The Rag Blog

Being a Christian is the best. It’s not really OK to be a Jew unless you live in Israel, the Promised Land. Mormons should learn how to be more Christian. Everyone else should convert or die.

The U.S. does well when huge corporations are allowed to do whatever they want. The more we can make rich people richer, the better it will be for everybody:

Rich people hire everyone else to work for them, making our economy robust.

Rich people got rich because of the free market system and their own individual efforts, for which they should be rewarded. Those people who aren’t rich have only themselves to blame.

People in high office — like the president and the vice-president — have difficult, complicated jobs. If they forget to do stuff, or if they cut corners here and there, or if they tell a white lie now and then, that’s OK, because the important thing is for them to protect us not only from bad things but also from thinking about bad things, unless they feel we need to. The only thing a president shouldn’t do is to have sex with someone who’s not his wife — because that’s a betrayal of the American people’s trust.

Scientists’ opinions are neither better nor worse than anyone else’s.

Just because someone doesn’t use big words or make sense a lot of the time doesn’t mean that that someone isn’t smart and kind and doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

If people disagree with you, the only reasonable explanation for their behavior is that they’re traitors. Sometimes they know this and sometimes they don’t.

If you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter who listens to your phone calls or looks at your bank statements or follows you around the block in a van that says “ClearTone Cell Phones” or talks to your neighbors about who’s been visiting you on Tuesday evenings under the guise of “playing poker.” Only criminals would object to any of those things.

If you live in an area that’s prone to a natural disaster like a fire or a flood or an earthquake or a hurricane, you shouldn’t expect the federal government to take care of you when your neighborhood gets destroyed. Next time you’ll think more carefully about where you’re going to settle down.

Some people in the world are envious of everything we have — computers and cable TV and cool-looking clothes and the Super Bowl and especially our freedoms. They’ll do anything to destroy us, because if they can’t have those things, they believe that no one should. These people are probably dark-skinned. That doesn’t mean we should be suspicious of everyone who’s dark-skinned. Still.

The immigration problem is the most critical issue facing Americans today, except maybe for those terrorists who are envious of us — unless they’re both illegal immigrants and terrorists, which is more common than most people think.

The fall of communism is the best evidence that providing everyone in this country with free health care is doomed and in any case gives drug addicts and slugabeds free handouts and no motivation to succeed on their own merits.

Democrats block progress at every turn, either by spending beyond our means, taxing beyond our means, preventing the administration from doing what’s right, or just kind of being obnoxious. They should go away and let Republicans fulfill their mandate.

God speaks to the president, which is really fortunate, because otherwise people might have stronger arguments against what he does.

Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31

01/04/08 “ICH” — — DAVID BARSAMIAN: One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival… is Adam Smith. You’ve done some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated… a lot of information that’s not coming out. You’ve often quoted him describing the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

NOAM CHOMSKY: I didn’t do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There’s no research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That’s the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work, he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.

The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you’re literate, you’ll find it out. I did do a little research in the way it’s treated, and that’s interesting. For example, the University of Chicago, the great bastion of free market economics, etc., etc., published a bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a huge index, a real scholarly edition. That’s the one I used. It’s the best edition. The scholarly framework was very interesting, including Stigler’s introduction. It’s likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he said about the book was completely false. I went through a bunch of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and elsewhere.

But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at “division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research because it’s ten minutes’ work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.

I want to be clear about this. There is good Smith scholarship. If you look at the serious Smith scholarship, nothing I’m saying is any surprise to anyone. How could it be? You open the book and you read it and it’s staring you right in the face. On the other hand if you look at the myth of Adam Smith, which is the only one we get, the discrepancy between that and the reality is enormous.

This is true of classical liberalism in general. The founders of classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill — they were what we would call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he’s a human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create — since that’s the fundamental nature of humans — in free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be called capitalism.

It’s the same when you read Jefferson. He lived a half century later, so he saw state capitalism developing, and he despised it, of course. He said it’s going to lead to a form of absolutism worse than the one we defended ourselves against. In fact, if you run through this whole period you see a very clear, sharp critique of what we would later call capitalism and certainly of the twentieth century version of it, which is designed to destroy individual, even entrepreneurial capitalism.

There’s a side current here which is rarely looked at but which is also quite fascinating. That’s the working class literature of the nineteenth century. They didn’t read Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, but they’re saying the same things. Read journals put out by the people called the “factory girls of Lowell,” young women in the factories, mechanics, and other working people who were running their own newspapers. It’s the same kind of critique. There was a real battle fought by working people in England and the U.S. to defend themselves against what they called the degradation and oppression and violence of the industrial capitalist system, which was not only dehumanizing them but was even radically reducing their intellectual level. So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called “factory girls,” young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on. And they fought against it bitterly for a long period. That’s the history of the rise of capitalism.

The other part of the story is the development of corporations, which is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn’t say much about them, but he did criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings, and he was very strongly opposed to them. But the development of corporations really took place in the early twentieth century and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally, corporations existed as a public service. People would get together to build a bridge and they would be incorporated for that purpose by the state. They built the bridge and that’s it. They were supposed to have a public interest function. Well into the 1870s, states were removing corporate charters. They were granted by the state. They didn’t have any other authority. They were fictions. They were removing corporate charters because they weren’t serving a public function. But then you get into the period of the trusts and various efforts to consolidate power that were beginning to be made in the late nineteenth century. It’s interesting to look at the literature. The courts didn’t really accept it. There were some hints about it. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that courts and lawyers designed a new socioeconomic system. It was never done by legislation. It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. Then the other states had to do the same thing just to defend themselves or be wiped out. It’s kind of a small-scale globalization. Then the courts and the corporate lawyers came along and created a whole new body of doctrine which gave corporations authority and power that they never had before. If you look at the background of it, it’s the same background that led to fascism and Bolshevism. A lot of it was supported by people called progressives, for these reasons: They said, individual rights are gone. We are in a period of corporatization of power, consolidation of power, centralization. That’s supposed to be good if you’re a progressive, like a Marxist-Leninist. Out of that same background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the same more or less Hegelian roots. It’s fairly recent. We think of corporations as immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests. It was certainly not popular will. It’s basically court decisions and lawyers’ decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was. These are major parts of modern twentieth century history. The classical liberals would be horrified. They didn’t even imagine this. But the smaller things that they saw, they were already horrified about. This would have totally scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone like that….

BARSAMIAN: ….You’re very patient with people, particularly people who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this something you’ve cultivated?

CHOMSKY: First of all, I’m usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn’t necessarily what’s inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I shouldn’t. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the other hand, what you’re describing as inane questions usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People have no reason to believe anything other than what they’re saying. If you think about where the questioner is coming from, what the person has been exposed to, that’s a very rational and intelligent question. It may sound inane from some other point of view, but it’s not at all inane from within the framework in which it’s being raised. It’s usually quite reasonable. So there’s nothing to be irritated about.

You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions arise. The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their intellectual confinement, which is not just accidental, as I mentioned. There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable….

BARSAMIAN: At the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago… you focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell [regarding education]…

CHOMSKY: … These were highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the American mainstream. People who read what he actually said would now consider him some far-out anti-American lunatic or something. He was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had so grotesquely distorted the tradition. By now, it’s unrecognizable. For example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment tradition that, as he put it, “the goal of production is to produce free people,” — “free men,” he said, but that’s many years ago. That’s the goal of production, not to produce commodities. He was a major theorist of democracy. There were many different, conflicting strands of democratic theory, but the one I’m talking about held that democracy requires dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is private control over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn’t do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. Basically, a classical liberal view. His main point was that you can’t even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the institutions, and the communities.

These are standard libertarian socialist and anarchist ideas which go straight back to the Enlightenment, an outgrowth of the views of the kind that we were talking about before from classical liberalism. Dewey represented these in the modern period, as did Bertrand Russell, from another tradition, but again with roots in the Enlightenment. These were two of the major, if not the two major thinkers, of the twentieth century, whose ideas are about as well known as the real Adam Smith. Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own immediate intellectual background.

BARSAMIAN: In that same Mellon lecture, you paraphrased Russell on education. You said that he promoted the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather assisting a flower to grow in its own way…

CHOMSKY: That’s an eighteenth century idea. I don’t know if Russell knew about it or reinvented it, but you read that as standard in early Enlightenment literature. That’s the image that was used… Humboldt, the founder of classical liberalism, his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may do some guiding. That’s what serious education would be from kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in advanced science, because there’s no other way to do it.

But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

On the other hand, there are exceptions, and Dewey and Russell are among those exceptions. But they are completely marginalized and unknown, although everybody sings praises to them, as they do to Adam Smith. What they actually said would be considered intolerable in the autocratic climate of dominant opinion. The totalitarian element of it is quite striking. The very fact that the concept “anti-American” can exist — forget the way it’s used — exhibits a totalitarian streak that’s pretty dramatic. That concept, anti-Americanism — the only real counterpart to it in the modern world is anti-Sovietism. In the Soviet Union, the worst crime was to be anti-Soviet. That’s the hallmark of a totalitarian society, to have concepts like anti-Sovietism or anti-Americanism. Here it’s considered quite natural. Books on anti-Americanism, by people who are basically Stalinist clones, are highly respected. That’s true of Anglo-American societies, which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I think there’s a correlation there…As freedom grows, the need to coerce and control opinion also grows if you want to prevent the great beast from doing something with its freedom….

01/04/08 “ICH” — – Perhaps a clear and simple law is needed that states: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech. Speech includes ‘the broad and constant streams of information’ freely exchanged on the Internet.” Does the Internet need to be singled out? Or is this self-evident in the First Amendment to the Constitution? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Clearly, Jane Harman (D-CA) who sponsored H.Res.1955 does not respect the Constitution. Nor does her partner, Dave Reichert (R-WA), who authored the original bill, H.Res.1695. Both bills seriously violate the most precious amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are preparing to follow suit with a Senate companion bill, S.1959. Did any of the 404 members of the House of Representatives who voted for the passage of this bill understand that they violated our Constitutional rights, once again? The “immanent threat” charade seems to nullify their capacity for critical thinking and erase their memory of the Constitution, as well as their oath to defend it. How many Senators will succumb to terrorist fear tactics and betray the American people?

Among the Powers granted to the Federal Government by the People of the United States which one authorizes Congress to investigate the so-called “belief systems” of private citizens? Which Power granted by the People endows Congress with authority to investigate the motivations and clairvoyantly predict the intentions of private citizens? Which Power granted by the People authorizes Government surveillance and censorship of the Internet? Which Power granted by the People authorizes the Government to data mine the personal records of US citizens, subjectively filter the personal beliefs of Americans and categorize them for acceptability or to infiltrate local communities and eradicate ‘unacceptable’ beliefs? Which Power authorizes the Federal Government to gather intelligence on American citizens for use by Federal, State and local law enforcement? What is the Constitutional authority for Frau Harman’s storm troopers to terrorize the public through “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies”?

Is this Congress aware of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution? “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Is this Congress unclear about its Constitutional boundaries? Which rights are reserved to the People? The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the People.” The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.” In other words, the People retain all rights not specifically granted to the Government. The rights to think freely, to exchange information, to choose values and beliefs and to freely associate with others are reserved to the People.

If current employees of the Federal Government are not happy with the laws that govern this country and would prefer to live under totalitarian regimes they are free to exit and live elsewhere. They are not free to pervert our laws to conform with their own personal belief systems and ideologically based values. In fact, they have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as a prerequisite for holding public office.

This bill establishes a National Commission and Center of so-called “Excellence” to censor and crush social concerns which are subjectively perceived to be “threats” by RAND spokesmen, who supplied the content for this bill. RAND coined the folksy epithets “homegrown terrorism,” “violent radicalization” and “ideologically based violence” to invalidate expressions of social conscience that conflict with corporate interests. RAND does not propose restraints on corporate abuse or explore US policy corrections that acknowledge the validity of these concerns. Rather, it characterizes individuals who care deeply about international human rights, national sovereignty and ecological protection as “homegrown terrorists” who have been “violently radicalized” by “extremist belief systems.” This bill quotes RAND ideology verbatim.

The People of the United States did not elect RAND Corporation or its emissaries on Capitol Hill to rewrite the laws of our nation “to advance political and social change” that serves the special interests of selected individuals. Our Constitution was carefully crafted to protect citizens from precisely this type of despotism. Regardless of emotional pretexts which appeal to fear, it is not the Constitutional prerogative of Congress to investigate, evaluate, censor or suppress the personal beliefs of United States citizens.

The Internet, which is a public channel of communication, is being systematically strangled by surveillance devices that police the flow of information; filtering web servers, search engines, web sites, email content and keystrokes. Specifically, the information-sharing networks of citizens whose concerns are inconsistent with global corporate objectives are being censored, blacklisted and suffocated. In direct violation of our Constitution, channels of communication which are protected by the First Amendment are under surveillance by the National Security Agency. The Open Net Initiative reports, “With respect to online surveillance, the United States may be among the most aggressive states in the world in terms of listening to online conversations.”

This bill is a direct assault on Internet privacy and freedom of speech. Packaged as a pretext for “preventing terrorism”, the authors of this bill claim that, “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.” Even if this gibberish were true, it would not legitimize Government censorship. There is no Constitutional authority for Government supervision of information freely chosen by American citizens. This assault on the First Amendment is a transparent attempt to police the Internet by slandering the personal values of citizens and denouncing their activities, a practice well underway in Britain where Internet Service Providers are required to install software with secret “offender” lists that block out blacklisted websites.

China’s 60,000 strong Internet police force uses western surveillance technology to repress its citizens. There are currently 64 Chinese citizens in prison for signing online petitions. The Open Net Initiative reports that “Australia maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western nation. Britain has been criticized for leading a ‘Web takedown’ culture where Internet Service Providers immediately remove content that is allegedly defamatory for fear of facing law suits.” Comcast, the second largest US Internet Service Provider is forging TCP RST packets with faked return addresses that disrupt file sharing among its customers, using equipment sold by the Canadian company, Sandvine. These are the exemplary democratic models of “lessons learned by foreign nations” that this bill declares the United States “can benefit from”; citing Canada, Australia and the UK.

The Baltimore Sun reported In November that George Bush requested $154 million in preliminary funding to “prevent cyberspace attacks”, which current and former government officials say is expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar program to “track threats” in cyberspace on both government and private networks. A lawless administration which is notorious for covert surveillance and conjuring up fictitious threats of immanent danger can hardly be trusted to identify genuine threats or use this revenue in the public interest. Nor would an incoming administration be able to alleviate these unconstitutional invasions of our privacy. These Government crimes would be permanently institutionalized through the National Security Agency CAEIAE program, the Center of so-called “Excellence” designated by this bill. There is nothing excellent about unlawful surveillance and social repression by storm troopers.

What Harman describes as “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies” is equivalent to The Third Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda which terrorized German citizens from Party Headquarters through a chain of command that reached all the way down into local communities. With modern telecommunications technology this terror campaign of “intelligence sharing” will persecute citizens in the privacy of their homes, monitoring their online conversations and reporting dissidents to the Gestapo. Lawmakers who voted for this malicious operation have forgotten that pogroms always begin by targeting a contrived enemy and expand exponentially to terrorize the whole society. We have laws for a reason.

Inventing a special “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer” embedded in this unlawful operation to create rules for handling the Constitutional rights of US citizens should raise a red flag for lawmakers. Those procedures have been on the books for two hundred and thirty years. All civil servants in every branch of Government are required to uphold the Constitution and follow the rules established by the Bill of Rights. Assigning one individual to tailor those rules to an illegal Cointelpro operation is an indication of deep antisocial contempt for the Constitutional rights of all citizens protected by our system of law.

Masquerading as an “academic” assembly, the political appointees to this Commission will have “relevant expertise” in Information Technology, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Counterterrorism, Intelligence and Local Law Enforcement. All members of the group will be endowed with sweeping investigative powers and unlimited access to classified files in all branches of government ~ A McCarthy Inquisition with a mandate to hold hearings, administer oaths, take testimony and propose “initiatives to intercede” in the so-called “radicalization process,” a RAND euphemism for crushing social dissent. This mandate to subjectively define and eradicate “unacceptable” social values and beliefs is a gross violation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The operation neatly sidesteps peer review systems and strict academic privacy safeguards for data collection that would be imposed on genuine academic scholars and conveniently bypasses the process of competitive bids for taxpayer-funded recommendations deemed “necessary” by this coterie of political insiders. If this assemblage of political appointees had wholesome objectives it would not have been released from congressional oversight and public transparency secured by The Federal Advisory Committee Act. The bill requires only that the Commission produce a public “version” of its findings before disbanding, permitting secret versions to permanently remain at the Center of so-called “Excellence” as a catalyst for Government abuse by Federal, State and local law enforcement agents trained to believe that their targets deserve persecution.

The Waco Texas massacre is a perfect example of citizens being assaulted without provocation by Government agents who ‘believed’ they were targeting “radicals”. The men, women and children who were poisoned and set on fire by Federal agents had not committed any crime, nor were their religious beliefs posing any threat to the community. Yet these Government agents tormented their victims for 51 days, violently destroying their homes and gassing 76 American citizens including 21 children. This bill would authorize exactly this type of ideological profiling perpetrated by self-righteous bigots under Color of Authority whose personal values direct them to commit acts of ‘ideologically based violence.’

RAND spokesman, Brian Jenkins whose personal ideology is fully incorporated into this bill said to Jane Harman’s Committee: “Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.” This statement perfectly expresses the deep contempt for Constitutional law that pervades this legislation. Is there any doubt that exterminating people would come easily to someone who views his victims as cockroaches? This particular characterization of human beings is the precise terminology that was used by Nazis to justify exterminating Jews.

If members of Congress were the intended victims of this malicious legislation they would instantly comprehend why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Make no exceptions to the rule of law. Violating the Constitutional rights of any group or individual jeopardizes the security of our whole society.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all Beings are created equal, that they are endowed by Creation with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these Rights governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ~ that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind is more disposed to suffer than to right itself by abolishing the forms to which it is accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” ~ The Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Four Marines to Face Lesser Charges After Two-Year Inquiry Into Iraqi Killings

01/04/08 “Washington Post” — — After a two-year investigation into the killings of up to 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Marine Corps has decided that none of the Marines involved in the incident will be charged with murder. Instead, two enlisted Marines and two Marine officers will face trial in coming months for the killings and for failing to investigate them.

The most serious charges have been leveled against Marine Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of voluntary manslaughter in California next week, the last step before the case officially moves to trial.

Initially called a massacre by Iraqi residents of Haditha and later characterized as coldblooded murder by a U.S. congressman, the case has turned not on an alleged rampage but on a far more complex analysis of how U.S. troops fight an insurgency in the midst of a population they seek to protect.

The Marine Corps at first charged eight Marines and officers with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime. The charges have since been narrowed to four men in the unit, after three were cleared and a fourth was granted immunity to testify.

Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter, with the charges alleging that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing “in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.” Charging documents released this week say he killed at least nine people without properly obtaining positive identification that they were the enemy in the midst of an attack. 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson has been charged with obstructing the investigation.

Wuterich and Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum are the only two shooters that day to face criminal scrutiny; Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, the battalion commander, faces charges that he was derelict in his duty for failing to ask for an investigation.

The charges arise from the Nov. 19, 2005, shootings of as many as 24 innocent civilians who were nearby when a roadside bomb killed a member of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Wuterich and others in his unit killed a group of men who were in a white car near the blast and then stormed into two nearby houses, killing unarmed men, women and children after the Marines believed they were taking fire from the homes.

Public attention to the Haditha case increased in the spring of 2006 when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) said after briefings from military officials that the Marines had killed civilians “in cold blood.” The killings are among the most infamous of the Iraq war; 69 U.S. troops have been charged in connection with killing Iraqi civilians, and 22 of them have been convicted of murder, negligent homicide or voluntary manslaughter.

Military law experts said the manslaughter charges reflect the military’s reluctance to pursue murder charges because they are hard to win in court — especially as military juries tend to give combat troops the benefit of the doubt. Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.

“I think it’s still going to be hard to get convictions in these types of cases when you’re in a battlefield environment,” said David P. Sheldon, a military law expert in Washington.

Mark Zaid, one of Wuterich’s defense attorneys, said the charges show there was no “massacre” and that the case highlights how difficult it is for U.S. troops to make tough battlefield decisions. He said Wuterich and the other Marines were following their rules of engagement when they shot and killed their targets in Haditha, with unfortunate — but not illegal — consequences.

“Every Marine, period, is trained with the intent to kill,” Zaid said. “What everyone will realize at the end of the day is that the characterization of the events was nothing like reality, that the training the troops on the ground received was primarily responsible for what happened, and that the fog of war sometimes ends up with terrible results.”

Brian Rooney, an attorney for Chessani, said yesterday that Chessani’s trial, scheduled for April, is merely a way for the Marines to show they prosecuted an officer even after they administratively punished at least three senior officers who never ordered an investigation. Military probes blamed Chessani and several others for failing to take civilian deaths seriously.

“It’s clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward,” Rooney said.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said that while the charges against the Marines are still “very serious,” they are not “the bang that people expected at the front end.” Each charge of voluntary manslaughter carries a potential maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

On Thursday December 27th 2007, shortly after polling stations were closed, Kenya was hailed as having fulfilled an African dream – to have a free and fair closely contested democratic election. But less than 48 hours later it was clear that the dream of democracy could become a nightmare of ethnic violence. Most of the casualties so far have been the poor and the marginalized – and if things continue as they are, a bitter civil war fought along ethnic lines is certain. To say that what is at stake is the very future of Kenya is not an overstatement.

To answer the question of how the promise became a nightmare one must begin with very nature of democracy and how it has been functioning in Africa.

The first element to consider is that in the absence of strong democratic institutions (the three pillars of legislature, executive and judiciary), democracies in Africa are relying more and more on the goodwill of politicians: in this case, a nation is only as democratic as its politicians.

Added to this, African democracy is in real terms an expression of ethnic tensions. Instead of rolling back tribalism (I use the derisive term deliberately), African democracy serves it. One could say that all democracies have an element of this: in the West it generally goes under the euphemism of voter demographics. When Hilary Clinton is courting the white, black or Latino vote, she is in fact practicing what might, in other circumstances, be called tribal politics.

In the Kenyan presidential election, ethnic politics were a key factor in the close election results: the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, received very few votes in the Luo areas, while his Luo opponent, Raila Odinga, received only a very small percentage of the Kikuyu vote. In this bitterly contested election where ethnicity was the deciding factor, victory from either side was bound to spill into violence.

As a direct result of the above, questions of what true justice means and about the growing divide between haves and have-nots become lost to ethnicity. Raila is a flamboyant millionaire while Kibaki is as elite as you can get in Kenya. Lost in the fires of ethnicity is the simple fact that Kibaki and Raila have much more in common with each other than with their supporters. In this sense those engaged in the violence are, to put it bluntly, proxies in a war between two elite leaders.

Another element to consider is the extent to which the landscape of African politics has changed. We need to stop blanket condemnations of African leadership, and acknowledge that it varies and some leaders are better or worse than others. Kibaki, while not a Mandela is not a Moi or a Mobutu, or a Bokassa or an Idi Amin. By the same token the nature of opposition has changed. Since independence and the struggles against neo-colonial governments, opposition has been automatically understood as the legitimate voice of the people. But opposition no longer means the good guys. In many instances the opposition and the sitting government are practically the same as is indeed the case in Kenya. So while Raila is accusing Kibaki of vote-rigging, it could just as easily be Raila trying to rig and short-circuit the democratic process to favor himself. In other words we have no reason to take either of their claims to be true at face-value. In this impasse of two leaders intent on seizing power, respect for the democratic process couldn’t be more important.

Raila in my opinion seems to be attempting to foment a Ukrainian-style Orange revolution hence the call for a million-man march in the capital and the threats to form a parallel government. In a country demarcated along ethnic lines, this will only lead to more ethnic violence. Luos will arm against the Kikuyus who will in turn form Kikuyu defense teams. The result will be not a fast transition of power, but rather escalating ethnic violence. Only an insistence on true democratic processes will see Kenya through this crisis. And we need to bind both Kibaki, who is equally responsible for the violence, and Raila to these processes.

Toward a solution, Kenyans should realize that something beautiful did happen during this election. Most of the big men of Kenyan politics were voted out of Parliament and hence out of office. Even the sons of former dictator Moi did not win seats in Parliament. There seemed to be a belief that voting was a way of talking back the Kenyan political elite, and that democracy could be made to work for the majority poor. This is the flame that we must not let die.

To nurture this flame, a recount of the votes in a transparent manner is necessary. This, no matter what one thinks of Raila or Kibaki, or whether one thinks the elections were fair or not, should be the meeting ground of all those concerned about the future, immediate and long term, of Kenya.

If the votes can be recounted in full transparency, this election will not then become the death of Kenyan democracy but rather a test along the way to a democracy with real content – the content of security, equality and justice for Kenya’s majority poor.

There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times a couple of days ago, he said: “The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader.” Later in the interview, Edwards added: “I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year.”

Now, apparently, Edwards is one of three people with a chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee this year. If so, he would be the most progressive Democrat to top the national ticket in more than half a century.

The main causes of John Edwards’ biggest problems with the media establishment have been tied in with his firm stands for economic justice instead of corporate power.

Weeks ago, when the Gannett-chain-owned Des Moines Register opted to endorse Hillary Clinton this time around, the newspaper’s editorial threw down the corporate gauntlet: “Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the positive, optimistic campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.”

Many in big media have soured on Edwards and his “harsh anti-corporate rhetoric.” As a result, we’re now in the midst of a classic conflict between corporate media sensibilities and grassroots left-leaning populism.

On Wednesday, Edwards launched a TV ad in New Hampshire with him saying at a rally: “Corporate greed has infiltrated everything that’s happening in this democracy. It’s time for us to say, ‘We’re not going to let our children’s future be stolen by these people.’ I have never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist or a special interest PAC and I’m proud of that.”

But, when it comes to policy positions, he’s still no Dennis Kucinich. And that’s why, as 2007 neared its end, I planned to vote for Kucinich when punching my primary ballot.

Reasons for a Kucinich vote remain. The caucuses and primaries are a time to make a clear statement about what we believe in — and to signal a choice for the best available candidate. Ironically, history may show that the person who did the most to undermine such reasoning for a Dennis Kucinich vote at the start of 2008 was… Dennis Kucinich.

In a written statement released on Jan. 1, he said: “I hope Iowans will caucus for me as their first choice this Thursday, because of my singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade. This is an opportunity for people to stand up for themselves. But in those caucuses locations where my support doesn’t reach the necessary [15 percent] threshold, I strongly encourage all of my supporters to make Barack Obama their second choice. Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.”

This statement doesn’t seem to respect the intelligence of those of us who have planned to vote for Dennis Kucinich.

It’s hard to think of a single major issue — including “the war,” “health care” and “trade” — for which Obama has a more progressive position than Edwards. But there are many issues, including those three, for which Edwards has a decidedly more progressive position than Obama.

But the most disturbing part of Dennis’ statement was this: “Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.” This doesn’t seem like a reasoned argument for Obama. It seems like an exercise in smoke-blowing.

I write these words unhappily. I was a strong advocate for Kucinich during the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Two weeks ago, I spoke at an event for his campaign in Northern California. I believe there is no one in Congress today with a more brilliant analysis of key problems facing humankind or a more solid progressive political program for how to overcome them.

As of the first of this year, Dennis has urged Iowa caucusers to do exactly what he spent the last year telling us not to do — skip over a candidate with more progressive politics in order to support a candidate with less progressive politics.

The best argument for voting for Dennis Kucinich in caucuses and primaries has been what he aptly describes as his “singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade.” But his support for Obama over Edwards indicates that he’s willing to allow some opaque and illogical priorities to trump maximizing the momentum of our common progressive agendas.

Presidential candidates have to be considered in the context of the current historical crossroads. No matter how much we admire or revere an individual, there’s too much at stake to pursue faith-based politics at the expense of reality-based politics. There’s no reason to support Obama over Edwards on Kucinich’s say-so. And now, I can’t think of reasons good enough to support Kucinich rather than Edwards in the weeks ahead.

THE WHITE House, leading Democrats, and the media are all trumpeting the recent decrease in violent attacks in Iraq as a sign that Bush’s surge has worked. This Chicago Tribune report is typical of the new line: “Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation. No longer do the streets empty at dusk. Liquor stores and cinemas have reopened for business. Some shops stay open until late in the evening. Children play in parks, young women stay out after dark, restaurants are filled with families and old men sit at sidewalk cafes playing backgammon and smoking shisha pipes.”

Democrats like presidential frontrunner Hilary Clinton have conceded and even celebrated the success of the surge.

In order to present the surge as a success, the media have focused almost exclusively on the decline in Iraqi and U.S. casualties over the past few months. The fact that these numbers are comparable to 2005 figures—a period when no one was touting any great successes in Iraq—is perhaps the best indicator of how shallow the feel-good talk is. The fact remains that in Iraq 1.2 million people have died, 5 million have been driven from their homes, the central state is practically non-functioning, and the economy is in complete shambles.

2007: The deadliest year

Bush’s surge sent in 30,000 troops over the last year to bring the U.S. troop presence up to about 160,000, concentrated in Baghdad and Anbar province. The administration planned to defeat al-Qaeda, contain the civil war between the militias, and give space for political reconciliation between the Kurdish, Arab Sunni, and Arab Shia elites.

The surge initially caused a massive spike in violence, and in spite of the recent declines—which are likely to be only temporary—the overall picture is one of increased casualties. Lauren Frayer, a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem, reports that 2007 has been “the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite the recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count. At least 852 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year—the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003.”

A Pew Research Center poll of American reporters who have worked in Iraq found that “nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit.”

Iraqis see conditions getting worse, not better. An ABC/BBC poll found that in 2005, two-thirds of Iraqis said life was getting better, but by August 2007, that figure had declined to one-third of the population. Instead of supporting the surge and occupation, 47 percent want immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, and an overwhelming majority wants withdrawal within a year. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. soldiers.

Real causes of recent drop in violence

Only in the last few months have attacks on U.S. troops, the Iraqi Army, and civilians dropped. But, as Juan Cole concludes, “the ‘good news’ of a lull in violence is relative at best. In fact, Iraq’s overall death rate makes it among the worst civil conflicts in the world.”

Bush’s troop surge, moreover, is not even the cause of this recent decline. Rather, the drop seems to be the result of a shift in U.S. tactics combined with unforeseen changes on the ground in Iraq. The American forces have increasingly used air strikes instead of ground troops, thereby minimizing U.S. casualties. Pepe Escobar reports that the U.S. launched “four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007—the year of Bush’s ‘surge’—than in the whole of 2006.”

Similarly, instead of exposing U.S. troops to battle in Anbar, Bush opted to buy off tribal leaders of the resistance and arm their militias to fight al-Qaeda. Hala Jaber reports in the Sunday Times, “U.S.-backed Sunni militias have spread eastward from Anbar across Baghdad. They already number 77,000, known collectively as ‘concerned local citizens.’ This is more than the Shiite Mahdi Army and nearly half the number in the Iraqi army.”

The U.S. troops also did not have to weigh into battle against Sadr’s forces. Instead of risking open warfare with a buttressed U.S. troop presence, Sadr declared a cease-fire.

The recent decline in Iraqi civilian deaths followed a frenzy of sectarian killing earlier in 2007 that ethnically cleansed Baghdad and its neighborhoods. As a result, it has gone from a city that was 65 percent Sunni to 75 percent Shia. Charles Crain writes in Time magazine, “many neighborhoods have completed their brutal sectarian segregation, leaving fewer easy targets for intimidation and murder.” Juan Cole notes that the relative reduction in violence is artificial and probably cannot endure.

Blast walls enclose once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend on. When a Baghdad pet market was bombed recently, it was revealed that the U.S. military had banned vehicles in its vicinity for some time, but allowed cars to drive there again just a few days before the bombing. Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?

Refugees returning to peace and security?

Perhaps the biggest scam of the surge propaganda is the claim that refugees are returning to Iraq because of the improved peace and security. The Iraqi government now claims 46,300 refugees returned in October at the rate of 1,600 a day.

However, as Damien Cave writes in the New York Times, “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.”

The tiny minority of the 5 million driven from their homes is not returning willingly. Instead, the countries that have received most of the Iraqis—Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—have all in various ways made it so difficult to enter or stay in their countries that most of the refugees are being forced back into Iraq as a result of persecution and poverty.

The New York Times reports that a UN survey of Iraqi refugees in Syria found “46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.”

Political failure of the surge

The surge’s political goal of reconciliation between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish elites has also failed. The U.S. hoped to force them to agree on a central government, repeal the ban on Baath Party members’ participation in politics, hold regional elections, and pass the infamous oil law to open Iraq’s key industry to U.S. corporations.

All of these initiatives have stalled. The various Iraqi elites are completely at odds with one another on most of these issues and have mutually incompatible plans for a future Iraq. The Kurds want a separate nation. The Shia want to either control the central state on their terms or establish a majority Shia region. The Sunnis want a return to a central government so they are not cut out of oil revenues that are concentrated in the Kurdish and Shia regions.

The only point that the Arab elites agree on is opposition to the U.S. occupation and its aims. As Pepe Escobar writes, “As far as the key Sunni and Shiite factions are concerned they all agree on the basics. Iraq won’t be occupied. Iraq won’t have permanent U.S. military bases. Iraq won’t give up its oil wealth. And Iraq won’t be a toothless pro-Israel puppet regime.” The Kurds, by contrast, are still willing allies of the U.S. occupation.

Time bomb of resistance and civil war

U.S. policies enacted during the surge have set in motion dynamics that will spur greater resistance. U.S. troops now back Sunni tribal leaders and militias that recently had been fighting the U.S. in Anbar province; these newly armed and trained forces see themselves as temporary allies with the U.S. against al-Qaeda, but there is nothing that says they won’t resume at a future date active armed opposition to the occupation. The U.S. also supports the Shia parties that oppose the occupation. And the Sadrists are merely biding their time until the U.S. withdraws the 30,000 surge troops to assert their more effectively organized forces.

As one army officer stated, “the tactic of paying your enemy not to fight is not a new one, but it has limitations. If the plan is to leave Iraq, it’s a good solution. If the plan is to stay in perpetuity, and that seems to be the case with the Bush administration, history says it’s dangerous. Eventually, the underlying hatred for the foreign presence overwhelms greed.”

The surge has also set the stage for an even more destructive civil war. Because the U.S. has increasingly allied itself with Sunni forces and used them to pressure Shia parties to pass pro-Sunni legislation, such as ending the ban on ex-Baathists serving in government, they have further deepened the schisms between the Arab sects that could produce greater sectarian violence. Even worse, the U.S. has armed the Sunni resistance in Anbar to the teeth, making it more capable of taking on the Shia militias and Shia-dominated government that they despise. Moreover, if the surrounding countries expel greater numbers of Iraqis, the returning refugees will only further spark sectarian tensions. Most cannot return to their homes because families of other sects now occupy them. The sectarian forces will likely use their demands as a rallying point for a renewed civil war.

The civil war is also spreading to the previously stable Kurdish region. The Kurdish parties are trying to retake control of Kirkuk, one of the key centers of oil production, in order to establish the economic foundations of their autonomous region. This has brought them into conflict with not only the Iraqi Arabs but also U.S. ally Turkey which fears that the strengthened Kurdish region will inspire their own Kurdish population’s nationalist aspirations.

Surge triumphalism is merely the latest justification for the American occupation of Iraq. With bipartisan agreement, the U.S. has proceeded with the construction of five mega-bases, one hundred smaller ones, and its massive Baghdad embassy. From these redoubts they plan to rule Iraq as a neocolony and use it as a permanent base from which to police the region.

“The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam, which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.” – Sen. Barack Obama [1]

Barack, I thought Hillary Clinton was known as the Great Triangulator, but you are learning well. The problem with setting up false polarities to position yourself in the “center”, however, is that it’s unproductive both politically and intellectually.

Politically, it is a mistake because there last time I looked there were a whole lot more “Tom Hayden Democrats” voting in the California primary and, I suspect, around the country, than “‘Scoop’ Jackson Democrats.” In fact, they are your greatest potential base, aside from African-American voters, in a multi-candidate primary.

More disturbing is what happens to the mind by setting up these polarities. To take a “centrist” position, one calculates the equal distance between two “extremes.” It doesn’t matter if one “extreme” is closer to the truth. All that matters is achieving the equidistance. This means the presumably “extreme” view is prevented from having a fair hearing, which would require abandoning the imaginary center. And it invites the “extreme” to become more “extreme” in order to pull the candidate’s thinking in a more progressive direction. The process of substantive thinking is corroded by the priority of political positioning.

I have been enthused by the crowds you draw, by the excitement you instill in my son and daughter-in-law, by the seeds of inspiration you plant in our seven-year old [biracial] kid. I love the alternative American narrative you weave on the stump, one in which once-radical social movements ultimately create a better America step by step. I very much respect your senior advisers like David Axelrod, who figured out a way to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago. You are a truly global figure in this age of globalization.

But as the months wear on, I see a problem of the potential being squandered. Hillary Clinton already occupies the political center. John Edwards holds the populist labor/left. And that leaves you with a transcendent vision in search of a constituency.

Your opposition to the Iraq War could have distinguished you, but it became more parsed than pronounced. All the nuance might please the New York Times’Michael Gordon, who helped get us into this madness in the first place, but the slivers of difference appear too narrow for many voters to notice. Clinton’s plan, such as it is, amounts to six more years of thousands of American troops in Iraq [at least]. Your proposal is to remove combat troops by mid-2010, while leaving thousands of advisers trying to train a dysfunctional Iraqi army, and adding that you might re-invade to stave off ethnic genocide. Lately, you have said the mission of your residual American force would be more limited than the Clinton proposal. You would commit trainers, for example, only if the Iraqi government engages in reconciliation and abandons sectarian policing. You would not embed American trainers in the crossfire of combat. This nuancing avoids the tough and obvious question of what to do with the sectarian Frankenstein monster we have funded, armed and trained in the Baghdad Interior Ministry. The Jones Commission recently proposed “scrapping” the Iraqi police service. Do you agree? The Center for American Progress, directed by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, is urging that all US troops, including trainers, be redeployed this year. Why do you disagree? Lately you have taken advantage of Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness on Iran to oppose bombing that country without Congressional authorization. But you carefully decline to say whether you would support bombing Iran when and if the time comes.

This caution has a history:

– you were against the war in 2002 because it was a “dumb war”, but you had to point out that you were not against all wars, without exactly saying what wars you favored;
– then you visited Iraq for 36 hours and “could only marvel at the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities within hostile territory”;
– then as the quagmire deepened, you cloaked yourself in the bipartisan mantle of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group, which advocated leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq to fight terrorism, train the Iraqis until they “stand up”, and sundry other tasks of occupation;

Perhaps your national security advisers are getting to you when it should be the other way around. Their expertise is not in the politics of primaries. If anything, they reject the of populist peace pressure influencing elite national security decisions. The result is a frustration towards all the Democratic candidates for what the Center for American Progress has recently called “strategic drift.” The political result is the danger of returning to John Kerry’s muffled message in 2004. The policy result may be a total security disaster for our country, draining our young soldiers’ blood and everyone’s taxes on the continuing degradation of our national honor in a war which cannot be won.

Just for the record, let me tell you my position on Iraq. I think the only alternative is to begin a global diplomatic peace offensive starting with a commitment to withdraw all our troops as rapidly as possible. That is the only way to engage the world, including the Iraqi factions, in doing something about containing the crises of refugees, reconciliation and reconstruction. It means negotiating with Iran rather than escalating to a broader war. If you want to “turn a new page”, it should not be about leaving the Sixties behind. It will be about leaving behind the superpower fantasies of both the neo-conservatives and your humanitarian hawks. And yes, it is to be “suspicious”, as Eisenhower and John Kennedy came to be suspicious, of the advice of any Wise Men or security experts who advocated the military occupation of Iraq. Is that position as extreme as your rhetoric assumes?

Your problem, if I may say so out loud, and with all respect, is that the deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president. The quiet implication of your centrism is that all races can live beyond the present divisions, in the higher reality above the dualities. You may be right. You see the problems Hillary Clinton encounters every time she implies that she wants to shatter all those glass ceilings and empower a woman, a product of the feminist movement, to be president? Same problem. So here’s my question: how can you say let’s “turn the page” and leave all those Sixties’ quarrels behind us if we dare not talk freely in public places about a black man or a woman being president? Doesn’t that reveal that on some very deep level that we are not yet ready to “turn the page”?

When you think about it, these should be wonderful choices, not forbidden topics. John Edwards can’t be left out either, for his dramatic and, once again, unstated role as yet another reformed white male southerner seeking America’s acceptance, like Carter, Clinton and Gore before him. Or Bill Richardson trying to surface the long-neglected national issues of Latinos. I think these all these underlying narratives, of blacks, women, white southerners and la raza – excuse me, Hispanic-Americans – are far more moving, engaging and electorally-important than the dry details of policy.

What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency. I can understand, I suppose, your need to define yourself as a American rather than a black American, as if some people need to be reassured over and over. I don’t know if those people will vote for you.

You were ten years old when the Sixties ended, so it is the formative story of your childhood. The polarizations that you want to transcend today began with life-and-death issues that were imposed on us. No one chose to be “extreme” or “militant” as a lifestyle preference. It was an extreme situation that produced us. On one side were armed segregationists, on the other peaceful black youth. On one side were the destroyers of Vietnam, on the other were those who refused to submit to orders. On the one side were those keeping women in inferior roles, on the other were those demanding an equal rights amendment. On one side were those injecting chemical poisons into our rivers, soils, air and blood streams, on the other were the defenders of the natural world. On one side were the perpetrators of big money politics, on the other were keepers of the plain democratic tradition. Does anyone believe those conflicts are behind us?

I can understand, in my old age, someone wanting to dissociate from the extremes to which some of us were driven by the times. That seems to be the ticket to legitimacy in the theater of the media and cultural gatekeepers. That appears to be what happened to John Kerry when he tried to erase his heroic past as a Vietnam veteran against the war. I went through a similar process in 1982 when I ran for the legislature, reassuring voters that I wasn’t “the angry young man that I used to be.” I won the election, and then the Republicans objected to my being seated anyway! Holding the idea that the opposites of the Sixties were equally extreme or morally equivalent is to risk denying where you came from and what made your opportunities possible. You surely understand that you are one of the finest descendants of the whole Sixties generation, not some hybrid formed by the clashing opposites of that time. We want to be proud of the role we may have played in all you have become, and not be considered baggage to be discarded on your ascent. You recognize this primal truth when you stand on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, basking in the glory of those who were there when you were three years old. But you can’t have it both ways, revering the Selma march while trying to “turn the page” on the past.

This brings me back to why you want to stand in the presumed center against the “Tom Hayden Democrats.” Are you are equally distant from the “George McGovern Democrats.”, and the “Jesse Jackson Democrats”? How about the “Martin Luther King Democrats”, the “Cesar Chavez Democrats”, the “Gloria Steinem Democrats”? Where does it end?

What about the “Bobby Kennedy Democrats”? I sat listening to you last year at an RFK human rights event in our capital. I was sitting behind Ethel Kennedy and several of her children, all of whom take more progressive stands than anyone currently leading the national Democratic Party. They were applauding you, supporting your candidacy, and trying to persuade me that you were not just another charismatic candidate but the one we have been waiting for.

Will you live up to the standard set by Bobby Kennedy in 1968? He who sat with Cesar Chavez at the breaking of the fast, he who enlisted civil rights and women activists in his crusade, who questioned the Gross National Product as immoral, who dialogued with people like myself about ending the war and poverty? Yes, Bobby appealed to cops and priests and Richard Daley too, but in 1968 he never distanced himself from the dispossessed, the farmworkers, the folksingers, the war resisters, nor the poets of the powerless. He walked among us.

The greatest gift you have been given by history is that as the elected tribune of a revived democracy, you could change America’s dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect. There are no plazas large enough for the crowds that would listen to your every word, wondering if you are the one the whole world is waiting for. They would not wait for long, of course. But they would passionately want to give you the space to reset the American direction.

What is the risk, after all? If “think globally, act locally” ever made any sense, this is the time, and you are the prophet. If you want to be mainstream, look to the forgotten mainstream. You don’t even have to leave the Democratic Party. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the Good Neighbor policy of Roosevelt before it dissolved into the Cold War, the Strangelove priesthood, the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala, the sordid Bay of Pigs, the open graves of Vietnam. It’s time to renew the best legacy of the New Deal before it became Neo-Liberalism, and finally achieve the 1948 Democratic vision of national health care.

May you – and Hillary too – live up to the potential, the gift of the past, prepared for you in the dreams not only of our fathers, but of all those generations with hopes of not being forgotten. #

[1] New York Times Magazine, Nov. 4, 2007

[Naomi Wolf’s new book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot was published by Chelsea Green in September.]

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy — but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically — as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government — the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors — we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security — remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” — didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable — as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space — the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat — hydra-like, secretive, evil — is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain — which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks — than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) — where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders — opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists — are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantanamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemoller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantanamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode — but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China — in every closed society — secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four — you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government — after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s — all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy — a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America — it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year — when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantanamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantanamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually — for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence — it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model — you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests — usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency — which the president now has enhanced powers to declare – he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night… Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act – which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere — while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life… How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” — a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president — without US citizens realising it yet — the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions — and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack — say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani — because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us — staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before — and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

In a bold move that could dramatically alter the playing field of the 2008 GOP presidential race, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee today named Jesus Christ as his vice presidential running mate.

Huckabee has made an increasing number of comments about his relationship with Jesus in recent debates, but few Republican insiders expected him to announce that he was anointing Christ as his vice presidential pick.

“This could be huge for Huckabee,” said Stenson Partridge, a veteran GOP consultant. “Among Republican voters, Jesus Christ is even more popular than Ronald Reagan.”

The Rev. Pat Robertson, a supporter of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, said he was “blindsided” by the news of Huckabee’s decision: “I talked to Jesus last night, and he didn’t mention anything about it.”

At a raucous Huckabee rally in Davenport, Iowa, today, supporters of the former Arkansas governor could be seen holding signs reading “HUCKABEE/CHRIST ‘08.”†

It is “highly unorthodox” for a presidential candidate to select a vice presidential running mate who is a prominent figure in the Holy Bible, says Davis Logsdon, dean of the School of Divinity at the University of Minnesota.

But according to Logsdon, if the Huckabee-Christ ticket makes it all the way to the White House, it could be historic in more ways than one: “If Huckabee is elected and then something happens to him while in office, we would be looking at our first Jewish president.”

Elsewhere, a madman attempted to take hostages at former Sen. Fred Thompson’s campaign headquarters in Rochester, N.H., but found that everyone had been given the week off.

Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of “The Republican Playbook.”

Let the drooling begin. Over me — one Iowan who, any other time, is as recognizable on the national landscape as a furrow.

Last night was my night. Iowans like me traipsed across icy parking lots and tired TV screens to tell the world, “Hey! Iowa is more than a bunch of vowels! We got the caucus!” (Try to say that without a tongue.)

And boy, do we milk this udderly unique opportunity. Here are a few notes from last night’s proceedings, a “lessons learned,” if you will, on how some of us Iowans make the most of these 15 minutes… or 117, if your bespectacled Precinct Chair goes by the book.

Never arrive at your caucus decided. No matter how decided you are.
Avoid wearing clothing that gives away your leanings (i.e. second-hand duds: Kucinich; anything with the word “rock” on it: Obama)

Politely decline all stickers thrust at you upon entry into your precinct site. Alternately, you may choose, as a friend of mine did, to wear them all.

Remember, though, the goal is to appear available, not slutty.

Sit in a portion of the room on the immediate border of an established group — even better, sandwich yourself between two. People will repeatedly confuse you for a member of their camp, and will then be beholden to woo you.

Talk to as many people as possible, particularly when the Democratic Party Order of Proceedings are being read.

If your precinct is large, and there is a question about something insignificant, like anything at all about Mike Gravel, wave the notebook page written by your 8-year-old and speak authoritatively to keep things moving.

When the Chair instructs you to choose a “preference group,” look down and scuff your shoe in front of you. Only look up if nobody comes to sweep you off your scuffing feet. Then, mill into a camp coyly. They won’t be able to help themselves.

If you find that nobody is panting after you, ask arbitrary questions of glum-looking people. To those on the prowl, this has opportunity written all over it.

Avoid interacting with the loud people. Instead, offer them a stick of gum.

When you ask a question about global human rights issues, and the kid says, “I don’t know about that but I’m in education — do you like education? Let me tell you about this guy and education…” offer him a stick of gum, too.

Be a tease. Commit to a group only after much wandering and waffling. Make them work to get your body.

Take it to the wire. Make your choice in the final seconds. This will elicit cheers from the prowlers in your chosen camp, and envious stares from those that sat there all along.

Commit dramatically. A throaty “Sticker me” works well.

Notice how, when the Obama camp Captain makes their final count, it’s like they’re doing the wave in slow motion. You are suddenly a rock star.

And that does it. We head home to our foursquares and farmhouses and once again assume the form of Field of Dreams extras to the rest of the country. But a little taller, perhaps. And who knows what these stickers might fetch on e-bay.

More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul, infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade. They could all have safe, clean water within 10 years, for just a tiny fraction of the cost of global military spending. Why isn’t it happening?

Most governments, especially rich white ones, would apparently rather buy weapons to kill other human beings than build water facilities to save the lives of black, brown and yellow poor people.

According to the Stockholm international peace research institute, in 2006 total global military expenditure topped $1.2tn; with the US accounting for $528.7bn of this spending and the UK for $59.2bn.

At a cost of about 5% of the world’s military budgets, over a period of 10 years clean, safe water could be provided to every person on earth. But this won’t happen because while the poor are deprived, the rich are depraved.

Mega-rich individuals, corporations and nations rule the world. They worship the false idols of celebrity, money, profits, consumerism, speculation and conspicuous consumption. Love, compassion, mercy and human solidarity are largely alien ideals in the ruthless, cut-throat world of free markets and stockmarkets. The super-wealthy know the price of everything and the value of nothing. People are commodities, just like sacks of maize or barrels of oil. Human needs are not important. Money is everything, and since the poor don’t have it, they are held in contempt. Hundreds of millions of non-white people are condemned to drink muddy, stinking water. If the have-a-lots care, they don’t show it. Their unspoken message seems to be: let them drink shit.

While children are dying all over the world every day from contaminated water, the rich world carries on regardless. And we, the people, are to blame. We let the rich get away with their greed. We keep electing governments who, at the drop of a hat, find billions to wage illegal, immoral wars, but who can’t bring themselves to even marginally downsize their armaments budget to finance a truly just battle – the battle to give everyone on this planet what we, in Britain and the west, assume is a fundamental right: easy access to drinking water that tastes good and won’t harm us.

Our government would not tolerate people dying of waterborne diseases in the UK. So why should we tolerate such needless deaths in developing countries? Isn’t a human being a human being, whoever they are and wherever they live on this planet? Aren’t all people’s lives equally precious? Apparently not, otherwise there would be concerted international action to tackle the shame of dirty water and the resultant obscene waste of human life.

I recently interviewed Nick Edmans of the charity WaterAid for my online TV series, Talking With Tatchell. He confirmed that in the eighth year of the 21st century, at least 1.1 billion people have no fresh, safe water to drink.

Before this day is over, 5,000 children will die from infected water, leaving up to 10,000 parents grieving – tonight, and every night.

All in all, around 2.2 million people – 1.8 million of them children – are killed each year by waterborne diseases.

A further 2.6 billion people have no secure, hygienic toilet facilities. They use rudimentary holes in the ground which breed disease. The human waste leaches into the soil, often contaminating the groundwater that supplies wells and despoiling rivers where people bathe, wash and fish.

This morning I woke up and walked 12 feet to my kitchen tap. I drank a large refreshing glass of pure water. Alas, the easily accessible, clean, safe water that we take for granted in the west is only a distant dream for one-sixth of the world’s population, especially in Asia and Africa.

Hundreds of millions of poor people have to trek for many miles and hours every day to fetch often foul-smelling, diseased drinking water that can cause deadly dysentery, cholera, typhoid and intestinal worms and parasites.

The lack of safe water supplies frequently impacts worst on marginal social groups, such as lower castes and ethnic minorities, who may be denied access to the best water sources and be forced to pay premium prices to private suppliers.

Some tourist developments in developing countries, such as big hotels and golf courses, involve the private owners sinking their own bore holes to extract water from below ground. This often results in the depression of the water table, drying up wells and causing water crises in the surrounding villages.

Water shortages and a lack of affordability in developing countries have, in some cases, been exacerbated by privatisation, which has usually benefited urban dwellers to the neglect of their rural counterparts, and has usually resulted in private monopolies and price hikes, to the detriment of low income families.

With global warming and rising populations, the prospect looms of future disputes – even wars – over shortages of fresh water supplies. A foretaste of such disputes can be seen in the friction between Israel and the Palestine over Tel Aviv’s diversion of water from the Jordan river to meet Israeli demand, leaving the West Bank under-supplied.

It strikes me as utterly immoral that in the midst of a world of immense wealth and plenty, billions of people have so little – not even the basics of life like safe water to drink.

Surely, it is time for a major global effort to redistribute wealth from rich nations to poor ones and to divert investment in weapons and wars to health-sustaining, life-saving development projects such as the universal provision of cheap, accessible, clean water?

Safe water is a human right. Give them water, not war.

Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, and a member of the queer rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the Green party.