisoners, as soldiers of a "High Contracting Party," (Afghanistan) were entitled to some kind of grudging civility. But the real prizes, the al-Qaeda creeps - no such luck. All bets were off. Al-Qaeda was not a signatory to anything. Not even a country, let alone a "contracting party." Crank that wheel another turn, Torquemada!

Along comes the elderly kill-joy John Paul Steves, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Writing for the Court in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld:

"The Court of Appeals thought, and the Government
asserts, that Common Article 3 does not apply to Hamdan
because the conflict with al Qaeda, being “‘international in
scope,’” does not qualify as a “ ‘conflict not of an international
character.’ ” 415 F. 3d, at 41. That reasoning is
erroneous. The term “conflict not of an international
character” is used here in contradistinction to a conflict
between nations. So much is demonstrated by the “fundamental
logic [of] the Convention’s provisions on its
application.” Id., at 44 (Williams, J., concurring). Common
Article 2 provides that “the present Convention shall
apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed
conflict which may arise between two or more of the High
Contracting Parties.” 6 U. S. T., at 3318 (Art. 2, ¶1). High
Contracting Parties (signatories) also must abide by all
terms of the Conventions vis-à-vis one another even if one
party to the conflict is a nonsignatory “Power,” and must
so abide vis-à-vis the nonsignatory if “the latter accepts
and applies” those terms. Ibid. (Art. 2, ¶3). Common
Article 3, by contrast, affords some minimal protection,
falling short of full protection under the Conventions, to
individuals associated with neither a signatory nor even a
nonsignatory “Power” who are involved in a conflict “in the
territory of” a signatory. The latter kind of conflict is
distinguishable from the conflict described in Common
Article 2 chiefly because it does not involve a clash between
nations (whether signatories or not). In context,
then, the phrase “not of an international character” bears
its literal meaning."

Upon such fine nuances may hang a man's entire future. Not so much a failure to read the fine print as a failure to appreciate the full import of the fine print. Hamdan, allegedly Osama's limo driver, was not "associated" with a signatory (the Afghan/Taliban or the United States), but he was, alas, "involved in a conflict 'in the territory' of a signatory" (Afghanistan). And, further alas, that conflict is "not of an international character" because as Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Addington, and Gonzalez, and Yoo, and Carbone and all the other charter members of Torture 'R Us keep insisting: Al Qaeda is not a nation, so it can't be involved in an international conflict, that is, one "between nations." Unfortunately for these future defendants (perhaps the near future, in Germany), this accurate observation had exactly the opposite effect to that hoped for.

So Common Article 3 is right on point. Oh, I know. It's so easy to figure something out once someone tells you the right answer.

Hamdan, it turns out, was a human being with rights under Article 3. Who could have imagined such a thing? The consequences of this revoltin' development, as Jimmy Durante would have said about something actually funny, will be spelled out next time.

Maybe the trial should be in Nuremberg

Posted Friday, Nov. 10, 2006
"Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." Time Magazine

To say the least, there is considerable irony in the idea of German prosecution of American war crimes. The prospect of German legal proceedings against Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Carbone and others first surfaced two years ago and caused a diplomatic dust-up because of its effect on Rumsfeld's plan to attend a conference in Munich. Rumsfeld, now operating ex officio, is not faced with that difficulty anymore, although it's unlikely he's planning any idyllic sojourns in the Bavarian Alps at present. That case was terminated by the Germans on the theory the USA would deal with its own war criminals in its own way, under the complex network of American federal statutes which deal with torture and violations of the Geneva Conventions (the War Crimes Act). No doubt this rather fanciful notion served diplomatic purposes of the moment, and could not have been reflective of actual German sentiment.

Under Germany's Code of Crimes Against International Law, which was introduced in 2002, German courts have universal jurisdiction in war crimes and crimes against humanity. As another instance of irony, the U.S. largely led the way in establishing international precedent for the prosecution of war crimes following World War II, and presumably the Germans, once hoist on this petard themselves, would draw on the principles as the textual basis for a prosecution of alleged American war crimes. The USA, as noted, carries the same general principles on its own books as part of the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Statute and the recently enacted Detainee Treatment Act (McCain bill) applying the anti-torture statute to all detainees in U.S. custody, whether or not designated "enemy combatants," an extension solidified by the decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court clarified the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to human beings in general, despite the strenuous efforts of Bush's Torture Brigade to create a special class of Untermenschen upon whom any atrocity or depraved act could be practiced with impunity, rather like another polity between 1933 and 1945.

The Supreme Court, having brought Bush up short with its Hamdan decision, motivated The Decider to decide to seek a get-out-of-jail free card in his Military Commissions Act. You may recall from an earlier Swim in the Pond that Bush was vociferous in his need, expressed in September, 2006, to get on with immediate trials at Guantanamo for his high value detainees being shipped there even as he spoke. Without risking too much sarcasm, one might note that (a) no trials are currently underway, as the Bush Administration fights mightily to deprive the inmates of counsel on the basis of Kafkaesque arguments also previously detailed, and (2) the real deadline Bush was up against was November 8, 2006, election day, when his pet Congress might turn a little unruly. The sole purpose of the MCA can be stated in the following, innocent-looking citations (the first is from the Military Commissions Act):

"(b) PROTECTION OF PERSONNEL.—Section 1004 of the Detainee
Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd–1) shall apply with respect
to any criminal prosecution that—
(1) relates to the detention and interrogation of aliens
described in such section;
(2) is grounded in section 2441(c)(3) of title 18, United
States Code; and
(3) relates to actions occurring between September 11,
2001, and December 30, 2005.

(The cited section from the Detainee Treatment Act reads in full as follows:)

SEC. 1004. PROTECTION OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL ENGAGED IN AUTHORIZED INTERROGATIONS.

(a) Protection of United States Government Personnel- In any civil action or criminal prosecution against an officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States Government who is a United States person, arising out of the officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent's engaging in specific operational practices, that involve detention and interrogation of aliens who the President or his designees have determined are believed to be engaged in or associated with international terrorist activity that poses a serious, continuing threat to the United States, its interests, or its allies, and that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time that they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful. Good faith reliance on advice of counsel should be an important factor, among others, to consider in assessing whether a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the practices to be unlawful. Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or extinguish any defense or protection otherwise available to any person or entity from suit, civil or criminal liability, or damages, or to provide immunity from prosecution for any criminal offense by the proper authorities. (Italics added.)"

Neat, huh? Without actually ever mentioning the words "exculpation" or "exoneration" in the Military Commissions Act, Bush completes his task of artful dodging by incorporating another no-worries the Republicans gladly handed him. And the italicized language is simply priceless. Bush will rely on the advice of the High Inquisitioner himself, Alberto Gonzalez, aided and abetted by John Yoo (another potential German defendant, and a person who sullies the proud traditions of UC Berkeley), as part of his airtight defense against prosecution for War Crimes under American law. Alberto, in that memo I asked him to put together to justify torture of "enemy combatants," told me it was okay to torture enemy combatants. So how could I have been doing anything wrong? Our noble President: craven, sneaky, dishonest, irresponsible to the very last. What a role model!

Under these circumstances, the Germans, who now have the assistance of the U.S. legal team representing Guantanamo prisoners (Michael Ratner and the Lawyers for Constitutional Rights), and Janet Karpinski, the military fall-woman for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, can perhaps be excused from their earlier decision to exercise, as they say, judicial restraint. Not only does the United States have no intention of ever prosecuting anyone for war crimes, at least under present arrangements; the Congress is actively engaged in making sure the whole thing is covered up.

It's simply shameful. Why, the Germans and the rest of the civilized world may ask, should the United States actively shield war criminals from the consequences of their actions? The German High Command, at least, could argue they were being charged with crimes that were not on anyone's books. Rumsfeld and his ilk violated statutes and the clear provisions of the Geneva Conventions in existence long before they took that road to the "dark side." And no, Mr. Bush - Common Article 3 is not "vague"--it is intentionally general, because it forbids indecent acts, and any decent person understands that what went on at Abu Ghraib, what has gone on in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, what has happened in all those secret CIA dungeons, degrades and debases the United States of America and the legal principles on which it was founded.

An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Dear Representative Pelosi:

Congratulations on your ascension to the Speakership of the House of Representatives. Like many other Northern Californians, I have watched the progress of your career from the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco to a position just two steps removed from the presidency. Throughout your career, you have conducted yourself, from everything I have been able to observe, with intelligence, grace, dignity and a sense of fair play.

I can understand, after 6 years of Bush's shameful leadership, your impulse to right the ship of state and proceed with a series of domestic and foreign legislative initiatives designed to assist ordinary Americans and to restore a sense of honor to America's standing in the world community. It is as if to say that the first task of the Democrats is to assure that the blood is made no redder, and that ameliorative steps, such as ethics reform, raising the minimum wage, funding stem cell research, taking real steps to deal with the existential threat of global warming, leveling the unfair playing field of trade agreements and other measures are urgent and must be delayed no further.

However, I take issue with your immediate reiteration (stated first during the campaign) that the impeachment of George W. Bush is "off the table." It is as if you have consigned this Constitutional perogative of the Congress to the trash bin of "politics as usual" or excessive "partisanship," and that from your perspective the fresh breeze blowing through Washington, D.C. is "about" (to use that overworked preposition) bipartisanship and cooperation "for the good of the American people." I have no doubt that your experience in politics makes you a far more savvy interpreter of political movements than I could ever hope to be. But I can't help feeling that you are succumbing, almost immediately, to an inside-the-Beltway style of business as usual, this time under the guise of a populist agenda of "reform," without really rocking the boat.

I think the boat needs rocking. I agreed with your assessments of President Bush made before the feel-good spectacle of the last couple of days; to wit, that he is chief Docent of the Republican "Culture of Corruption," that he is "incompetent," and that he is a "naked emperor." Your words, not ours, but about 70% of the American public agrees with you completely. The evidence in support of your evaluation is overwhelming. In fewer than six years:

Bush has left the Bill of Rights in tatters. He has destroyed the concept of the presumption of innocence. His despicable, junta-like disappearing of American citizens, such as (but not limited to) Jose Padilla as part of an undeclared "war on terror" has virtually no precedent, and certainly none we should be proud of. The Congress stood silently by while these abuses occurred, and they continue to occur even now. The Justice Department now argues at this very moment (with a straight, or perhaps smirking, face) that detainees at Guantanamo Bay who are to be tried before the tribunals established by the execrable (and unconstitutional) Military Commissions Act should not be allowed to talk to their attorneys because the detainees possess "top secret information" that would be disclosed in these conversations; namely, the location of the CIA dungeons where they were secretly kept, and the kind of tortures ("alternative interrogation techniques") practiced upon them. This kind of insanity would be farcical if it were not tragic. It bespeaks an "imperial" (to use your word) disregard for the rule of law.

So much for the Fifth and Sixth Amendments as they apply to detainees. For the abrogation of the rights of Americans to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment, we need look no further than President Bush's wholesale violations of the FISA law. Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School, and Bruce Fein, formerly counsel in the Reagan Administration, have not hesitated to brand Bush's actions "felonious." He simply rode roughshod over the clear requirements of the FISA law to seek appropriate warrants, after lying to the American people that he had sought such authorization. And Congress did nothing.

As for the Eighth Amendment, and its prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, we have Bush's systematic and blatant authorization for the use of torture at every level of his war on terror, on every front, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. When the Hamdan case made clear that Common Article 3 applied to all detainees simply and only because they were human beings, despite Bush's attempt to create a class of humans upon whom any atrocity could be practiced, Bush was caught up short. He realized that even with the help of a go-along Congress and a mostly go-along Court, he had overstepped his bounds and was now in jeopardy of yet another felony indictment, this one for violation of the Federal Anti-torture Statute, which incorporates the Geneva Conventions as part of its definitional criteria. Since people have died as the result of American torture, the death penalty was potentially applicable. Thus, Bush sought, and Congress of course gave him, a full exoneration (as part of the Military Commissions Act) for any atrocity practiced on enemy combatants at any time since September 11, 2001. This shameful pardon now stands on the books of the United States Code Annotated. The legislation was rushed through in advance of the November elections. Bush knew what was coming, and the putative reason for hurry, the need to get the trials underway immediately, was of course another of Bush's misrepresentations.

I think this episode betrays more than many others Bush's true mindset as he faces the last two years of his Presidency. It accounts for his conciliatory and gracious attitude toward your ascension to the Speakership, and his invitation to lunch. He needed to assess what he was dealing with. You and the Democrats could make life very hard indeed for George W. Bush. So his initial gambit was his usual back-slapping, nickname-calling, utterly false bonhomie. He is as sincere in this attitude of goodwill as he was about firing anyone in his cabinet who was involved in the disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA identity. It's another lie. It's another corrupt act. His goal is to co-opt the Democratic Congress so as to escape impeachment and indictment.

One could go on and on, of course. Bush's utter indifference to the fate of the Earth's climate, to the sale of the U.S.A. to foreign banks through budget and trade deficits, to war profiteering, to Americans without medical insurance, to the rule of law and respect for civil liberties. The list is so long it boggles the mind while it sickens the stomach.

Bush does not care about his legacy, his place in history or the welfare of the American people at large. A substantial majority of Americans know that, which is why Bush is so universally reviled. But it should be noted that before the election, American approval of Congress was even lower than Bush's job approval rating. I think that's because the American people see Congress as part of the problem. That Congress is in on it. That they have let Bush get away with everything. The Democrats have been given an opportunity to prove otherwise. To demonstrate they can clean house, and restore America's moral standing in the world community. If this opportunity is not seized, the American people will seek other solutions.

Whether the House impeaches Bush or not, I do not see the wisdom in "taking it off the table." This does not seem like good poker. The President is immune to moral suasion, to the appeals of reason, to the elicitation of his better angels. He understands power and the uses of fear. If I were Speaker, I would hold impeachment and the possibility of indictment over his head like a sword of Damocles. I would resist his importuning and play acting. I would use the power the American people had given me to keep him in line.

Sincerely,

Just in case you're wondering whether Bush is really capable of "changing the tone"

"The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

"Because Khan 'was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level,' an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for 'sensitive compartmented information.'" News reports on pretrial motions, United States vs. Khan.

So follow along with this if you can. In other words, travel with me all the way Through the Looking Glass into the Wonderland World of Bush's judicial logic.

Let us say that you are a "terrorist" who is "accused" of plotting "terrorist activity" in a "conspiracy (or otherwise)" against the United States. I use quotation marks for all these terms to suggest the contingent and amorphous nature of what we know so far about the "legal side" of the "war on terror." Which is to say, we don't really know anything. We don't have any idea who the people detained at Guantanamo are, what they did (if anything), or what they've been accused of (if anything). We just know there are several hundred men, overwhelmingly (exclusively?) Muslim, who may have been in Afghanistan at the time of the U.S. invasion in 2001, or they may be al-Qaeda "members" who have been captured there or elsewhere, and they may or may not have engaged in hostilities against the United States. Since the war on terror, under Bush's logic, can never end, and since it is customary to detain enemy combatants or prisoners of war until the cessation of hostilities, it is possible that these "enemy combatants" or "terrorists" or whatever the hell they are will be detained forever, unless they're tried, convicted and sentenced to death or to a term of years.

It used to be the case, under American jurisprudence, that the fact of detention or arrest did not prove anything. It started a legal process in motion whereby proof would be adduced and a decision made based on such evidence. In the case of an ordinary war conducted by a sane Commander in Chief, such as World War II, the capture of an enemy soldier, such as a German soldier confined in an American prisoner-of-war camp, simply resulted in temporary detention till the eventual cessation of hostilities, when the soldier would be repatriated.

In the insane world of Bushian America, however, we have neither of these situations. The confinement is open-ended; the detainees are termed "enemy combatants" because they are not recognized as members of a regular army entitled to repatriation, and repatriation is off the table anyway because the hostilities will never cease. That's why these "detainees" have been, in many cases, confined longer in Gitmo than probably any German soldier detained in an American POW camp during World War II. There is no way out. They're just "bad guys" without rights. Why are they bad? Perhaps they were engaged in hostilities against the United States during the Afghanistan war. Maybe they're people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, such as a heroin farmer taking his crop to market (for exportation to the United States, perhaps) when the American military came through. Maybe they're just three Pakistanis attending a friend's wedding, as happened to specific British nationals who endured a two-year nightmare of torture and abuse before their release.

One way you could find out what they did and whether they should be in Gitmo at all would be to furnish lawyers to represent them, and then conduct a hearing. You could call it "administrative habeas corpus," since we're loath to allow them the real kind, the kind where you go to an actual court. With the playing field slightly leveled, the detainee could present his case. The Bush Gang, seeing the difficulties involved in such normality, have now moved to block their access to legal counsel. And the reason? The detainees, whatever their low estate otherwise, have become privy to Top Secret Information. And what is that information? They are aware, perhaps, of the location of the secret dungeon where the CIA squirreled them away before transfer to Gitmo. And more. They know what the CIA did to them to extract information.

Well, it's plain as day to the Justice Department that these detainees, guilty by reason of detention, cannot be allowed to blab to their lawyers about the hellholes in which they were drowned, beaten and shocked into making confessions. That would compromise the security of the United States, since it's obvious that other terrorists, once informed of the nature of the drowning, beating and shocking, could easily resist without themselves coughing up a confession, false or otherwise. It doesn't need to make sense, of course. Nothing the Bush Administration ever does needs to make sense. "Preparing" yourself for torture doesn't help you resist torture, because there is no real preparation possible. But it's an argument, it's words on paper, anyway. It's worth a shot, because every other Medieval degradation of the rule of law proposed by the Bush Administration has, by and large, worked.

As I write this, Nancy Pelosi is making nice with President Bush at their festive lunch, where bygones will be bygones. They can talk about the minimum wage and the right of Medicare to engage in bulk negotiation with the pharma industry. The Dems will allow themselves to be co-opted, convincing themselves that Bush is a man they can do business with, a mistake also made by a group of diplomats who boarded a plane in Munich in 1938 and flew home to announce peace in their time.

Whither the USA after November 8?

Like millions of other Americans, I anxiously await the outcome of the elections on November 8, in the sense that one might anxiously await the successful deployment of a parachute after jumping from a plane 20,000 feet in the air. I would not say that absolutely everything hinges on displacing the Republican machine in this election, but if we don't...splat.

The United States has slowly but surely descended into gangsterism at the highest levels of government, a horror-filled development that even our overheated political discourse cannot bring itself to acknowledge openly. Once the Republican Congress decided to countenance flagrant violations of the law, to permit the commission of felonies by the Executive Branch without so much as a harsh word of protest, we lost our Constitutional form of government. I don't see how anyone can deny that. A right-wing polemicist might argue with a straight face that authoritarian rule in an unconstitutional manner is necessary because of external or internal threats to the security of the United States, but this is very different from arguing that the extra-legal actions of the Bush Administration comply with the spirit, letter or literal meaning of many federal statutes and constitutional provisions. And it must then be admitted that the United States has become not so different from the Soviet Union which Reagan called the Evil Empire. To preserve our existence, we have forfeited our freedoms and our adherence to the rule of law.

The specific examples of George W. Bush's misprisions have grown to such a long list that they're difficult to summarize. He has illegally wiretapped and intercepted the electronic communications of American citizens without a warrant, a felony and a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He established a systematic program of torture, a felony, a war crime, and a violation of the Eighth Amendment. He incarcerated American citizens without charges, denied them the right to counsel, denied them the right to a speedy trial, and disappeared them, a felony and a violation of the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. He has violated his oath of office over and over and over again.

The Republican Congress refused, on all occasions, ever to censure Bush or to reprimand him officially for any of these countless crimes and misprisions of office. Even the high-minded Republican Senators, like Arlen Specter, have voted to deprive "enemy combatants" of the right to habeas corpus in the Military Kangaroo Court Act, while openly acknowledging that the bill they supported with their votes was unconstitutional. In other words, obviously, unrepentantly, cavalierly violating their own oaths of office.

You see, gangsterism is catching. It is a kind of killer virus, and the infected gang members begin to confuse their own opinions, their own attitudes, with the rule of law. Once that happens, they break the law casually and routinely, as we are seeing now, in an accelerating fashion. They think what they want to do is good for the country, and if the law, or the American Constitution, says otherwise, then the law will have to give way. Who is going to tell them anything different?

That's where we are. It's a crucial point in American history. There will be widespread voter fraud on Tuesday. The question is whether the tidal wave of revulsion mounting against the gangsters in Washington is sufficient to overcome even that last-ditch scheme, that final criminal conspiracy. If not, after that...the deluge.

The Iraqi Dead

If the Johns Hopkins study recently published in The Lancet is correct, as many as 655,000 Iraqis have died as the result of the war since March 19, 2003. Since 1,303 days have passed since Shock 'N Awe Eve, Iraqis have been dying violent deaths at the rate of 503 persons per day, as the high average. Administration pronouncements this week declare that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq until at least 2010. For the sake of simplicity, if we assume this "date certain" (which it cannot be, since Bush feels this would embolden the terrorists, although it's difficult to see how they could become much bolder) is March 20, 2010, or 7 full years after the war started, then from an extrapolation of the death toll incurred to date (again, as the high estimate) we can calculate total Iraqi deaths by the formula 365 x 7 x 503 = 1,285,165.

Give or take a corpse or two. Remembering that Iraq began this war with about 25 million people (about 900,000 have left Iraq for surrounding countries since the war began, in addition to the war dead), we could analogize the effect on Iraq by scaling up the figures to a country the size of the United States, with 300 million people. If the United States is about 12 times the size of Iraq, then 600,000 dead is comparable to 7.2 million dead Americans, and 10,800,000 refugees, equivalent to total disruption in the lives of 18 million Americans.

Confronted yesterday with the carnage caused by his war of choice, President Bush sullenly disputed the Johns Hopkins study by saying its methodology had been "discredited." The passive voice is telling in the circumstances. "Discredited" by what organization, by what statistician, by what probability theorist? Surely it is not enough when talking about a disaster of this magnitude to dismiss a peer-reviewed study in Europe's most prestigious medical journal with a one-word perjorative, particularly when Bush's only comeback, when asked for his own estimate, is to assert again (in his awful grammar) that "a lot of innocent people have lost their life." Bush is the Commander in Chief and this war is the centerpiece of his presidency. He ought to know everything about it. If necessary, he ought to put L'Etranger and Hamlet to one side and pick up a statistics text and acquaint himself with sampling methodology. For that matter, he ought to read the Johns Hopkins study and find out why it was necessary for them to count dead by random sampling in the first place. Then, and only then, should he offer an opinion on the "discredited methodology" of the analysis. He might find, in fact, there is something to it. If so, he might begin to understand, however dimly, why Iraqis don't share his enthusiasm for the American occupation. He might conclude that it's high time the U.S. military chose to cut and run.

Why does the Dear Leader want to talk to us?

Among the official mysteries that trouble my sleep occasionally is the ongoing insanity about "multilateral" versus "one-on-one" "talks" with North Korea. I simply don't get it. While I have a hard time understanding why the Bush Administration is so adamant that it's impossible to talk directly to North Korea without a bunch of friends also in the room (Japan, China, Russia, etc.), I can't figure out why Prime Minister Pompadour insists it must must be an intimate tete-a-tete with the United States. In this morning's news, North Korea now threatens to launch a nuclear missile, outfitting one of its balky missiles with that contraption that may or may not have detonated on Sunday. (The weirdest idea is that N. Korea may have "faked" a nuke by exploding a vast pile of conventional explosives to simulate a low-kiloton-yield weapon.)

Anyway, the idea is now circulating that the USA blew its chance to head North Korea's nuke aspirations off at Pyongyang Pass by shunning Kim Jong, or not returning his calls, or maybe by not picking up the phone the morning after. The whole thing has the feeling of a jilted lover scenario. The Dear Leader does have a touch of the epicene about him, after all. Payback: it's a bitch. It's like a crazy girl friend you're trying to let down easy. First she waves a gun around. Then she actually fires off a shot. Now she's threatening to come over and burn your house down. She seems to do each thing she warns you about. Kim Jong has been following that pattern, firing missiles into the Sea of Japan, detonating nukes (maybe), now threatening to put the two together and shoot that sucker off.

All because we won't return his/her calls, or because we always show up with the guys and switch on the plasma to watch the game of the week, thwarting her chance to speak intimately, to give her a chance to prove we belong with her. So now we've gone to the UN and ganged up on her, isolating her in her madness.

All she wanted to do was talk...

Well, not really. Not probably. Thus endeth the cute analogy. There is an element of contradiction in the current criticisms of Pres. Bush. On one hand, the supposition is that talking to Kim Jong would have convinced him not to build nukes. On the other hand, the grave danger perceived by liberals arises from the possession of a nuclear arsenal by an unstable lunatic. Putting these two ideas together (which is never done in mass media analysis, since the arguments on either side would lose their partisan topspin), we get the idea that the U.S. should have had unilateral talks with an unstable lunatic to convince him not to build nukes. That does sound like one of those exit conversations with the crazy girl friend where you try to convince her, for the sake of getting out the door, that she'll actually be better off without you. That seems to work till you slide behind the wheel at the curb, turn the ignition and find the starter motor has been wired with C-4 explosives.

As an amateur fan of psychoanalysis, I like looking for unconscious motivations which seem to explain behavior that is not entirely rational on its surface. Talking, cajoling, manipulating, importuning a nut job is not going to result in a stable peace, yet this is the fond hope of liberals who are as troubled by a lunatic's possession of nuclear weapons as are conservatives on the right. Blaming the existence of such bombs on a "failure of negotiation" displaces one's fear. There is hope as long as the idea persists that reason can prevail over madness.

As a direct analogy, I notice no one on the liberal side currently talks about the development of nuclear bombs by Pakistan. The finalization of its advanced program occurred entirely during the Clinton Administration, in the mid-1990's. A.Q. Khan, who has operated a kind of mail-order House O' Apocalypse, is a nuclear physicist who received advanced training in metallurgy in Germany in the 1970's. He brought his expertise home to Islamabad and Pakistan, without signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and while shunning all international inspections, proceeded to build bombs using advanced uranium enrichment technology and plutonium. With no effective restraint from the United States or the world community, Pakistan then proceeded with a heavy program of nuclear testing. All while the Clinton Administration looked impotently on, while South Asia became the most dangerous place on Earth. Thus, we have the Islamic Bomb, and the idea Pakistan is a "stable" nation that cannot cause any problems for U.S. interests is of course a fantasy.

The most dangerous process in the history of the world is thus "robustly" underway, in the buzzword of the Zeitgeist, and proliferation of nuclear weapons among nations with unstable regimes, who refuse inspections, and who have already demonstrated a willingness to traffic in the sale and transfer of nightmares, proceeds apace. No wonder we wish that talking would make it all go away. It won't. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Dear Leader Nukes Foley's Hot Buns Off Front Page

Those post-pubescent Congressional pages can put their tape measures away for good, I guess. Mark Foley is in rehab for his drinking habit, and Kim Jong Ill has relegated the pages to back pages anyway with his underground test of an atomic bomb yesterday. Sic semper gloria mundi.

As a resident of the West Coast, I was always inclined to take North Korea's development of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles more seriously than the shenanigans of yet another child molestor, even before the Dear Leader, he of the dubious fashion statements and even dubiouser hairstyle, exploded an atomic bomb on Sunday. Democratic party leaders, of course, are bummed; they were counting on the Foley "scandal" to last through all of October, having finally found an "issue" worthy of the American electorate, that vast, uncharted Jerry Springer Green Room, the great unwashed and uninformed denizens whom H.L. Mencken dubbed the "Booboisie." Foley's obsession with teenage ass was supposed to be the Democrats' Monica Lewinsky, and the press was playing along, discovering one pocket of "corruption" after another, demonstrating that the Republican claim to be the party of family values was hypocritical, and their inability to protect the pages from "inappropriate" IMs from a Congressional creep was the final proof of their "incompetence."

Yeah, that's it.

The cynicism which characterizes political discourse in this country has become so extreme that I'm not sure my Alice in Wonderland metaphor can quite state the case anymore. No one on either side of the American debate takes the voters seriously. And maybe you can't. 50% of the American populace believes, for example, that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While over 60% of the Iraqi populace likes seeing American soldiers blown up in Iraq, 40% of the American populace still essentially approves of the war. Such examples can be multiplied till the cows come home. You do not sway the American populace with carefully reasoned analyses of the issues. You jerk them around with scandals and name-calling.

Thus, the Democrats have put together a publicity program which is intended to analogize the Republican leadership of the House to a deceiving Archdiocese. Foley is the libidinous priest with poor impulse control, but the Bishops won't discipline him. They cover for him, while the pages, the altar boys in this scenario, are left to fend for themselves. It's a movie the American public has seen and they can follow along, and that's the critical factor. Then the Democrats can seize control and begin their own programs of self-aggrandizement, and Congress can get back to the serious work of holding hearings and investigating itself, just like the good old days.

Meanwhile, the glaciers will continue to melt, the oceans will acidify, the American standard of living will continue to fall, and Premier Poof-Hair will go right along assembling his nuclear bombs for West Coast delivery.

Self-Fulfilling Religious Prophecies, and the High Road to Atheism

First, a congratulatory note to George Smoot of UC Berkeley's Physics Department for winning the Nobel Prize. It was a stunning achievement to confirm the way in which the Universe was formed on the basis of such subtle evidence. He has done my alma mater proud.

Meanwhile, back in American Reality, debates continue to rage about whether the Earth is 6,000 years old or somewhat less than the age of the (current?) Universe, about 14 billion. Perhaps just an honest difference of opinion. Or perhaps not. The persistence of irrational thinking in human affairs, even at this "late" date of human civilization, is probably a reliable indicator it's here to stay. Sorry, Sigmund, but your salutary hope that mankind would someday rise above the "illusion" you described in The Future of an Illusion has not yet come to pass, and that "future" you talked about? It's now, and things are as bad as ever. One could argue they're worse than ever, as the apocalyptics cheer on our impending demise brought about, in large part, because apocalyptics think an impending demise is a good thing.

If we're going to follow Hawking's advice and preserve some human DNA on Mars, it might be best to search for a Human Genome 2.0 which could avoid the mischief apparently inherent in Version 1.0. That one was obviously shipped before complete debugging, and we've paid a terrible price for rushing to market.

By the way, think about this idea, which I owe almost completely to a parallel line of thought first penned by Richard Feynman, another eminent physicist who liked thinking about ultimate questions. Feynman thought that religous thinking could be grouped into "believers" and "atheists," and that all interim categories, such as agnostics, could be eliminated. Just like him to go deep and eliminate unnecessary complications. You get there as follows:

Belief in a Supreme Being is a conscious state characterized by faith. If you believe, you believe. You can describe the god so conceived as anything you like, a Consciousness, an anthropomorphic God, or some shadowy, insubstantial presence so ethereal that Freud puckishly said that such backpedaling led to "taking the Lord's name in vain." Very clever, that Sigmund. In New Age parlance, it might be called "Spirit" (on the Oprah Show also). Anyway Someone or Something is up there, out there, around here. You can talk or communicate with it perhaps, through prayer or meditation.

Anyone who doesn't believe, in the positive, conscious sense described above, is an atheist. If, for example, you claim you simply don't know how the Universe was formed or created, or whether there's an ultimate cause, or a spiritual meaning to life, you certainly are not, by such declaration, affirming your "faith." On the other hand, you are admitting that you lack that positive, conscious affirmation in a divinity, etc. Lacking such faith, you are an atheist.

The wiggle room sought by agnostics (a kind of propitiation of the gods, I suspect - ancient habits die hard) is achieved by driving a distinction between "knowing" and "thinking" or perhaps "believing." Agnostics claim they simply don't know if there is a god or Supreme Being, but they don't rule it out. The distinction, for such questions, is specious, because no one can rule it out. Of course you don't know. Similarly, you can't really say you "know" there is no Supreme Being. We have no tools or sensory apparatus available to us in our Universe that allow us to determine singular conditions existing before the Big Bang (outside of our space-time continuum) or what may have occurred in prior Universes, and the possibility always exists, of course, that the real solution to Leibnitz's question, why is there Something instead of Nothing?, lies in data that are simply not accessible to the human sensory apparatus.

So, think it through and see if Feynman, as usual, hasn't simplified the issue profoundly. You're a believer or you're an atheist. You profess faith, as a positive, conscious attitude, or you don't, and if you're in the second category, however you arrive there, you're an atheist, although in the second category, of course and as in all human endeavors, there is a lot of jostling about who is more pious in their godlessness.

Why is Bush picking on Americans instead of Iraqis?

As we approach the crescendo of the Fall 2006 elections, Bush is amping up the vitriolic attacks on non-supporters of his war on Iraq. "Cut and run," "appeasement," "shaken will" -- all the terms from his meager pejorative vocabulary are hurled at his political enemies, those who do not share his unique insight into the true state of the battle for democracy in the heart of the Arab world, who don't appreciate the Herculean efforts he is making (as he told Katie Couric) to connect the Iraq war to the wider war on terror. He's out on the hustings again, his mouth agape, his hands flailing the air, as the nervous beneficiaries of his support - Republican candidates - stand just out of camera range at the back of the platform.

Curiously, however, Bush aims his criticism at Americans, and more particularly at Democrats. Now that Bush (as he admits) reads the news, didn't he see the recent AP poll on Iraqi attitudes about the war? Specifically,

"WASHINGTON — About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, according to a poll in that country."

The AP poll is scientifically designed (a point in its disfavor, of course) and includes Iraqis of all sectarian stripes. The enthusiasm for American carnage runs across the board, including the Shiites we have installed in power and the Sunnis we displaced. They all like seeing us blown up. They cheer when American soldiers, Army, Marines, National Guard, you name it, are shredded by RPG's, when they're shot through the head by an automatic weapon, when their arms and legs are reduced to blackened, bleeding stumps by roadside bombs, when they are blinded, or parts of their brains are blown away and the soldiers become helpless vegetables. When they die, right then and there or from horrible complications. When these things happen, more than 60% of the Iraqi people are happy that they happened. They're glad American soldiers are suffering and dying. Most Iraqis feel that way. The people that Bush's war on Iraq liberated. The people we are protecting with all that carnage, the people we are going bankrupt for.

They want us dead.

So, Mr. Bush -- wouldn't it be appropriate for you to aim some of your famous bad temper and irritation at them? Just lay off Democrats and members of your own party, like that troublesome Chuck Hagel, and all those generals who don't buy the party line --and in fact, the 60% of Americans who don't like your war. Leave them alone for a while, grant some leeway for honest dissent. Turn that inimitable ire on your adopted children, the Iraqis, and give them a piece of your mind. They're not only "naive" about the war on terror, as you accuse American dissenters of being -- they're monstrously, inexplicably, outrageously, unconscionably ungrateful. How sharper than a serpent's tooth! (I know you read Shakespeare now, so you'll get it.) Tell them to get back in line. Tell them you know, better than they do, what's good for them. Tell them to shut the hell up and appreciate us!

The End of the Republic

The matchless beauty of the American legal system, as it existed until September 28, 2006, originated in the thinking of the Founding Fathers, who seemed animated by two contemporary influences. The first of these was the Enlightenment and the evolution of the scientific method. Rather than arguing on the basis of a priori logic, which held (as in religious or dogmatic thinking) that answers were preordained or accessible through Received Wisdom, the Enlightenment and the scientific method born of Enlightenment thinking proceeded on the basis of intellectual humility. That the answers were not known beforehand through divine revelation, that the secrets of Nature must be discovered through a rigorous process of trial and error, through scrupulous intellectual honesty, and that service to the Truth, as it was discovered and regardless of the form it might take, was the ultimate guiding principle. Subjective assertions of being "right" were of no weight; you had to prove it, and according to precisely defined standards.

The second influence was the tyranny of the British Crown. The colonists in America had suffered under the arbitrary and cruel dictates of an unchecked monarch and were determined to eliminate such capricious subjectivity from their own legal system.

Thus, the Founding Fathers introduced the concept of an "anti-majoritarian" Bill of Rights, encoding America's basic civil liberties. If one examines closely the ideas behind the Bill of Rights, you are struck by the close correlation between the scientific method and the fundamental principles behind such bedrock concepts as the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the right to trial by jury, and the right of a defendant to be confronted by all witnesses and evidence against him. The maintenance of such delicate systems was entrusted to the political system, with its intricate clockwork of checks and balances. In particular, the interplay between the legislative and executive branches, on one hand, and the judicial system on the other, ensured that arbitrary and unjust decisions against individuals could either be prevented or redressed in the event of miscarriages of justice. No matter how "obvious" the criminal case against an individual, you still had to prove it, and according to the exacting standards of the rules of evidence, and only after a full, bilateral and open trial.

That system, that magnificent edifice of justice, served us so well for so long. It's gone now. We have joined the others, the juntas, the dictatorships, the Central Committees, the strongmen, the kings. We legislated it out of existence. What we will now call justice will be characterized by arbitrary decisions by Presidents and his High Command, by subjective judgments unchallenged by open trials, and by the sequestration of individuals locked up forever without legal recourse of any kind.

Why? I don't think there's any point in asking why. We lost respect for the wisdom of the Ancients, of our elders, of our betters, all of whom endured far greater threats, far more desperate battles, than we have ever seen. We proved unworthy of our heritage. We will now descend from our Enlightened ramparts into the depths of a new Dark Age.

Where is John Lennon now that we need him more

I confess that I always thought John Lennon was The Man, the artist par excellence, a performer/songwriter of such immense genius that being great was to him as natural as going through the motions of everyday life for the rest of us. Onstage, especially after he left the Beatles, he commanded the attention of everyone watching and listening, the cynosure of all eyes, the natural leader of whatever aggregation of musicians or artists he happened to be among. His guitar playing, his singing, even much of the writing seemed in some ways secondary to his creative genius. Most of all, it was the way his mind worked that was most captivating. He was, of course, good at all the things that went into performing music, the rock-solid rhythm, the phrasing, the shaping of melodic contour. He wasn't the best at any of those things, but he didn't need to be.

He was also very funny, deeply wise and penetratingly direct. All of those qualities came through in the movie "The United States vs. John Lennon," the recently-released documentary about Lennon's years in New York post-Beatles, when he fell in with radicals like Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale and others. About his political awakening, and his subsequent harassment by Hoover and Nixon, which led to a prolonged immigration fight. Through it all, Lennon kept his integrity and his puckish, self-effacing humor, which naturally rubbed some people the wrong way. The masses love false humility in their idols. I don't suppose he was the easiest human being on Earth to get along with, and no doubt he left many bruised egos in his wake. You don't become John Lennon, I guess, by just being one of the guys. Asked why he would not simply leave the U.S. and return to Britain to end the immigration fight, Lennon answered by saying that he liked New York, that he had many friends there, that he liked the artistic stimulation, and then, with his typical deadpan irony: "And I even brought my own cash."

During one meditative moment in a videotaped interview (with Dick Cavett, or maybe Geraldo), Lennon expressed his view that a fair analysis of what the governments of the United States, or Great Britain, or China, or most other countries were up to yielded the conclusion that they were pursuing "insane" goals. That their very purpose was to do insane things, and that a person such as himself, who pointed out the insanity (the Vietnam War, for example, or the repression by the Chinese government of its own populace) was nevertheless the one considered insane, who ought to be locked up for pointing out the madness. Somehow, when he said it, this perhaps commonplace observation acquired a new resonance. Thus always with the truly exceptional.

Monday I watched Senator James Inhofe, Chairman of the Senate's Committee on Public Works and the Environment (something like that) take the floor, as he does periodically, and denounce global warming as a hoax or hysterical overreaction or however it is he describes it these days. He talked about "left wing" scientists, used "California" as a pejorative term in describing Schwarzenegger's global warming initiative, and employed vague and ad hominem arguments such as the failure of the "environmental movement" to be right on all previous predictions as proof they were wrong about this one. He said that he was going to take on the "science" of global warming in his speech, but I didn't hear him do that. Over the years, as he has gone through these exercises, the science becomes more conclusive, better refined, and coheres toward an inescapable conclusion we're headed toward disaster, and sooner than we used to think. Inhofe, with his sandy hair and blandly rubicund face, stumbling along in his inarticulate manner, continues to proclaim what I guess is the official Senate take on this life-or-death issue: there's nothing to worry about, the climate changes over time but we don't have much to do with it, and the issue has been hyped by "Hollywood" and liberals and people like that because they want the attention. While this impractically practical man, whose formal education, as far as I can tell, does not include any curriculum involving hard science (he used to be the mayor of Tulsa, and attended the University of Tulsa in business or economics), appoints himself the gate keeper of the U.S. response to climate change, probably the main existential threat to human life over the next century. I'm sure there are reasons not immediately apparent why a Senator from Oklahoma would assert that fossil-fuel burning is no big deal, although Inhofe's attitude seems at this point even more backward than Exxon Mobil's.

I don't know who Inhofe's real audience is. One thing that is obvious is that he's not qualified to make the judgments he's making. He doesn't have the depth and he sounds like an idiot when he talks about atmospheric science. There are ways that public policy could be advanced on the subject. For example, Inhofe could bring in the posse of global warming deniers he always cites and have them square off against James Hansen and the many other (read: virtually all) serious scientists who hold the contrary view. Stephen Hawking, armed with his voice synthesizer, could attend. There's something I would pay a great deal of money to see: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma making his inane arguments in the presence of Stephen Hawking. Remember the scene in "Annie Hall" when Woody pulls Marshall McLuhan out of nowhere...? Like that. A public debate in a Senate hearing room running over 5 or 6 days. As long as it takes, because if we don't figure this one out, nothing much else is going to matter. Thus, instead of an egotistical exercise in thundering, meaningless oration, by a Senator who thinks scientific opinions are simply expressions of underlying political leanings, we could actually find something out. If global warming is a hoax - great! I'd be glad to hear it. And if we'd better get started on a crash program to save ourselves - the sooner the better.

But to proceed in such a way would require a sane government pursuing sane objectives, instead of what we've got. Sad to say it, John, but in the generation you've been gone, things have only gotten worse. And I sure miss your music.

Toward an understanding of the American economy

I think it works along these lines, and if any insight is contained herein, I credit that in part to a recent trip abroad which confirmed the essential unlivability of even the First World at this point in world history.

America is the most desirable place to live on Planet Earth. The reasons for this are many and are related to the factors which made the United States preeminent in the first place. Favorable placement in the world's latitutdes, producing generally clement weather; a varied topography; lots of empty space; abundant resources; the inheritance of an advanced civilization. We have, for the most part, squandered all this, but we should not beat ourselves up about it. Humans are uniquely unsuited to the maintenance of beauty, and the mass production of ugliness is a general malaise of homo sapiens and not a strictly American characteristic. Other cultures produce ugliness as fast as they can, but they have, until recent times, lacked a comparable ugly-making technology.

It is said that America practices something called the New Economy, or the Information Economy, or the Post-Industrial Economy. These are stand-in terms for another way of looking at it, which is that we don't like doing dirty work anymore. The Hallucinated Economy is probably the most viable term at this point, where "wealth" is created through manipulation of paper instruments of debt, expansion of a money supply untethered to any standard (such as a precious metal) and a massive group psychosis. We pretend to envy countries like China which proliferate sweat shops and drudgery, but we don't, really. That's how we used to work in the old industrial towns of the Midwest, and upper Northeast and...well, just about everywhere. We didn't like the work then and we would hate it now. It is repetitive, difficult, soul-crushing work, as millions of young Chinese girls would affirm after a day of piecing together seams on NFL jerseys destined for Wal-Mart's leisure wear departments.

What was left after we decided to quit work? Well, it was kind of like the late stages of a losing game of Monopoly. You've got a lot of property cards, and a bunch of green houses, and a few red hotels. But you're low on cash, because you keep buying things (off the board, you could say) that you can't afford. You think you deserve them because everyone else has them, and the country's so...well, rich. Isn't it? The government assures us we are. The economy is booming, they say. So what's left? You don't want to work, or you lost the one job the United Auto Workers promised you'd have forever. So you borrow against those cards, those houses, those hotels. You refinance. That provides jobs to those who manipulate the money, who arrange the loans, who "appraise" your property, who "check" your credit, who bundle your loan with millions of others and make new "securities" out of them, which then are sucked into the dark vortex of the derivatives industry where they lose any resemblance to the simple transaction your loan once was. We take the money and head to the Big Box stores and buy stuff made in China. The line workers, the drudges, the wage slaves in China save astonishing fractions of their small earnings and live in crowded hovels dreaming of the day they can live like Americans. Their savings create a vast money pool which is loaned back to the USA, and the government issues IOUs to the Chinese and all our other creditors in the form of Treasury securities, T-bills, notes, bonds. The foreign creditors pretend that the cash-strapped American government can pay this money back, but the real security for their loans are all those green houses and red hotels. You are their security, your state of indenture to your own house where you derived all your "income" to buy hair dryers and an extension phone for every room.

Voila! The American economy. It is, strictly speaking, a psychological construct. It will exist so long as Americans and their slightly nervous creditors will it to exist. We shall mortgage the Great American Development to the hilt, to the max, to the roof to keep the game going.

Until, one dark day, it stops going altogether.

Meandering through Europe

Perspectives change as the years go by. Of course, of course. The difference between a sojourn to Europe in 1972 and 2006, among other things, is that the Uncertainty Principle assures me that the Reality I See is different not just because Europe has changed so much, but because I have too. The Observer and the Observed. Most Europeans are now younger than I am, and it feels a little foolish to be much in awe of an ancient culture being run by a bunch of kids, particularly kids who hyphy out to the same music as at home, who wear the same Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, who drive at insane speeds on the same high-end Japanese motorcycles.

I don't think I encountered much in the way of anti-American sentiment, but then again the primary interface of an American tourist is with the mercantile segment of European society who need the American's poor, pathetic, devalued dollar more than ever. Who's got time for chauvinism under circumstances like that? When a sandwich costs $12 and a beer 8 bucks, they'll overlook a few hegemonic impulses.

I got through Customs at both ends, not that I'd done anything wrong (I hasten to reassure the NSA), but that momentary glitch at SF International, when she ran my passport through the magnetic reader...and looked at the screen, wrinkled her brow, and then ran it through again...Just a paranoid flash, I'm sure. At the luggage carousel, I read the electronic board with its saccharine reassurances about how the Border Control was just there to help. The Memo has been circulated, in other words; we're tough now, but we'll put it out there in a sort of menacingly nice way. Play ball and nobody gets hurt. The Bushies are in control now, and you wouldn't want to leave something off your customs declaration and wind up rendered in an extraordinary way to Syria. You think you got jet lag now? Wait till you've been up for 8 straight days in Damascus, scumbag.

It was interesting to sit in a hotel breakfast room in Lyon and read about the courageous stand of the defiant Republican Senators, the "insurgents," who refused to knuckle under to Bush's demand to gut the War Crimes Act. The International Herald Tribune covers such stuff pretty well, mixed in with a quasi-European perspective. Arriving home, I realized it was simply more kabuki theatre from McCain & Co.; the main thing Bush wanted, the retroactivity of the amendment to get himself off the hook for authorizing war crimes, with its haunting long-tail statute of limitations, the Senators are sure to give him. The rest is persiflage. Bush doesn't care about interrogation "tools" for harassing inmates at Guantanamo; he knows as well as anyone 90% of them have nothing to say. But facing serious jail time himself for roughing up a bunch of Muslims...that's intolerable, or "unacceptable," as he said in his press conference, talking about "this program," meaning his gulag set-up for disappearing the flotsam and jetsam of the war on terror.

No one anywhere in "respectable" journalism points out the ludicrous premise of Bush's demand that this legislation be passed now, so that not another day of delay ensue. This demand, after sitting on the heads of most of these prisoners for the better part of 5 years. Yep, we'll lose the war on terror if we don't get Khallid Sheikh Mohammed in the dock by the middle of October. Few and far between are the reporters who dare to point out that Bush has just a few days left with a reliably Republican Congress to secure his get-out-of-jail-free card from McCain & Co. THAT'S the reason he was so animated, so solicitous of the interrogators who were simply doing their jobs in a "thorough and professional" manner. Professional manner? What profession is that? Marqui de Sadists? But, as ever, the Decider had procrastinated until the last possible minute, and now he needs to get a year's worth of work done in a week.

Not much has changed, in other words. I wasn't gone long. Couldn't afford to be, actually. The dollar is becoming the New Peso. A kind of scrip. I'm back in the Bush Leagues, now, waiting for the next bizarre turn of events, the next strange piece of legislation to slither up from the Congressional Well.

Please, Mr. President, Stop. I can't take it anymore

"As the horror of that morning grows more distant, there is a tendency to believe the threat is receding and this war is coming to a close. That feeling is natural and comforting - and wrong. If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities." President George W. Bush, before the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, August 31, 2006.

Okay, I'm scared. Please stop talking about the suiciders, the evil-doers and the haters of freedom. They're ruining my sleep. I'll tell you how bad this has gotten, with your constant reminders, your obsessive evocation of all these nightmarish characters wearing Bedouin Ninja outifts and leaping out from behind parked cars.

I'm thinking we should just leave Baghdad. Right now. Then, as you say, the terrorists will follow us over here. This would be good for two reasons. First, it's not fair that only our soldiers should get blown up in an endless, pointless war. We should all get blown up once in a while. Second, at least we'll see them and have a clear shot at them. The way it is, with you warning us every single day how much trouble we're in, but nothing ever happening, I'm a nervous wreck. I'm sick with worry. It's like we're all in a machine gun nest in a World War II movie, and we know the Japanese invasion is coming, and we're tense as hell, and we hear them talking out there in the jungle in that incomprehensible jabbering -- but we can't see them!

It's like that, you know? You're almost relieved when the attack comes, it becomes more of an even fight. I would rather take on a few Jihadis on my way down to the local upscale market. Hey, the suburbanites around here are locked and loaded, W. Most of them cruise the streets in SUVs with the heft and menace of a Humvee. Not up-armored, maybe, but I understand a lot of the American military isn't either. We can take 'em, once they're in the streets here, just like you say they'll be. They'll be obvious here, too, not like in Baghdad, where they just look like...well, like all the other Arabs. An Arab here in Marin County wearing a feyadeen costume, all black, with an RPG strapped to his shoulder...you think we won't notice? We'll pick him out in a minute.

I'd feel safer on an airplane then, too. Knowing they're in the streets, out in the open, instead of, say, in seat 14B. They won't need subterfuge once they're right out in the streets in a fair fight, right here in America.

So let 'em follow us, W! Taunt them with a sudden withdrawal! Leave Baghdad in a huff! You know: bring 'em on!

Lunatics at the asylum convention

Blogging, of course, is yet another artifact of the Information Age. With a few exceptions (none of which come to mind), blogs are poorly written, reactive and derivative. After gaining enough notoriety to attract attention from bloggers with opposing points of view, the political blogger (in particular) can then devote his space to flaming his opponents in a ceaseless roundelay of venomous opprobrium. I have watched the blogs of Eric Alterman and Glenn Greenwald degenerate into just such exercises, among many other examples.

Blog-based catfights are a form of entertainment, as news has become a form of entertainment. Once the concept of a rapid "news cycle" took firm root in the public consciousness, and lead stories were selected on the basis of their lurid entertainment value (Southern coed disappears in Aruba, etc.), the budget for serious investigative reporting dried up and the superficial reigned supreme. Following this, anyone with access to the Internet could then recycle the same news bits in an opinion blog and to an extent could have the same authority as the "reporters," who were also dependent on unverified sources and propaganda. Thus, as one reads through the repetitive rehashes on the Huffington Post, for example, one sees again and again the same factoids repackaged and contextualized in the style of the Blogger in question. These are narcissistic exercises, by and large, the Blogger restating what everyone else is saying but finding his perspective unique and important because of the way he's saying it.

Thus: "We didn't have enough troops." "Deficits don't matter." "Bush joked about finding WMD under his desk in the Oval Office." "Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army." "There is no link between the attacks of 9-11 and Iraq." "We are creating more terrorists in Iraq than we are killing." "Afghanistan is returning as a narco-state, and the Taliban are resurgent." "Iraq is in a civil war." "Iran is the big winner in the Iraqi conflict." "Over 45 million Americans have no health insurance." "Bush routinely violates the FISA law by his warrantless wiretapping." "China is buying up the U.S. through its purchase of U.S. Treasuries." "The government does not allow itself quantity discounts in dealing with Big Pharma." "The Republicans running for office in November are distancing themselves from Bush." "The disparity in wealth between rich and poor has increased with Bush's tax cuts."

Grab 2 or 3 such lines and build a blog piece. Mix in your perspective, your attitude, and presto! You too can be a pundit. What do you have when you're done? What unique contribution have you made to the intellectual edifice of American thought?

There are other facts that might draw the attention of a more curious and insightful reader. The American standard of living has been in steady decline since 1973, since the first Oil Shock. America's preeminent place among educated peoples of the First World has been in sharp decline since the 1950's. 75% of the American economy is now based on consumerism, and mostly buying things made in other countries. The United States is now the biggest debtor country and the biggest borrower in the world. America has no plan for handling its official national debt of $9 trillion, nor any idea (or hope) for dealing with its huge unfunded liabilities for social safety net programs. America is bankrupt. The American people derived more "income" during the period 2000 through 2005 by refinancing houses than by earning money at jobs.

The first set of circumstances, the Blogomania of the modern age, is related to the second set of circumstances. We have become a frivolous and indolent people well on our way to displacement (as usual in the course of World History) by the Golden Horde, the Tatars, the Barbarians, the Vandals. And when we sink out of sight, we'll blog about that too.

The gunfight aboard the Titanic

Look, how can I say this politely? George W. Bush has been reduced to saying "Boo!" as a means of rallying the American people to his Great War on Terror. He's made the comparisons of al-Qaeda to Hitler, to Lenin, and by a parity of reasoning, of himself to Churchill. The rhetorical bag is now officially empty.

Meanwhile, this from the British Antarctic Survey, a research group based in Cambridge, that same university where Stephen Hawking occupies the Lucasian Chair in Mathematics. That same Mr. Hawking who recently advised us to colonize Mars as a way of dealing with global warming:

"The core [from Antarctic drilling] shows that carbon dioxide was always between 180 parts per million (ppm) and 300 ppm during the 800,000 years. However, now it is 380 ppm. Methane was never higher than 750 parts per billion (ppb) in this timescale, but now it stands at 1,780 ppb.

"But the rate of change is even more dramatic, with increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years -- and yet now carbon dioxide has risen by 30 ppm in the last 17 years.

"The rate of change is probably the most scary thing because it means that the Earth systems can't cope with it," Dr Wolff told the British Association meeting at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

"On such a crowded planet, we have little capacity to adapt to changes that are much faster than anything in human experience."

"The most scary thing" indeed. More scary even than dynamite-laden Muslims, in my way of thinking. Scarier than bird flu. Scarier than the "obesity pandemic." Scarier than just about anything. I wonder if we have become too jaded, too inured to the perilous state of the modern world, to comprehend fully what Dr. Wolff is saying. He is looking back 800,000 years for comparison, and he is saying that CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere are off the chart. He is also saying that CO2 concentrations are rising at a rate that is completely unprecedented during that same time period, 58 times faster than any previous increase of 30 parts per million.

We are in very deep trouble. We're obsessed with episodic events in which crazy people occasionally explode stuff and kill people, and we're paying virtually no attention on a national level to a certainty guaranteed by the physical universe, by atmospheric science, to destroy us all in Hawking's apocalyptic nightmare vision of the runaway greenhouse. On the maiden cruise of modern civilization we're drifting through a dark sea on a white ship, while gunfire rings out on the grand staircase, and bombs explode in the ball room, as we struggle insanely to "survive" aboard the vessel. While we sail, in blind ignorance, toward our fate.