Year: 2004

But first, picking up from yesterday . . .

TWO THINGS

Bob Fyfe: ‘The two things about politics are:

1. Money
2. I can’t remember the other one.

‘This is from one of your daily quotations, I can’t remember who said it.’

☞ ‘There are two things you need for success in politics. Money . . . and I can’t think of the other.’ – Senator Mark Hanna (R-OH), 1903

And now . . .

A PERSPECTIVE ON IRAQ

Mary: ‘This link to an article by Scott Ritter (ex-US WMD inspector in Iraq, ex-Marine) argues we cannot hope to ‘save’ or democratize Iraq, and Kerry should change his strategy.’

☞ It begins:

The battle for Iraq’s sovereign future is a battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. As things currently stand, it appears that victory will go to the side most in tune with the reality of the Iraqi society of today: the leaders of the anti-U.S. resistance.

Iyad Allawi’s government was recently installed by the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to counter a Ba’athist nationalism that ceased to exist nearly a decade ago. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s regime shifted toward an amalgam of Islamic fundamentalism, tribalism and nationalism that more accurately reflected the political reality of Iraq. Thanks to his meticulous planning and foresight, Saddam’s lieutenants are now running the Iraqi resistance, including the Islamist groups.

Not only has the United States failed to put into place a viable government to replace the CPA in the aftermath of the so-called “transfer of sovereignty,” but more importantly, it continues to misidentify the true nature of the Iraqi insurgency. As a consequence, the resistance will inevitably continue to flourish and grow until no force can defeat it, Iraqi or American. . . .

☞ And it concludes:

The historical parallel that best underscores the current disaster-in-the-making is not the Vietnam War but rather Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Originally intended to rid Lebanon of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel’s subsequent occupation led to the creation of Hizbollah as a viable force of political and military resistance. The Hizbollah was so effective that Israel was forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces from Lebanon in May, 2000. The 18-year occupation not only failed to defeat the PLO, but it also created an Islamic fundamentalist movement that today poses a serious threat to the security of Israel and the Middle East region.

In Iraq, history may very well produce the same result since neither the Bush Administration nor a possible Kerry Administration shows any inclination to withdraw from Iraq in the foreseeable future. And so the course of American involvement in Iraq and its inevitable consequences are clear. We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq which will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.

The strength of this anti-American resistance depends on how long the United States chooses to “stay the course” in Iraq. The calculus is quite simple: The sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: The longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this by-product of Bush’s elective war on Iraq will be.

There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning, but rather mitigating defeat.

Scott Ritter was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998. He is also the author of “Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America” (Context Books, 2003).

A PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE EAST

David Baker: ‘This speech was sent to me by my uncle, a professor at Stanford.’

☞ It’s a perspective worth reading, whatever yours may be. To compensate for its length, tomorrow’s column will be just 13 words long. (But such words!)

HAIM HARARI, a theoretical physicist, is the Chair, Davidson Institute of Science Education, and Former President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

During his years as President of the Institute, it entered numerous new scientific fields and projects, built 47 new buildings, raised one Billion Dollars in philanthropic money, hired more than half of its current tenured Professors and became one of the highest royalty-earning academic organizations in the world.

Throughout all his adult life, he has made major contributions to three different fields: Particle Physics Research on the international scene, Science Education in the Israeli school system and Science Administration and Policy Making.

‘A View from the Eye of the Storm’

Talk delivered by Haim Harariat at a meeting of the International Advisory Board of a large multi-national corporation, April, 2004

As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological “entertainment” in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country. I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities. Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilians in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60’s because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion.

They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror net works, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia, and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as “the undeclared World War III”. I have no better name for the present situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

The first element is the suicide murder. Suicide murders are not a new invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines. It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector?

How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn’t you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren’t they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naïve children, retarded people and young incited hotheads.  They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair.  The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa.  It never happens there.  There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents.  Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation.  There was certainly more despair in Saddam’s Iraq then in Paul Bremmer’s Iraq, and no one exploded himself.  A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

The only way to fight this new “popular” weapon is identical to the only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the offensive way.  Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime pyramid.  You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner.  You must go after the head of the “Family”.

If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The United States understands this now, after September 11.  Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well.  I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big way.  In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen.  The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning.  The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable.  Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved.

The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be lethal.  They kill people.  It is often said that politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their professional life.  But the norms of politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are talking about.  An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your own milieu, can only happen in this region.  Mr. Sahaf eventually became a popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some allegedly respectable newspapers from giving him equal time.  It also does not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to similar liars.  After all, if you want to be an anti-Semite, there are subtle ways of doing it.  You do not have to claim that the holocaust never happened and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case. When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true.

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them.  It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy everything.  Little children are raised on deep hatred and on admiration of so-called martyrs, and the Western World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows.  I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time.  You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle.  A demonstration in Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam’s regime and featuring three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by political leaders as a “peace demonstration”.  You may support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peace activists is a bit too much.  A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant.  She is called “martyr” by several Arab leaders and “activist” by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called “the military wing”, the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called “the political wing” and the head of the operation is called the “spiritual leader”.  There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media.  These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities.  It was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.  He is now being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money.  Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder.  In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves.  The money funds their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets.  They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure.  Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance.  This circle operates mostly through mosques, madras’s and other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and printed media.  It is this circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal.  It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside.  Some parts of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by, the inner circles.  The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate.  Half of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind hatred.

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes.  These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of the wholesale murder vendors.  The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO’s and by certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle.  The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle.  The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.?

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on their loot.  You meet their children in the best private schools in Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers.  The Jihad “soldiers” join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while some of their leaders are skiing in Switzerland.  Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of all laws.  The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties.  There are naive old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs.  Never in history, not even the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now.  Every student of political science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing democracy.  Other aspects of a civilized society must also have limitations.  Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers?  Does free speech protect you when you shout “fire” in a crowded theater?  Should there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders?  These are the old-fashioned dilemmas.  But now we have an entire new set.  Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage?  Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital?  Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages?  Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets?  Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly?  Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children?  Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital?  Do you shoot anarchic-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas.  What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma.  But it cannot be avoided. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the  Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary.  I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment.  It is trying to play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player.  In the same way that no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their Government or society.  International law does not know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a Government.  International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him.  The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the allegations.  The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality.  The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder, not during and not after.  After every world war, the rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the present one.  But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.

The picture I described here is not pretty.  What can we do about it?  In the short run, only fight and win.  In the long run?  Only educate the next generation and open it to the world.  The inner circles can and must be destroyed by force.  The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more education, counterpropaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against all three circles of evil.

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science.  When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically.  You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new “supplies” from expanding the tumor.  If you want to be sure,it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise,you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years.  In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people.  I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia.  Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony.  Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded  by territories unfriendly to them.  Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union.  Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq.  I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime.  It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions.  It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture.  It is ruthless.  It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian Embassies.  It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons.  Its so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the “good-cop versus bad-cop” game.  Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hezbollah and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaida anthems and the Shiite terror of Hizbulla, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises.  When it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror.  It is important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism.  It is also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror.  No one will ever know whether the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not for the train bombings a few days earlier.  But it really does not matter.  What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq.  The Spanish story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq.  In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world?  If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution.  If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory.  We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey.  It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully.  On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the real thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work in Russia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail.  But the longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly and painful the victory will be.  Europe, more than any other region, is the key.  Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the tide will turn.

If you love your country – and I know you do – read this speech and see what you think. (I’m sorry not to have posted it last month.) The bold-face, as always, is mine.

Remarks by Al Gore
June 24, 2004

OUR FOUNDERS AND THE UNBALANCE OF POWER

When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.

It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation’s handiwork and assess the quality of our generation’s stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he – the president – label any citizen an ‘unlawful enemy combatant,’ and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen’s liberty – even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.

What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners – and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together.

What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush’s assertion that he has the inherent power – even without a declaration of war by the Congress – to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.

How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current President’s recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief.

I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment. Shouldn’t we be equally concerned? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?

Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history – a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.

Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent – that is, when war transformed America’s president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.

That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war.

Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, ‘The constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.’

In more recent decades, the emergence of new weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive’s war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarily increase the war powers of the President at the expense of Congress do not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president – when added to his other powers – carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution, and in the process, threatening our liberty.

They were greatly influenced – far more than we can imagine – by a careful reading of the history and human dramas surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic. They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate’s long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined his military commander role with his chief executive role, the Senate – and with it the Republic – withered away. And then for all intents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for seventeen centuries, until its rebirth in our land.

Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander-in-chief role and his head of government role to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America.

In Justice Jackson’s famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case in the 1950’s, the single most important Supreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, ‘The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new Executive in their image…and if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian.”

I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into “the city” and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.

We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked on September 11th, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. But just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country that, according to the best evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bi-partisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us.As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.

A little over a year ago, when we launched the war against this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al Qaeda, and not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind. And, of course, over the course of this past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, the President and the Vice President are arguing with this commission, and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right, and that there actually was a working co-operation between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The problem for the President is that he doesn’t have any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite of that, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like to pause for a moment to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. And I think it’s particularly important because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government.

To begin with, our founders wouldn’t be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it’s so important particularly for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda isn’t true. Among these Americans who still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the President’s decision to invade Iraq. But among those who accept the commission’s detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly.

And that’s understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the President took us to war when he didn’t have to. Almost nine hundred of our soldiers have been killed, and almost five thousand have been wounded.

Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there’s a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they’ll not only lose support for the controversial decision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they’ve picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.

But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the President’s determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to this editorial from the Financial Times: “There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition to Saddam’s tyranny – however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense.”

Of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with the promised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92% of Iraqis, while only 2% see them as liberators.  

But right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public’s mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, Bush’s consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie — visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resorted to statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70% of the American people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident – the President and Vice President deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe’s top terrorism investigator said in 2002, “We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.” A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was “an exaggeration.”

And at least some honest voices within the President’s own party admitted as such. Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, “Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda…I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda.”

But those voices did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the President and Vice President used carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed al Qaeda.

In the fall of 2002, the President told the country “You can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam” and that the “true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam.” At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that “there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.”

By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network.”

But after the invasion, no ties were found. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council’s al Qaeda monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al Qaeda. By August, three former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al Qaeda claim was “tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies.” And earlier this year, Knight-Ridder newspapers reported “Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence” of a connection.

So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding “no credible evidence” of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead of the candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence. Vice President Cheney insisted even this week that “there clearly was a relationship” and that there is “overwhelming evidence.” Even more shocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: “Was Iraq involved with al-Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don’t know.” He then claimed that he “probably” had more information than the commission, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults.

The President was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.” He provided no evidence.

Friends of the administration tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an Al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the commission’s files yielded definitive evidence that it was another man with a similar name – ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush’s entire symbolic argument.

They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.

That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad decisions and also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage.

To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that Iraq did not work with Al Qaeda. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission “finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie” – a clear statement of the obvious – and said there is no “fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said.” He tried to deny that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression of linkage between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart played Cheney’s outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney’s image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney’s frozen image on the television screen, “It’s my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire.”

Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking government officials “the toughest of the tough questions.” Rather went so far as to compare Administration efforts to intimidate the press to “necklacing” in apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as “an obscene comparison.” “The fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck,” Rather explained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush Administration.

Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the Administration’s policy “makes it complicated and more difficult” to fight the war.  CNN’s Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September, “I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I’m sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a certain extent my station, was intimidated by the Administration.”

The Administration works closely with a network of “rapid response” digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for “undermining support for our troops.” Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the President’s consistent distortions of the facts.  Krugman writes, “Let’s not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President…you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.

Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report “without fear or favor” our democracy will disappear.

Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again.  We must help them resist this pressure for everyone’s sake, or we risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions.

We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration’s policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.

When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush’s ideology and America’s reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.

But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President’s policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation’s conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse – and even torture and murder – by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the “rule of law.” At least we don’t have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.

By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, “irrelevant and overbroad.” But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo – that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information – most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush, meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America’s strategic catastrophe in Iraq.

I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.

The Bush administration’s objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another.  But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democracies don’t invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the bush administration to ignore the United Nations, do serious damage to our most alliances in the world, violate international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.

And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fools gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress, courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation.

If the congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.

Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of America’s most basic founding principles, “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them…to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal… If the president, for example approves something, approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president’s decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law.”

Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as President before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis.

The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon’s abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.

In some ways, our current President is actually claiming significantly more extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting the see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who picked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassing memos justifying and enabling torture.

Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that saved the country from Richard Nixon’s sinister abuses, the current Congress has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government.

Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the President on what they vote for and what they don’t vote for. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form, and instead, they let the President’s staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they believed that the power of the Congress was the most important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the Executive branch.)

This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the Administration to the American people.

Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has to say about their secrecy: “The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government – cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters.”

Here are just a few examples, and for each one, you have to ask, what are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?

More than 6000 documents have been removed by the Bush Administration from governmental Web sites. To cite only one example, a document on the EPA Web site giving citizenscrucial information on how to identify chemical hazards to their families. Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bush administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American citizens.

To head off complaints from our nation’s Governors over how much they receive under federal programs, the Bush Administration simply stopped printing the primary state budget report.

To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language.  

They’ve kept hidden from view Cheney’s ultra-secret energy task force. They have fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and lobbyists advised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the new laws.

And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing they simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades. For this administration, the truth hurts, when the truth is available to the American people. They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?

In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing Constitutional power grab by the President. So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public’s mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties – again on his personal discretion – and he will continue to intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for re-election.

War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the President, nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the Secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the National Security Advisor.

Always before, we could look to the Chief Executive as the point from which redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a President and an administration for whom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.

In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend up on a debased department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. “Congressional oversight” and “special prosecution” are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do.

BETTER THAN MILES?

This is new – who knows if they will stay in business. But between the rebates they promise on merchandise, and the 2% promised from their no-annual-fee MBNA Visa card, Stockback could conceivably pay you more than enough to cover the cost of your subscription to this column. It’s sold as a way to channel rebates straight into your mutual fund or other investment account. But you can also just have them send you a check every time your credit reaches $25 or more. Spend $1,000 at the Gap and get $70 back (5% rebate plus 2% from the card). Hmmm.

REMEMBER FISH?

To those to whom all this environmental carping seems so tedious, this may be of interest. Snippet:

“This is no sudden crash, but rather an extremely slow-speed fatal collision,” Carl Safina, founder of the conservationist Blue Ocean Institute on Long Island in New York, told The Associated Press.

For decades, he said, the world has moved blindly toward a precipice. “We have been confronted with signs and warnings and a clear view of the danger. And now we have fallen off. We may deserve it, but our children do not.”

Safina reflected views heard in a broad range of interviews in North America and Europe, from environmental activists to government-funded specialists charged with helping to set fishing limits.

Some are more optimistic, arguing that careful management can restore stocks to sustainable levels, but none dispute that urgent action is essential.

So, okay – who do we bomb?

Actually, it’s one of those world-cooperation problems we just might come to grips with under a new administration – but only if people do become sufficiently alarmed.

In the meantime, here’s something you can put in your wallet to remind you whether it’s okay to order anchovies on your pizza.

THEY DISTORT, YOU DECIDE

I watched Outfoxed tonight. It’s a faced-paced $10 DVD horror movie. Buy one and throw a house party to watch it. Ask everyone to bring a bottle of wine but conveniently ‘forget’ where you keep the corkscrew and serve Dr. Pepper instead. (It’s so good for you!) That will keep them wide awake during the movie and you get to keep 15 bottles of wine that would have cost $150. You net $125 on the party ($150 less the $10 DVD and the case of Dr. Pepper) and open some eyes to what Fox News really is.

Tomorrow: Just Because He’s Smarter and Got More Votes Doesn’t Mean He’s Wrong

After 19 years with the same phone number, and generally paying my bill two or three months’ in advance, I had $116.71 due June 22 and returned from a trip today to find that the phone had been disconnected for nonpayment. Getting service restored took a good bit of time . . . and I have spent the rest of the night, when I could have been writing my column, trying to think of ways to destroy Verizon. I thought that was more important.

More later.

50-48

Thanks to all the fair-minded folks who might not be comfortable around people like Charles and me, but who are even less comfortable amending the United States Constitution specifically to exclude us from equal rights.

The vote was 50-48 our way – and would have been 57-43 or 58-42 had it been an actual vote on the amendment. Instead, it was a procedural maneuver designed as a stop-loss measure by the Republican leadership. (Even then, it failed to stop their loss.)

This must have distressed President Bush and the 88% of the Republican Senators who voted against us. But what was meant to be a wedge issue to divide Democrats just might wind up wedging Republicans worse. For starters, Lynn and Mary Cheney both came out as disagreeing with their husband/father’s support of the amendment. And women generally have better sense than men.

OH, THAT EXPLAINS IT

Andy Borowitz’s latest scoop:

LAY: ENRON COLLAPSED WHILE I WAS AT LUNCH

Embattled former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay adopted a bold new legal strategy today, telling CNN that he had no part in Enron’s spectacular collapse because it happened “while I was at lunch.”

Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Mr. Lay said that he wished he could have done something to prevent the energy giant’s demise, “but I was out of the office at the time.”

When Mr. Lay returned from lunch, he told Mr. Blitzer, “Enron was gone.”

BRUUUUUCE!

Mark Frisk: ‘Re your item on Bruce Springsteen, did you know about this?’

☞ No. But I signed up. Thanks!