Rubicon

Their Children Are Our Children

Tonight at the Berkeley Zen Center Annette Herskovits spoke of how brotherhood can flourish in the most unlikely soil. She screened the French TV documentary "A Forgotten Resistance: The Paris Mosque," by Derri Berkani, and described her own escape from the Holocaust as a child in France.

During the German occupation of World War II the Paris mosque was a refuge for Jewish children and others fleeing the Nazis. Kaddour Benghabrit, rector of the mosque, taught that Islam required believers to provide shelter and protection to all who were in trouble, whatever their religion. In the course of the war, over 1,700 Jews and Resistance fighters were hidden in the spacious grounds of the mosque, and not one asylum seeker was captured.

On July 16 and 17, 1942, nearly 13,000 Jews—4,000 of them children—were rounded up in Paris to be sent to concentration camps. Only 30 survived the war, none of them children. Those who escaped the initial dragnet remained in constant danger. While conducting research for his film, Berkani discovered a leaflet that was distributed among Algerian Muslims in Paris at that time. It expresses, simply but eloquently, the sense of solidarity that bridged the religious divide:

Yesterday, at dawn, the Jews of Paris were arrested—the old people, the women, and the children. They are in exile like us, workers like us. They are our brothers, and their children are our children. If any of you see these children, you must give them asylum and protection, for as long as these times of misfortune last.

Annette Herskovits was one of those children who survived. Her parents—Romanian Jews who had migrated to France in the 1920s—were among those who died in Auschwitz. At age five, she hid in a Paris hotel room while the building next door was demolished by Allied bombs, and she endured the screams of trapped victims for days. Her teenage brother cleverly contacted a clandestine network similar to the one described in Berkani's film, and she was rescued to survive the war.

Herskovits is now a committed activist, and she has been working recently to help increase understanding between Arabs and Jews. She pointed out, for example, that many Israelis think of all Palestinians as terrorists, though nonviolent protest against the occupation is common. In Bilin, a village near Ramallah, the nonviolent demonstrations are unusually creative, as Mohammad Daraghmeh writes in the Daily Star (Beirut):

The first demonstration was restricted to women, and aimed to convey that they came to protest peacefully.… The second demonstration was restricted to children.

When occupation forces started bulldozing land and uprooting olive trees, the villagers expressed their attachment to their trees, some of which were more than a hundred years old, by tying themselves to those about to be uprooted. The villagers succeeded in delaying the soldiers' work for over five hours while soldiers cut the chains connecting people to their olive trees.

Next, participants entered drums that close from the inside, showing their head only, and tied themselves to the trees. Another time, villagers surprised the soldiers with a march of white coffins, each carrying the name of a respected value, such as justice, humanity, rights, manners, etc. Once demonstrators taped their mouths shut while flying the flags of countries that are active in the international arena - symbolizing international silence towards the suffering of the Palestinian people.

These are times of misfortune for both Israelis and Palestinians. Protests, even nonviolent protests, are no substitute for a spirit of brotherhood and a shared desire for peace. Let us hope that both sides will embrace the words of those Algerian Muslims 60 years ago about the Jews of Paris: "They are our brothers, and their children are our children."

Bring Them All Home

The problem is not Iraq. The problem is not Afghanistan. The problem is empire. The care and nourishment of the US empire requires that many soldiers be stationed around the globe—as of 2001, about 475,000 people at 725 bases from Iceland to Australia, according to Chalmers Johnson's calculation in The Sorrows of Empire.

Since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign deployments have  increased by at least 150,000, to an estimated total of nearly 650,000. The danger has increased too, with 1,744 now dead in the big war and 209 in the little war that refuses to simmer down.  Sixteen died on Tuesday in Afghanistan when a helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. There have been  54 American military deaths in that country so far this year, more than in all of 2004. They are dying for empire.

Why, 60 years after the end of World War II, does the US have 185,000 troops in Germany? Why, 16 years after the end of the Cold War, are there 89,000 in Japan? Germany and Japan do not have military bases on US soil. That would be thought bizarre, as Johnson points out in his earlier book Blowback, though such bases would make just as much strategic sense. The American bases are not thought bizarre, because American hegemony is considered a fact of life, an acceptable departure from the principle of national sovereignty. And therefore hardly worth noticing.

Many non-Americans do not find that hegemony acceptable, however, since the economic benefits of US bases are often outweighed by social and political dislocation, even when the US presence is not an overt occupation. Besides, people prefer to rule themselves. And at home, despite the sense of imperial militarism as normality, Americans suffer almost as much from ruling an empire as others suffer from being ruled. The cost is astronomical, $490 billion for the coming fiscal year, money that might be spent instead on education or healthcare.

Support the Troops

"I support the troops. That's why I'm bringing them home. I made a mistake. You can't start a war with lies, and you can't impose democracy with a gun. I'm sorry." That's what George Bush should have said tonight.

But he didn't. He rolled his usual tape, though in a more automaton-like way than usual, as though he knew that nobody would believe him now. He said:

Can't stop now. Global war on terror. And 9/11 9/11 9/11. Hard. Difficult. Hateful people over there. Savages. Same as Osama. But we're making progress. Strategy to defend ourselves and spread freedom working. 9/11 9/11 9/11. Freedom. Do more of the same, even though it's hard. Courage. Hard-fought battles. Certain truths. Oh, yes, and did I mention 9/11 9/11 9/11?

Why bother? He could have mailed it in. No changes in policy, no changes in rhetoric, just a desperate stab at repeating the same old lies yet again. The soldiers didn't clap as much as civilians at a hand-picked town meeting do. That may be because they know they're the ones riding into the valley of death, and high-sounding abstractions don't sound so good when you're on the front line, on the bleeding edge. They know too that the mission keeps shifting, there aren't enough troops to do the job, and their flawed equipment can't keep them safe. Whatever fine words the commander in chief pronounces, they know that many of them will not make it home alive and whole. And all for no good reason.

Mark Sandalow of the San Francisco Chronicle puts his finger on the recurrent central theme, the threadbare lie at the heart of Bush's troubles:

The direct link between the attack on Iraq and the broader "war on terror'' is one that Bush has made persistently since he began stating his case for attacking Baghdad nearly three years ago.

The urgency of ridding Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction has steadily evolved into a mission of "hunting down the terrorists'' and "helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror.''

Bush provided no new details nor a new strategy to end involvement in Iraq. He offered neither an apology for setbacks nor a mea culpa for miscalculations. No connection has ever been made between the Sept. 11 attacks and Hussein, and no weapons of mass destruction have ever been found.

Writing in The Nation, David Corn summed up the weary sameness of it all:

Bush's speech will not alter the landscape--here or in Iraq. It was the rhetorical equivalent of treading water. Before the speech, NPR had asked me to talk about the address afterward with a conservative pundit. Minutes before we were to go on, an NPR worker called. We've decided, she said, that there was not enough in the speech to warrant an analysis segment. I could hardly protest.

Nothing new. Nothing to discuss. More and more Americans are now seeing through the hollow words. The polls are headed south. Cheney says it's almost over, while Rumsfeld says it might take 12 years. And ex–war supporters in Congress like Chuck Hagel, worried about reelection, are disconnecting from Bush by saying he's "disconnected from reality."

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post, predicting this morning that Bush would announce no change in policy, described the situation well:

But the public discontent over Bush and the war is too deep for him to ignore, and too reasoned for him to write off so easily.

According to the latest polls, Americans are not saying that U.S. troops should leave instantly. They're saying they feel the country is bogged down in a war that was a mistake in the first place, they're saying they feel misled by the president and have lost confidence in him, and they're saying they want to know the way out.

They're not saying abandon the troops; they're saying support the troops. They're not saying dishonor the dead, they're saying stop the dying. They're not saying let the terrorists win; they're saying they don't think that victory in Iraq will have a major impact on terrorism elsewhere.

Support the troops. Bring them home.

Sixty Dollars and Rising

Oil closed today at more than sixty dollars a barrel, for the first time in history. It won't be the last time.

Our 21st-century society—both industrial and postindustrial—is based on fossil fuels, with special emphasis on petroleum. But the amount of petroleum on earth is finite. There is a limited supply, and nobody's making any more, not fast enough to make a difference.

The United States is especially vulnerable, because our transportation system relies on gas-guzzling vehicles, our housing stock is spread thin over a vast area that is mostly unserved by public transit, our agriculture is highly mechanized and oil-dependent, and development of alternative energy sources is slow and limited. Domestic oil production has been diminishing for decades—that 1901 Spindletop gusher in the photo is ancient history—and all of Alaska (including ANWR) is unlikely to produce more than 20 billion barrels, enough to feed the world's oil hunger for a mere eight months. It won't help to conquer any more oil-rich countries, either—they're all running out of oil too. Even the vast Saudi fields are running dry.

The demand for oil is increasing rapidly, and the two largest factors contributing to that increase are the improvident American energy policies and the rapid industrialization of China and India. The supply of oil is not increasing as rapidly as the demand, and therefore the price is going up. It is true that some new fields continue to be discovered and developed. It is also true that as the price of oil goes up, somewhat more oil can be economically produced, though there remains a real geological limit even if oil were to reach $380 a barrel—the price French investment bank Ixis-CIB says is possible by 2015. Eventually—at the point the increase in newly discovered and newly economically recoverable oil is smaller than the increase in demand natural decrease in output from existing fields—total world production will begin to diminish.

That inflection point is called peak oil, and it is approaching faster than you think. After that, it's not just a supply-demand squeeze; it's that less oil is available for sale in each succeeding year. How soon? A French government report says 2013. A recent ExxonMobil report says 2010. But Matthew Simmons thinks that peak oil could be even sooner. Simmons is the conservative CEO of the investment bank Simmons & Company International, and he has been investing in the oil business for decades. His new book, Twilight in the Desert, focuses on Saudi Arabia, the country that produces by far more oil than any other and has by far the largest reserves. But Saudi Arabia is in trouble, and that means the world is in trouble. 

Michale Klare writes in TomDispatch about Simmons's deeply pessimistic message:

For those oil enthusiasts who believe that petroleum will remain abundant for decades to come -- among them, the President, the Vice President, and their many friends in the oil industry -- any talk of an imminent "peak" in global oil production and an ensuing decline can be easily countered with a simple mantra: "Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia." Not only will the Saudis pump extra oil now to alleviate global shortages, it is claimed, but they will keep pumping more in the years ahead to quench our insatiable thirst for energy.…

"Saudi Arabian production," [Simmons] adds, italicizing his claims to drive home his point, "is at or very near its peak sustainable volume … and it is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future."…

Essentially, Simmons' argument boils down to four major points: (1) most of Saudi Arabia's oil output is generated by a few giant fields, of which Ghawar -- the world's largest -- is the most prolific; (2) these giant fields were first developed 40 to 50 years ago, and have since given up much of their easily-extracted petroleum; (3) to maintain high levels of production in these fields, the Saudis have come to rely increasingly on the use of water injection and other secondary recovery methods to compensate for the drop in natural field pressure; and (4) as time goes on, the ratio of water to oil in these underground fields rises to the point where further oil extraction becomes difficult, if not impossible. To top it all off, there is very little reason to assume that future Saudi exploration will result in the discovery of new fields to replace those now in decline.…

The moment that Saudi production goes into permanent decline, the Petroleum Age as we know it will draw to a close. Oil will still be available on international markets, but not in the abundance to which we have become accustomed and not at a price that many of us will be able to afford. Transportation, and everything it effects -- which is to say, virtually the entire world economy -- will be much, much more costly. The cost of food will also rise, as modern agriculture relies to an extraordinary extent on petroleum products for tilling, harvesting, pest protection, processing, and delivery. Many other products made with petroleum -- paints, plastics, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and so forth -- will also prove far more costly. Under these circumstances, a global economic contraction -- with all the individual pain and hardship that would surely produce -- appears nearly inevitable.

In the face of these hard geological facts, Bush and Cheney continue to push their profligate energy policy. And even those programs touted as energy-efficient and environment-friendly often turn out to be as wasteful as a Hummer. I've written earlier about the false promise of hydrogen fuel cells. And now we learn that ethanol—sold as the very essence of green—is actually an energy sink; new research shows that "up to six times more energy is used to make ethanol than the finished fuel actually contains." There are no easy answers.

It's time to install those solar panels you've been thinking about, time to move into an energy-efficient house that's an easy bicycle commute from where you work, time to buy a hybrid car to use on your rare weekend trips. Peak oil is just around the corner. And a long, cold winter is on the way.

Restoring Democracy

Rick Perlstein has written a long, thoughtful essay about the troubles of the Democrats and what they (we) might do to turn the tide. It's been published by Prickly Paradigm Press as the first item in a pocket-size, 114-page pamphlet titled The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party. The essay is followed by a dozen trenchant responses from a range of party luminaries, including Stanley Aronowitz, William Galston, Elaine Karmack, Robert Reich, and Ruy Teixeira. If you care about regime change in Washington, this pamphlet is a good place to start. The participants represent a variety of Democratic political shades, and their writing is well informed and clearly argued.

Perlstein argues for a long-term plan to restore the Democrats by returning to the traditional strengths of the party—that is, unabashed liberalism instead of Republicanism Lite. That means using the power of government to protect the weakest among us and to promote egalitarian ideals, rather than hobbling government and promoting the interests of corporations and the superrich. As Congressman Maury Maverick put it in the 1930s, that kind of liberalism is "freedom plus groceries." It is not an apologetic "We're just like the Republicans, but not as mean."

Perlstein says that the changes may take decades. He hopes Democrats will regain conrol of Congress by 2018, but he warns to plan for a 30-year war. That's how long it took the radical conservatives—the followers of Barry Goldwater—to construct their ideological edifice and their organizational steamroller over the ruins of the 1964 presidential election and to capture Congress with Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." True, they had better luck with the White House in the interim, but Nixon's domestic policies were Roosevelt Lite, and even Reagan raised more taxes than he cut. Those presidencies were only partial victories for the truly radical Republicans, those for whom government is the enemy.

Taking decades to return to dominance is not bad, Perlstein says—though we can certainly hope and plan for some more immediate victories too—because what he recommends is a rebranding of the Democratic Party, or more precisely a revival and restamping of the benign and powerful brand of liberalism that was forged in the New Deal and World War II. He summarizes:

Its philosophy is rooted in the notion of human beings as autonomous agents.  With the realization that formal autonomy meant little without the means to sustain a decent life, its practical definition in this century came to encompass the various kinds of government arrangements democratically devised to share the social burden.

Here's an example: three-fourths of Americans, when polled, favor a federal mandate "requiring business to offer private health insurance for their employees." And yet 45 million Americans are without healthcare protection, and the political terrain is so unfriendly to any such mandate—in fact, to any meaningful reform of the healthcare system—that few Democrats engage the issue at all, and when someone like John Kerry does propose a comprehensive plan, it is almost completely ignored.

But Perlstein is not suggesting a laundry list of specific policies. The rebranding is what's important, the overarching ideas, and the policies will naturally follow. In a sense, his call to arms is simply a more specific version of George Lakoff's plea to frame the discourse in a progressive way. That means defining a clear, understandable vision and sticking to it through thick and thin, even in those election years when the vision may not immediately win over the swing voters. And yet it also means making the hard political choices that will win elections and put the party back at the levers of power. So there is a tension, but Perlstein insists that the emphasis should be on the vision, on consistent messages over time, and that the result will be a loyal base and a persuadable swing bloc.

The title of the essay, "The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo," refers to the long-term success and the more recent decline of Boeing. For many decades, Boeing maintained "the willingness to stake itself to the long term for the sake of building something enduring." The company bet a bundle—gambled its very existence—on the superjumbo 747. The prospects did not seem good; in fact, during one 18-month period, the company failed to get a single domestic passenger-jet order. But the persistence paid off, and Boeing made $20 billion over a decade on the original $2 billion investment.

Then came the stock-market mania of the 1990s, and Boeing succumbed to the fervor for ever-improving quarterly reports and ever-rising stock prices. The focus on the short-term bottom line has reduced innovation, cut long-term research and development, and caused Boeing to fall behind its European rival Airbus. That's the parable, and I would add from personal experience that it describes the rise and fall of Hewlett-Packard with equal accuracy, along with many other once-proud American companies.

The moral of the story for the Democrats is clear. Think long term. Invest for the future. Be consistent. Don't compromise.

A one-party government is not a democracy. Therefore, restoring the Democratic Party—or, less plausibly, creating another viable progressive alternative to the GOP—is a necessary step toward restoring democracy. Let's hope we have time to effect the changes soon, before the military-religious-corporate wing of the Republican Party decides to cancel all future elections.

Fear Itself

Here's a quick test of recent history. True or false?

1. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR were close to equality in military strength, and we lived in a bipolar world in which nuclear war was avoided solely due to MAD (the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction).
2. In the 1980s, the USSR was driven out of Afghanistan by indigenous forces with some assistance from outside Islamist fighters.
3. The USSR disintegrated as a result of increased US military budgets and Reagan's unyielding diplomacy.
4. Al Qaeda is a worldwide network of terrorists, organized hierarchically under the command of Osama bin Laden.
5. By 2000, Al Qaeda and its radical jihadist allies had reached a new level of coordination and success.
6. Bin Laden planned and executed the 9/11/2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
7. Al Qaeda sleeper cells in 60 countries, including the US, are currently planning devastating new attacks.

According to Adam Curtis, documentary filmmaker whose three-hour BBC series is playing at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco through June 30, every one of these statements is demonstrably false. The Power of Nightmares posits that the principal lever of political power George Bush and Tony Blair now wield is fear—baseless fear—and that myths such as these serve to keep the fear alive among the uninformed citizens of the US and the UK. The conjured state of imaginary terror serves the interests of both the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and the jihadists in the Arab world, by increasing the perceived necessity for their radical strategies and the power they are therefore able to grasp.

In fact, says Curtis:

1. The USSR was always much weaker than the US, with unreliable nuclear devices and failure-prone delivery systems. The world from 1945 to 1989 was essentially unipolar.
2. The CIA, under William Casey, provided so much money for technologically advanced weapons that the 1980s war in Afghanistan was a US-USSR war, with the CIA using Islamists as proxies. Some of them later became the ruling Taliban, and others became the groups that are now called Al Qaeda.
3. The government of the USSR disintegrated from within, economically and socially, until it lost authority with those it ruled, both inside the Soviet Union and in satellite states.
4. Over the years, several unaffiliated groups of radical Islamists have received financial aid from bin Laden for specific projects, but there exists no command structure that he heads. The FBI developed the organizational theory and called it Al Qaeda in order to convict the 1993 World Trade Center bombers of conspiracy. Bin Laden liked the name and began to use it, since it increased his perceived power.
5. Radical Islamists were at a low ebb in 2000, having failed to achieve political power in Algeria, Egypt, or anywhere else outside Afghanistan. Many of their members had been jailed or executed, and people throughout the Islamic world were repelled by their violence against their fellow civilians.
6. The 9/11 attacks were planned and executed by a small group of sophisticated Saudis (and a few others), headed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They requested and received funding from bin Laden.
7. Members of  presumed sleeper cells in Buffalo and Detroit were arrested to great fanfare, but there was no proof of any terrorist activity. There may well be groups of young Muslims, angered by the invasion of Iraq and inspired by the fervor of martyrdom, who are planning terrorist attacks; but it is unlikely any of them are associated with bin Laden.

In short, Al Qaeda does not exist. It is a phantom, conjured into media reality by American neoconservatives and radical Islamists for their own purposes. Each group gains power from the perceived power of the other group. They feed off of each other, a fact that may explain why bin Laden has not been arrested.

There exist dangerous people in the world, certainly, and many of them have Islamist ideas. Attacks such as those in Bali and Madrid will probably continue to occur. But it does no one any good to abandon civil liberties and democratic processes, to advance militaristic solutions, to expand the state security apparatus and impose ineffective security processes, to live in a state of unwarranted hatred and fear. It does no one any good, that is, except for Bush and bin Laden and their fellow radicals.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself," said Franklin Roosevelt, speaking in a time when there was far greater reason for fear and hopelessness. Now we fear everything and everyone. As Adam Curtis puts it: "Those with the darkest imaginations have now become the most powerful."

The Power of Nightmares is not yet available on DVD. If you can't make it to the Roxie by June 30, you can download the series from this website. I had read about the series and mentioned it last month, but now that I've seen it, I recommend it even more strongly.

Iraq = Vietnam + 35 Years

Imagine thirty-five years from now that an Iraqi prime minister visits the White House, and his talk with the American president is about how Iraq and the US can work together peacefully and constructively, despite their history of war and their profound remaining differences. The prime minister would probably be a Muslim cleric on the Iranian model, and the specific discussions might be about increased trade or joint humanitarian aid.

That's almost precisely what happened this week—except for the Muslim cleric—when Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai visited the White House. George Bush mentioned "economic relations" and "the fight against HIV/AIDS," and Khai said:

Mr. President and I also agreed that there remain differences between our two countries due to the different conditions that we have, the different histories and cultures. But we also agreed that we should work together through constructive dialogue based upon mutual respect to reduce those differences in order to improve our bilateral relations.

Thirty-five years ago, Vietnam was the American nightmare that would not go away. It was the focus of American foreign policy, and we installed and supported several puppet regimes in Saigon. Successive US presidents considered the "democratization" of Vietnam so central to American interests that the country was invaded, occupied, bombed, strafed, and transformed into a charnel house for 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. Now the two countries cooperate peacefully in matters of public health and sell many shiploads of goods to each other—in fact, the US is Vietnam's largest trading partner, to the tune of $6.1 billion last year. We no longer spend time worrying that Vietnam is undemocratic or that its government is one Communist domino that might cause other dominoes to fall. From the perspective of contemporary Washington, it's just one more small country that we occasionally think about, usually in economic terms.

Today, Iraq is our national nightmare, the focus of American foreign policy and our chosen charnel house. We are "democratizing" Iraq by installing puppet regimes in Baghdad. More than 1,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died—and the war continues, worsening with every passing month.

The current nightmare seems certain to last several more years, until some president finally realizes it's time to cut our losses and leave, that the situation in Iraq will not improve as long as there are American troops in the country. Then, after thousands more deaths, the last helicopters will evacuate the last Americans, just as they did in Vietnam.

In fact, Iraq may extract even more blood and destroy even more psyche than Vietnam did. The parallels are far from exact even now, and the future of the country is hostage to players on both sides who are even more crazed with rectitude than Ho Chi Minh and William Westmoreland were. But the parallels are there, becoming ever more evident as Bush digs in his heels and proclaims illusionary progress. The Cunning Realist, in an eloquent post last week, lists 15 similarities—rhymes, he calls them—between Vietnam and Iraq. Among them:

• Military escalation is justified based on false pretenses.
• There is no "front line" in a country-wide war.
• The enemy has inferior firepower but will not give up.
• Indigenous troops are expected to take over for US troops but never do.
• American casualties are treated as a reason to stay the course, in order not to "dishonor their sacrifice."
• Success is always just around the corner.

Today's quicksand in southwest Asia is disturbingly similar to that old quagmire in southeast Asia. When you're in the middle of the muck, it's easy to convince yourself that there are good reasons to continue  flailing in place. But the historical rhymes tell another tale: the sooner we extract American boots from the quicksand of Iraq, the sooner it will be possible for an independent Iraqi prime minister to visit Washington and talk vaguely about "working together." If the resident of the White House were not worried about the appearance of cowardice, that visit might occur much sooner than 35 years from now, and with far fewer deaths in the interim.

A Vision of Iraq

George Bush invaded Iraq, diverting resources from the search for the Islamist jihadists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, by pretending the invasion had some connection to that search, which he calls the "war on terror." Or is it possible that he really believes Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden, planning the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, the 1998 African embassy bombings, and the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington?

Whatever Bush's real thoughts, he continues to beat the drum against a single undifferentiated type of terrorist enemy, and he continues to ignore his own role in the proliferation of terrorists and the deterioration of Iraq. Here's what he said in Saturday's radio address:

We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens. Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror.

He's right: we can all agree that Iraq is now a central front in the "war on terror." In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, before 2003, there were no active jihadists —Hussein didn't allow them to operate. In George Bush's Iraq, however, there are many thousands, because Bush has created the perfect situation for them to flourish: insufficient security for Iraqis to build a normal daily life; porous borders and an anti-American populace for jihadists to travel and hide; an aggressive occupying force that is recognizable and therefore easy to attack; and progressively worsening anarchy. There are many more people in Iraq now who want to harm the US than there were before the occupation began. They were not in Iraq before the war, and the ineffectual presence of the US military has drawn them there. In fact, the country is now the central site of jihad training.

The situation continues to deteriorate, despite Bush's rosy portrayal. The latest evidence comes from the powerful PBS Frontline documentary "Private Warriors," which examines the role of the 120,000 private contractors who support the US military. Reporter Martin Smith said that the April 2005 trip to make the film is his fifth time in Iraq, and it's the first time he has felt unsafe. The sense of random violence and constant danger is strongly conveyed by video of the documentary team careening through Baghdad neighborhoods at breakneck speed, in a convoy of three SUVs loaded with armed, trigger-happy guards. Producer Marcela Gaviria describes the changes:

Establishing Truth

The significance of the Downing Street memos is gradually dawning on the American public. They demonstrate that Bush decided to invade Iraq many months before he admitted the decision, that he went to the UN not to avoid war but to create a credible excuse for it, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The minutes of the British cabinet meeting held on July 23, 2002, constitute the original Downing Street memo; but seven other related documents have also been leaked, one briefing paper to prepare the cabinet for that meeting and six other individual briefing papers containing additional details on what the British government knew about Bush's intentions and tactics (including the paper extracted above—click on the extract for more).

These memos, as one writer recently pointed out, may be less a smoking gun than a bomb with a long, slow fuse. Whatever the image, Bush is getting burned. His poll ratings are plummeting, and—as Dan Froomkin points out in the Washington Post—his statements about Iraq are no longer taken seriously.

Mark Danner analyzed the original memo and its tortuous path to media revelation in the June 9 issue of the New York Review of Books. He concluded:

The Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion.

That attitude was complex. It might be summarized thus: There were many clues in the 12 months before the invasion that Bush was intent on a military solution, despite his protestations that an invasion would be a last resort. As a result, many Americans assumed that he would proceed with an invasion whatever the result of UN inspections for WMDs. But there was no hard evidence; therefore that assumption could not be called factual. Later, when these eight pieces of documentary evidence surfaced, they were not deemed newsworthy because everyone had already concluded that something like what they described was going on. And yet, because they were not in the form of a taped conversation between Bush and George Tenet, for example, or a televised admission by Bush, they were dismissed as second-hand, hearsay evidence—and therefore they could not be called factual.

How We Train Interrogators

When accusations of torture in the American gulag come from prisoners, Bush's defense is that they are based merely "on the word of—and the allegations—by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble—that means not tell the truth." When the source is Amnesty International, Bush calls it "absurd." When it's the International Red Cross, he flatly denies the charges.

But when the source is an American military policeman who claims he was severely beaten by fellow MPs because they mistakenly thought he was an uncooperative detainee in the Guantánamo Bay prison, Bush's blustering denials sound hollow. Specialist Sean Baker charges that he was assaulted in January 2003 after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit in what he understood was a training exercise. He has sued the Department of Defense for 15 million dollars. David Zucchino reports in the Los Angeles Times:

Officials conceded that he was treated for injuries suffered when a five-man MP "internal reaction force" choked him, slammed his head several times against a concrete floor and sprayed him with pepper gas.

The drill took place in a prison isolation wing reserved for suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees who were disruptive or had attacked MPs.

Baker said he put on the jumpsuit and squeezed under a prison bunk after being told by a lieutenant that he would be portraying an unruly detainee. He said he was assured that MPs conducting the "extraction drill" knew it was a training exercise and that Baker was an American soldier.

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, "red," and shouted: "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!" He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

The lawsuit says of the extraction team: "Armed with the highly inflammatory, false, incendiary and misleading information that had been loaded into their psyches by their platoon leader, these perceptions and fears … became their operative reality, and they acted upon these fears, all to the detriment of Sean Baker."

No one has been disciplined or punished for the assault, said Baker's lawyer, T. Bruce Simpson Jr.

The secret is out. It's yet another smoking gun. Now we know for certain what American military interrogators do when they deal with prisoners who do not cooperate. They mistook an American soldier for a prisoner, so they choked him and slammed his head on a concrete floor. This time, however, since the victim was an American soldier rather than an Afghan or Iraqi civilian, the word is out.

There has been much evidence over the last two years that Bush, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld ordered illegal torture. Most readers who have been keeping up with the news are not surprised by this latest revelation. But this situation is different: Spc Baker's charges provide a unique kind of personal testimony that the training of military interrogators sanctioned brutality and torture far beyond the bounds of the Geneva Conventions and American law. Bush's denials are no longer at all credible.

Just as the Downing Street memos have confirmed strong suspicions that Bush lied about his plans for war, Spc Baker's charges confirm strong suspicions that brutal torture is US government policy. When the malefactors think no one is looking, their true colors are revealed. This is how we train interrogators for the American concentration camps.