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NEW YORK - Devastating storms? Harsh droughts? More diseases? Polluted air and waterways? Contaminated food? Some of the key causes are global warming and a loss of biodiversity caused by humans' excessive use and abuse of the Earth and its resources.

Complex global problems all, so what's an individual to do?

Environmental researchers and activists in the United States are calling on individual citizens to adopt more sustainable and healthy lifestyles and urging political leaders to begin thinking in terms of a "wartime mobilization" as a gesture of respect for Mother Earth.

"Sustaining progress depends on shifting from a fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy to a renewable-energy-based, diversified-transport, reuse/recycle economy," said Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown in a statement released ahead of this weekend's celebration of Earth Day and adapted from his new book Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

"Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first to move onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable," said Brown, who the Washington Post has called "one of the world's most influential thinkers."

As people worldwide observe Earth Day this weekend, two other U.S.-based environmental groups have made a list of "10 things to do" that they believe can effectively contribute to the efforts to recover the planet's health. (See links.)

"So how can we live lightly on the Earth and save money at the same time?" asks the environmental guide prepared by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based independent think tank, and a youth network for sustainable development called SustainUS.

The first step they suggest is to walk or bike to work and save money on gas. It will improve your cardiovascular health and reduce the risk of obesity. If you live far from your place of work, explore the option of telecommuting or move closer, they say; even if it means paying more rent, it could save money in the long run.

Noting that "purchasing habits have a real impact, for better or worse," the groups recommend buying used furniture, appliances and other items; avoiding bottled water when tap water is clean; and shopping locally whenever possible. Buying from thrift stores, garage sales, and farmers' markets conserves fossil fuels that would otherwise be used for transportation and production costs and bolsters local economies.

A little creativity can go a long way too. According to the groups, making your own cleaning supplies from common household products like soap and vinegar can save money and time and improve your indoor air quality. Composting food scraps can reduce waste and improve your garden, and at birthday and holiday time, think about "gifting green," they say.

Other recommendations include recycling electronics--like cell phones--favoring the library over bookstores, bumping the thermostat up and down at opportune moments, and eating one meatless meal per week.

While Worldwatch and SustainUS focus on what individuals can do, Brown focuses on the need for governments to do more to promote environmentally sustainable lifestyles.

"The good news is that we have the technologies needed to build the new economy," said Brown, saying that the beginnings of change can be seen "in the wind farms of western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the growing fleet of gas-electric hybrid cars in the United States, the reforested mountains of South Korea, and the bicycle friendly streets of Amsterdam."

Citing the vast economic restructuring that took place during World War II, Brown's statement called for "a wartime mobilization to save the environment and civilization."

The great issue of the current era, according to Brown, is how to move the global economy onto an environmentally sound path.

"The question facing governments is whether they can respond quickly enough to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes....We need a national political leader to step forward, an environmental Churchill, to rally the world around this effort," said Brown.

Related Links

10 Ways to Go Green and Save Green (Worldwatch and SustainUS)

Brown: 'A Wartime Mobilization to Save the Environment and Civilization'

The Technology Available to Make Automobiles Greener (Global Exchange)

Copyright © 2006 OneWorld.net

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Reports that the Bush administration is considering a nuclear strike on Iran may not frighten the mad mullahs in Tehran, but it will scare the hell out of many Americans here at home.

It's hard to believe that with one military venture gone bad in Iraq and a world that now sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace, the Bushies would contemplate attacking a second nation, this time with tactical nukes. Which prompts two questions: Are these guys obsessed with a messianic sense of world mission that has robbed them of common sense? Or are they just plain nuts?

And the answers are yes and possibly so.

Some years ago, a Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey produced a Washington novel called "Seven Days in May" in which a cabal of Pentagon generals plans to depose the nation's civilian leaders and militarize foreign policy. It was a page-turner of a yarn. But they got it all wrong, for now we have the real thing -- and the seizure of power is by Bush civilians in the Pentagon, determined to ignore or overrule the more cautious instincts of the generals and militarize U.S. foreign policy.

Writing in the current issue of the New Yorker, Sy Hersh, perhaps the best investigative reporter of my time, recounts a conversation with a Pentagon adviser who worries about "a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians" -- the neoconservatives around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, with Vice President Dick Cheney as their enabler, authored the misadventure in Iraq.

Some generals are considering resignation as a means of protest, the adviser told Hersh. It's "a juggernaut that has to be stopped," the adviser added.

What's fascinating about these neocons is their obsession with the use of force as old men when, as young men, many of them --notably Cheney -- managed to avoid service in Vietnam. In their youth, when it might have mattered for their country, they never fired a shot in anger. (In Cheney's case, considering his marksmanship, that was not all bad.)

The whole Iranian matter is fraught with awful irony and echoes of mistakes made in Iraq. Consider, for example, the irony of America inflicting a nuclear strike on the people of Iran in the name of stopping nuclear proliferation. Are the Bushies totally insensate? Or are they simply stupid?

Within hours of an American attack on Iranian nuclear sites, U.S. embassies across the globe would be under assault -- maybe even in flames -- and American tourists and diplomats and businessmen and women would have to run for cover. But how would Bush or Cheney or the civilian neocons in the Pentagon appreciate this possibility? They've lived lives immunized by privilege and draft deferments from the costs of war. The tragedy is that they've fallen heir to the greatest military power in history -- with no grasp of how to use it wisely.

There seems little doubt that the regime in Iran is led by theological fascists -- sane perhaps, but reckless. Our European allies, who live much closer to the Iranian threat than we do, are just as worried about the prospect of a nuclear Iran, maybe more. But they'll treat Bush as an international leper if he strikes Iran without United Nations sanction -- especially if he resorts to nuclear weapons.

Jack Straw, the Britain's foreign minister, said last year that a Western military strike on Iran would be "inconceivable." Europe is rightfully concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of an Islamic regime in the grip of apocalyptic theological politics. But it wants no part of the Bush-Cheney desire for regime change in Tehran.

We're plagued in Iran by lousy intelligence, as we were in Iraq. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is, from all appearances, a certifiable loony, denying the Holocaust and pledging to "wipe Israel off the map." But he may not really be in charge. And it's hard to believe that the one thought to the real leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, would subject his people to sanctions, isolation, even a nuclear threat without privately pursuing every diplomatic avenue even as Ahmadinejad blusters.

Trouble is, the Bushies don't seem to know how to orchestrate the mix of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, military threats and -- but only finally -- force. For example, they seem hell-bent on repeating the mistake they made in Iraq of not waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency to reach a judgment on Iran's nuclear capacities and intentions.

It may be seen as surprising that the voices of reason and restraint in this Iran question, as Hersh reports it, are the generals. But it shouldn't be. After all, it was George Washington who warned against the dangers of a standing peacetime army, and Dwight Eisenhower who alerted us to the danger of the military-industrial complex. Having seen it, they know the horror of war.

And what about the neocons, our home-front heroes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the civilians they've recruited like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley -- who orchestrated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war and foreign regime change?

They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.

John Farmer is The Star-Ledger's national political correspondent.

© 2006 The Star-Ledger

 CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

In 2003, while pledging to fire anyone in his administration found to have leaked the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Wilson to journalists, President George Bush intoned that he did not know of "anybody in my administration who leaked classified information."

Well.

Pick your favorite Bush quote on this topic; there are countless good ones, now that we learn that former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, when forced by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify under oath to save his own skin, fingered both Bush and his former boss, Dick Cheney. Libby testified that they both authorized the leaking of classified National Intelligence Estimate information on Iraq in July 2003 in order to defend the administration's decision to unilaterally invade Iraq. A president who has ordered the launching of widespread investigations to find leakers in the CIA and State Department, including the polygraphing of scores of intelligence professionals, the man who wants the NSA spying and CIA gulag whistleblowers prosecuted, is himself a leaker. And the same testimony revealed that Bush was aware at every step of the way of the ongoing campaign to publicly smear Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Wilson. Pick your sanctimonious Bush statements about that, too.

What. A. Freaking. Hypocrite.

And, as we've come to expect, a liar. Stop the presses. We're so accustomed to the lies of George Bush being uncovered after the fact, we don't even notice any longer.

And they thought Clinton's behavior brought disgrace to the Oval Office.

Beyond those obvious morsels, however, lies the disturbing legal rationale for the Bush/Cheney leak, offered up by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (naturally) and already arrived at Scott McClellan's mouth. The White House, tellingly, has not denied any of Libby's testimony (including the Wilson conspiracy). The leak was legal and proper, the defense goes, because the president's verbal authority is enough to declassify classified information, and by authorizing its release Bush automatically declassified it.

The White House is sticking to this story even though much of the cherry-picked NEI Iraq data was formally declassified ten days after the leak, so that the Bush administration could further defend its choice to invade. According to the White House, the later declassification shows that the NEI data wasn't all that important and that the leak didn't damage national security. But that misses the point. If Bush's word is enough to declassify classified information, why did the White House feel the need to "formally declassify" the material ten days later? Wasn't the deed already done, on Bush's sole verbal authority?

Now they're claiming that's the case, and the Bush NEI leak rationale follows an all-too-familiar theme: Bush cannot break the law, because Bush is the law. He can't leak a document, because if he says it's OK to release the document it's therefore by definition not a leak. Just like torture is illegal except when George says it's not. Or warrantless domestic wiretapping is illegal, except when he authorizes it.

Bush and the people around him appear to have genuinely believed, for at least the four and a half years since 9-11, that the President by definition is incapable of breaking the law. On his sole authority laws can be ignored, overridden, or changed. Even implicitly. Even retroactively, as when some unappetizing piece of this puzzle inadvertently comes to the public's attention.

Combine this with an administration more intent on secrecy and lack of transparency than any other in U.S. history, and you have a recipe for, well, a dictatorship. Which is exactly what it appears Bush and company believe they are operating in. Oh, of course, in normal times America is a democracy, but these aren't normal times, are they? Why? Because we're at war. Why are we at war? Because the President said so. How long will the war last? Several generations. After that, presumably, the Constitution will be in force again, and Congress and the courts can re-convene if they like.

Dictatorship.

The tendency will be for this leak headline, as with so many Bush scandals before it, to slip from the news after a few days, with the gutless Republican-controlled Congress rendered irrelevant and the Republican-appointed courts years away from final rulings on any of this nonsense. But the recurrent theme of a President and his administration which believe they are above the law -- Bush on his own say-so, and the rest of them acting on his presumed authority -- is more than a scandal. It is a direct challenge to the Constitution of the United States of America. You know, the "freedom" that politicians like Bush enjoy invoking when talking about the soldiers they're sending to kill and be killed in one or another illegal, pointless War On Brown People.

It is more evident than ever that this President and Vice President need to be impeached. Not because it is or isn't politically expedient; not even because their successors might be any better, or because it will be an advantage for one or another party in 2008. But because this sort of behavior in the most powerful job in the world must be punished, in the clearest possible manner. Justice demands it. Setting an example, to try to prevent similar abuses by future leaders from any party, demands it.

Otherwise, we might as well cancel that 2008 presidential election and be done with this farce we call an electoral process. Sooner or later, should Bush go unpunished, somebody in power is going to try to do exactly that sort of thing. When they do, they'll cite national security and the need for stable and experienced political leadership in a time of war, and when they do, they'll cite the precedents set by George Bush and permitted by the Congress, courts, and American public of his day. And our country's long, mostly successful experiment in representative democracy will be over.

Perhaps it already is.

Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot for WorkingForChange. He can be reached by email at geovlp@earthlink.net -- please indicate whether your comments may be used on WorkingForChange in an upcoming "letters" column.

© 2006 Working Assets

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

AUSTIN, Texas — In general, I'm against kicking 'em when they're down ... unless really awful people are involved. I figured Tom DeLay is so awful, plenty of people would gang up on him and I could pass.

Imagine my surprise when the toughest question one famous TV tough guy could come up with was, "Do you think you invested too much in the Republican Party?" Another inquired whether DeLay could think of any mistakes he'd made. I waited with bated breath for the immortal, "I wish I could learn not to work so hard," but no, he couldn't think of a single one.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay first came to power promising to restore democracy to the House of Representatives, supposedly suffering from then-Speaker Jim Wright's tyrannical regime. Even after the Rs drove Wright from office, however, bipartisanship was out of the question for DeLay. In the budget fight and government shutdown of 1995, DeLay rejected compromise and famously said, "It's time for all-out war."

I never minded DeLay being a tough guy — it was his syrupy claims to carry the banner for Christianity that I found offensive, as he frog-marched the House toward being a cash-operated special-interest machine. The idea of putting pressure on lobbyists to give only to Republicans, pressuring lobbying firms into hiring only Republicans and then letting lobbyists sit at the table during committee meetings where legislation was written — it was just screaming overt corruption.

Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich turned the U.S. House of Representatives, "the people's House," into a pay-for-play machine for corporations. Put in enough money, get your special tax exemption, get your earmarked government contract, get your trade legislation and your environmental exemption, get rid of safety regulation.

I'd like to address the idea that what DeLay did was only "payback" for the alleged sins of Jim Wright and then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, that it's "our turn," so why not act like Dan Rostenkowski? It's a great way to rationalize misbehavior, even if the misbehavior is as disproportionate as Wright's ethical peccadillo compared to the open corruption of DeLay's "K Street Project," selling Congress to the lobby.

I've watched enough switches of political power and use of the "payback" excuse to realize that what the new Ins call "payback" has little to do with whatever the new Outs used to do. It is, instead, a direct reflection — "projection," the shrinks call it — of the ethical values of the Ins onto the Outs. Every time you hear a misdeed justified by, "Well, they used to do it," you can generally mark off a 50-percent to 75-percent exaggeration.

To get a real sense of DeLay's cynicism and recklessness, forget the stuff the press loves, like the "free golfing trip" to St. Andrew's. Instead, take note of the following example.

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods "Made in the USA") in the Pacific being used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere and paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum-wage bill from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.

Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

"Stand firm," he added. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator." He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay's professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.

Copyright 2006, The Daily Camera and Boulder Publishing, LLC.

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

No president of the United States has asserted his religiosity more than George W. Bush. And yet, as a person who takes his own religious tradition seriously, no president has so embarrassed me by acting in such a way as to violate the essential ethical message of religion and the teachings of its most honored founders.

As a twenty-first century American, steeped in this ancient literature, I cannot hear the present without also hearing the echoes of the past. I cannot read of what Bush and his administration have done in these five years without hearing the voices of the Torah, the prophets and Jesus reminding him and us that we as individuals and as a society can and should do better.

When President Bush makes countless executive decisions in which he sacrifices environmental concerns to the interests of particular industries, I hear the voice of Genesis. It is in the first book of the Bible that, after creating the man and placing him into Eden, God announces to us our species' job description. We are here to tend this global garden.

When President Bush pressures Congress to eliminate or limit a whole range of social and legal services designed for those who are in need, I hear the adamant voices of Moses and the prophets. For Moses, walking with God means taking care of the widow, the orphan and even the stranger who live among us. It means opening our hands widely to the poor. It means establishing a legal system and a civil administration which is neither influenced by money nor class.

For the biblical prophets, God judges a society, not on the basis of its martial triumphs, influence or wealth, but on how the powerful treat the powerless. For the prophet, a society is known by how the weakest live. For an Isaiah or a Jeremiah, a society's growth or decline is dependent upon the seriousness with which a ruler takes his social responsibility to the poor and the disenfranchised.

When President Bush, during this disastrous period of war and of record budget deficits, favors the wealthiest among us with tax decreases, saddling the middle class, the poor, and all our children with heavy fiscal burdens, I hear the voice of the President's "favorite political philosopher." Jesus of Nazareth taught on the mountain that those whom should be blessed and cared for are the poor, the meek and the peacemaker. Like his insistent prophetic predecessors, Jesus had no patience whatsoever for those who would show favor to the powerful over the powerless.

Many have argued that President Bush is too religious. On the contrary, I would argue that the President is not religious enough.

This president has not yet fully grasped the vast personal and social implications of taking the great wisdom of our ancient religious texts seriously. This president has not yet appreciated his personal and political responsibility to transform the highest ethical values of the Jewish-Christian tradition into a moral society in which all divine images are treated with respect.

George, please, for our sake, for God sake, it is time for you to find religion!

Dennis Shulman is a rabbi and a clinical psychologist-psychoanalyst. He is on the Kollel faculty of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (the Reform seminary in New York City). His most recent book is The Genius of Genesis: A Psychoanalyst and Rabbi Examines the First Book of the Bible. He can be reached at Shulman@DennisShulman.com.

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The media watchdog organization, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, likes to keep tabs on the pontificators in print and on television and occasionally looks back to see how they did.

The Iraq war, for instance, has been a treasure trove in providing some first-class embarrassments for America's punditry, particularly those talking heads on cable TV.

Here's a sampling. There are many more at the group's website.

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it." (CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper West Side liberals, and a few people here in Washington." (Charles Krauthammer, "Inside Washington," 4/19/03)

"Well, the hot story of the week is victory. The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths. There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far. The final word on this is hooray." (Morton Kondracke, Fox News, 4/12/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war." (Fred Barnes, Fox News, 4/10/03)

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. ... Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts U.S. might can set the world right." (New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)

"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?" (Alan Colmes, Fox News, 4/25/03)

"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?" (Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 1/29/03)

"There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and British unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that." (Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 2/10/03)

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times. E-mail to: dzweifel@madison.com.

© 2006 The Capital Times

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Expose an individual to violence and depravity long enough and he’s likely either to join in or become numb to it. Something along those lines seems to be happening to the American public regarding those vague vile wars on Iraq, on “terror,” on themselves. The scandals aren’t diminishing. To the contrary. Tales of mayhem and massacres are verging on the routine. But the reaction, aside from obvious discontent and an abandon-the-Bush-ship signal for a slew of once-upon-a-time warmongers, is either more calls for blood from that quickly diminishing corps of diehard Bush brigades (because we haven’t dropped enough bombs in three years) or… tired indifference.

Abu Ghraib, it turns out, was summer camp compared with what has happened beyond Abu Ghraib, what keeps happening since. Americans don’t recognize themselves in their projections on Arab lands. Their little “Support Our Troops” stickers are becoming increasingly ironic badges of imbecility, of insults to Iraqi civilians to whom troop support translates into daily humiliations and outright killings at the hands of trigger-jittered soldiers, who see a suicide bomber behind every bush. So the American public is retreating to itself, as if not looking is a way of staving off the reckoning. Break scandal after scandal. Reveal that GIs may have executed a couple dozen people, some of them too old to fire a weapon, in a mosque, reveal that the president has been having Ngo Dinh Diem fantasies about the Iraqi prime minister. The reaction is the same. A little outrage in a few editorials, a column or two, a few dozen blogs. But from the public at large: Inattention. Focus only on “American Idol.” Grasp for innocence where you can more readily find it, on the sound stage of a Fox Television variety show where it’s still possible to believe that the best talent can still win and the greatest threat to western civilization is the clash between Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell—the dim and dour of America’s moral compass. And for a little relaxation from the tension later on, there’s always Bill O’Reilly and the rest of Fox’s brown-shirted line-up of puff-swaddled bullies. “Support Our Troops” indeed—just as long as they stay out of our faces, the reminders of their inglorious fate safely and soundly distant. Like rogues. The troops are living up to the expectations. And when the press discovers it, the reaction is, of course even more virulent toward the messenger: The media have it all wrong. The media are the enemy. Isn’t that what Bush’s recent PR offensive cheerleading for the war has been all about? Let’s call it waterboarding with whitewash.

Take the story of Task Force 6-26, reported in the New York Times on March 19: “As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room. In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball.” Their intention, the paragraph goes on almost by means of rationalization, was to find Mussab al-Zarqawi, whose DNA is becoming increasingly similar to those WMDs: His existence may be more myth than reality, and the occupation forces’ obsession with him is all to the insurgents’ advantage. But what does it matter why the Black Room existed. The mere fact of its existence under American control is the disgrace, not least because the same place was used by Saddam Hussein as a torture chamber. The Americans, never keen on the sort of symbolism that blares louder than the desert sun in the Middle East, in 2003 transferred Baghdad’s Green Zone from Saddam’s forbidding seat of power to their own, as The Atlantic’s William Langewiesche so vividly described it in a November 2004 Atlantic report. They weren’t content with aping the old tyrant’s luxuries and conceits. They had to adopt Saddam’s basement methods, too, and not always by proxy. His thuggery has been replaced by the two main Shiite militias’ and their “men in black,” death squads that roam streets and roadblocks for errant Sunnis. ( U.S. foreign policy, of course, has a long, ignoble history of conveniently veiled associations with death squads.) But it’s also been replaced, institutionally, by the force and arbitrariness of the occupation, by its lethal insecurity coupled with any great power’s outsized arrogance. Task Force 6-26’s “Black Room” was, is, like the CIA’s “black sites” and Bush’s contemptuous “we do not torture” one-liner, the expression of that institutional thuggery. Yet the story came and went with hardly a ripple in the nation's shallowed tub of scruples.

The fact that Saddam used the Task Force basement as a torture chamber is only one of the many details that should (but seemingly doesn’t) flood American living rooms with outrage. The other is this, barely touched on in the New York Times story: When Donald Rumsfeld’s top aide ordered a subordinate to “get to the bottom” of any misconduct, it was to Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin that he wrote the memo. “General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force,” the Times reports. And that’s that as far as Boykin is concerned. No mention of Boykin’s background, which implicates his motives and ridicules his credibility. Boykin, you see, is the Christian bigot who once said of a Somali warlord that “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” who claimed that the United States was in a holy war against Satan, that Bush was in the White House “because God put him there,” who took his video and bigotry show on tour around evangelical churches and who, when word of his Christian-Taliban-style crusading finally got out to the press (the evil one, once again), was promoted by Rumsfeld. Boykin was then put in charge of reforming Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons. Task Force 6-26’s party basement, naturally, was one way to reform it according to Boykin’s tenets. So his telling Cambone that he had found no pattern of misconduct was like one brute telling another that the little gulag encampment they’re looking after is really a dandy place God and country would be proud of. For Cambone, too, is a brute: As Sydney Blumenthal wrote two years ago in the Guardian, Cambone, a conservative defense intellectual appointed to the new post of undersecretary of intelligence, “is universally despised by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial style and regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. A former senior Pentagon official told me of a conversation with a three-star general, who remarked: ‘If we were being overrun by the enemy and I had only one bullet left, I’d use it on Cambone.’” (Counterpunch’s Jeffrey Sinclair has the Cambone story in detail.)

The Times did not see fit to refer to any of Boykin’s background, or Cambone’s. Its story was revealing. But so was the allowance for a vat of whitewash. “Military and legal experts,” the Times wrote, “say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.” But mostly, because with the likes of Cambone and Boykin in charge, reflecting the will and desire of the Bush junta, the American public is no longer on a need-to-know basis regarding the doings of its government. There really is no high-level conspiracy to deceive the public or flout the Constitution. There is only a Grand Inquisitor-like presidency that’s giving the public what it wants: It wants immunity. It wants plausible deniability of the unconscionable. And it’s getting what it wants.

Pierre Tristam is an editorial writer and columnist at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks. email: ptristam@att.net

© 2006 Pierre Tristam

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK