The Rag Blog

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

— Emma Lazarus, 1883

If you don’t mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn’t an ideal “tempest-tost” candidate for Emma Lazarus’ famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of “the Christmas spirit.” She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, “look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life.” On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time — with the President’s Global War on Terror in full swing — she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, “handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep… without food and drink and… confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned.” It was “the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected.”

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions — “by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania” — confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself “in a small, dirty cell.” On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, “because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.”

On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won’t go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an “investigation,” a “review of its work procedures” and expressed “regrets.” But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we’re living in?

Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it’s a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.

Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife’s family, he has been stopped so many times — “I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers…” — that he is a connoisseur of detention. He’s been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he’ll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.

The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been “trashed.” (“My son’s portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.”) During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. (“He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.”) His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine’s website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild’s coverage of his case.

The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: “We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together.”

Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the “huddled masses” category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post’s Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is “a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai,” always has the same “galling” experience on entering the country:

“A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf’s passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf — who goes by ‘Your Excellency’ at home — disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of ‘a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy’… He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed.”

Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college… in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:

“A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here.”

This is what “homeland security” means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a “tempest-tost” experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.

News from Nowhere

So far, of course, we’ve only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.

Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA’s global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like “the Salt Pit” near Kabul; that it may have used the “British” island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own “black sites” or which it “rendered” in “extraordinary” manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.

Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA’s incarceration puzzle: an “imposing building” on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for “CIA prisoners captured in other countries.” The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantanamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:

“Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer.”

Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider’s account of the CIA “black sites” (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that “high-value targets” were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a “full confession” (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, “I am innocent,” on a cell wall in his own blood.

Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:

“And then they put… like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted.”

In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, “[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music.” From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, “His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake… Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. ‘I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,’ Bashmilah wrote in his declaration…

“After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.”

No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of — and a legacy of — George Bush’s world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.

Embedded Reports from the Dark Side

A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be “embedded” in U.S. military units. That term — so close in sound to “in bed with” — should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been “embedded,” largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as “extraordinary rendition”), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the “freedom” rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase “the price of freedom” has been superseded by the price of what passes for “safety” and “security.”

Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories — some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation — indicates just how normalized all this has become.

A legacy can often be framed in words. So here’s a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:

Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture — sorry, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives — in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President’s office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.

As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration’s secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, “Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image,” with this telling line from the CIA’s then number three official, A. B. Krongard: “You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.” Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA’s Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same — unsuccessfully.

Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, “A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it.” According to that lawyer, the precedent “goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.” This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. “The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.” International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:

“This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law… The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the ‘law of nations’ referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution.”

Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year old German citizen who “chose a bad time to travel.” Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, “his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist.” This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a “dangerous al-Qaeda ally” by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany “goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay.”

Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, “[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress… that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA’s aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.” He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration’s nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it “repugnant.”

Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to “veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year.”

Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding “torture,” regretted its use (“we Americans are better than that”), and also insisted that “[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department.” In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the “king of torture” and “the monster” by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. (“They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live — we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.”) He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, “In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them.” Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.

Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had “illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect.” Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.

Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the “surge” months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what’s left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.

Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December’s melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann “to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture.” In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:

“Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition…. Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai… Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

“General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out.”

Or you could mention the news that the “Australian Taliban,” David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given “a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk,” including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or… but the list is almost unending.

The Bush Legacy

As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst — at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad — “rendition” — began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as “the water cure.”)

Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy’s still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren’t a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them — in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone — where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for “secret experiments” in harsh interrogation, “using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing.”

And yet, don’t for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn’t yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.

Today, and it’s a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial “24” or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a “no-brainer,” a “dunk in the water” in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies — and little enough of it in real life.

American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.

George W. Bush didn’t invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre “torture memos” that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.

It’s not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.

Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of “globalization” in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains “sovereign,” and that’s the United States of America.

If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk’s landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).

Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their “innocence” — even when mocked as “innocents abroad” — and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, “innocent until proven guilty.”

Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a “war” against “terror” supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.

This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah’s living nightmare — dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Note to Tomdispatch Readers: If you wish to read a translation of Erla Ósk‘s blog about her 24 hours “in” the U.S., click here and then scroll to entry 306. Expect the next Tomdispatch post, a new piece by Chalmers Johnson, on Sunday night January 6th.]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Several Guantanamo Bay prisoners are seriously ill, lawyers said Monday, rejecting U.S. claims after the death of one prisoner that no other detainees are in immediate medical danger.

On Sunday, a 68-year-old Afghan died from cancer at the isolated U.S. base in southeast Cuba, heightening lawyers’ concerns over clients held at Guantanamo for suspected al-Qaida or Taliban links.

“Many attorneys are concerned,” said H. Candace Gorman, a Chicago lawyer whose Libyan client held at the camp has Hepatitis B and tuberculosis.

At least four of the 275 men held at Guantanamo Bay are gravely ill and another has become psychotic, lawyers told The Associated Press.

The death of Abdul Razzak at the prison clinic Sunday marked the first time any of the more than 700 men who have been held at Guantanamo Bay has died from natural causes, the military said. Four prisoners committed suicide. The U.S. now holds about 275 men there.

The sick prisoners have ailments that include liver infection, heart disease and another possible case of cancer and lack adequate medical treatment, according to lawyers for the men.

Razzak was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in September and had been receiving chemotherapy treatment since October, the military said. His death was expected, and he had been living in the clinic in recent weeks as his condition deteriorated, said Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention center.

Haupt said he did not know if Razzak was allowed any final contact with family in Afghanistan before he died.

U.S. authorities accused Razzak, who had been held at Guantanamo since early 2003, of being a senior leader of a 40-man Taliban unit — an allegation he denied. No charges were ever filed against him.

“There are so many ill people there — according to my client and clients of other attorneys — that it’s just a matter of time before someone else dies from this medical neglect,” Gorman said.

Haupt said no other detainees are in any immediate medical danger. Military authorities have long praised the medical care at Guantanamo — noting last year that they have performed more than 300 surgical procedures and treated hepatitis, battlefield wounds, tuberculosis, appendicitis, malnutrition and malaria.

“We go to significant lengths to provide every bit of medical care to the detainee population,” Haupt said.

The military brought a surgical team and a mobile cardiac lab to Guantanamo — at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of about US$400,000 (€270,000) — for a heart procedure on Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman accused of supporting al-Qaida.

Paracha refused the treatment. His lawyers insist it is too risky to allow the procedure to be done at Guantanamo and want him transferred to a properly equipped cardiac care facility. In November, he said his chest pain is so severe that “he is convinced he is dying,” said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney with the British legal rights group Reprieve.

Attorney Clive Stafford Smith, also from Reprieve, said he has at least two seriously ill clients, including Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for the Al-Jazeera TV network who is being evaluated by doctors at Guantanamo after he complained of pain and blood in his urine. The lawyer said that cancer is a possibility, but he does not know the results of the cameraman’s latest examination.

Stafford Smith also said that another client, Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed, is apparently psychotic — engaging in such behavior as smearing feces on the walls of his cell.

Gorman said her client, Abdul Hamid Abdul Salam Al-Ghizzawi, has not been treated for his hepatitis or tuberculosis and has developed a severe liver infection. In court papers, she said: “Al-Ghizzawi is dying a slow and painful death.”

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s? A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone and the U.S.

01/01/08 “Toronto Star ” — — “We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way.”

Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.

It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world’s lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.

The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.

That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic “stagflation” that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.

This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn’t abide Washington’s sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America’s destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.

All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.

The resentment of what the French labelled “the U.S. hyper-power” in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.

The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here’s Tony Blair, who revered Britain’s “special relationship” with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. “A single-power world is inherently unstable,” Blair said back in 2005. “That’s the rationale for Europe to unite.

“We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S.”

The euro has been the world’s strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People’s Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world’s undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)

It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America’s deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.

America now is the world’s largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.

As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it’s difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.

World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman’s cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.

But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America’s staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.

As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin’s heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush’s soulmate excoriated the U.S. for “an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts.”

America’s foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington’s full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country’s supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.

“No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.

America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a “New World Order” of universal peace and mutual prosperity.

Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.

Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers’ next target.

In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the “E generation,” as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.

Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the “benign hegemony” that still shapes America’s regard of its impact on the world.

And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton’s view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that “America is the indispensable nation.” In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, “The American people now know something they’ve never known before. In their bones they know that there’s almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way.”

Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America’s lone-superpower status, has warned that “Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?

“They must have one,” the London-based global military analyst wrote. “Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies.”

Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world’s second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world’s largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia’s regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country’s entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.

The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America’s respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as “the shining city on the hill” that Ronald Reagan invoked.

With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today’s America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were “declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its “unsustainable” disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. “It’s time to learn from history,” Walker said, “and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

“What we’re seeing (in the U.S.) isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: Income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite … It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.” – Paul Krugman, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006.

01/01/07 “The Star” — — In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street Journal delivered the classic insult to this nation when it called Canada an honorary Third World country.

Indeed, at that time Canada’s economy was coming out of a period of relative difficulty.

Our balance of payments was shaky, the federal government had posted a long string of budget deficits and the Canadian dollar was weak.

Adding to these economic woes, as of the mid-1990s, Canada also had a long history of posting substantially higher inflation rates than in the United States.

Now, however, the trade and fiscal deficits situation has been turned on its head, with the United States incurring huge fiscal deficits and borrowing enormous amounts of foreign capital to balance its hefty international trade deficit. In fact, in a relatively short time span, the U.S. has become the largest debtor nation in the world.

And as Paul Krugman and many other economists have pointed out, U.S. income disparity is obscenely large and increasing, while higher education is not overcoming the polarization of income and the shrinking of the middle class.

The latter point is somewhat surprising, since most Western democracies see the elimination or reduction of economic inequality as a good idea. Indeed, it is a generally accepted principle that the underlying causes of economic inequality based on such non-economic differences as race, gender, or geography should also be minimized or eliminated.

In other words, there is a strong predilection in most Western countries to level the economic playing field as much as possible. This seems not to be the case in the United States.

The United Nations publishes a Human Development Index that ranks countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. The latest published data were based on 2005 statistics. The U.S., despite its vast wealth and power, placed only in the 12th position among industrial countries. The top four countries were Iceland, Norway, Australia and Canada. These top four countries still pay some lip service to income distribution as an important economic and social goal.

Ironically, the U.S. today has many more features in common with Third World status than Canada ever did back in the mid-1990s.

What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.

But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations’ fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.

The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.

Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.

Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative.

Guess what country we are talking about now?

Dozens of African-Americans gathered in Philadelphia on January 1, 1808not for festivities celebrating the New Year but to commemorate a new freedom for members of their race.

A federal law prohibiting the importation of new slaves into the United States took effect on Friday 1/1/1808 and this law provided the basis for that commemoration.

Another legal event enlivened those blacks gathering at the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church ­ then located not far from the building where America’s Founding Fathers issued their Declaration of Independence and approved the nation’s Constitution.

The year 1808 marked freedom for scores of slaves in Pennsylvania under terms of the Gradual Abolition of Slavery enacted by that state’s legislature in 1780.

Persons attending that commemoration at St. Thomas listened to the Rector of that church, Absalom Jones, deliver what is now his historically famous “Thanksgiving Sermon” praising the abolition of the African slave trade.

During that sermon, Jones expressed hope that January 1st would become a day of public “thanksgiving” recognizing the “abolition of the slave trade in our country.”

Rev. Jones desired this annual “thanksgiving” recognition to ensure that “our children in the remotest generations [knew the]history of the suffering of our brethren, and of their deliverance”

While that national day of observance Jones desired never materialized, Jones would be pleased that nearly 200-years after his Sermon, black Philadelphians successfully pushed the federal government to approve erection of a memorial to slaves.

This first-ever federally sanctioned memorial for slaves is slated for construction outside the Liberty Bell Pavilion in Center City Philadelphiathe famed facility now located not far from where Jones delivered that January 1, 1808 address.

And given Jones’ concern that blacks in the distant future understand the importance of that January 1808 abolition on importing slaves, it’s ironic that the Philadelphia group that took a lead role in pushing for the memorial is named the: Avenging the Ancestors Coalition.

This memorial particularly recognizes the nine slaves that President George Washington kept inside the then Philadelphia based White House.

The stable area where Washington’s slave slept was located a few feet from the front door of the Liberty Bell Pavilion.

Much to the disappointment of those attending that 1808 “Thanksgiving Sermon” the importation of slaves did not end, largely due to lax enforcement by the federal government.

That dynamic of the federal government’s lax and/or discriminatory enforcement of laws continues to operate today to the detriment of African-Americans in Philadelphia and across the nation.

Rev. Jones spearheaded historically significant struggles against abuses of the Fugitive Slave Law where free blacks (emancipated slaves and free born) were illegally sold into slavery.

Jones authored the first two petitions (1797 and 1799) sent to Congress by blacks asking for relief from Fugitive Law abuses, with the 1799 petition being the first formal request from blacks for an end of domestic slavery.

Both petitions sought congressional action against illegal Fugitive Law abuses.

“Is not some remedy for an evil of such magnitude highly worthy of the deep inquiry of the supreme Legislative body of a free and enlightened people?” the 1797 petition asked, stating freedmen were being “hunted day and night, like beasts of the forest by armed me with dogs.”

Congress rejected both petitions ­ refusing to enforce the law fairly for free blacks.

Those abusing the Fugitive Slave Law to kidnap free blacks often asserted that black skin created the assumption that the person was probably a slave.

This skin-color based assertion is hauntingly similar to an assumption driving contemporary racial profiling: being black creates the presumption of possible criminal behavior.

For over a decade, charges of racial profiling rocked the New Jersey State Police, arising from the presumption that blacks are more prone to criminal conduct than whites…similar to the assumption that all blacks are slaves.

In 1826 a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling declared “It is a settled rulethat the black color is proof of slavery” A decade later a NJ high court ruling noted “It was once the doctrine of this court that every colored person was presumed a slave till the contrary was shown”

In November 2007, Chicago black Congressman Danny Davis (D-7th Dist) accused police of profiling him leading to a traffic ticket.

While Chicago police officials rejected Davis’ profiling charge months earlier Illinois state officials released a study showing police across that state disproportionately stopped and searched minorities.

Rep. Davis, weeks after that profiling incident, joined a bi-partisan congressional group in co-sponsoring legislation to enact federal prohibitions against racial profiling.

President Bush opposed racial profiling while campaigning in 2000 and condemned the practice in his first State of the Union speech but failed to follow-up following 9/11 when be backed profiling of Muslims.

President Clinton refused to take strong action against profiling during his two terms despite the issue flaring nationwide repeatedly during the 90s including in Maryland not far from the White House.

Clinton was well aware of the issue of racial profiling since a federal judge cited the Arkansas State Police for violating an anti-profiling settlement when Clinton served as Arkansas’ Governor.

President Clinton also refused to end what many condemn as a modern slavery-like matter ­ injustices arising from federal crack cocaine laws.

Days after delivering an October 1995 speech declaring that blacks “indeed have lived too long with” an unjust justice system, President Clinton approved a congressional rejection of a US Sentencing Commission recommendation to end crack cocaine law inequities.

Clinton did grant a few clemencies to persons serving onerous crack law sentences unlike his predecessor President George H.W. Bush.

The first President Bush did grant Christmas Eve 1992 pardons to six of his Reagan Administration colleagues involved in the Iran-Contra Scandala scandal where the Reagan White House ignored illegal cocaine sales inside the United States that help fund the Contras.

President George H.W. Bush failed to either pardon or grant clemency to the Washington, DC teen lured to the park across the street from the White House by federal drug agents to make a purchase of crack that Bush used as a prop during a September 1989 presidential speech about the war on drugs.

Experts see promise in easing crack law injustices from a December 2007 US Supreme Court ruling and a sentencing reform action by the US Sentencing Commission days after that ruling.

Rev. Absalom Jones’ 1797 petition to Congress criticized the hypocrisy of those in “eminent stations” who would callously deny free blacks “public Justice and the protection which is the great object of Government.”

Then Virginia Congressman James Madison, an author of the US Constitution and a proponent of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, proved to be one of those hypocrites.

In urging the adoption of the Constitution, Madison had written that justice is the end of both “government and civil society.”

Yet when it came time for Madison to back his beliefs by fighting for justice for illegally enslaved freedmen, he urged his congressional colleagues to reject consideration of that petition authored by Rev. Jones.

Jones, during his 1/1/1808 Sermon, said “Let us further implore the influence of his divine and holy Spirit to dispose the hearts of our legislatures to pass laws to ameliorate the condition of our brethren still in bondage.”

Congress can take a big step towards ameliorating historic injustice by resolving this year to approve measures to end abuses in racial profiling and crack law inequities.

DALLAS — Many Texans busted for misdemeanor marijuana possession are still being jailed despite a new state law that allows police to issue a citation instead of making an arrest, according to a newspaper report.

Texas lawmakers hoped to ease jail crowding with the new legislation, which took effect Sept. 1, but some local prosecutors worry what message getting a mere ticket for pot might send.

“It may…lead some people to believe that drug use is no more serious than double parking,” Collin County prosecutor Greg Davis said in Tuesday’s editions of The Dallas Morning News.

The Travis County Sheriff’s Department is the only law enforcement agency in the state known to be taking advantage of the new legislation, according to the newspaper.

Prosecutors in Dallas, Tarrant and Collin counties said they have no plans to set up a system dealing with citations for misdemeanor possession, which is less than 4 ounces of marijuana.

In addition to easing crowding, the new law would also theoretically keep officers on the street instead of making runs to jail for nonviolent offenders.

The Dallas County Jail has a history of being understaffed and crowded, which has led, in part, to repeated failed state inspections.

But Dallas County officials worry that because the misdemeanors could still result in a case for prosecution, citations raise issues like making sure suspects appear in court and that no one is misidentified.

“These are not just tickets. These are crimes that need to be appropriately dealt with,” said Ron Stretcher, Dallas County’s director of criminal justice. “We want to make sure we get them back to court to stand trial.”

State Rep. Jerry Madden, a Plano Republican whose district includes Collin County, said it’s likely that some counties are taking a wait-and-see approach, looking for someone to lead the way.

Travis County sheriff’s spokesman Roger Wade said his department lobbied for the new law to help ease jail crowding and increase efficiency.

Issuing citations also helps save the department save gas by not driving suspects from the county’s outlying areas to the jail in Austin, he said.

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — President Bush on Monday signed a bill aimed at giving the public and the media greater access to information about what the government is doing. The new law toughens the Freedom of Information Act, the first such makeover to the signature public-access law in a decade. It amounts to a congressional pushback against the Bush administration’s movement to greater secrecy since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Bush signed the bill without comment in one of his final decisions of the year.

The legislation creates a system for the media and public to track the status of their FOIA requests. It establishes a hot line service for all federal agencies to deal with problems and an ombudsman to provide an alternative to litigation in disclosure disputes.

The law also restores a presumption of a standard that orders government agencies to release information on request unless there is a finding that disclosure could do harm.

Agencies would be required to meet a 20-day deadline for responding to FOIA requests. Nonproprietary information held by government contractors also would be subject to the law.

The legislation is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11 attacks in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security.

Dozens of media outlets, including The Associated Press, supported the legislation.

A seasoned observer writes:

‘ The complexity, interrelationships, results and consequences (intended and unintended) of US Iraq policy – one of the seven foreign interventions by the Bush Administration – were on confused display this week. While the sequence was to have been Iran sanctions followed by the Iraq matter, because of manipulations by the regime in Iran, the two matters were taken up in reverse order by the Security Council and President Bush. Additional Iran sanctions, originally scheduled for not later than November 30, have been delayed, and it is probable that there will be no additional sanctions. The Security Council extended the Iraq mandate on December 18.

Prime Minister Maliki’s submission to the Security Council, presumably with the assistance of General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker and the White House, requested an extension of the Iraq mandate. He did not present the submission to the Iraqi Council of Representatives for approval, as required by an Iraqi statute. The Sadr Movement and others did not have the opportunity to block it.

The letter of Secretary of State Rice was correspondingly deficient in relation to the subsequent enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 and the votes by the Senate December 18 and the House one day later with respect to the Emergency Supplemental Request of President Bush.

The Security Council extended the Iraq mandate for “only one more year.”

The bottom line is that:

(1) the commitment made in the Rice letter is supported by funding of US troops in Iraq only through June 30 and (2) the request made by Prime Minister Maliki was not supported by necessary approval of the Iraqi Council of Representatives.

In short, the extension of the Security Council mandate was based upon materially deficient submissions by Secretary of State Rice and Prime Minister Maliki, and is “illegal,” joining the “illegal” invasion of Iraq in the first place.

In effect, having granted a one-year extension, the members of the Security Council were relying upon the mid-March 2008 assessments of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker and upon the US Congress to do the “right thing” before June 30, 2008.

President Putin and the PRC leadership went along, as they have done in the three previous resolutions, for extrinsic reasons relating to other US interventions or other matters, notwithstanding the otherwise strongly held principle of non-intervention of the PRC.

The Security Council mandate, which authorizes the MNF-I (with the UK on the way out of Iraq, the US military) to use “all necessary measures,” provides legal authority for the US military to be in Iraq and, among other things, to arrest and detain insurgents. If there were no mandate, the US military would be subject to Iraqi law, including the Emergency Law under which only Iraqi “government officials” can make arrests, and would be unable to make arrests or to conduct operations without a court order. Until a US-Iraq SOFA or Strategic Partnership Agreement is finalized, signed and delivered, which is now contemplated to happen some time before July 2008, there will be no legal permission from the Iraqi Government for US troops to be in Iraq.

“AINO” (All In; None Out) is still possible with respect to all seven foreign policy interventions by the Bush Administration (except that Iraq will have been invaded and there could be a definitive settlement with North Korea). The Democrats will find it difficult to reverse the New World Order because it would require the PRC to change its principle of non-intervention, which is beyond the control or determining influence of the US Government. The best they can hope to do is wind up the Iraq War by withdrawing substantially all US troops. With respect to Afghanistan, they will be stuck with a war in perpetuity, which cannot be stopped until Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Zawahiri are “captured or killed,” which will not happen. Under the Pakistan Constitution, the limited measures available to the President with respect to the North-West Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan cannot be delegated.

It’s the start of a new year. ‘Tis the season to frolic in the Future – a time to consider our utopian dreams and confront our dystopian nightmares. Or, as my grandfather is fond of saying, now’s a good time to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

So, let’s check the futurology front. And who better to consult than the forward-looking folks at The Futurist magazine?

Every year since 1985, TF editors have been publishing “the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts” that surfaced in their pages in the previous year. This year’s “Outlook Report” is fascinating, as always, including the Top 10 future forecast for 2008.

1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025.

Meanwhile water-shortages and poverty will grip two-thirds of the earth’s population. Wealth-gap? How about wealth chasm?

2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.

We’re talking “color-changing or perfume-emitting jeans and wristwatches that work as digital wallets.” They call it “smart fabrics.”

3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.

Citing Edward Luttwak, the editor’s note, “scenarios for what a war with China or Russia would look like make the clashes and wars in which the United States is now involved seem insignificant. The power of radical jihadists is trivial compared with Soviet missile capabilities, for instance. The focus of U.S. foreign policy should thus be on preventing an engagement among Great Powers.”

4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.

There’s Big Brother and then there’s Big Brother’s big brother – Big Biz Brother.

5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event.

The World Resources Institute reports the coming century “could witness a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity. Protecting biodiversity in a time of increased resource consumption, overpopulation, and environmental degradation will require continued sacrifice on the part of local, often impoverished communities.”

6. Water will be in the 21st century what oil was in the 20th century.

Though the world is full of water (the salty kind), water shortages and droughts are popping up faster than season premiers of yet another new reality TV show. Future war protestors will be carrying signs that say “No War for Water!”

7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.

Think the world is crowded now? Too much traffic? The UN upped its global population forecast from 9.1 billion people by 2050 to 9.2 billion.

8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080.

Despite the racially-tinged savage imagery we have of the “dark Continent” in the U.S., Africa is actually experiencing rapid urbanization, which is why World Trends & Forecasts cautions that “if global sea levels rise by the predicted 38 cm by 2080, the number of Africans affected by floods will grow from 1 million to 70 million.”

9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic.

And we’re not talking only oil and natural gas. There’s also a huge Artic supply of nickel, copper, zinc, coal, freshwater, forests, and even fish, all of which are needed to feed the insatiable and metastasizing global economy.

10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities.

“Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers’ competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error,” pushing us toward “electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms” who “will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us.”

Memo to Election ‘08 reporters: it’s important to focus on the Big Issues of today. But the time is ripe to get the presidential candidates talking (out loud) about the Big Issues of tomorrow.

Questioning them about any one of the above forecasts might stimulate a much-needed discussion about vision, while getting the candidates to reveal something deeper than poll-driven answers and platitudes. Listening to people talk about their vision for the future is how you know if someone is utopian or eutopian – with an ‘e.’

The word “utopia” comes from the Greek for “no place” or “nowhere.” Utopian thought is meant to describe a vision of a better future society – but one beyond our grasp.

Eutopia is a vision of a preferable place – but one with a bridge that gets us from here to there. Visions of a better society don’t attract a critical mass of people. Only future visions with a visible, viable bridge can do that – a lesson many progressives have yet to learn.

It’s not just a vision thing. It’s also a bridge thing.

As we close this year on the low of Congress giving Bush more billions for war, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, let’s remember some of the year’s gains that can revive our spirits for the New Year. Here are just ten.

1. With the exception of the White House, this has been a banner year for environmental consciousness and action. Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize. Green building and renewable energy have exploded. Congress passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for green job training. Over 700 U.S. mayors, representing 25 percent of the U.S. population, have signed a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012. Illinois became the 26th state to require that some of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources and Kansas became the first state to refuse a permit for a new coal-fired power plant for health and environmental reasons. That’s progress!

2. On the global environmental scene, the Bush dinosaurs were tackled head on. When the US delegation at the UN climate change conference in Bali tried to sabotage the negotiations, the delegate from tiny Papua New Guinea threw diplomatic niceties to the wind and said that if the U.S. couldn’t lead, it should get out of the way. Embarrassed by international and domestic outrage, the U.S. delegation buckled, and the way was cleared for adopting the “Bali road map.” Although it is a weak mandate, it lays the groundwork for a stronger climate agreement post-2012 when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocols ends.

3. Imagine living in a waste-free urban society? Well, it’s no longer a utopian dream but a well-thought-out plan for India’s state of Kerala. The plan to be “waste-free” within five years includes waste prevention, intensive re-use and recycling, composting, replacing unsustainable materials with sustainable ones, training people to produce these materials, and providing funds for setting up sustainably run businesses. The ground-breaking plan, spearheaded by a local grassroots movement, demonstrates how citizen groups can advance pioneering policies to heal the planet.

4. While the war in Iraq rages on, a new war was stopped. The specter of war with Iran loomed large throughout the year, with Washington accusing Iran of killing U.S . soldiers in Iraq and being a nuclear threat. Then in December came the National Intelligence Estimate showing that the Bush administration knew all along that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. It exposed the Administration claims of an Iranian threat as unjustifiably inflated, and the winds of war were suddenly subdued. Nothing is guaranteed, but a U.S. military attack on Iran is less likely now than it was earlier in the year.

5. This year also brought a decrease in tensions with North Korea. Hostilities flared after North Korea successfully conducted a nuclear test in 2006. But the Bush administration, bogged down in Iraq and pushed by international pressure, agreed to negotiate. Following a series of six-party talks involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the U.S, on March 17, 2007, an historic agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and submit a list of its nuclear programs in exchange for fuel and normalization talks with the U.S. and Japan. During this age of raw aggression, it is a welcome example of putting diplomacy first.

6. The Iraqi people have little to celebrate, but there was one important victory for the people this year. Remember how the Bush administration and Congress were insisting that the Iraqi Parliament pass a new oil law? Touted as a way to “share oil revenue among all Iraqis”, the oil law was really designed to transform the country’s currently nationalized oil system to one open to foreign corporate control. But opposition was fierce inside Iraq, especially from the nation’s oil worker unions. In a rare sign of independence from Washington and concern for domestic opinion, the Iraqi Parliament withstood intense U.S. pressure and refused to pass the oil law.

7. In early 2007, few Americans had heard of the private security company Blackwater. By year’s end, Blackwater had become infamous for the killing of civilians in Iraq. The radical privatization of our military to corporations like Blackwater that are accountable to no one was exposed for all to see. This frightening process is still well under way, with more private contractors in Iraq than soldiers, but at least the issue has now entered the public dialogue. And Blackwater has received such a black eye that it’s unlikely to get a new Iraq contract when the present one expires in May.

8. One victory on both the war and environmental fronts came in Australia, where Labor Party’s Kevin Rudd beat conservative John Howard to become Prime Minister. Howard was an enthusiastic backer of George Bush’s disastrous war on terror, from defending the Guantánamo prison and extraordinary rendition to sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard also joined Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Agreement, arguing it would cost Australians jobs. After assuming office on December 3, Kevin Rudd immediately signed the Kyoto agreement and he has promised to remove Australia’s combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008.

9. Sometimes a loss is a win. Hugo Chavez had initiated a constitutional referendum that would have, among other changes, scrapped term limits. His immediate acceptance of a razor-thin margin of defeat before all the votes were even counted showed his democratic colors and made it a lot harder for Bush and the corporate media to label him a dictator. Despite the loss, Chavez remains extremely popular, especially among the poor and working class in Venezuela. And throughout Latin America, the historic transformation led by progressive leaders like Chavez continues to blossom.

10. Last but not least, this year saw the resignation of some of Bush’s closest allies in government – Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense, Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General, and Karl Rove as Deputy Chief of Staff. Best of all, we can give thanks that we only have ONE YEAR left of the criminal, war-mongering, constitution-shredding, rights-violating, torture-sanctioning Bush Administration! It’s just GOT to get better than this!

So here’s a toast to a green future, diplomacy, and surviving the last throes of the Bush regime. Que viva 2008!

It has become a mantra of sorts among the faltering Republican candidates: Victory is at hand in Iraq. Mitt Romney, in particular, has taken to so openly embracing the “success” of the U.S. troop “surge” that it has become the centerpiece of his litany of attacks on the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

“Think of what’s happened this year,” Romney recently implored a crowd in Iowa. “General [David] Petraeus came in to report to Congress and Hillary Clinton said she couldn’t believe him. She said she just couldn’t believe General Petraeus. Now think about that. He’s been proven to be right. He should be on the cover, by the way, of Time magazine, and not Putin.”

Clinton, for her part, has stood her ground. Addressing a crowd of voters in Iowa, she took a swipe back at Romney: “We all know the Republican candidates are just plain wrong when they declare mission accomplished about the troop surge.” She went on to note that U.S. casualty figures in Iraq for 2007 were at an all-time high, and that for all of the positive reports concerning the surge, Iraq remains a nation on the verge of a civil war, no closer today to a political solution than it was before the escalation. She promised that, if nominated, “I will not hesitate to go toe to toe with Republicans in the debates to end the war as quickly and responsibly as possible.”

Therein lies the catch. How does Clinton explain her commitment to quick and responsible withdrawal in the context of the short-term reduction of violence in Iraq achieved by the surge? How does she propose to rectify the admitted internal shortcomings inside Iraq, which she likens to near-civil war conditions, with her pledge for a “responsible” withdrawal? If one takes at face value the alleged successes of the surge, it is difficult to justify the embrace of an alternative policy option. Likewise, if one chooses to criticize the surge as all smoke and mirrors, as Clinton has, and yet argues for a quick and responsible end to the war in Iraq without revealing the details of how this would be accomplished, the rhetoric comes across as remarkably shallow.

I’m not one inclined to speak out in support of Hillary Clinton. She made her bed with Iraq, and she should now be forced to sleep in it. However, she is right that nothing the surge has accomplished so far remotely approaches a solution to these enormously destabilizing realities: a largely disaffected Sunni population which finds the current Shiite-dominated government of Iraq fundamentally unacceptable; a decisively fractured Shiite population torn between an Iranian-dominated government on the one hand (controlled by the political proxies of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, itself an Iranian proxy) or an indigenous firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a false paradise in Kurdistan, where the dream of an independent Kurdish homeland corrupts a viable Kurdish autonomy and threatens regional instability by provoking Turkish military intervention.

“Quickly and responsibly”? The problem with Clinton is that when it comes to Iraq, she is as shallow as the next candidate, and once one gets past her flowery rhetoric and protestations of expertise, it becomes crystal clear that she, like almost everyone else in the presidential race from either party, hasn’t a clue about what is really happening on the ground in Iraq.

There are, in fact, five Iraqs that must be dealt with by a singular American policy. The first is the Iraq of the Green Zone, and by that I mean the Iraqi government brought about by the “purple finger revolution” of January 2005. Those sham elections produced a sham democracy which lacks any viability outside of the never-never land of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. This lack of centralized authority has led some, like Sen. Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate, to advocate the division of Iraq into three de facto states, one Sunni, one Shiite and one Kurdish, lumped together in a loose federation overseen by a weak central authority. Given that the 2005 elections were designed to prevent this very sort of Iraqi breakup to begin with, one can begin to understand the fallacy of any policy that contradicts the very foundation upon which it is built. But this sort of behavior defines the entire Iraq fiasco, one contradiction built upon another, until there has been woven a web of contradictions from which no clarity can ever be found. That, in a sentence, is the reality of the current Iraqi government. It is almost as if by design the Bush administration has cobbled together a wreck incapable of governance. How does Hillary Clinton propose to deal “quickly and responsibly” with such a mess?

The second Iraq is the one being managed from Tehran. This Iraq, stretching from Basra in the south up into Baghdad, exists outside of the reach of the compromised disaster that is the current government of Iraq, and is instead dominated by SCIRI and its military wing, the Badr Brigade. Here one finds the unvarnished reality of the dream of the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites, those who reached political maturity festering in the anti-Saddam ideology cooked up in the theocracy of Iran. Given the roots of this political movement, bred and paid for by the reactionary mullahs of Iran, the politics of revenge that it embraces should come as no surprise. However, whereas the mullahs in Tehran seek long-term political stability guaranteed by a friendly, compliant government in Baghdad, the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiites seem more focused on rapidly reversing decades of inequities, real and perceived. Revenge is not a policy that breeds stability, and yet it is the politics of revenge that dominates the mind-set of SCIRI.

Serving as a major domestic counterweight to SCIRI is the indigenous grass-roots Iraqi Shiite movement controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, the third Iraq. Possessing similar geographic reach as SCIRI, the Iraq of the “Mahdi Army” is one which rejects the SCIRI proxy government operating out of the Green Zone as but a tool of the American occupation, and the SCIRI movement itself as a tool of Iran. While maintaining close relations with Tehran, al-Sadr mocks those who would govern in south Iraq as having Farsi, vice Arabic, as their first tongue. The movement headed by al-Sadr bases its credibility on its pure Iraqi roots, derived as it is from the Shiites of Iraq who actually lived under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Surprisingly, these Shiites are more inclined to find common cause with their fellow Iraqis, including Sunnis who are disaffected with the current government, than with their SCIRI co-religionists. While much has been made of the Sunni-Shiite divide, the fact is that one of the most serious threats to stability in Iraq is the emerging Shiite-versus-Shiite conflict between al-Sadr and SCIRI.

The fourth Iraq is the Iraq of the Sunni. The first three years of the American occupation were dominated by violence emanating from the Sunni heartland as those elements loyal to Saddam, and those opposed to Shiite domination, worked together to make the American occupation, and any affiliated post-Saddam government derived from the occupation, a failure. To this extent, elements of the Sunni of Iraq, drawn primarily from the intelligence services of the Hussein regime, facilitated the creation and operation of al-Qaida in Iraq. The work of this Iraqi al-Qaida has been successful in destabilizing the country to the point that the United States has been compelled to fund, equip and train Sunni militias in an effort to confront al-Qaida, as well as to make up for the real shortfalls of the central Iraqi government when it comes to security and stability in the Sunni areas. The newfound relationship between the Sunni and the United States, especially in Anbar province, is cited as a major factor in the success of the surge.

The fifth Iraq is that of the Kurds. Long hailed as a poster child of stability and prosperity, the fundamental problems inherent in post-Saddam Kurdistan are coming to a head. The inherent incompatibility between the “sanctuary” created by the United States through the northern “no-fly zone” and post-Saddam Iraq is more evident today than ever. The Kurds, pleased with their status as a “special case” in the eyes of the Bush administration, have made no honest effort to assimilate into a centralized system of government. Furthermore, the false dream of an independent Kurdish homeland has not only poisoned relations with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad (witness the conflict over oil deals in Kurdistan and the Iraqi national oil law), but also between the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds’ ongoing support of Kurdish nationalist groups in Turkey and Iran has led to increased instability, the most current manifestation of which are the ongoing cross-border attacks into Iraqi territory by the Turkish military. And, given the high level of emotion attached to matters pertaining to Kurdish nationalism, the likelihood of the situation de-escalating anytime soon is remote.

Five Iraqs, and one Iraq policy ill-suited to the reality of any single situation, yet alone the whole. The success of the surge is pure fantasy, a fancy bit of illusion that would do David Copperfield proud, but not the people of Iraq or the United States. The surge addresses events in Iraq based upon short-term objectives (i.e., reducing the immediate level of violence) without resolving any of the deep-seated, long-term issues that promote the violence to begin with. It is like placing a Band-Aid on a gaping chest wound. The pink, frothy blood may not be visible on the surface, but the wound remains as grave as ever, and because it is not being directly attended to, it only gets worse. Eventually the lungs will collapse and the body will die. This is the reality of Iraq today. Thanks to the surge, we do not see the horrific wound that is Iraq for what it truly is. As such, our policies do nothing to cure the problem, and in doing nothing, only make the matter worse.

History will show that this period of relative “calm” we attribute to the surge is but the pause before the storm. Hillary Clinton is correct to label the surge a failed strategy. But her motivation for doing so rests more with her desire to position herself politically on the domestic front than it is a reflection of a thoughtful Iraq policy. So long as American politicians, regardless of political affiliation, seek to solve the problem of Iraq from a domestic political perspective, then the problem that is Iraq will never be resolved, either “quickly” or “responsibly.” Iraq is an unpopular war. There are, therefore, no “popular” solutions, only realistic ones.

The five-dimensional problem embodied in post-Saddam Iraq cannot be bundled up into a neat package. America, and its leaders, must do the right thing in Iraq, not for Iraq, but for America, even when doing so requires making some tough decisions. Narrow the problem set from five dimensions to two, and the problem becomes more manageable. For my money, I choose working with the Sunnis and al-Sadr to create a viable coalition, and then cutting a deal with Iran that trades off better relations in exchange for encouraging the current failed Iraqi government to step aside in favor of new elections. And the Kurds? Autonomy or nothing.

My loyalty is first and foremost to the United States, and when we look at the situation in Iraq from a genuine national security perspective, there is no threat worthy of the continued sacrifice being asked of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. As such, the only policy option worthy of consideration is that which brings our troops home as expeditiously as possible. Politicians who embrace a different policy are simply using the sacrifice of our service members as a shield behind which to hide their ignorance of Iraqi issues, and their personal cowardice, which manifests itself any time brave young men and women are allowed to die in order to preserve someone’s political viability.

As we in the United States celebrate this holiday season, let us not forget those who serve overseas in uniform, and the sacrifices they make in our name. And as we approach the coming election season, let us never forget those politicians who would have these sacrifices continue in order to safeguard their individual political fortune. This applies to all who seek the nomination for the office of the presidency, even those like Hillary Clinton who claim to embrace an anti-war position but whose words and actions strongly suggest something else.

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) , “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007).

The story of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan’s recent death from liver failure was tragic. But it was a uniquely American brand of tragedy. Only in the United States would the medical fate of a sick child be left to some private company’s idea of what constitutes necessary care.

The Northridge, California, teenager died after her health insurer, Cigna Healthcare, spent critical weeks denying approval for the liver transplant her UCLA medical team said was her last hope. Only after public protests by her family and the California Nurses Association embarrassed Cigna did the company reverse its decision. But it was too late. The decision came the same day Nataline died.

What is wrong with this picture? Like all insurers, Cigna relies on hired medical advisors to evaluate a treatment’s medical appropriateness under the terms of a policy. In this case, Cigna’s “evidence-based” medical guidelines led it to deny the recommended liver transplant, categorizing the procedure as “experimental.” This was a complex medical situation, of course. But all the more reason why the patient’s actual medical team should have been the only authority to determine the appropriateness of treatment. In fact, there was uniform support for the transplant from UCLA’s medical experts. Instead, the insurer’s conduct became a case study in the worst possible outcome that can result from the involvement of a for-profit insurer in medical decisions.

But the case also suggests something is wrong even when things go right under the present health system. Obviously, insurance companies stay in business by paying most claims. No one would buy their products if they didn’t. But they also stay profitable by trying to avoid sick people as customers, and whenever possible by not paying claims.

Who among us cannot speak from personal experience about the frustrations of getting a legitimate claim paid? Years ago I once found myself in a hospital emergency room in Chicago with an acute kidney infection. I spent two days in the hospital and was successfully treated. I also ended up with about $4,000 in medical bills. Fortunately, I had health insurance through my employer. But fortunate can be a relative thing when you’re dealing with an insurance company. Shortly after returning to work I received a letter from the insurer informing me that my hospital stay was not covered since it was for a “pre-existing condition.” The plan excluded pre-existing conditions during my first year of coverage.

By what stretch of the imagination could an acute infection and emergency hospitalization constitute a pre-existing condition? Was it because I had always had a kidney? This was the question I had when I called the company’s claims department. The claims rep couldn’t answer my question and said he would get back to me. A short while later I received another letter from the company informing me that my hospital stay would now be covered.

The insurer’s attempt to avoid paying my claim was clearly wrong. So why would they do it? Was it just an “oversight?” Or was there some cost-benefit analysis somewhere that showed if an insurer denies coverage in 100 similar cases, X number of policyholders could be expected not to challenge the decision, thus saving Y dollars? Insurance companies are not penalized for rejecting claims, of course, unless fraud can be proven in court. But the fact that insurers will often quickly reverse a rejected claim when the customer protests suggests the rotten core at the heart of their system.

I also once sought chiropractic care, which my insurer covered at 70 percent of the cost of care. But the catch was that the insurer paid 70 percent of what they considered a reasonable fee for the particular service. Of course, their idea of a reasonable fee was always lower than the doctor’s. The absurdity of this was brought home when my doctor actually lowered her per visit cost by a small amount. Naively, I thought my out-of-pocket costs would go down. Wrong. The insurance company responded by re-adjusting downward their definition of a “reasonable fee.”

All this is otherwise known as the “let’s see what we can get away with” approach to quarterly profits. Such experiences among policy holders are hardly out of the ordinary, and they raise a pertinent question: Do we really want a health care system that encourages those who pay for care to find ways not to pay for care?

Contrary to the free-market hype of Republicans, inefficiency runs rampant in a health system controlled by private companies. Lavish executive salaries, marketing costs, and stock dividends all eat up financial resources that could be used for actual health care services. But contrary also to the reform hype of most Democrats, a more closely regulated mishmash of private insurance and employer plans combined with new public benefits, tax credits, and subsidies is not going to resolve the current system’s failings.

Both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards propose mandates that will require the public to purchase health insurance, a potential boon in new profits the insurance industry can only welcome. In return, they expect the insurance industry to cooperate with reforms to improve their products. Barack Obama’s health plan differs fundamentally only in leaving out a purchasing mandate. But either way the candidates are sidestepping reality: for-profit and health care go together like oil and water. In fact, as the California Nurses Association and other single-payer advocates note, mixed public-private systems always seem to end up favoring the private sector’s efforts to corral the most profitable patients and services. Invariably less profitable patients and services become the burden of public resources.

Unlike most modern nations, Americans have allowed their health care system to be undermined by a business culture that apparently sees no aspect of the human experience as off-limits to those who prefer dollar signs to social responsibility. Currently, millions of uninsured as well as insured Americans are not getting timely or adequate medical care because of unaffordable costs or concerns over high deductibles and co-pays. Or, sometimes, as one Northridge family learned, because their insurance company is more concerned about profits.

The CEO of Cigna Healthcare’s parent Cigna Corporation, H. Edward Hanway, earned about $21 million in total compensation in 2006. You just have to ask. Is this right? Do children who use the Canadian health care system die to make other people rich?