The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON — Embattled State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard submitted his resignation Friday, forced out for allegedly impeding ongoing criminal investigations into the construction of a new, $740 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and security firm Blackwater Worldwide.

A State Department official said that Krongard had become a political liability, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, through aides, asked him this week to leave. The official insisted on anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak about personnel matters.

An abrasive attorney who once reportedly referred to himself as an “equal-opportunity abuser,” Krongard came under fire from his own investigators and from a congressional panel for allegedly blocking probes into serious claims of wrongdoing in Iraq.

Those allegations include contract fraud and shoddy workmanship in the troubled Baghdad embassy and arms smuggling by North Carolina-based Blackwater.

Krongard initially vowed to fight the accusations against him. But his position collapsed at a House of Representatives hearing last month when he was asked whether his brother, former top CIA official Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, had accepted a position on a Blackwater advisory board. Krongard first denounced what he said were “ugly rumors,” then, after telephoning his brother, reversed himself.

Only then did he recuse himself from any further supervision of the growing Blackwater investigation. (His brother subsequently resigned from the Blackwater post.) Krongard had also been asked by the Justice Department to withdraw from the investigation into the embassy construction scandal.

In a 2 1/2 page letter to President Bush, Krongard portrayed the decision to leave as his own and said he was departing with “a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment,” but he also suggested that he was the victim of partisan politics.

He spoke of “the grave threat to public service posed by the current rancor and distrust between and among political parties, the legislative and executive branches of government, the media, and various interest groups.”

In a separate statement, he declined comment on the charges that have swirled around him since mid-September.

Krongard, according to officials and documents, stopped his agents from assisting in the Justice Department’s Blackwater probe; met individually with a State Department official and a contractor implicated in the embassy investigation, despite pleas that he not do so; and belittled underlings, causing many to leave or resign.

Krongard said he’d step down on Jan. 15, after the opening of a permanent State Department inspector general’s office in the Middle East.

“We thank him for his dedication to public service,” said State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos.

Krongard is the second major casualty in the spreading controversy over Rice’s management of department activities in Iraq.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, quit in late October amid a furor over a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad by Blackwater employees which left 17 Iraqis dead.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement: “Mr. Krongard’s decision removes an enormous distraction from the Inspector General’s office and will allow the office to focus on its important oversight responsibilities.”

The State Department’s inspector general is supposed to investigate criminal wrongdoing, audit contracts and inspect the agency’s embassies and missions worldwide.

But current and former investigators told Waxman’s committee that Krongard repeatedly blocked them from doing their jobs aggressively.

In an e-mail to his staff sent Friday and obtained by McClatchy, Krongard referred to the turmoil in his office. “I . . . ask you, frankly, to make an effort to reduce the static that interferes with the harmony we would like to achieve,” he wrote.

In July 2007, Krongard ordered aides to halt work on an investigation of Blackwater arms smuggling to Iraq and demanded a meeting with Justice Department prosecutors. At that meeting, he disparaged the probe and ordered a close personal aide to keep tabs on it, according to e-mails obtained by the committee and U.S. officials.

Five days before Krongard met with Justice, Buzzy Krongard was offered the position on the Blackwater advisory board.

As of last week, Justice Department investigators still haven’t received the State Department contract documents they requested, the officials said.

I am not sure what the climate change discussions in Bali are expected to achieve, besides imposing unnecessary hardships on Australians looking for cheap booze before the Christmas break. (I am usually inclined to accommodate such wishes with respect to the antipodeans, and their ejection of prime minister John Howard in recent elections has made them quite popular in Asia.)

If the intent of the conference was to reshape the global economy, then the assembled delegates have started completely the wrong way. Then again, these left-leaning do-gooders cannot be expected to get things right anyway.

Where I propose they start is in the halls of global central banks instead, for the biggest culprits of the global warming debate lie right there. To explain why I believe that is the case, readers can look at the following topics – consumption, negative goods and innovation. Once these are explained, it becomes easy to see what global central bankers should do.

Consumption

By and large, the world economy thrives on consumption and especially the American kind. The US economy supplies one in five dollars of global consumption. This, added to the second dollar supplied by Europe, is what pushes global warming.

The US economy doesn’t produce as much as it consumes, hence its significant current account deficit. The other deficit, namely budget, is merely a function of Dick Cheney lying through his teeth (dentures?) about pretty much everything the government does.

Going back to the current account deficit though, it represents the ”dream” target of any Green. In actual carbon terms, the import of Asian products for example represents the carbon emissions of Asian countries as well as those of the global shipping industry. All told, various publications cite different figures but it would not be hazardous to assign some 30% of global emissions to the US current account deficit.

This is what the Greens miss completely – they count the emissions of China and India in the same league as those of the US and Europe, and that is wrong because a substantial portion of Asian emissions goes to the manufacture of goods consumed in the US.

In turn, what gets consumed in the US is also financed by Asia because Americans stopped saving from the time Carter stepped down. This is the billions of dollars in Asian central banks devoted to the purchase of US treasury bonds, as well as various ”highly rated” securities. I have written often enough about how much money will be lost in Asia because of these bonds, and there is no need to repeat my arguments here.

To a large extent, the twin forces of a disingenuous Fed (euphemism for outright liars) and harmony-seeking Asian central banks (euphemism for dumb no-gooders who wouldn’t get a job flipping burgers if their uncles hadn’t made them the governors of the People’s Bank of China or Bank of Japan or whatever) allow this circle of deficit-financed consumption to persist.

At the moment, with US consumer loans looking very risky indeed – this week for example reports showed sharply increased delinquency rates on auto loans in addition to the continued defaults on housing loans – Asian bankers are panicking about what to do with the billions of US securities on their books.

They have urged the US Fed to become more aggressive on interest rate cuts to help the US economy recover, in effect helping to perpetuate the cycle of global warming described above. In the face of rampant inflation, it makes sense for the US Fed to hike rates now and engineer a hard landing for the US economy. A few million Americans will be thrown out of work, but so what – they weren’t necessarily working on anything except selling each other inflated housing anyway.

A hard landing for the US economy will help cut global carbon emissions, by a factor of over 10%, so why not engineer it? This will also force Asian central banks to abandon their US dollar pegs (which is the main reason their incompetence can never be seen by the public) and actually try to manage inflation and growth in their own countries.

With a bulk of the world’s manufacturing now in Asia, a shift in consumption to the region would not be a bad thing, and anyway overall shipping emissions will decline because goods will be consumed closer to the point of manufacture.

Negative economic goods

The second aspect that the Greens miss out is the pricing of negative economic goods. The Greenspan Fed introduced some innovations in the calculation of inflation (and here I use the word innovation in the sense of lying) wherein the pricing of goods was adjusted for improvements in the product.

Thus, a medium-sized family car could well cost a couple of thousand dollars more than the last year’s model, but by incorporating metrics such as improved safety, higher engine capacity and bigger boot, the Fed could say that the price of the car actually fell for the year. This in turn meant that inflation was negative, which in turn allowed them to cut interest rates, boost consumption and all the stuff described above.

Think back though – if the world’s central banks can be urged to price negative economic goods into their calculation of inflation, they would have a completely different picture. In practice, the price of an average supermarket widget would have to be pushed up to highlight the effect of shipping it over from China, to the detriment of the global climate.

That alone can add some 10 percentage points to inflation calculations in the US and Europe, which should be sufficient to push these central banks from accommodative to restrictive in one step. The idea is hardly new as the US pioneered the pricing of negative economic goods with the tobacco industry. Just as smoking is bad for the lungs, driving cars and shipping dolls from China is bad for the environment. The reduction in living standards thus entailed should be reflected in the price of the product.

Innovation

There is an old joke from the dot-com era, wherein the computer industry makes light of the automobile industry. The computer nerds point out that if cars had evolved as quickly as computers in the nineties, the average automobile would drive like a Rolls Royce, be priced like a Hyundai and have the fuel economy of an electric car. The joke of course was in the response from the car industry, which said – yes, all that is technically possible, but if cars performed like computers, you would need to change your models every time the road markers were repainted, among other quibbles.

Whichever way you lean on the joke above, ie, sympathetic to the computer nerds or the automobile engineers, the fact of the matter is that innovation in the car industry has been extremely slow by the standards of modern science. I have written previously about the economics of the car industry, with the main point being that the intervention in the automobile industries of Europe and Japan by local governments is one of the main factors limiting innovation in the industry.

There are other industries, such as carbon capture, where the right dose of pricing – see the argument on negative economic goods above – would help push innovation that is currently stalled. Promising new technologies such as fuel cell stacks for homes, wind power for large industries and electric cars on the road are all stalled due to the limits on the economics of innovation.

Much as the global pharmaceutical industry refuses to research drugs for diseases that do not affect Americans and Europeans, research and development of alternative energy technologies will not take off until underlying economics are addressed. This is the most significant force that humanity possesses to offset global emissions, and yet there has been little to no progress.

Pricing money correctly

The price of money, much like anything else, can induce behavioral shifts. The problem of global warming is linked closely to the excessive deficit-financed consumption of the US, but equally the thoughtless pricing of negative economic goods in the process.

Global central banks have the responsibility as well as the ability to make a difference. The major central banks such as the US Fed, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Bank of England should be urged to change their inflation calculations to incorporate the effect of environmental damage wrought by various activities. This will help countries to change the mix of domestic production and consumption, through the rather blunt instrument of interest rate changes. These banks would for example look to raise rather than cut interest rates now, if these adjustments were made.

That would necessarily push the world into recession, but it will be a short one as innovation takes over and new products and technologies that come to the forefront will help reduce the carbon footprint of global industry.

The second aspect is to ensure that unnecessary restrictions on the pricing of currency rates are removed. China’s peg is not just bad for the global environment; it also encourages other countries in Asia and Latin America to maintain currency intervention well past anything required realistically.

The last change that is required is for the Greens to stop assembling in various exotic locations. Available technologies such as video conferencing and internet blogging are more than sufficient to get their points across to various government officials. Plus it would leave the cheap booze for the Australians, as demanded by nature.

CHICAGO, Dec. 7 — The City of Chicago is preparing to pay nearly $20 million to four men who were once sent to death row after interrogations that they say amounted to torture by the Chicago police, the city’s law department said on Friday.

If the legal settlement is approved next week by the city’s aldermen, it will be a crucial first effort to put a painful, notorious chapter in the city’s history behind it, some officials here said.

The four men were among scores of black men who reported being tortured, beaten with telephone books, and even suffocated with plastic typewriter covers during police interrogations in the 1970s and 1980s, special prosecutors found last year. The four men were pardoned by Gov. George Ryan in 2003.

Of the proposed settlement, Flint Taylor, a lawyer for one of the men, Leroy Orange, said, “It speaks volumes about the seriousness of the systematic torture, abuse and cover-up that went on in the city of Chicago for decades.”

The settlement comes at a time of tense relations between the Chicago Police Department and the city’s residents, following a string of incidents — the beatings of civilians caught on videotape, a report showing a high rate of brutality complaints, a corruption investigation into an elite police unit. Only last month, officials announced they had selected a new police superintendent from outside the city ranks.

“This is an important step down the road,” Toni Preckwinkle, an alderman, said of the planned settlement. “We have to acknowledge first that terrible wrongs were committed, then begin to make amends to those who were wronged, then put a system in place to see that this doesn’t happen again.”

Monique Bond, a spokeswoman for the Police Department, called the settlement “a positive step forward as we make fighting crime and building community trust our No. 1 priority.”

Many of those who reported torture in police interrogation rooms pointed to a commander named Jon Burge, who was fired in 1993, and to those he supervised. Mr. Burge did not respond to a telephone message at his Florida home on Friday.

Advocates for some of the four men seemed relieved by the financial settlements, but emphasized that there were still others out there who had reported being similarly abused and tortured into confessing. Many were still behind bars, Mr. Taylor said.

Kurt Feuer, who represents Madison Hobley, another of the four men, criticized the city as taking too long.

“It shouldn’t have taken four and a half years and millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money spent on fighting us tooth and nail every step of the way,” Mr. Feuer said. “Whose interests were served by that?”

Since their pardons, Mr. Hobley, who had been convicted of killing seven people in a 1987 arson, and Mr. Orange, who was convicted in the 1984 stabbing deaths of two adults and two children, have been out of prison. Two others, Stanley Howard and Aaron Patterson, are behind bars now — Mr. Howard on an unrelated charge and Mr. Patterson on new drugs and weapon charges.

More recently, Mr. Hobley has been identified as the suspect in a federal arson and murder investigation, according to a news release from the city law department. If he is indicted and convicted in the federal case, the settlement says, a part of his money will not be paid.

Told of the settlement, Kevin Milan, a relative of Mr. Hobley, said, “They took long enough.”

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released on Monday — the little bombshell that says Iran has had its nuclear weapons program on hold since 2003 — raises two fundamental questions. First, if Iran really does not have a military weapons program, why has it resisted international inspections? Second, why is the United States allowing this news to break?

The Iranian motive for resisting inspections should first be considered.

For the past five years, Washington and Tehran have been engaged in on-again, off-again negotiations over Iraq’s future. In these talks the Iranians have been at a sizable disadvantage. The United States has more than 100,000 troops in the country, while Iran’s leverage is largely limited to its influence with many of the country’s Shiite militias. This influence is a useful tool for denying the United States the ability to impose its desires, though it is not a powerful enough one to allow the Iranians to turn their own preferences into reality.

Moreover, given that the majority of Iran’s population is either in or behind the Zagros Mountains, Iran might be difficult to invade, but it lacks military expeditionary capability. Its infantry-heavy army is designed for population control, not power projection. Therefore, for Iran to have a lever in manipulating events in its region, it must develop other playing cards.

Its nuclear program is one of those cards. Iran has had a vested interest in convincing the world — unofficially, of course — that it possesses a nuclear program. For Iran, the nuclear program is a trump card to be traded away, not a goal in and of itself.

As to the U.S. motive, it also wanted to play up the nuclear threat. Part of Washington’s negotiation strategy has been to isolate Iran from the rest of the international community. Charges that Iran desired nukes were an excellent way to marshal international action. Both sides had a vested interest in making Iran look the part of the wolf.

That no longer is the case. There are only two reasons the U.S. government would choose to issue a report that publicly undermines the past four years of its foreign policy: a deal has been struck, or one is close enough that an international diplomatic coalition is no longer perceived as critical. This level of coordination across all branches of U.S. intelligence could not happen without the knowledge and approval of the CIA director, the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser and the president himself. This is not a power play; this is the real deal.

The full details of any deal are unlikely to be made public any time soon because the U.S. and Iranian publics probably are not yet ready to consider each other as anything short of foes. But the deal is by design integrated into both states’ national security posture. It will allow for a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq to provide minimal national security for Iraq, but not in large enough numbers to be able to launch a sizable attack against Iran. It will allow for the training and equipping of the Iraqi military forces so that Iraq can defend itself, but not so much that it could boast a meaningful offensive force. It will integrate Iranian intelligence and military personnel into the U.S. effort so there are no surprises
on either side.

But those are the details. Here is the main thrust: Ultimately, both sides have nursed deep-seated fears. The Iranians do not want the Americans to assist in the rise of another militaristic Sunni power in Baghdad — the last one inflicted 1 million Iranian casualties during 1980-1988 war. The United States does not want to see Iran dominate Iraq and use it as a springboard to control Arabia; that would put some 20 million barrels per day of oil output under a single power. The real purpose of the deal is to install enough bilateral checks in Iraq to ensure that neither nightmare scenario happens.

Should such an arrangement stick, the two biggest winners obviously are the Americans and Iranians. That is not just because the two no longer would be in direct conflict, and not just because both would have freed up resources for other tasks.

U.S. geopolitical strategy is to prevent the rising of a power on a continental scale that has the potential to threaten North America. It does this by favoring isolated powers that are resisting larger forces. As powerful as Iran is, it is the runt of the neighborhood when one looks past the political lines on maps and takes a more
holistic view. Sunnis outnumber Shia many times over, and Arabs outnumber Persians. Indeed, Persians make up only roughly half of Iran’s population, making Tehran consistently vulnerable to outside influence. Simply put, the United States and Iran — because of the former’s strategy and the latter’s circumstances — are natural
allies.

On the flip side, the biggest losers are those entities that worry about footloose and fancy-free Americans and Iranians. The three groups at the top of that list are the Iraqis, the Russians and the Arabs. Washington and Tehran will each sell out their proxies in Iraq in a heartbeat for the promise of an overarching deal. Now is the time for the Kurds, Sunni and Shia of Iraq to prove their worth to either side; those who resist will be smears on the inside of history’s dustbin.

Separately, a core goal of U.S. foreign policy is to ensure that the Russians never again threaten North America, and to a lesser degree, Europe. A United States that is not obsessed with Tehran is one that has the freedom to be obsessed with Moscow. And do not forget that the last state to occupy portions of Iran was not the United States, but Russia. Persia has a long memory and there are scores to settle in the Caucasus.

Back in the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy has often supported the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, favoring the weak against the strong in line with the broad strategy discussed above. A United States that does not need to contain Iran is a United States that can leverage an Iran that very much wishes to be leveraged. That potentially puts the Arabs on the defensive on topics ranging from investment to defense. The Arabs tend to get worried whenever the Americans or the Iranians look directly at them; that is nothing compared to the emotions that will swirl the first time that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. President George W. Bush shake hands.

Although the immediate official reaction to the release of the National Intelligence Estimate has been curiously positive, welcoming the assessment as a vindication of Iran (an “official confession” of the United States, in the words of government spokesman and justice minister Gholam-hossein Elham and “announcement of Iranian people’s victory on the nuclear issue” according to Ahmadinejad), there are signs that other important players are mulling over questions related to the timing and implications of the report. The report also seems to be feeding into the on going domestic debates about the Ahmadinejad administration’s handling of the nuclear file as well as regular political jockeying that is integral to the Iranian political landscape.

The first objection to seeing the report only in a positive light came in Tabnak, a website closely associate with the former head of Islamic Revolution’s Guard Corps, Mohsen Rezaie. A commentary called “The Other Side of the Coin of the NIE,” acknowledges the positive impact of the argument that Iran has not had a weapons program since 2003 but cautions about the negative aspect:

“If in our reasoning for the critique of U.S. foreign policy regarding Iran’s nuclear technology, we rely on this report in a one-sided and reckless manner, this means that we accept that the American spy agency [sic] has mastered , at least in the past seven years, its knowledge of the process of the expansion of Iran’s nuclear technology and negate the past statements of this agency which saw its hands tied in the Iran’s information and security arena and this, undoubtedly, can have very negative and unpleasant effects in the domestic developments of the country. All these things were unfortunately ignored in the official position announced on Tuesday.”

The commentary goes on the point out how the NIE effectively negates the IAEA’s long standing position that no evidence of diversion has ever been found in Iran and urges the government to approach the report with more caution and not affirm the “intelligence presence of the United States in Iran.”

In another commentary in Tabnak, the NIE’s assertion of a 2003 turnaround is discussed as a “big lie” and the point is made that no change occurred in the Iranian program in 2003. The real change, the piece argues, came in 1998-9 when there was a change of leadership at Iran’s Nuclear Energy Organization and when under this new leadership “various and dispersed activities …became focused in activities related to the fuel cycle.”

Another set of cautions came in a television interview with Ali Larijani, Iran’s nuclear negotiator who was recently relieved of his job by Ahmadinejad. Pointing out that the NIE was released at Bush’s behest, he posits the report as part and parcel of American domestic politics, pointing to the need to create credibility after the Iraq intelligence fiasco. The need to make the case that at every step, depending on the information available, the right decision is made in the US, is offered as the second reason for the release of the report while the creation of a “breathing space” and need for a push back of the “Zionist lobby’s intense war mongering” is posited as the third reason.

Finally, Larijani points out that in the NIE there are elements in line with the 5+1 position that pressure works on Iran. This leads him to say, “On this basis it can be interpreted that by the release of the report the U.S. intends to change phase in its stance regarding Iran…. ElBaradei’s recent report and clearing of most of the ambiguities placated the United States. With this report, Washington intends to affirm ElBaradei’s report and say that like ElBaradei we think Iran does not have a nuclear weapon but believe it can move in that direction in the future.”

Also, in an implicit dig against Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who has reportedly not been very cooperative in his meeting last week with Javier Solana, Europe’s foreign policy chief, Larijani identifies Iran, Solana, ,and ElBaradei as a triangle and sees Iran in need of cooperation with the IAEA as well as continued dialogue with Solana. Cautioning against presenting the discussions with Solana as unimportant, Larijani analogizes the situation to a “container of milk that the United States would like to overturn.”

Along the same lines, the former deputy foreign minister, Abbas Maleki, writing in Etemad-e Melli daily, acknowledges the domestic consumption of the NIE and its importance in undercutting the rush to war. He also points to the seeming confusion that plagues current US foreign policy is the Middle East. Still he states what while “American power may be in decline,” underestimating American diplomatic prowess is a mistake.

Finally, speaking to students at Ferdowsi University in Mashad, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s former foreign minister and current advisor to the supreme leader, also cautions against seeing the report as positive. “We should not be too content with these types of reports. These reports, for or against Iran, have no impact on Iran’s diplomatic behavior… Of course we should see it as a good omen that our peaceful nuclear program has been vindicated and we should know that this report, like ElBaradei’s report, contains positive and negative points, hence value it on the basis of its capacity… These types of reports should be approached with doubt since more than wanting to give Iran its due; they are pursuing their own electoral interests.”

WASHINGTON (Dec. 7) – Congressional Democrats Friday demanded a full Justice Department investigation into whether the CIA obstructed justice by destroying videotapes that documented the harsh 2002 interrogations of two alleged terrorists.

A day after CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden told agency employees the tapes were destroyed in 2005, members of Congress, human rights groups and lawyers for accused terrorists said the tapes may have been key evidence that the U.S. government had illegally authorized torture.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Friday that President Bush did not have any recollection about the tapes or about their destruction. But she could not rule out White House involvement in the tapes’ destruction, saying that she asked only the president about it, not others.

Perino refused to comment on whether the destruction could represent obstruction of justice or a threat to cases against terrorism suspects. She said that if the attorney general decides to investigate, “of course the White House would support that.”

In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked for a probe of “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.”

In a Senate floor speech Durbin dismissed the CIA’s explanation that it was trying to protect the identities of the interrogators. “We know that it is possible and in fact easy to cover the faces” of those who appear on camera, Durbin said. “This is not an issue that can be ignored.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused the CIA of a coverup. “The agency was desperate to cover up damning evidence of their practices,” he said in floor remarks. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the tapes of President Richard Nixon.”

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr.. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole — or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked — at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so — whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr.. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago — briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago — who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation — or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush — if you can still hear us — if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re Remington Steele — you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.

About one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year, the Department of Justice reported yesterday.

An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005, while a record 5 million people were on parole or probation, an increase of 1.8 percent. Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.

The data reflect deep racial disparities in the nation’s correctional institutions, with a record 905,600 African-American inmates in prisons and state and local jails. In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

But the report concludes that nationally the percentage of black men in state and federal prison populations in 2006 fell to 38 percent, from 43 percent in 2000. The rates also declined for black women, while rates for white women increased.

Over all, the number of women in state and federal prisons, 112,498, was at a record high. The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years.

The report suggests that state prison capacity has expanded at roughly the same rate as the prison population, with prisons operating at 98 percent to 114 percent of capacity, a slight improvement over 2005.

Still, many prison systems are accommodating record numbers of inmates by using facilities that were never meant to provide bed space. Arizona has for years held inmates in tent encampments on prison grounds. Hundreds of California prisoners sleep in three-tier bunk beds in gymnasiums or day rooms. Prisons throughout the nation have made meeting rooms for educational and treatment programs into cell space.

Last Sunday, Venezuelans voted against reforms put forth by President Hugo Chavez. The vote against Chavez’s proposals for constitutional reform was surprising and extremely close, 51 percent to 49 percent. And yet both the United States and Chavez hailed the result of the referendum as a sign of Venezuela’s democracy.

Looking for an on-the-ground account of the referendum and insights into the results, I spoke to journalist and activist Chesa Boudin, author of The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions and 100 Answers. Boudin lived in Venezuela while researching Latin American public policy as part of his master’s degree from Oxford University and is back in Venezuela working on a new book about Latin America’s shift to the left and his own political awakening.

In a phone interview from Caracas with AlterNet, Boudin reflected on why the defeat of the referendum is a victory for Chavez, what JFK can teach the United States about respecting revolutions, the myth of the Chavez dictatorship, the now-obsolete “fraud” T-shirts preprinted by the opposition, and the good, the bad and the ugly (and the pretty) of Venezuela.

Katie Halper: What is it like in Caracas right now?

Chesa Boudin: It’s very calm here. Of course you have the normal violent crime and criminal activity in Venezuela. That is constant. If you had asked me last week, I would have said that Chavez’s referendum would have passed. But by the end of Sunday, before they announced the results, I knew that it wasn’t going to win.

Halper: Why did it fail?

Boudin: First of all, there were real problems with the content of the reform. Second of all, there were problems with the process through which they tried to get the reform passed. And third of all, there is general discontent with certain aspects of the government that weakened voter turnout even though the government remains very popular, and Chavez in particular is extremely popular.

Halper: What were your reservations?

Boudin: I was concerned about the centralization of power, indefinite terms and expanded emergency power. I was concerned about the vague nature and confusing way many of the articles were drafted. And I was also concerned about the government’s capacity to put into practice some of the articles that were on their face excellent. Like the expanded guarantees for social security for taxi drivers, street vendors, etc., is a great law. But in practice the government doesn’t have the ability at this stage to put that into effect. Many of the changes they were making could have been made through simple legislation; they didn’t need to be constitutional.

Halper: Why do you think Chavez wanted to do away with term limits?

Boudin: There is no question that Chavez wanted to get rid of term limits. I think that was one of the main motivations for the reform. I think they chose this year rather than four years from now, for two reasons. One, so they don’t need to worry about training new leadership. I think they need to change the leadership. I would encourage Chavez to stay in the government until his term ends and then train new leadership. He should allow somebody else to take charge for a change to see what good comes from the sharing of power. I think the other reason is because Chavez is a military man, and he had a very powerful successful electoral cycle last year when he won with almost 20 percent over the opposition. I think he saw the opportunity to steamroll forward through elections. And I think it’s a good thing that there is a check on that. Chavez does command the loyalty of the masses. But it’s not a blind loyalty. And it’s good that there be a check on executive power in any country.

Halper: Do you agree with Chavez’s claim that this is proof of Venezuela’s democracy maturing?

Boudin: Yes. I think the government was overconfident and took the popular support for granted. And this will force the government to realize that the grass-roots and popular support is contingent and cannot be assumed or taken for granted. There are people who will go out there and vote simply because Chavez says they should do. And they were able to get basically 50 percent of the vote. However, there were a lot of people who simply weren’t convinced because it was rushed, because they had reservations. And this will force the government to win, on a daily basis, the support and respect of the masses. That’s an important thing for any government, not just this government.

It will also force Chavez and his inner circle to reevaluate the information they get. The new political party that Chavez founded a year ago has roughly 5 million members, but Chavez didn’t even get the vote of all the people in the party. He got 4.5 million votes, less than 4.5 actually. So clearly there is a problem. The people around Chavez are telling him what they think he wants to hear. I think Chavez does a much better job with keeping in touch with the people than Bush does. And this will be a wake-up call for Chavez and the whole political establishment and, hopefully, a very positive thing.

Halper: How do the results of the referendum relate to the opposition’s claim that Chavez is a dictator?

Boudin: Calling it “the opposition,” as people do both internationally and in Venezuela, makes it sound like it is one homogeneous group. It’s a very diverse group that happens to be unified by their hatred of Chavez and his model. But there’s a wide range, some of which, in the United States, would be considered liberal, or mainstream. And then there are right-wingers. Some of the opposition doesn’t call Chavez a dictator, but most of them do. And certainly the U.S. media tends to describe him in terms that suggest dictatorship.

But the point you’re getting to is how does his accepting the results change the position of the opposition. I’m one of the people who identifies with the Bolivarian revolution, who thinks the outcome was pretty much perfect. I personally had, as did almost every Venezuelan I talked to, serious reservations about reform, even though it had lots of good things.

If this victory had been the other way around, if Chavez had won by one percentage point the opposition would have been in the streets crying fraud. They already had the T-shirts printed. This loss gave Chavez the opportunity to take the high road. Thus far, at least, he has humbly recognized the opposition’s victory. And as long as he continues to take the high road, I think it’s proof to Venezuela and to the world that Chavez is not a dictator, that Venezuela is democratic, that the popular will of the people is what matters.

The claim that Chavez is a dictator is based on nothing but media hype and propaganda. He has more of a democratic claim than Bush. He continues to have the support of the majority of the country, which Bush never had. Chavez has been supported multiple times through elections, recall referenda, and he’s won with huge margins. And the elections were monitored by the EU, the Carter Center, the International Lawyers Guild.

People accuse Chavez of executing people. There are executions in Venezuela, but not by the state. The police are incompetent, the prison system is atrocious; people are killed all the time through gun violence. But that’s not the same thing as the government executing people. That’s not the same thing as the government promoting death squads, which they do in Colombia, a country we support. But violence is there, and access to guns is a real problem.

Thus far the opposition has been the most responsible that I’ve ever seen it. Again, the opposition is a diverse group, but historically, during the Chavez era, it has played a very negative anti-democratic role, starting with the coup in 2002, boycotting elections regularly, crying out fraud when they couldn’t get out votes, trying to undermine the democratic process. This is proof to them and the world that this is a democratic system and that they do have a chance to win gains if they go about it democratically.

Halper: Can you talk about the alleged CIA memo that was circulated outlining the U.S. plan to intervene in Sunday’s elections?

Boudin: I’m not an expert on CIA memos, but the version that I saw was not plausible. It was only in Spanish, it was a Word document, not a real document that had been scanned. It may have been based on some real U.S. intervention. There’s no question that the U.S. government and its subsidiary grant-giving agencies like U.S.A.I.D. and National Endowment for Democracy were sending money to opposition groups. That’s public information. But whether this particular CIA plan was a reality, I highly doubt. In Venezuela, there is constant accusation of U.S. intervention and, more often than not, it’s rumors.

I want to be perfectly clear that there is a real risk of intervention. The U.S. participated in the coup and has overthrown dozens of governments in Latin America over the years. But since the coup of 2002, the main form of U.S. intervention and destabilization has been through political and electoral means, investing millions of dollars in opposition groups that advocate against the government in the media and civil society. The U.S. is trying very hard to unify the opposition and find candidates to defeat Chavez. If they do choose to increase intervention, all the analysts I’ve read, including ex-CIA agent Philip Agee, who wrote a report on this a few years ago, suggest it will be through a low-intensity paramilitary intervention, not a direct U.S. army intervention like we see in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration doesn’t have the political capital to invade another country, and if they did it would be Iran.

I think Venezuela should prepare against intervention, but not against a U.S. military invasion, because it’s not likely and because there’s nothing you can do about it if they bring out the big guns. Venezuela is much better off preparing against political electoral intervention and the possibility of a paramilitary destabilizing force, which was used in Nicaragua with the Contras.

Halper: Not that the Contras weren’t a formidable enemy.

Boudin: Yes, but Nicaragua was a very poor, easily starved country. Venezuela has billions of dollars coming in every year from revenue and a fairly up-to-date military arsenal and 26 million people. So it’s much bigger than Nicaragua. But I think it’s important to differentiate between interventions like the Contras or the paramilitaries in Colombia or Blackwater intervention, which I think are possibilities, and an Iraq style intervention.

Halper: What do you want Americans to know about Venezuela?

Boudin: Venezuela’s political process is a democratic one, one in which the majority of Venezuelans have cast their vote repeatedly. And it’s incumbent on the U.S., which advocates for democracy at least rhetorically, not to intervene or destabilize the Venezuelan political process. Venezuelans should be free to choose their own path and to make their own mistakes. As Americans, we can learn from the good and the bad of what happens in Venezuela. You have a peaceful revolution in Venezuela. John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolutions inevitable.” The quote applies to Venezuela perfectly.

At the same time that there is corruption and there are problems, there are also revolutionary programs that provide food, housing and free healthcare, which is not only more cost-effective but more humane than what we have in our country. And rather than condemning it because Hugo Chavez and George Bush both have a tendency to talk too much and say stupid things, people should come and see Venezuela for themselves.

SAN FRANCISCO -­ A statement issued last week by Nobel Peace Prize laureates including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has galvanized attention on a long-simmering case involving eight former Black Panther Party members charged with the 1971 murder of a San Francisco police sergeant. The men and their supporters contend the evidence cited against them was obtained under torture.

On Nov. 30, a World Council of Churches representative officially released the International Call on the San Francisco Eight, signed by Archbishop Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams of the Community of Peace People, Northern Ireland, and representatives of organizations that have also received the peace prize.

The statement cites the known involvement of the U.S. government and the FBI in illegal policing against civil and human rights organizations, including the COINTELPRO operation targeting the Black Panther Party, the lack of new evidence in the case, and the dismissal of the alleged evidence presented in an earlier investigation.

The Nobel laureates call for dropping all charges against the eight, freeing two of the men who have been jailed for decades, and pursuing official investigations into “the ongoing legacy and possible continued operation of COINTELPRO and similar programs, with an eye towards true reconciliation and human rights based on internationally recognized standards and principles.”

Six of the eight men ­ Francisco Torres, Richard Brown, Richard O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones and Harold Taylor ­ were rearrested last January on charges stemming from the 1971 killing of San Francisco Police Sgt. John Young and other charges connected to attacks on other officers. Two others, Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaquim, have long been jailed on other charges.

Three of the men had been charged in 1973 with Young’s murder. But a federal court ruled the next year that both San Francisco and New Orleans police had tortured them to obtain a confession. Charges were dismissed in 1975 because statements used as evidence were made following torture.

The case was reopened in 2003 by the U.S. Department of Justice, using funds allocated to the Department of Homeland Security. The California state attorney’s office, which is working on the case with a federal task force, has said no new scientific evidence has emerged.

Both on Jan. 26 and Nov. 30, “Democracy Now” featured interviews with San Francisco Eight members who detailed horrific accounts of prolonged torture at the hands of New Orleans police in 1973.

A Dec. 3 court hearing in the case brought nearly 100 supporters to a lively picket line in front of the City’s Hall of Justice. At the hearing, Judge Philip Moscone set Jan. 10 as the date for the San Francisco Eight to officially enter pleas. He also set April 21 for the start of the preliminary hearing in the case.

Marching in the picket line was S.F. Eight member Francisco Torres. “The message the government wants to send youth is, this is what will happen to you if you get involved and resist government policies, so it’s pointless to resist,” he said.

“This is not a government of the people any more,” Torres warned. “We need to become more aware and more investigative, and our movements need to build links and listen to each other.”

WASHINGTON (Dec. 6) – The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information about aspects of the program from the courts and from the Sept. 11 commission appointed by President Bush and Congress. It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The New York Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish an article in Friday’s newspaper about the destruction of the tapes. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and that if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials ” and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

General Hayden said in a statement that leaders of Congressional oversight committees were fully briefed on the matter, but some Congressional officials said notification to Congress had not been adequate.

“This is a matter that should have been briefed to the full Intelligence Committee at the time,” an official with the House Intelligence Committee said. “This does not appear to have been done. There may be a very logical reason for destroying records that are no longer needed; however, this requires a more complete explanation.”

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.”General Hayden said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read.

In October, federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case were forced to write a letter to the court amending those C.I.A. declarations. The letter stated that in September, the C.I.A. notified the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., that it had discovered a videotape documenting the interrogation of a detainee. After a more thorough search, the letter stated, C.I.A. officials discovered a second videotape and one audio tape.

The letter is heavily redacted and sentences stating which detainees’ interrogations the recordings document are blacked out. Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

There is no mention in the letter of the tapes that C.I.A. officials destroyed in 2005. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation techniques. He said the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

“People know what happened, but to see it in living color would have far greater power,” the official said.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.

Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. does not record the interrogation of detainees. “When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said ‘What tapes?’,” he said.

Here’s what I like to do every time I see a throng of frothing religious zombies marching in the streets of Sudan or Pakistan or Colorado Springs or anywhere else in the world, carrying knives and torches and holding festering clots of fear in their hearts as they burn flags or photographs or copies of “The Goblet of Fire” or “The Golden Compass” or that sweet little book about the cute gay penguins in the Central Park Zoo and all screaming for the instant death of someone who dared to suggest that, say, Jesus was actually a liberal pacifist or that L. Ron Hubbard was a nutball hack or that it’s perfectly delightful to let sweet little schoolkids name a sweet little teddy bear ‘Muhammad.’

I try to remember. No wait, that’s not quite right. First, I get past the wave of nausea and sadness, that hot, palpable feeling that we are, still and forever, a baffled and insane and deeply doomed species and the world of man is indeed bleak and hopeless on far too many levels to count.

Yes. Must get past that.

Then I remember. I remember the remaining 1.2 billion Muslims of the world who are also reading about the Great Teddy Bear Blasphemy of 2007 and going oh holy hell no, please, Allah no, not this again, not these inbred fundamentalist jackals making us all look so horribly bad, and why does the media insist on showing such a harsh, fragmented picture of a generally peaceful (albeit overly militant) faith and is there really nothing we can do?

I remember how difficult it must be in this, the age of instant and global and yet often wrongheaded media coverage, for the average true believer of any of the world’s giant, confused religions to stay focused and faithful and full of piety, considering the increasing number of mindless zealots who so effortlessly poison their spiritual well.

Then I wonder: Do such events ever spur any sort of somber internal query among the faithful? Do these countless acts of terrorism and extremism, so common to every major world religion, ever stir up some sort of nagging notion that perhaps there really is something fundamentally wrong with how billions of people still cling to these codified, archaic systems of faith, so terrified as they are of change, of progress, so saturated in reactionary groupthink that they give rise to endless outbursts of hate and ignorance? Sadly, I think I know the answer.

Indeed, the distressed reaction from normal Muslims must be a very similar to what average Christians experience when they hear about yet another loud-mouthed gaggle of Bible zealots using Jesus as a weapon to attack and bash and impede, to go after gays and women and science and sex and terrifying little books about girls and magic dust and talking polar bears.

It’s a common Christian lament. It’s also a bit bogus, unconvincing, hollow. Because the fact is, the extremists of any religion merely serve to illuminate the fact that there’s always something inherently dangerous in giving yourself (and your national identity) over to such divisive, woefully dualistic systems that, no matter what your stance, absolutely insist that man is but a flawed, lustful animal that can never truly know God. Or to put it more crudely: The fanatics may like to pee in the pool, but religion built the damn pool in the first place.

Because then I think of how many senators and Bible-thumpers and Bush-bashed Americans who are seeing stories like this and snorting, “See? Murderous Muslim fanatics raging in the streets! This is why Christianity is so much better. This is why we should bomb the Middle East to rubble. Bush is right!” And they raise their flags and cock their Bibles and pat themselves on their arrogant backs, conveniently forgetting that the only real difference between radical Islam and Christianity’s own bloody, murderous past is, well, a bit of time, with a splash of geography.

Ah yes, the bloody crusades, the sadistic assaults on conflicting belief systems, the gay popes and murderous priests and boundless hypocrisy, the book burnings and witch burnings and pagan slaughters and a billion sexual oppressions, the mountains of guilt and shame and sin sin sin. Been there, done that, still doing a great deal of it but not quite as, you know, explicitly as before. Note to righteous Christians: That violent Sudanese march? Different branch, same family tree.

I think of Christopher Hitchens’ terrific stunt of book, “God is Not Great,” and also Richard Dawkins’ excellent “The God Delusion,” bestsellers both and both effortlessly revealing, by way of reason and scientific fact and sheer common sense, how organized religion has been, almost without fail, the single most successful impediment to mankind’s true moral, spiritual and even political progress throughout history.

To me, both are dead right, and yet also deeply missing the point, if for no other reason than that they both argue their perspectives straight from the mind, the realm of reason and logic, when spirit is, of course, a matter of the heart. To me, the greatest argument against organized religion is not merely that it makes no logical sense — this much is obvious. It’s how it puts the heart, the fluid and indefinable — and yes, hotly mystical — spirit, in a kind of theological cage, bound and gagged and fed only scraps of carefully censored truth, and dares to call it love.

All these thoughts swirl and dance when suddenly I read that the pope, perhaps the most dangerous, out-of-touch world figure in all of organized religion’s dour pantheon, has declared that atheists — atheists! — are responsible for some of “the greatest forms of cruelty” in history. I laugh out loud. It is a wonder that lightning did not strike him dead on the spot.

Pascal: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Twain: “Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.” Tom Robbins: “A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.” Salud, gentlemen.

And finally, I think of the eternal chicken-and-egg debate, modified thusly: Which came first, the radical fundamentalists who can’t walk and chew warm theology at the same time, or the overeager commercial media, ever in need of tales of shock and titillation and blood to get you to pay attention?

Or the existential version: If extremist hooligans march in the streets and there are no media to cover it, do they make a sound? Does it make a bit of difference? Does anyone care? If there are no cameras, will the zealots just stay home and masturbate to copies of “The Hills” on DVD? Then again, if the media ignore such eruptions, will they be accused of bias? Of neglecting their duties, especially if something truly dangerous occurs? If you were running a news organization in this age of fear and persecution and limitless media potential, what would you do?

As for me, I love Great Danes. Also Dobermans and Ridgebacks and sleek Lab mixes. Alas, I do not yet have a dog. When I finally get one, perhaps I shall name him Allah. Maybe I shall get a second dog and name her Buddha, my parrot Jesus, my new mattress set Shiva and Shakti, my car Dionysus, and my favorite Pyrex sex toy, naturally, oh sweet Lord. This is the plan.

Robert Whiteside is a workingman’s workingman.

But exactly eight months ago, he found himself among the ranks of the unemployed.

The father of three, Statesville resident, erstwhile employee of the Cleveland Freightliner plant and union leader was fired, ostensibly for allowing what the powers to be said was an unauthorized strike.

Since then Whiteside and four other members of the United Auto Workers Local 3520’s negotiating team have been fighting to get their jobs back.

The group – which includes fellow Local 3520 officers Allen Bradley, David Crisco, Glenna Swinford and Franklin Torrence – has come to be known as “the Cleveland Five” and they have come to symbolize flaws in the labor union system.

“We did nothing wrong,” said Whiteside, “except to have the audacity to do what a union local is supposed to do – stand up for its membership.”

The group members said they did exactly what the rank and file voted for when, on April 3, they called for members to go on strike.

The workers’ contract had expired at midnight on April 1, one day after the company had a massive layoff. Later that day, the UAW International leaders called on the local “to accept a package we had already voted to reject,” Torrence said.

“We were told to take this and ratify it and that ‘we could work out the open issues later,’ ” Torrence said

But the negotiating team saw right through that.

“There was nothing new and if we accepted the contract we would lose all our bargaining power,” Swinford said. “Once you ratify a contract, the deal’s over and you have what you have.”

And they didn’t think what they were given was fair.

“There were 22 open articles,” Bradley said. “And 86 sub-issues that involved health and safety matters. The contract was no good as it was.”

But, for reasons the five could only speculate on, the international arm of the UAW wanted the matter settled quickly.

Part of settlement involved workers agreeing to work only every other week to stave off even more layoffs.

“I think international wanted that so they could keep the union dues coming in,” Bradley said. “But what happened is that by cutting back their hours so much, they lost their status as full-time workers and lost most of the benefits they fought for in the contract in the first place.”

But at least the workers still had jobs.

Initially, all 11 members of Local 3520’s negotiating committee were fired. Six have been reinstated.

“We don’t know what happened with the others,” Torrence said. “It seems like there was something political going on, but we really don’t know.”

The five who have remained without a job are running out of resources. They had to fight to get unemployment benefits, which were initially denied. Those funds have since dried up.

The group also had to defend itself against internal charges brought by fellow union members alleging that the group “misled” the membership into going on strike.

And an arbitration meeting that was supposedly “guaranteed” to take place within eight weeks has still not happened. It’s been eight months.

If the arbitrator rules in their favor – whenever the hearing takes place – the best the five can hope for is back pay minus any unemployment benefits and pay from other jobs.

The five think the UAW International is hoping they fade away. One of the five – Crisco – has been forced to take another job.

“I guess they can drag this thing out until next summer,” Whiteside said.

“They are trying to starve us out,” Torrence said.

Whiteside said the experience has left him wondering if organized labor can survive.

“We are all pro-labor and we still believe in the solidarity of the union,” he said. “But the structure of the UAW has to change or it will squeeze the middle-class workers right out of it. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

The Cleveland Five has gotten the attention of labor groups all over the country. The NAACP has also staked out a position in support of the group.

“It is very strange for a members of a local to be forced to fight against their own union,” Whiteside said.

12/05/07 “Washington Post” — – – 12/04/07 — – We Americans like to think of ourselves as strong, rugged and supremely confident — a nation of Marlboro Men and Marlboro Women, minus the cigarettes and the lung cancer. So why do we increasingly find ourselves hunkered behind walls, popping pills by the handful to stave off diseases we might never contract and eyeing the rest of the world with an us-or-them suspicion that borders on the pathological?

Last week, I heard some of the nation’s leading cultural anthropologists try to explain these and other phenomena. I came away convinced that we, as a nation, definitely should seek professional help.

The American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting here in Washington, and I was invited to an afternoon-long panel discussion titled “The Insecure American.” I decided to overlook the fact that my hosts, Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University and Catherine Besteman of Colby College, had recently co-edited a book called “Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong.”

“The Insecure American” turned out to be a revelation — by turns alarming, depressing and laugh-out-loud amusing — as scholar after scholar presented research showing just how unnerved this society is.

Setha Low, who teaches at the City University of New York, has spent years studying the advent and increase of gated communities. People decide to sequester their families behind walls because they are afraid of crime, they feel isolated from their neighbors, and they’re nostalgic for a kind of idealized Norman Rockwell past, Low reported. Nothing terribly irrational about that.

But after extensive interviews with residents of gated communities in San Antonio and on Long Island, Low discovered that there isn’t really less crime behind the walls, people don’t really feel more secure, and there was no greater sense of small-town closeness among neighbors. Despite the gates and guard huts, people still felt they needed to set their alarm systems.

Joseph Dumit of the University of California at Davis presented his work arguing that health care has been redefined into a statistical exercise in risk reduction. The average American fills nearly 13 prescriptions a year, Dumit said, and many of the drugs are not to make the patient well but to reduce the statistical risk that the person will become ill. People who are otherwise healthy are prescribed statins to lower their cholesterol, for example, or beta blockers for high blood pressure.

Dumit pointed out that this risk-driven approach assumes that every one of us is “inherently ill.” It also drives health-care costs by pushing doctors and drug companies to spend whatever it takes to incrementally reduce a patient’s risk of getting sick — even though some of those patients never would have gotten sick, anyway.

Susan F. Hirsch, a professor at George Mason University, gave a riveting presentation on how terrorism feeds insecurity. Hirsch’s husband, Abdulrahman Abdullah, was killed in the 1998 al-Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. When some of the alleged perpetrators faced justice in a New York courtroom in 2001, Hirsch began attending the trial as a victim. She ended up studying it as an anthropologist, concluding that the legal system, while imperfect, was the best way to deal with terrorists.

Catherine Lutz of Brown University reported on her studies of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” She noted that the immense resources this country devotes to war-making are based on assumptions that anthropologists might not accept as given — that war is embedded in human nature, for example, and therefore can never be consigned to our barbarian past, as was done with slavery.

Lee Baker of Duke University, Brett Williams of American University and other presenters described their research on economic insecurity, driven by forces such as globalization, immigration and gentrification.

And Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, had me wincing as she talked about her investigations of what she called “vulture capitalism” — the global trade in body parts for transplant. The fastest-growing segment of kidney transplant recipients, Scheper-Hughes said, consists of patients over 70; when they can’t get a needed organ from the transplant registry, she said, they often ask a healthy child or grandchild to donate.

To recap: We’re afraid of one another, we’re afraid of the rest of the world, we’re afraid of getting sick, we’re afraid of dying. Maybe if we study our insecurities and confront them, we’ll learn to keep them in check. Before we turn the whole nation into one big, paranoid gated community, maybe we’ll learn that life isn’t really any better behind the walls.