IPS: Business Booming for Soldiers of Fortune

"Despite scandals over human rights abuses and war profiteering, private military contractors are expanding their presence overseas, and may even be involved in helping to draft the next U.S. defence budget.
Currently more than 20,000 privately contracted employees are at work in Iraq, feeding U.S. troops, providing security, and rebuilding the occupied nation's shattered infrastructure.
Although private military contractors, known as PMCs, were implicated in the torture scandal at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, and are the target of congressional probes into over-billing, more than 150 U.S. companies have been awarded contracts worth up to 48.7 billion dollars for work in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq, according to research by the Washington-based Centre for Public Integrity.
That figure represents an increase of 82 companies and more than 40 billion dollars since the centre first issued a study of contracts awarded to PMCs last fall.
In a separate report released Jul. 29, the centre also found that three private companies -- Booz Allen Hamilton, Perot Systems Government Services and Miltec Systems Co -- are headhunting for analysts to work in the development of the U.S. defence budget..
"The trend is rising and has been driven by many factors: the drive to privatise state services, the vast disparity between the pay PMCs get and those employed by the state -- PMCs earn perhaps five times as much -- leading to a real shortage within the armed forces of the U.S. and U.K," says William Bowles, a journalist who has written extensively on PMCs.
"It's (also) a method of hiding the real level of casualties," he added in an interview.
Some high-profile killings in Iraq have involved contractors, like Paul Johnson, the Lockheed Martin engineer beheaded by Islamic militants in June, and the four employees of Blackwater Security who were killed and dragged through the streets by a mob in Fallujah.
Lesser known are the more than 100 other contractors, including about 40 employees of controversial giant Halliburton, who have also lost their lives in Iraq since fighting officially ended more than one year ago.
Casualty numbers from the war itself are hard to come by, but Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn reported in South Africa's 'The Star' Apr. 16 that "at least 80 foreign mercenaries -- security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies -- have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq".
Independent experts say one of the main problems with PMCs is the lack of transparency in the bidding for their contracts, combined with scant oversight of how they spend the money.
Halliburton, the military services company with close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been probed by Congress and the accounting firm KPMG for overcharging for some 167 million dollars worth of gasoline imports from Kuwait, as well as a variety of other abuses associated with its 5.6-billion-dollar troop support and military logistics (LOGCAP) contract.
Bechtel Corp, which won a 680-million-dollar deal to rebuild Iraq's water and sewage system, was one of only six firms to take part in a secretive bidding process. According to the Centre for Responsive Politics in Washington, the company gave 1.3 million dollars in campaign contributions over the last three years, mostly to Republicans.
"Ironically, we set up a process to take advantage of the private market, but we're getting the worst of it," said Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who is an expert on military privatisation.
"It's more about who you know, not who can do the best job for the best price," he said in an interview. "The oversight has been quite terrible, so we're not seeing any cost savings."
One of the most controversial tasks delegated to private contractors has been interrogation of Iraqi detainees. This week, victims of abuse at Abu Ghraib, including the widow of one detainee who died of torture, filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court against two PMCs: CACI and Titan. Employees of the firms were allegedly present during the abuse of prisoners.
According to an Army Inspector General's report, more than one-third of the 31 interrogators provided by CACI lacked any "formal training in military interrogation policies and techniques." The company still has 19 interrogators working in Iraq.
CACI insists its workers were always subject to the military chain of command, and notes that it has been cleared of any wrongdoing and continues to hold government contracts. It has called the lawsuit "frivolous."
"CACI personnel were never in charge of military personnel in Iraq," the company said in a statement. "Civilian contractors do not give orders to military personnel."
But some experts say that focusing on the chain of command misses the more important issue.
"Most people, including many people in the military, find it stunning to turn over an integral, mission-critical role like interrogation in a military prison to a private contractor," said Singer.
The United States is not only reliant on private contractors for work overseas, but also at home. This year the government will spend 275 billion dollars -- more than 10 percent of the federal budget -- on contracts to carry out its daily business.
In his book 'The True Size of Government', Paul Light of the Brookings Institution estimates the federal budget funds a "shadow government" of nearly 12 million contractors, about one-half of them in defence. That means contractors outnumber civil servants and military personnel by two to one.
And as the military has trouble finding young people to sign up during wartime, and some seasoned troops leave for far more lucrative jobs in the private sector, Pentagon officials expect the role of contractors to expand further.
Brian Hilferty, a spokesperson for Lt Gen Franklin L Hagenbeck, the Army's top personnel officer, told IPS that private contractors would also be used to recruit new soldiers.
As the use of contractors grows, so does the cost of U.S. occupation. Last week Congress approved an additional 25 billion dollars for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and seven percent more for the rest of the Pentagon's programmes, in a 417.5-billion-dollar defence bill.
In a victory for the Pentagon, legislators backed down on language requiring the military to reveal the private security contractors it hires for work in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay (a prison for detainees in President George W Bush's "war on terrorism") in Cuba."

Raw Story: Reagan defense sec. confirms legal analysis Bush was AWOL

"Lawrence J. Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics under Ronald Reagan from 1981-1985, confirmed RAW STORY’s legal analysis of President Bush’s Guard Service in a telephone call Friday afternoon.
The analysis, which proves that President George W. Bush was absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, is available here.
Given proof that Bush missed five months of Guard training sessions, he said that Bush would be considered AWOL.
“If you don’t show up, you’re absent without leave, by definition,” Korb said.
No more than ten percent of sessions could be missed without them being made up, he asserted, confirming RAW STORY’s findings. He added that President Bush should have been mandated to serve active duty if he missed even two months of service in a fiscal year – 24 months of active duty minus the amount of active duty already served.
For Bush, this would have amounted to 113 days. How this number was divined can be seen here.
“You would be put on active duty and sent wherever they needed you,” he said.
At the time Bush was serving in the Texas Air National Guard, Korb himself was serving in the Naval Reserve, the Navy’s equivalent of the National Guard, where he served from 1966 to 1985. He dismisses suggestions that the Guard was being lenient about service at the time.
“At that time they were very strict about fulfilling their obligations – and we don’t like to say it – because this was a way to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam."‘
He was unable to examine Bush’s payroll records at his home on Friday, but is expected to formally confirm that Bush had failed to complete his required duty in 1972, therefore rendering him AWOL, at his office Monday.
Korb currently serves as a Senior Analyst at the Center for Defense Information and a Senior Fellow at the progressive thinktank, the Center for American Progress.
He has written more than 100 editorials in major publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and has appeared more than a thousand times as a commentator on television on shows such as Larry King Live, Good Morning America and The O’Reilly Factor.
RAW STORY plans to bring President Bush’s AWOL research to its full conclusion Monday, when Korb is able to review Bush’s payroll records."

KYW-TV3: Clinton Adviser Berger Cleared of Document Theft

"President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger -- who'd been accused of stealing classified material from the National Archives -- has been cleared of all wrongdoing.
The National Archives and the Justice Department have concluded nothing is missing and nothing in the Clinton administration's record was withheld from the 9-11 Commission.
The Wall Street Journal reports archives staff have accounted for all classified documents Berger looked at.
Late last year they asked investigators to see if the former national security adviser removed materials during his visits.
Berger's lawyers said his client had inadvertently removed several photocopies of reports, but later returned them."

From the archives: Revealed: the special relationship behind America's Middle East policy

(Telegraph) "Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary who was a driving force behind the invasion of Iraq , is depicted as a fiercely pro-Zionist hardliner. Philip Sherwell reveals his unlikely confidante is a high-powered Arab divorcee with whom he is said to be closely involved."
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"Political foes of Paul Wolfowitz like to portray him as a leading light in Washington's so-called 'Zionist conspiracy', part of a small cabal of Jewish neo-conservatives driving a blindly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East.
The US deputy secretary of defence was one of the original architects of the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and remains an enthusiastic advocate of spreading democracy in the Middle East, despite the setbacks in Iraq. For his detractors, it is evidence that he is pursuing an agenda hostile to Arab regimes, particularly ones as virulently opposed to Israel as Saddam's.
Critics have also latched on to the fact that his sister, Laura, a biologist, lives in Israel as proof for their theory. Indeed she does; she even has an Israeli husband. But although she rarely talks about politics, the reality is that she is a moderate rather than a hawkish settler or enthusiastic backer of Ariel Sharon, Israel's hardline prime minister.
In fact, there is a woman from whom Mr Wolfowitz does draw support and backing for his views, but she comes from a very different - and unexpected - background. The Telegraph can reveal that his closest companion and most valued confidantes is a middle-aged Arab feminist whose own strongly held views on instilling democracy in her native Middle East have helped bolster his resolve.
Shaha Ali Riza is a senior World Bank official who was born in Tunis, grew up in Saudi Arabia and holds an international relations masters degree from St Anthony's College, Oxford. Close acquaintances of the couple have told The Telegraph that she is romantically linked with Mr Wolfowitz, 61, a fellow divorcee with whom she has been friends for several years.
Even by the discreet standards of Washington's powerful inner circle, it is a remarkably closely guarded secret. They rarely go out as a couple openly or demonstrate affection publicly, according to friends who are aware of the relationship. They attend low-key Washington social events and visit friends' homes together and Ms Riza also sometimes goes to official functions and dinners with him, but is not identified as his partner, an acquaintance said. 'Most people would never guess there was a relationship, even if they saw them together,' he said.
It is a sign of the sensitivity surrounding the relationship that the few friends willing even to acknowledge it last week did not want to be named. 'Shaha Riza runs around with Wolfowitz a lot. I gather that she is his current girlfriend but they are very careful about this,' said one.
Ms Riza was on holiday last week on a ranch in Wyoming and did not respond to messages left for her. Mr Wolfowitz did not return a call placed with his office at the Pentagon.
It would amaze the detractors who depict Mr Wolfowitz as part of a narrow-minded Jewish lobby that one of the most important people in his life is, in fact, an Arab woman whose job is to promote gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa. It will doubtless also surprise many of his supporters.
Ms Riza's childhood in Saudi Arabia did much to shape her commitment to democracy, equal rights and civil liberties in the Arab world as she experienced at first hand the kingdom's oppressive regime, particularly for women. She has long pursued those beliefs in adult life and joined the World Bank in 1997 as the senior gender co-ordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, a role that involves extensive travel in the region.
She previously worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates in 1991 to push for democracy and human rights in that country after the first Gulf war, and then established the Middle East programme at the National Endowment for Democracy, a federal agency created under Ronald Reagan in 1983 with the ambitious goal of promoting American political values internationally.
So Mr Wolfowitz and Ms Riza are not just close personally, they have also both long espoused the same deeply held conviction that democracy should be spread across the Arab world. With his ear, she is one of most influential Arabs in Washington.
'Paul and some others always had Saddam Hussein in their sights, but she helped reinforce that resolve,' said a friend who moves in similar conservative circles. 'That was greatly helped by the fact that she is an Arab woman who is an expert on the process of democracy.
'Paul Wolfowitz is always being accused of being part of a bunch of Jews pushing Zionist interests with the likes of Richard Perle [a former senior Pentagon adviser] and Doug Feith [the Pentagon number three]. So when an Arab woman says something similar, her views have tremendous authority.
'This agenda is being pushed by a group in which Shaha has a crucial role. She has views she holds strongly, but she is a modest, polite person.
'Paul's sister in Israel is always quoted as evidence that he's part of some Zionist conspiracy. But she's actually quite Left-wing and he has more in common with Shaha than with her.'
As with Ms Riza, Mr Wolfowitz's political creed also began to take shape in his childhood. His father, Jacob, an eminent mathematician, emigrated from Poland to America as a boy in 1920 but lost several relatives in the Holocaust. The young Paul was taught from an early age that appeasement does not work.
He met Clare Selgin, later to become a renowned scholar on Indonesian anthropology, when they were students at Cornell in the early 1960s. They married in 1968, have three children and quietly divorced in 2002. Mr Wolfowitz is intensely private and makes a point of never discussing his personal life in interviews.
Ms Riza is also divorced and has a 17-year-old son, who lives with her in Wesley Heights in an elegant street of townhouses popular with foreign diplomats who are based in nearby embassies. Her former husband, Bulent Ali Riza, a Turkish Cypriot who heads the Turkish programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that he was aware that she discusses her views on the Middle East with Mr Wolfowitz. 'She talks to Paul,' he said, 'though I think she now has some reservations about the democratisation process in Iraq.'
Mr and Ms Riza both studied for their international relations postgraduate degrees at St Anthony's in the early 1980s before moving to America. They later split up but both made their mark in the influential Washington world of international thinktanks and institutes.
She was moving in the same conservative academic circles as Mr Wolfowitz, who was dean and professor of international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies for seven years before he joined President Bush's administration in 2001. Friends say that they have been seeing each other for several years, but do not know when they started dating.
Asked about their relationship, Mr Perle, a close political and intellectual soulmate of Mr Wolfowitz, said: 'You should ask her and Mr Wolfowitz about that. Any relationship they may have is a personal and private matter. I don't know the extent or nature of it.'
Mr Wolfowitz was, of course, already beating the drums for regime change in Iraq and was one of the signatories with Mr Perle on the 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for Saddam to be ousted. After al-Qa'eda's attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, he immediately pushed Mr Bush towards challenging states that sponsor terrorism rather than just pursuing the terror network's leader, Osama bin Laden.
For him, the war on terror brought with it the chance to pursue regime change and democracy across the Islamic world. In these views, he found common ground with Ms Riza, who had often expressed her frustration at the widely held view in the West that Arab states would never embrace democracy.
'She felt that the US supported democracy all over the world except in Arab countries,' said a friend. 'She believed that was wrong and that democracy can and must be promoted in the Arab world, even if it upsets feudal rulers and dictators.'
Mr Wolfowitz hoped that the invasion of Iraq that he did so much to engineer with his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, would not just topple a brutal dictator, but also set off a democracy 'domino effect' across the Middle East.
For many of the neo-conservative cheerleaders of democracy, the next target is the autocratic Saudi state. Mr Wolfowitz has already said that another goal of the Iraq war was to allow US troops to pull out of the kingdom to alternative bases. Ms Riza will doubtless have offered him her views on how to deal with her childhood home."

Books: Sprawling Toward Bethlehem: Dolores Hayden examines the omnipresence of sprawl.

(MotherJones) "In The Crying of Lot 49—Thomas Pynchon's 1966 satire of suburbia and its discontents—Oedipa Maas looks down "onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop" and is reminded of her first peek inside a transistor radio. "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had." Sprawl was a relatively limited phenomenon then; today it is omnipresent, and epiphanies about it are hard to come by. Nevertheless, Yale professor Dolores Hayden has, with a pinch of Pynchon, written A Field Guide to Sprawl in hopes of prompting a re-examination of what freeway subsidies, commercial-property-tax waivers, and exclusionary developments have wrought. By pairing the aerial photography of Jim Wark with her own devil's dictionary of 51 terms—from "alligator" (a failed subdivision) to "zoomburb" (think Sun City, Arizona)—Hayden makes an often depressing and wonkish subject lively and provocative. Some of her terms are clever, like "privatopia" (gated community), while others feel a bit tired, but no matter. In the end, it is Wark's bird's-eye view that allows one to see anew what has been festering all around us. By book's end, the reader, much like Ms. Maas, cannot help but imagine that sprawl is no accident, but a vast conspiracy of banality."

The Dead Play At Bohemian Grove! Powell, Rumsfeld, Grateful Dead members on exclusive club´s guest list

(SF IndyMedia) "Occidental resident Mickey Hart will join fellow Grateful Dead member Bob Weir. The musicians, along with rocker Steve Miller, are part of an effort to bring a younger vibe to the grove, the Wall Street Journal reported."
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"The summer retreat that Herbert Hoover called "the greatest men´s party on Earth" is under way in Monte Rio, and the guest list is as eclectic as ever.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the CEO of Bechtel Corp., former Grateful Dead bandmates and vintner Robert Mondavi are all scheduled to attend the Midsummer Encampment of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco.
So, too, is conservative author William F. Buckley Jr., liberal TV personality Chris Matthews and gay porn star Chad Savage.
Actually, Savage is working the event as a valet, according to the New York Post, which quoted another, unidentified employee despite confidentiality agreements that employees sign when they are hired.
The point is, Bohemians and the cast of hundreds who help put on this summer camp for grown men really are an "unconventional" lot, as the word is technically defined by Webster´s.
The 125th gathering of "Bohos" is no exception, according to an official guest list distributed to club members. More than 2,500 men are scheduled to go to the club´s 2,800-acre redwood grove just east of Monte Rio. This is the busiest weekend of the 17-day event, which means everybody who´s anybody should be there.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a perennial camper, arrived Thursday by private plane at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. Fifty to 100 private jets have landed at the airport daily in the past two weeks, about average for this time of year, said Walt Smith, regional coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration.
But as of Friday, the Secret Service hadn´t alerted airport officials to any special arrivals, despite the fact that Powell is on the guest list and scheduled to stay in Mandalay, the same camp as Kissinger and Riley Bechtel, the CEO of the engineering firm whose projects include the reconstruction of Iraq.
Mandalay is one of 119 separate camps that dot the floor and walls of the steep canyon and is so far up the fern-covered bank that it has an incline railway to haul firewood and supplies.
Mandalay is the traditional seat of power in Bohemian Grove. Its guest list this year includes George Schultz, a former secretary of state; David O´Reilly, chairman of ChevronTexaco; H.B. Atwater Jr., chief executive officer of General Mills; and Edgar Kaiser Jr., founder of the Kaiser Foundation.
In all, about 30 prominent businessmen and current and former government officials are scheduled to stay in Mandalay.
Rumsfeld and former President George Bush are members of the Hill Billies camp, although it´s unclear whether either is actually going.
Former President Gerald Ford, however, apparently won´t be in attendance, as his name does not appear on the guest list. Former President Ronald Reagan also appears on the list despite his June 5 death.
The associations of powerful men made possible by the Bohemian Club encampment have raised the ire of protesters, who charge that captains of industry and government officials discuss business in secret despite the grove´s official motto: "Weaving spiders come not here."
Of particular interest are the "Lakeside Talks," which this year include:

An untitled talk by David Gergen, commentator and former adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.
"The Landscape of American Politics," by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist.
"College Athletics: Serious Business or Toy Department?" by Ted Leland, Stanford University´s athletic director.
"Flight," by Chuck Yeager.
"The Long War of the 20th Century," by James Woolsey, a former CIA director.
"Bohemia," by author Herman Wouk.
"Exploring Mars and Searching for Life in the Universe," by Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
"The Coming Virtual Soldier," by Roger McCarthy, principal and engineer of Exponent Inc.

Local notables scheduled to attend include Victor Trione, son of financier and philanthropist Henry Trione; winemakers Jim Bundschu, Daniel Duckhorn and Wente brothers Eric and Phil; and car dealer Henry Hansel.
Occidental resident Mickey Hart will join fellow Grateful Dead member Bob Weir. The musicians, along with rocker Steve Miller, are part of an effort to bring a younger vibe to the grove, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Not everyone who attends is rich and famous, however.
Peter Phillips, a professor at Sonoma State University who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Grove, estimated one in five members actually fits that criterion, and the rest are either the ordinary rich or just plain ordinary.
"There´s associate members, maybe a high school teacher from Palo Alto, who plays tuba in the band," he said."

ALEXANDER COCKBURN & JEFFREY ST. CLAIR: Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes! What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam

(CounterPunch) ~Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new book on the 2004 elections, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, will be published in August.

"In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy, with his actual induction scheduled for the summer, after his graduation. Already notorious among his contemporaries for his political ambition, he'd maneuvered himself into the top slot at the Yale political union, while also winning admission to Skull and Bones.
While Bush, two years behind Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity at Yale by selling ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has recalled) Kerry was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature and duly noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some of whom he hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time.
It was a season for important decisions and Kerry pondered his options amid the delights of a Skull and Bones retreat on an island in the St Lawrence river. He duly decided to junk his speech on the theme of "life after graduation" and opted for a fiery denunciation of the war and of an LBJ. The speech was well received by the students and some professors. Most parents were aghast, though not Kerry's own mother and father.
Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Kerry duly presented himself for military service. After a year's training he was assigned to the USS Gridley, deployed to the Pacific, probably carrying nuclear missiles. Beset by boredom, Kerry received the news that once of his best friends, Dickie Pershing, grandson of "Black Jack" Pershing had been killed in Vietnam. Kerry seethed with rage and yearned, as he put it years later to his biographer Douglas Brinkley, for vengeance. (Brinkley's recently published and highly admiring bio, A Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, offers many telling vignettes to an assiduous reader. It's based almost entirely on Kerry's diaries and letters of the time.)
Kerry engineered reassignment to the Swift boat patrol. In Vietnam the Tet offensive had prompted a terrible series of search and destroy missions by the US, plus the assassination program known as Phoenix. As part of the US Navy's slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his sidekick Captain Roy "Latch" Hoffman had devised "Operation Sea Lords", in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals and secondary streams of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis on the areas near the Cambodian border. The basic plan, explicitly acknowledged by many Swift boat veterans, was to terrorize the peasants into turning against the National Liberation Front, aka Viet Cong. The entire area, except for certain designated "friendly villages", was a free fire zone, meaning the Americans could shoot at will and count anyone they killed as VC.
Arriving in Vietnam on November 17, 1968, Kerry chafed at patrols around Cam Ranh bay and pushed successfully for assignment to the forward, killing patrols. He was no Al Gore, peaceably smoking dope and shooting hoops on his Army base in Vietnam and writing home fierce moral critiques of the war. "I was more opposed to the war than ever", Kerry told Brinkley in 2003, "yet more compelled by patriotism to fight it. I guess until you're in it, you still want to try it."
Day after day, night after night, the Swift boats plied the waters, harassing and often killing villagers, fishermen and farmers. In this program, aimed at intimidating the peasants into submission, Kerry was notoriously zealous. One of his fellow lieutenants, James R. Wasser, described him admiringly in these words: "Kerry was an extremely aggressive officer and so was I. I liked that he took the fight to the enemy, that he was tough and gutsy--not afraid to spill blood for his country."
On December 2, Kerry went on his first patrol up one of the canals. It was near midnight when the crew caught sight of a sampan. Rules of engagement required no challenge, no effort to see who was on board the sampan. Kerry sent up a flare, signal for his crew to start blazing away with the boat's two machineguns and M16 rifles. Kerry described the fishermen "running away like gazelles".
Kerry sustained a very minor wound to his arm, probably caused by debris from his own boat's salvoes. The scratch earned him his first Purple Heart, a medal awarded for those wounded in combat. Actually there's no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal. "A cocky air of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel, because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
He got two more Purple Hearts, both for relatively minor wounds. Indeed Kerry never missed a day of duty for any of the medal-earning wounds.
Craving more action, Kerry got himself deployed to An Thoi, at Vietnam's southern tip, one of the centers for the lethal Phoenix sweeps and the location of a infamous interrogation camp which held as many as 30,000 prisoners.
Kerry's first mission as part of the Phoenix program was to ferry a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit of South Vietnamese soldiers, which would have been led by either a Green Beret or CIA officer. After off-loading the unit Kerry hid his Swift boat in a mangrove backwater. Two hours later a red flare told them that the PRU wanted an emergency "extraction". Kerry's boat picked up the PRU team, plus two prisoners. The leader of the PRU team told Kerry that while they were kidnapping the two villagers (one of them a young woman) from their hut, they'd seen four people in a sampan and promptly killed them. The two prisoners were "body-snatched" as part of a regular schedule of such seizures in the victims would be taken to An Thoi for interrogation and torture.
Kerry's term to Brinkley for such outings--and there were many in his brief--is "accidental atrocities".
On daylight missions the Swift boats were accompanied by Cobra Attack helicopters that would strafe the river banks and the skeletal forest ravaged by napalm and Agent Orange. "Helos upset the VC [sic, meaning anyone on the ground] more than anything else that we had to offer", Kerry tells Brinkley, "and any chance we had to have them with us was more than welcome."
An example of these Cobras in action. It's daylight, so the population is not under curfew. Kerry's boat is working its way up a canal, with a Cobra above it. They encounter a sampan with several people in it. The helicopter hovers right above the sampan, then empties its machineguns into it, killing everyone and sinking the sampan. Kerry, in his war diary, doesn't lament the deaths but does deplore the senselessness of the Cobra's crew in using all of its ammunition, since the chopper pilot "requested permission to leave in order to rearm, an operation that left us uncovered for more than 45 minutes in an area where cover was essential".
Christmas Eve, 1968, finds Kerry leading a patrol up a canal along the Cambodian border. The Christmas ceasefire has just come into effect. So what the boat was doing there is a question in and of itself. They spot two sampans and chase them to a small fishing village. The boat takes some sniper fire, (or at least Kerry says it did). Kerry orders his machine-gunner, James Wasser, to open up a barrage. At last a note of contrition, but not from Kerry. Wasser describes to Brinkley how he saw that he'd killed an old man leading a water buffalo. "I'm haunted by that old man's face. He was just doing his daily farming, hurting nobody. He got hit in the chest with an M-60 machinegun round. It may have been Christmas Eve, but I was real somber after that... to see the old man blown away sticks with you." It turned out that Kerry's boat had shot up one of the few "friendly" villages, with a garrison of South Vietnamese ARV soldiers, two of whom were wounded.
Contrast Wasser's sad reflections with Kerry's self-righteous account in his diary of such salvoes, often aimed into Cambodian territory. "On occasion we had shot towards the border when provoked by sniper or ambush, but without fail this led to a formal reprimand by the Cambodian government and accusations of civilian slaughters and random killings by American 'aggressors'. I have no doubt that on occasion some innocents were hit by bullets that were aimed in self-defense at the enemy, but of all the cases in Vietnam that could be labeled massacres, this was certainly the most spurious."
It's very striking how we never find, in any of Kerry's diaries or letters, the slightest expression of contrition or remorse--and Brinkley would surely have cited them had Kerry ever written such words. Nor did Kerry, in his later career as a self-promoting star of the antiwar movement, ever go beyond generalized verbiage about accidents of war, even as many vets were baring their souls about the horrors they had perpetrated.
It's not that he couldn't have summoned up for his audiences back then some awful episodes. For example, a few weeks after the incident on the Cambodian border Kerry's boat was heading up the Cua Lon river toward Square bay, when one of the crew yelled "sampan off port bow". Kerry ordered the machineguns to fire on the fishing boat. The sampan stopped and Kerry and his crew boarded it. They found a woman holding an infant, and near her the body of her young child riddled with machine gun bullets, lying face down among bags of rice. Kerry tells Brinkley he refused to look at the dead child, saying, "the face would stay with me for the rest of my life and it was better not to know whether it was a smile or grimace or whether it was a girl or boy". Kerry's preferred mode is the usual one. "Our orders", he tells Brinkley a few pages later, "were to destroy all the hooches and sampans we could find."
As part of Operation Sea Lords Kerry would ferry Nung tribesmen on assassination missions. The Nung were paid by the kill, and Kerry contrasts them favorably to the South Vietnamese PF guardsmen, derisively terming the latter "Cream Puffs". On one occasion, Kerry tells Brinkley, he ferried Nung to a village where they seized an old man and forced him to act as a human mine detector, walking ahead of them along the trail. There were no mines and the Nung encountered no enemy. But for the old man it was a one way trip. The Nung slit his throat, disembowelled him and left a warning note on his body.
When Kerry was awarded his Silver Star he had it pinned on by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and at the ceremony had the opportunity to meet Commander Adrian Lonsdale, the operational commander of Seas Lords. Kerry seized the chance to criticize the conduct of the war: "It's not that the men are afraid or chicken to go into the rivers", he says he told Lonsdale. "It's not that they're not willing to risk their lives, or that they don't agree with the principle of what's being done over here. It's just that they want to have a fair chance to do something that brings results and what they're doing now isn't bringing them anything. If we were to have some support, something that would guarantee that we were gaining something, but for a country with all the power that we have, we're making men fight in a fashion that defies reason.... What we need, Sir, are some troops to sweep through the areas and secure them after we leave; otherwise we're just going to be shot to hell after we go through, and there'll be nothing gained."
Yes, this is the same Kerry who today is calling for 40,000 more US troops to deployed to Iraq.

How He Won His Silver And Bronze Stars

The incident that won US Navy lieutenant John Kerry his Silver Star, thus lofting him to the useful status of "war hero", occurred on February 28, 1969. His Swift boat was ferrying US "explosives experts" and some South Vietnamese soldiers up the Dong Cung river. After dropping them off, Kerry's boat came under small arms fire. Kerry turned the boat toward the source of the shots, beached the boat and opened up at the forest with the boat's .50 and .60 caliber machine guns.
By beaching the boat Kerry was disobeying standard orders forbidding this on the grounds that it made the craft and its crew a sitting duck. Kerry's motive? As crew member Michael "Duke" Medeiros explained it to Kerry's biographer, Douglas Brinkley, it was a matter of verifying kills. "We never knew whether we killed any VC or not. When fired upon, he [Kerry] wanted to beach the boat and go get the enemy."
The boat's machine-guns had in fact killed a Vietnamese, described as "a VC guerilla", and they took evidence [undescribed] from the body.
The boat continued downstream and was fired on once more, by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Here's where accounts of the event diverge markedly, depending on the interests of the various narrators. The citation for Kerry's Silver Star describes the event this way: "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet from the VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy. Upon sweeping the area an immediate search uncovered an enemy rest and supply area which was destroyed. The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY in attacking the n numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."
This citation, issued by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was based on the incident report, written by John Kerry. Missing from the Zumwalt version was a dramatic confrontation described by Kerry 27 years later in 1996, in the heat of a nasty relection fight against Republican William Weld, when Kerry was seeking a third senate term. Kerry imparted to Jonathan Carroll, writing for the New Yorker, a story going as follows: he had faced down a Viet Cong standing a few feet from him with a B-40 rocket launcher; "It was either going to be him or it was going to be us", Kerry told Carroll. "It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us--I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of that hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn'tpull the trigger--he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead. I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand."
(He may not have wanted to talk but he certainly liked to screen. The first time Kerry took Hollywood star Dana Delany to his home in the Eighties she says his big move was showing her video clips taken of him in the Navy when he was in Vietnam. She never went out with him again. (As he prepared to make his grand entry to the Democratic convention in Boston, stories circulqatyed that Kerry had reenacted his skirmishes, filming them with an 8mm camera for later political use.)
Two of Kerry's crew members, Medeiros and machine-gunner Tommy Belodeau, found no mystery in why the VC soldier didn't fire his B-40 RPG launcher. The Vietnamese was effectively unarmed. He hadn't reloaded the RPGafter the first shot at Kerry's boat as it headed down the river.
Later that year of 1996 Belodeau described the full scope of the incident to the Boston Globe's David Warsh. Belodeau told Warsh that he opened with his M-60 machine gun on the Vietnamese man at a range of ten feet after they'd beached the boat. The machine gun bullets caught the Vietnamese in the legs, and the wounded man crawled behind a nearby hooch. At this point, Belodeau said, Kerry had seized an M-16 rifle, jumped out of the boat, gone up to the man who Belodeau says was near death, and finished him off.
When the Globe published Warsh's account of Belodeau's recollection, essentially accusing Kerry of a war crime, the Kerry campaign quickly led Madeiros to the press and he described how the Vietnamese, felled by Belodeau's machine-gun fire, got up, grabbed the rocket launcher and ran off down a trail through the forest and a disappeared around a bend. As Kerry set off after him, Medeiros followed. They came round the corner to find the Vietnamese once again pointing the RPG at them ten feet away. He didn't fire and Kerry shot him dead with his rifle.
Circulating around veterans' websites in early February of 2004 was an email written by Mike Morrison who, like Kerry, won a bronze star won in Vietnam. Morrison who later went on to write speeches for Lee Iacocca, was highly suspicion of Kerry's claims to martial glory. In a letter to his brother Ed he wrote as follows:

"I've long thought that John Kerry's war record was phoney. We talked about it when you were here. It's mainly been instinct because, as you know, nobody who claims to have seen the action he does would so shamelessly flaunt it for political gain.

"I was in the Delta shortly after he left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used. I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.

"Here are my problems and suspicions:

"(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected, a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable job. But that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated only along the coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong). The rough stuff in the hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller, faster PBRs. Fishy.

"(2) Three Purple Hearts but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.

"(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 (rocket propelled grenade) was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50 (caliber machine guns), Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retrieves the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong. (a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go (away) balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic integrity of a Frisbee after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's. ( Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a .50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no danger to you--just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and you wanted some derring-do in your after-action report). And we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.
"Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless. It couldn't run and it couldn't return fire. It was stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during or after a firefight.
"Something is very fishy."

The account that makes sense to us is Belodeau's. There were three high-powered machine guns on the boat and one Vietnamese at close range on the land and Belodeau says his machinegun knocked him down. Even if the Vietnamese fighter miraculously got up and started running away down that trail, is it likely that the two would have pursued him down an unknown path on foot. Wouldn't be more likely that the boat would have used its machineguns again, blazing away as on Kerry's own account they did, day and day and night after night?
Kerry's Bronze Star On March 13, 1969, two weeks after the episode that yielded the Silver Star Kerry saw his last slice of action. It got him his bronze star and his third purple heart, which meant he could file a request to be transferred out of Vietnam.
Kerry earned the bronze star by pulling another lieutenant out of the water after the latter's Swift boat had hit a mine. That same mine's detonation caused enough wake to throw Kerry against a bulkhead, bruising his arm. This was classed as a wound, which meant the third purple heart. Then, amid rifle fire, Kerry maneuvered his boat toward Lieutenant Rassman and hoisted him onto the deck.
Both boats had been on yet another mission ferrying Green Berets, US Navy SEALs and Nung assassins to a village. Once again they had mistakenly targeted a friendly village, where they opened fire on South Vietnamese troops who were interrogating a group of women and children lined up against a wall.
When the Green Berets and SEALs opened fire, the South Vietnamese soldiers jumped the wall and at least ten of the women and children were killed. Meanwhile, against orders, Kerry had again left his boat and attached himself to the Nung and was, by his own words, "shooting and blowing things up". One of the Nung threwew a grenade into a hut which turned out to be filled with sacks of rice. Kerry got grains of rice and some bits of metal debris embedded in his ass, the most severe wounds he sustained in Vetnam.
With three purple hearts, the silver and bronze stars, Kerry now applied for reassignment as a personal aide to a senior officer in either Boston, New York or Washington DC. He ended up in New York working for Admiral Walter F. Schlech in New York. In January 1970 he applied for early discharge to run for office. As he put it, he'd decided not to join the antiwar movement but work within the system and try and win a seat in Congress from the Third District in Massachusetts.
Zumwalt: "Kerry's Record Will Haunt Him"
A former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor,W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Kerry's recollection of their discussions: "[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt,told me --30 years ago when he was still CNO [chief naval officer in Vietnam] that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam,just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets. "We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control", the admiral said. "Bud" Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions --but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage." "

Nicholas Von Hoffman: There’s an Ill Wind Blowing From Washington: If there is a draft again, the costs involved will make you sick.

(New York Observer) "Some people are saying with apprehension that after George W. Bush is re-elected, he will bring back the draft. Those people usually have draft-age children. Others are saying it with approval. Those people don’t have draft-age loved ones, unless they assume, perhaps unconsciously, that like the shirker Presidents—Mr. Bush and Bill Clinton—their kids will be able to leave the military service to somebody else.
As a little of the starch and swagger has gone out of Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon-Likudnik collaborators, we are getting half-admissions that their planning misfired and they failed to send enough troops to Iraq, perhaps because they didn’t have enough troops to send. More soldiers are needed, according to nearly everybody who knows about staffing wars, but scaring them up is a problem.
It hasn’t been for lack of advertising and patriotic propaganda. We have been treated to a prolonged spate of war movies, war TV shows and war books, mostly about World War II, the last war they can get everybody to cheer about. Who can claim to know what is in the minds of the people who have ordered up this wall-to-wall glorification of war and the accompanying public reverence for—dare one say it?—an almost Islamic-like celebration of dying for the cause.
But though they sing the national anthem at the beginning of the baseball games and then belt out "God Bless America" in the seventh inning, they still can’t get the kids to sign up in satisfactory numbers. Is this a sign of a healthy skepticism, or are the young dolts too engrossed in computer games to hear the incessant call to arms issuing from the minarets of Washington?
The people in charge are past masters at misdirection, so you don’t know whether to believe the Pentagon when it says recruitment has not dipped and they are not taking in bottom-of-the-barrel people. The signs and portents point to drop-offs in enlistment in both the regular forces and the National Guard since the days when the war against terrorism caused long lines in front of the recruiting offices as America’s college-age young people rushed to the colors.
There is less talk just now of Mr. Bush playing Alexander the Great and pouring molten democracy down the throats of 200 million Arabs. Faced with a shortage of ready cannon fodder, Mr. Bush may have to change his foreign policy and abandon the conquest of the Middle East. But will that stop those who are determined to bring back conscription? Even if plans for invading Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia are put on hold, there will still be those who want to reinstate the draft, claiming the need for more troopers in the war against terrorism, that strange struggle against an ill-defined, invisible enemy whose strength in numbers, money and backup are unknown and unknowable.
In the short term, even conscription cannot help Mr. Bush in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It takes six months plus to train someone to be a reasonably efficient soldier. So short of "cutting and running"—the chesty imperialists’ phrase for leaving the unholy rat’s nest they have made of the place—he can do little to conjure up enough military personnel to eradicate the guerrillas. Save in token numbers, our NATO allies have told Mr. Bush that they are not going to risk their young people’s death and disfigurement to rescue him. He and his pals are left with the troops they have now and a bunch of mercenaries. (There are supposed to be 20,000 to 30,000 of the latter bopping around Iraq, doing God knows what.) Lots of luck, guys. Whether or not they can pacify the ungrateful Iraqis with the troops at their disposal remains to be seen, but it looks like an Afghanistan rerun: Pretend all is quiet, send out press releases about a new school and girls without head kerchiefs, and let these former nations stagger down the road of time half-dismembered in a sort of perpetual low-grade civil war.
Even in the long term, if Mr. Bush does go for conscription, he’ll be creating more problems than he solves. The spirit of the times is such that resurrecting the Selective Service System would be too politically costly. Selective Service allowed for exemptions for people in college or holding important jobs—excuses used by the well-connected to get out of going into the military. It was this system which enabled Bill Clinton and George Bush to get out of Vietnam and many another to stay home by simply staying in college. This time the draft will be for universal military service—that is, all young people, male, female, being called for two years.
According to the Census Bureau, there are four million 18-year-olds and four million 19-year olds. Hence, once the system is cranked up, the military establishment will find itself with eight million more bodies than it has now. That is not quite the force level of World War II, but it’s getting up there. When the Pentagon says it has no need for anything like that many people, no reason exists to doubt them. Even a man like Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense who dreams of nothing but new conquests, might have trouble finding enough countries to invade to keep so many soldiers occupied.
If there is a draft again, the costs involved will make you sick. Bases and barracks will need building; the supplementary services and the equipment should add handsomely to the debt and to inflation, as the United States goes into retrograde motion and retreats from a 21st-century capital-intensive, modern military establishment to a 19th- and mid-20th-century labor-intensive one. There will also be the hidden but very high costs of postponing by two years the entry into the labor force of millions of people.
It is not inconceivable that the administration would ask Congress for a new draft law and that it will be passed. A majority could be formed to support this wickedness by joining together the militarist reactionaries and the liberal, invasive social uplifters. The uplifters believe that all young people "owe" service to their country—if not by shouldering a gun, then by lifting a nursing-home bedpan or working in a national forest or a blighted public school.
The uplifters believe that forcing young people of every stripe and background to serve together in beneficent labor battalions encourages democracy. Let’s have a big hoo-hah for diversity here. Plus think of how much better children, old people, the handicapped and sick persons will be served when the institutions they depend on are infused with so many new willing (or maybe not-so-willing) hands.
Heretofore, the rationale for conscription has been that the nation is in dire peril. If you think terrorism has the country by the throat, you can offer that as a reason for conscripting people to fight terrorism, but not for using the power of the government to make somebody work in an orphanage or a day-care center or on a pollution-reclamation project. The latter are meritorious endeavors—but at the cost of snatching a person off the street and making him or her do it?
National service is a form of slavery, though some may argue that it’s really not since the conscriptees get paid, get college money, medical insurance and perhaps other bennies. But it’s not a wage which distinguishes a free person from a slave; slaves have often been paid in the past. The difference between a slave and a free man is that a free man is free—free to work at whatever wages he can get, free not to work. He’s free to go, free to come, free to talk, free to be silent and free to refuse to serve."

BBC: Greenland ice-melt 'speeding up'

"First you hear a savage cracking sound, next the rolling crash of thunder.
Then as the icebergs rip away from the margin of the ice-sheet they plunge into the grey waters of the Atlantic with a roar that echoes around the mountains.
In some places, the ice is melting one metre a month
Nothing prepares you for the sheer scale and drama of events in this forbidding terrain and all the signs are that the changes at work here are gathering pace.
The only way to reach the ice-sheet is by helicopter - a spectacular flight through remote fjords and the jagged blue-white rubble of the ice.
We travelled with Danish scientist Carl Boggild of GEUS, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
For the past few years he has been managing a network of 10 automatic monitoring stations and his first results are alarming - the edges of the ice-sheet are melting up to 10 times more rapidly than earlier research had indicated.

Cracks and crevasses

In 2001 NASA scientists published a major study based on observations by satellite and aircraft.
It concluded that the margins of the Greenland ice-sheet were dropping in height at a rate of roughly one metre a year.
Now, amid some of the most hostile conditions anywhere on the planet, Carl Boggild and his team have recorded falls as dramatic as 10 metres a year - in places the ice is dropping at a rate of one metre a month.
The glacier we visited - the Sermilik glacier in southern Greenland - is so volatile that one automatic monitoring station was lost into a yawning crevasse.

Guide to climate change

Between a maintenance visit in May and our visit this month, new cracks had opened up in the icy surface and we had to help shift one of the devices to a safer position.
Engravings from the late 19th Century show how the glacier once reached far into the ocean and satellite pictures highlight how the retreat has accelerated - the glacier dropping an astounding 150 metres in the last 15 years.
The latest data shows the melting picking up even more speed.

Heating up?

A vicious wind whipping across 2,000 kilometres of solid ice - the length of the Greenland ice-sheet - chilled us as we filmed.
But the feeling of cold was ironic - it is the rise in air temperatures recorded here that is at least partly responsible for the sudden acceleration of the melting.
Dr Boggild and his colleagues, studying the physics of how the air and ice relate, conclude that as much as 55% of the melting is attributable to warming in the air.
He is cautious to avoid blaming climate change too readily: "Maybe if we look back after 50 years and see how temperatures have risen, then we can call it climate change."

Sea level rise

Dr Boggild is all too aware of how easily he could be accused of jumping onto a climate change bandwagon.
But he is adamant that the results he has gathered so far are reliable.
"We can say for certain that the rate of melting has increased and we can say for certain that the height of the ice-sheet is falling, even allowing for increased ice-flow.
"There is no doubt that something very major is happening here."
As we speak, he checks the instruments on the automatic station. A large range of data is collected and transmitted via satellite to Copenhagen every six hours.
For the first time, scientists should have a long-term, on-the-ground view of the changes taking place here.
Just before we leave, there is another roar as more icebergs crash into the ocean
Many more icebergs falling into the sea will cause two things to happen - the sea-level will rise and the injection of freshwater could disrupt the ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream.
What happens in this remote barren land has the potential to affect us all."

Reuters: Fear of Death Wins Minds and Votes, Study Finds

"President Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the Sept. 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Talking about death can raise people's need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
"There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat," said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study.
"We are saying this is psychologically useful."
Jeff Greenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said generating fear was a common tactic.
"A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association.
"Sometimes that may be the right thing to do. But it is a psychological approach, particularly when death is close to peoples' consciousness."
For their first study, Solomon, Greenberg and colleagues asked students to think about either their own death or a neutral topic.
They then read the campaign statements of three hypothetical candidates for governor, each with a different leadership style. One was charismatic, said Solomon.
"That was a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special," Solomon, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
The others were task-oriented -- focusing on the job to be done -- or relationship-oriented -- with a "let's get it done together" style, Solomon said.    

FEARING DOOM, TURNING TO CHARISMA

The students who thought about death were much more likely to choose the charismatic leader, they found. Only four out of about 100 chose that imaginary leader when thinking about exams, but 30 did after thinking about death.
Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.
"In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."
When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.
"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said.
Solomon, a social psychologist who specializes in terrorism, said it was very rare for a person's opinions to differ so strongly depending on the situation.
Another study focused directly on Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person's political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.
"I think this should concern anybody," Solomon said. "If I was speaking lightly, I would say that people in their, quote, right minds, unquote, don't care much for President Bush and his policies in Iraq."
He wants voters to be aware of psychological pressures and how they are used.
"If people are aware that thinking about death makes them act differently, then they don't act differently," Solomon said. Solomon says he personally opposes Bush but describes himself as a political independent who could vote Republican."

Mark Weisbrot: The Unbearable Costs of Empire

(BusinessWeek) ~Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.
Edited by Patricia O'Connell.

"Establishment types are trumpeting America's role as global police force. Too bad the U.S. just can't afford the job
Since September 11, 2001, the phrases "American empire" and "America as an imperial power" are being heard a lot more. But in contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when such terms were brandished by an angry domestic anti-war movement or by developing nations in U.N. debates, the concept they represent has now at least partially entered the mainstream. However much it has incurred hostility throughout most of the world, including European and other countries usually allied with the U.S., the "new imperialism" has gained ground among the Establishment here.
The post-9/11 rationale is that America has terrorist enemies and rogue states that will do it serious harm -- maybe even with weapons of mass destruction -- if it doesn't police the world to stop them. "Being an imperial power is more than being the most powerful nation," writes Michael Ingatieff at Harvard's Kennedy Center. "It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest."
But what most analysts have missed –- whether or not they support the idea of an American empire -- is that the U.S. simply can't afford the role of global cop.
THE REAL DEBT.  First, the U.S. is entering this new age of empire with a gross federal debt that is the highest in more than 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product. For fiscal 2005, which begins in October, the U.S. gross federal debt is projected to be $8.1 trillion, or 67.5% of GDP. By the time 100,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1965, it was 46.9% and falling.
One technical point that's vitally important here: It's the gross federal debt and deficits that matter, not the smaller "debt held by the public" and "unified budget deficit" that are generally cited in the press. For example, the most commonly reported estimate of the annual federal budget deficit is $478 billion for 2004. But this number is misleading, because it doesn't include borrowing from federal trust funds -- mostly Social Security and Medicare.
But the money the government is borrowing from Social Security and other trust funds will, with nearly 100% certainty, be paid back -- just like the money it borrows when it sells bonds to Bill Gates or the Chinese government. The annual federal budget deficit is, therefore, $639 billion, according to the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. This is 5.6% of GDP, a near-record level for the post-World War II era.
BORROWING FROM ABROAD.  America can –- just barely -- afford this deficit right now, but that's about to change. First, the interest burden on the debt is currently manageable because of extremely low interest rates. But the Fed is expected to raise short-term rates to 2% by yearend. More important, long-term rates will almost certainly rise even more because inflation has accelerated to 4.9% over the last six months -- a big jump from 2003's 1.9%.
If Kerry wins and takes back the tax cut for households earning more than $200,000 a year, as promised, that won't even reduce the deficit by 1% of GDP. And if he keeps his spending promises, then the monies realized by repealing the tax cut would be canceled out. The Bush budget, which the conservative CATO Institute's Chairman Bill Niskanen recently described as "a fraud" put together by "borrow and spend Republicans," would make the deficit and debt problem even worse.
Then there's the problem of the U.S. –- both the government and the private sector –- borrowing from foreign countries. Most government borrowing is now being financed from overseas -- especially the central banks of China, Japan, and other countries. These institutions are deliberately buying dollars in order to keep their currencies from rising against the greenback. But they won't keep doing this indefinitely. The U.S. is borrowing more than $600 billion a year from the rest of the world, and it can't go on much longer.
THE BIG BANG.  Sometime within a decade, and most likely in the next couple of years, foreign investors will see that a steep decline of the dollar is unavoidable and will begin to unload them and U.S. Treasury securities. As with any bubble, it will be better if this one bursts sooner rather than later, when it would be even bigger. But adjustment and pain will still occur, including higher interest rates and consequently slower growth.
Slower growth will also mean larger federal budget deficits. And one event that will certainly slow growth and increase federal government borrowing well beyond current projections is the bursting of the housing bubble. Housing prices have seen an unprecedented run-up since 1995 of more than 35 percentage points above the rate of inflation. That has created more than $3 trillion in paper wealth that –- just like the illusory wealth of the stock-market bubble -- is programmed to disappear. This, too, is almost certain to happen in the next few years.
The economic impact will be at least equivalent to that of equities popping in 2000-02, which caused the last recession. Another slump is, therefore, likely in the near future, and with it a further ballooning of the federal budget deficit, as tax revenues fall and automatic countercyclical spending rises.
CHINA RISING.  The combination of unsustainable public debt and foreign debt is a deadly and explosive mix by itself. Rising real interest rates and a looming housing bubble bursting make it all the more dangerous. Financial markets will exert the necessary discipline if politicians refuse to do so, but either way the U.S. can't afford even the $486 billion a year that it's currently spending annually on the military and homeland security.
And even these spending levels are a lot less than would be necessary to maintain America's power in the world. Over the next decade or so, the Chinese economy will actually surpass the U.S. in size. America has 100,000 troops in East Asia. If the U.S. were to try to maintain its current dominance of the region -- something that will probably prove impossible -- it would boost our military spending even further.
The bottom line is that the American empire just isn't affordable. Within a decade or so, the U.S. will be forced to be much less preemptive and outward-looking and to engage in scaled-back foreign policy -- even if the foreign-policy Establishment never changes its views or ambitions.
REALITY CHECK.  In the meantime, the segment of American society that would like to see advances in health care, education, poverty alleviation, or any other positive economic or social goals will get bad news. The foreseeable future is a lot different from most of the post-World War II era, during which the U.S. added such programs as Medicare and Medicaid while spending literally trillions of dollars on cold and hot wars.
This time, little or no federal money will be available for any of these things until U.S. foreign policy changes. The most likely scenario is that most areas of nonmilitary discretionary spending will be squeezed relentlessly before anything gives in the realm of superpower ambitions.
The post-9/11 age of American empire will close not with a bang but a whimper, suffocated by the laws of arithmetic, the constraints of public financing, and the limits of foreign borrowing. What remains to be determined is how much the U.S. will pay -- in lost and ruined lives, as well as bills for future generations -- and how many enemies it will make throughout the world, before coming to grips with reality."

TBR News: More gossip from the "The Voice of the White House"

"In previous  issues, we carried comments from a reporter assigned to the White House press corps. Some of these remarks, most especially one about Bush’s physical and mental problems, drew an enormous number of viewers and hundreds of inquiries, most especially from foreign press entities. The reporter advised us by email that there was rampant fury in the White House and security was becoming very tight. As a result of this, he decided to lay low for a few weeks and see how the wind was blowing. Yesterday, he sent us the following material which we are now posting. Some of it is outrageous in the extreme but to date, no one has proven him wrong."
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(July 21, 2004) “I have several interesting bits for you and your readers. Never mind the Democratic Convention or the 9-11 Report. The military adventures of King George are really a lot more important. There is no question that Bush wants to attack ( read ’neutralize’) both North Korea and Iran. The press has been publishing stories about how Iran supported bin Laden and how North Korea has rejected the attempts of the peace-loving Bush to mediate the problems existing between the two countries. Nothing could be further from the truth, believe me. The spin people are now passing out press releases about this, trying to damp it down and prevent preemptive strikes by our new victims. A very secret report is floating around about the serious problems with our commercial shipping ports. According to this, over nine million cargo containers arrive in the States every year and the much-vaunted but entirely useless Homeland Security geeks can only examine about 2% of these. Much propaganda and bs about how our ever vigilant boys are searching everything to protect us. This report says that a freighter full of dirty bombs could sail into Baltimore, Norfolk, New York, San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle and explode on cue and there is not a damned thing our security people could do about it. In fact, the first thing these guys would know was when the walls of their offices blew in and they were deposited twenty miles away, well-done. The 9-11 report is fine, as far as it goes but no one here expects anything to be done. None of the alphabet agencies will give up any power and Bush is not the man to force a reorganization through. Oh yes, he will bleat about it for a while but in the end, they will all go back to their turf wars and someday, Boston will glow green, what’s left of it. And another thing. The Bush brothers are bold as brass. The talk here is that Florida will be the leader in vote stealing again but I think that this time, the public is well aware of their tricks last time, and Bush and company had better be very careful to walk right down the middle of the road or some large and angry mob will shove him into the ditch in bits and pieces. The Fahrenheit movie has taken in over a hundred millions bucks but the Bush toadies in the media claim that it won’t influence the elections at all. These thick heads need a wake up call with a sledge hammer. The real polls, and most of them are faked just for the folks at home, show Bush about to take a Carter-like bath but the bully boys with the crosses on their coats stick their fingers in their hairy ears and whistle ‘Rock of Ages’ while trotting by the cemetery. And here is a lovely bit of news you will not hear on FOX, or CNN either. It seems the Iranians, determined to put a stop to American imperialism, have determined to grab off all the area’s oil. They are behind the attacks in Iraq and are now holding very private talks with the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia. Purpose? To encourace and finace the overthrow of the Saud dynasty in that country and to replace it with a fundamentalists government, so hostile to the US that it will cut off all oil. This is known to a number of people. My sources are: A friend of my cousin who was Special Forces once and is now a Blue Dragon man and head of personal security for several Saudi rebels. Also, a Russian colleague with connections completely confirmed this and neither know each other. They could hold a public meeting with big signs and a hired band, in the lobby of the Hay-Adams for all the notice the CIA would take of it.  This is true economic warfare and all of us will really suffer if they are successful."

Capitol Hill Blue: Sullen, Depressed President Retreats Into Private, Paranoid World

"A sullen President George W. Bush is withdrawing more and more from aides and senior staff, retreating into a private, paranoid world where only the ardent loyalists are welcome.
Cabinet officials, senior White House aides and leaders on Capitol Hill complain privately about the increasing lack of “face time” with the President and campaign advisors are worried the depressed President may not be up to the rigors of a tough re-election campaign.
“Yes, there are concerns,” a top Republican political advisor admitted privately Wednesday. “The George W. Bush we see today is not the same, gregarious, back-slapping President of old. He’s moody, distrustful and withdrawn.”
Bush Walks AloneBush’s erratic behavior and sharp mood swings led White House physician Col. Richard J. Tubb to put the President on powerful anti-depressant drugs after he stormed off stage rather than answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay, but White House insiders say the strong, prescription medications seem to increase Bush’s sullen behavior towards those around him.
“This is a President known for his ability to charm people one-on-one,” says a staff member to House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert. “Not any more.”
White House aides say Bush has retreated into a tightly-controlled environment where only top political advisors like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes are allowed. Even White House chief of staff Andrew Card complains he has less and less access to the President.
Among cabinet members, only Attorney General John Ashcroft, a fundamentalist who shares many of Bush’s strict religious convictions, remains part of the inner circle. White House aides call Bush and Ashcroft the “Blue Brothers” because, like the mythical movie characters, “both believe they are on a mission from God.”
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, the man most responsible for waging America’s war on terrorism, complains to staff that he gets very little time with the President and gets most of his marching orders lately from Ashcroft. Some on Ridge’s staff gripe privately that Ashcroft is “Bush’s Himmler,” a reference to Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS (the German Police) under Adolph Hitler.
“Too many make the mistake of thinking Dick Cheney is the real power in the Bush administration,” says one senior Homeland Security aide. “They’re wrong. It’s Ashcroft and that is reason enough for all of us to be very, very afraid.”
While Vice President Cheney remains part of Bush’s tight, inner circle, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has fallen out of favor and tells his staff that “no matter what happens in November, I’m outta here.”
White House aides say the West Wing has been overtaken by a “siege mentality,” where phone calls and emails are monitored and everyone is under suspicion for “disloyalty to the crown.”
“I was questioned about an email I sent out on my personal email account from home,” says one staffer. “When I asked how they got access to my personal email account, I was told that when I came to work at the White House I gave up any rights to privacy.”
Another staffer was questioned on why she once dated a registered Democrat.
“He voted for Bush in 2000,” she said, “but that didn’t seem to matter. Mary Matalin is married to James Carville and that’s all right but suddenly my loyalty is questioned because a former boyfriend was a Democrat?” Matalin, a Republican political operative and advisor to the Bush campaign, is the wife of former Bill Clinton political strategist James Carville.
Psychiatrists say the increasing paranoia at the White House is symptomatic of Bush’s “paranoid, delusional personality.”
Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent Washington psychiatrist and author of the book, Bush on the Couch, Inside the Mind of the President, says the President suffers from “character pathology,” including “grandiosity” and “megalomania” – viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable.
Dr. Frank also concludes that Bush’s years of heavy drinking “may have affected his brain function – and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step programs puts him at a far higher risk of relapse.”
Whatever the cause for the President’s increasing paranoia and delusions, veteran White House watchers see a strong parallel with another Republican president from 30 years ago.
“From what people who work there now tell me, this White House looks more and more like the White House of Richard M. Nixon,” says retired political science professor George Harleigh, who worked in the Nixon White House. “It may be 2004 but it is starting to seem more like 1974 (the year Nixon resigned in disgrace).” "

Reuters: Unhappy Workers Should Take Prozac - Bush Campaigner

"A campaign worker for President Bush (news - web sites) said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.
The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark.
When told the Prozac comment had been overheard, Sheybani said: "Oh, I was just kidding."
While recent employment growth has buoyed Bush's economic record, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) has argued the new jobs are not as good as those lost due to outsourcing in recent years.
Nearly 1.1 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001."

Ron Reagan: The Case Against George W. Bush

(Esquire) The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees.
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"It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent. 
Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT. 
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar. 
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on. 
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos. 
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush. 

THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq. 
During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble" foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East. 
But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan? 
Well, no. 
As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified. 
The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth. 
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center. 

ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network. 
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"? 
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib? 
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie. 
This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining. 
And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet. 

ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes. 
Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements—"I invented the Internet"—that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush. 
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha male." 
Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off. 

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat. 
Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office. 
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission. 
What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth. 
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think. 

GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them—"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm." 
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses? 
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term. 

UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully—once during my father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them? 
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT."