The Rag Blog

Four years ago this week, the tanks rolled for what President Bush originally called, “Operation Iraqi Liberation” — O.I.L. I kid you not.

And it was four years ago that, from the White House, George Bush, declaring war, said, “I want to talk to the Iraqi people.” That Dick Cheney didn’t tell Bush that Iraqis speak Arabic … well, never mind. I expected the President to say something like, “Our troops are coming to liberate you, so don’t shoot them.” Instead, Mr. Bush told, the Iraqis,

“Do not destroy oil wells.“

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration said the war had nothing to do with Iraq’s oil. Indeed, in 2002, the State Department stated, and its official newsletter, the Washington Post, repeated, that State’s Iraq study group, “does not have oil on its list of issues.”

But now, we’ve learned that, despite protestations to the contrary, Condoleezza Rice held a secret meeting with the former Secretary-General of OPEC, Fadhil Chalabi, an Iraqi, and offered Chalabi the job of Oil Minister for Iraq. (It is well established that the President of the United States may appoint the cabinet ministers of another nation if that appointment is confirmed by the 101st Airborne.)

In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well — for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq’s oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that’s a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq’s 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet’s reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze — and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill “Love-Not-War” Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share — not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts — peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney’s former company’s main business is “oil services.” And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney’s former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil’s having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the “Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.” Now, you might think our government shouldn’t be writing a plan for another nation’s oil. Well, our government didn’t write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq’s oil. That’s not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq’s oil production — and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Of course, the language was far more subtle than, “Let’s cut Iraq’s oil production and jack up prices.” Rather, the report uses industry jargon and euphemisms which require Iraq to remain an obedient member of the OPEC cartel and stick to the oil-production limits — “quotas” — which keep up oil prices.

The Houston plan, enforced by an army of occupation, would, “enhance [Iraq’s] relationship with OPEC,” the oil cartel.

And that’s undoubtedly why Condoleezza Rice asked Fadhil Chalabi to take charge of Iraq’s Oil Ministry. As former chief operating officer of OPEC, the oil cartel, Fadhil was a Big Oil favorite, certain to ensure that Iraq would never again allow the world to slip back to the Clinton era of low prices and low profits. (In investigating for BBC, I was told by the former chief of the CIA’s oil unit that he’d met with Fadhil regarding oil at Bush’s request. Fadhil recently complained to the BBC. He denied the meeting with the Bush emissary in London because, he noted, he was secretly meeting that week in Washington with Condi!)

Fadhil, by the way, turned down Condi’s offer to run Iraq’s Oil Ministry. Ultimately, Iraq’s Oil Ministry was given to Fadhil’s fellow tribesman, Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted bank swindler and neo-con idol. But whichever Chalabi is nominal head of Iraq’s oil industry in Baghdad, the orders come from Houston. Indeed, the oil law adopted by Iraq’s shaky government this month is virtually a photocopy of the “Options” plan first conceived in Texas long before Iraq was “liberated.”

In other words, the war has gone exactly to plan — the Houston plan. So forget the naïve cloth-rending about a conflict gone haywire. Exxon-Mobil reported a record $10 billion profit last quarter, the largest of any corporation in history. Mission Accomplished.

‘Beware the ides of March’, is said as a warning of impending and certain danger. Since it is from Plutarch, referring to a warning to Julius Caesar, it is unlikely to have influenced George W.Bush’s ‘shock and awe’ decision to invade Iraq in March, since literature is not his forte. (Unless you count ‘My Pet Goat’.)

For Iraq though, March brings not alone the fourth anniversary of the illegal US led invasion, monumental destruction of life, all societal structures, history, the National Museum, libraries of ancient manuscripts, all records from educational qualifications to medical reports, births, deaths and marriages and never ending death and trauma beyond imagination, but the memory of the 1991 ‘turkey shoot’ on the Basra Road and the US encouraged uprisings in the south and north – then bloodily put down – with US assistance. March marked the beginning of the forty day period of mourning for the thousands of retreating conscripts and civilian families incinerated in their vehicles, when B52’s bombed the front and back of the sixty mile convoy, then relentlessly bombed the rest ‘like sitting ducks’, as one pilot explained.

At least ‘fifteen hundred tanks, armoured vehicles, jeeps, water and fuel tankers, ambulances, firetrucks, tractor trailors, buses and civilian vehicles and passenger cars … some flying white flags’ were ‘pounded for hours’ with anti-personel bombs ‘and finally finished off with devastating B52 bombing runs’. It is thought that thousands were crushed, or incinerated in their vehicles. Windscreens and humanity melted. As the William Tell overture and the Lone Ranger theme, blasted out on the USS Ranger, ‘planes reloaded and reloaded, returning to hit the convoy again and again, dropping everything from cluster bombs to five hundred pound bombs ‘like sharks in a feeding frenzy’.

US Air Force planes from Saudia Arabia ‘raced north to join in the fun’. There was so much air traffic involved in the ‘frenzy’ that the ‘killing box’ had to be divided up by air traffic controllers to prevent aircraft colliding. ‘I think we’re past the point of letting (Hussein) get in his tanks and drive them back to Iraq ….’ a US pilot said, adding: ‘I feel fairly punitive about it.’ Saddam Hussein, in whose name the United Nations denied medicines, food, pencils and even blackboards since he would personally misuse them, was now apparently capable of driving sixty miles of vehicles, single handedly.

‘It’s a slaughter’, Jordanian businessman Zaki Ayoubi said:’You are going to slaughter one hundred thousand young men who belong to one hundred thousand families. We’re not talking abstract artillery and machinery.’ President Bush senior, cared, not about indescribable carnage, but semantics. ‘Saddam’s most recent speech’ (saying Iraq was withdrawing from Kuwait, which they did) ‘is an outrage … his forces are retreating.’ Vice President Dan Quayle (over who, stories abound regarding string pulling in order to avoid service in Viet Nam abound) chimed in saying that a lasting peace and Saddam were incompatable. Thus was bloodbath justified.

Admitting ‘massive casualties’, those not vapourised were buried in mass graves in the desert. Soldiers cleaning up ‘said they were satisfied justice had been done.’ Bush senior was asked in beautiful Martinique whether he had any thoughts that the carnage had got out of hand and replied: ‘No, none at all’. Much was made of the fact that many of the vehicles contained ‘looted’ items – toys, silverware, vaccum cleaners, soap, even underwear, as some kind of justification for the massacre. Even in the casual world of US justice, looting does not carry the death penalty (if it did, there would be even more dead US and British soldiers in Iraq currently) and whilst there was indeed looting, Iraqis and Kuwaitis intermarried and many were fleeing with personal belongings from a home they had now had to leave. Then as now there were also many fleeing Palestinians. (See: ‘Desert Mirage’, Martin Yant, Prometheus Books.)

White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater had given a committment that US and coalition forces would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. Yet: ‘Even in Viet Nam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic’, stated Major Bob Nugent of US Army Intelligence. (War Crimes. Ramsey Clark and others, Maisonneuve Press.)

The Iraqi pull out from Kuwait began on 26th February 1991, the ceasefire was signed on the 28th February. On 2nd March 1991, the US 24th Mechanised Division slaughtered thousands more Iraqi soldiers, an action approved by General Norman Schwatzkopf (who famously remarked: ‘no one left to kill’. His autobiography is ‘It doesn’t take a Hero’. Indeed.) ‘We really waxed them’, said one Commander. Another American was recorded saying ‘Say hello to Allah’, as his Hellfire missile obliterated a vehicle. ‘Yee-hah’, said another voice. There was an attempt to cover up the carnage of another vehicle strewn road, since: ‘..it didn’t look good coming after the ceasefire.’ (Ramsey Clark, The Fire this Time, Thunder’s Mouth Press.) The then US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had told Saddam Hussein that America had ‘no view on Arab-Arab conflicts.’ Hussein had consulted her on the possible invasion. Iraq accused Kuwait of slant-drilling into their Rumaila oil field across Kuwait’s border, destabilising Iraq’s currency and moving Kuwaiti settlements well into Iraqi territory.

One conscript who survived the horrors of the Basra Road, with the remnants of his unit, told me how they had walked the five hundred and fifty kilometres, through the destruction, by the body parts, home, to carpet bombed Baghdad, none knowing whether family or house had survived: ‘We wanted to cry, but we had no tears left.’ Eighty eight thousand five hundred tonnes of bombs had fallen on ancient Mesapotamia, which brought the world all we call civlized.

As the wickedness of George W.Bush and his war criminal Administration are marked, four years on from the illegal invasion and destruction of the ‘cradle of civilisation’, another George Bush and other criminal acts should also be remembered. He may have taken to crying publicly over his son, he should also look in the mirror.

10. Refusing to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when his incompetence and maliciousness became apparent in the growing guerrilla war and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

9. Declining to intervene in the collapsed economy or help put Iraqi state industries back on a good footing, on the grounds that the “market” would magically produce prosperity effortlessly.

8. Invading and destroying the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah in November, 2004, thus pushing the Sunni Arabs into the arms of the insurgency in protest and ensuring that they would boycott the January, 2005, parliamentary elections, a boycott that excluded them from power and from a significant voice in crafting the new constitution, which they then rejected.

7. Suddenly announcing that the US would “kill or capture” young nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in spring, 2004, throwing the country into massive turmoil for months.

6. Replying to Baathist guerrilla provocations with harsh search and destroy missions that humiliated and angered ever more Sunni Arab clans, driving them to support or join the budding guerrilla movement.

4. Dissolving the Iraqi Army in May, 2003, and sending 400,000 men home, unemployed, resentful and heavily armed.

3. Allowing widespread looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, on the grounds that “stuff happens,” “democracy is messy,” and “how many vases can they have?”– and thus signalling that there would be no serious attempt to provide law and order in American Iraq.

2. Plotting to install corrupt financier, notorious liar, and shady operator Ahmad Chalabi as the soft dictator of Iraq, and refusing to plan for a post-war administration of the country because that might forestall Chalabi’s coronation.

While serving as President Bush’s White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales advised Bush that the president’s war time powers permitted Bush to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to use the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on US citizens without obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by law. Under an order signed by Bush in 2002, NSA illegally spied on Americans without warrants.

By spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, Bush committed felonies under FISA. Moreover, there is strong, indeed overwhelming, evidence that justice was obstructed when Bush and Gonzales blocked a 2006 Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales acted properly as Attorney General in approving and overseeing the Bush administration’s program of spying on US citizens. Also at issue is whether Gonzales acted properly in advising Bush to kill an investigation of Gonzales’ professional actions with regard to the NSA spy program.

We are faced with the almost certain fact that the two highest law enforcement officials of the United States are criminals.

The evidence that Bush and Gonzales have obstructed justice comes from internal Justice Department memos and exchanges of letters between the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an investigative office, and members of Congress. The documents were leaked to the National Journal, and the story was reported in the March 15, 2007, issue by Murray Waas, who also relied on interviews with both current and former high ranking DOJ officials. Ten months previously on May 25, 2006, Waas broke the story in the National Journal about the derailing of the OPR investigation.

From Waas’s report it is obvious that many current and former Justice Department officials have serious concerns about the high-handed behavior of the Bush administration. The incriminating documents were leaked to the National Journal, the only remaining national publication that has any credibility. The New York Times and Washington Post have proven to be supine tools of the Bush administration and are no longer trusted.

In Andrew Cockburn’s new book Rumsfeld, the gap between rampant power and its faraway victims is closed.

Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last year and a designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow human beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

Cockburn’s documented evidence shows that other Bush mafiosi, such as Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, “had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction.”

In Washington, I asked Ray McGovern, formerly a senior CIA officer, what he made of Norman Mailer’s remark that the US had entered a pre-fascist state.

“I hope he’s right,” he replied, “because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode. When you see who is controlling the means of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and periodicals and the TV stations from which most Americans take their news and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed. It’s quite something that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of America and Great Britain.”

McGovern was the author of the president’s daily CIA intelligence brief. I interviewed him more than three years ago and his prescient words are as striking today as Cockburn’s revelation of Rumsfeld’s secret life is illuminating.

His description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls George Orwell’s warning that totalitarianism does not require a totalitarian state.

‘The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by a majority.’

The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by the majority of humanity. This was illustrated vividly on February 15-16 2003, when some 30 million people took to the streets of cities around the world, including the greatest demonstration in British history.

It was illustrated again the other day in Latin America, which George W Bush on tour sought to reclaim for the lost US “backyard.”

“The distinguished visitor,” noted one commentator in Caracas, “was received with fear and loathing.”

There are many connections in Latin America to the suffering in the Middle East. The crushing of popular, reformist governments by the US and the setting up of torture regimes from Guatemala to Chile have echoes from Iran to Afghanistan.

The current attacks on the Chavez government in Venezuela by the media, which McGovern describes as being “domesticated by their wish to serve,” are essential in disclaiming the right of the poor to find another way.

Elected last December with a record landslide of votes cast by three-quarters of the eligible population – his 11th major election victory – Chavez expresses the kind of genuine exuberant democracy long ago abandoned in Britain.

In this country, the political class offers instead the arthritic pirouetting of Tony Blair, a criminal, and Gordon Brown, the paymaster of imperial adventures fought by 18-year-old soldiers who, on their return home, are so ill treated that there is no-one to change their colostomy bag.

Chavez, having all but got rid of the deadly International Monetary Fund from Latin America, dares to use the wealth from Venezuela’s oil to unite the Latin peoples and to expel a foreign economic system that calls itself liberal and is the source of historic suffering. He is supported by governments and by millions across south America from whom he derives his mandate.

You would not know this on either side of the Atlantic unless you studied carefully. The propaganda that converts a lively, open democracy to an “authoritarian” dictatorship is written on the rusted crosses of Salvador Allende’s comrades, of whom the same was said.

Guantanamo Bay has just marked its fifth anniversary. John Yoo was instrumental in setting up the prison camp that has been widely condemned. (The normally solidly pro-American Daily Mail newspaper in England, for example, has called it “the sort of show that once only dictators like Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao knew how to put on.”)

Yet Yoo’s infamy in America derives less from clearing the legal way for Guantanamo than from being the author of the “torture memo,” a legal opinion filed on Aug. 2, 2002, by the Office of Legal Counsel, a section of the U.S. Department of Justice. The memo examined what methods of inflicting pain and suffering constitute torture, and whether the U.S. president can order torture if he thinks it necessary.

Yoo’s memo was leaked to the press in the summer of 2004, in the aftermath of the publication of pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees inside Abu Ghraib prison. Overnight, he became a celebrity – but for all the wrong reasons. He was held personally responsible for Abu Ghraib’s horrors: The disgusting behaviour of U.S. service personnel was seen as the bottom of the slippery slope down which Yoo had started America’s military sliding when he wrote the torture memo.

“That was totally absurd,” he told me when we meet for lunch in a restaurant opposite his office at the Boalt School of Law in Berkeley, Calif. “Two bipartisan congressional reports and several military investigations showed that the Pentagon hadn’t even read the memo. Disgraceful behaviour of the kind which took place at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with interrogation policy. Similar things have happened in practically every war. What was different was that this time they had cameras on their cellphones to photograph it. … But the idea that what went on in Abu Ghraib would never have happened without that memo is just silly.”

That, however, hasn’t stopped many people from believing it. Various distinguished lawyers and professors have called Yoo’s advice in the torture memo “disgusting,” “unethical” and “a disgrace to our profession” – and that’s without explicitly connecting it to Abu Ghraib. Others want Yoo indicted as a war criminal.

Even the Bush administration has disowned him: The OLC issued a subsequent opinion that, it stated, overturned his original advice. Yoo had opined that the president had the power to order torture. The new memo emphatically insists he does not.

Given his reputation, I was a little nervous about meeting John Yoo. I half-expected to encounter the kind of man who bites the head off a chicken each morning, and who has electrodes at the ready in his office. In reality, the man is nothing like the bloodthirsty sadist he is depicted as being. Yoo is gentle and reticent, and listens without interrupting. He’s polite, courteous and not yet 40. He gives the impression of being a conscientious academic eager to find out what the law is and to ensure it is never flouted.

Flouting the law is, however, precisely what he stands accused of doing by writing the torture memo. “I reject that criticism totally,” he said. “Everything I did was carefully crafted to make sure that it was consistent with the existing legislation. My obligation was to make sure that what the president did was lawful, and I took the obligation very seriously.”

Still, it is difficult to read that memo without being shocked by its conclusions. It states, for instance, that “acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture” (within the meaning of the Convention Against Torture as ratified by Congress). “The infliction of pain or suffering … is insufficient to amount to torture.” “Pain or suffering must be severe.” “To amount to torture, an act must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure or even death.”

The memo gives examples of some of the activities that count as torture: forcing someone to play Russian roulette, beating him until he goes into cardiac arrest, applying electric shocks to the genitalia, rape or sexual assault. The memo also gives examples of forms of treatment Yoo thinks do not constitute torture – among them are kicking someone, forcing him to stand against a wall, subjecting him to noise and depriving him of sleep. And he provides the legal precedents to back up his case: not just U.S. statutes but also judgments from the European Court.

It is all very specific, and very unpleasant. Even if he’s right about what U.S. law permits, wouldn’t it just have been better left unsaid? “That was simply not an option,” Yoo said. “The CIA wanted – needed – a definitive answer to the question: how far can we go? They had specifically requested a legal opinion. They had captured senior Al-Qa’ida operatives who were not responding to being asked questions politely. CIA officers needed to know what, legally, they were entitled to do to them to get them to talk. They knew these guys had information on what Al-Qa’ida was planning. If the CIA could get that information, they could save lives. But they also wanted to be sure they would not end up going to prison for doing so.” That’s why they asked the OLC for answers – and in 2002 the OLC turned out to be represented by John Yoo.

Yoo’s answer to “How far can we go?” turned out to be indistinguishable from “as far as the president wants to.” The most controversial part of Yoo’s advice was that, as commander-in-chief in war, the U.S. constitution allows the president to be the judge of what is and what is not “necessary” to prosecute war successfully. That’s the claim the OLC later explicitly disavowed.

His hands were bleeding and his eyes filled with tears as, four years ago, he slammed a sledgehammer into the tiled plinth that held a 20ft bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Then Kadhim al-Jubouri spoke of his joy at being the leader of the crowd that toppled the statue in Baghdad’s Firdous Square. Now, he is filled with nothing but regret.

The moment became symbolic across the world as it signalled the fall of the dictator. Wearing a black vest, Mr al-Jubouri, an Iraqi weightlifting champion, pounded through the concrete in an attempt to smash the statue and all it meant to him. Now, on the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, he says: “I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.”

The weightlifter had also been a mechanic and had felt the full weight of Saddam’s regime when he was sent to Abu Ghraib prison by the Iraqi leader’s son, Uday, after complaining that he had not been paid for fixing his motorcycle.

He explained: “There were lots of people from my tribe who were also put in prison or hanged. It became my dream ever since I saw them building that statue to one day topple it.”

Yet he now says he would prefer to be living under Saddam than under US occupation. He said: “The devil you know [is] better than the devil you don’t. We no longer know friend from foe. The situation is becoming more dangerous. It’s not getting better at all. People are poor and the prices are going higher and higher.”

Saddam, he says, “was like Stalin. But the occupation is proving to be worse”.

According to an opinion poll of 5,000 Iraqis carried out over the past month, 49% say they are better off now than under Saddam, and 26% say life was better under Saddam. More than one in four said they had had a close relative murdered in the past three years.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A high school senior’s 14-foot banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” gave the Supreme Court a provocative prop for a lively argument Monday about the extent of schools’ control over student speech.

If the justices conclude Joseph Frederick’s homemade sign was a pro-drug message, they are likely to side with principal Deborah Morse. She suspended Frederick in 2002 when he unfurled the banner across the street from the school in Juneau, Alaska.

“I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including the character formation and not to use drugs,” Chief Justice Roberts said Monday. (Watch why “bong hits” are on the court’s plate )

But the court could rule for Frederick if it determines that he was, as he has contended, conducting a free-speech experiment using a nonsensical message that contained no pitch for drug use.

“It sounds like just a kid’s provocative statement to me,” Justice David Souter said.

Students in public schools don’t have the same rights as adults, but neither do they leave their constitutional protections at the schoolhouse gate, as the court said in a landmark speech-rights ruling from Vietnam era.

Morse, now a Juneau schools’ administrator, was at the court Monday. Frederick, teaching and studying in China, was not.

Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose Kirkland and Ellis law firm is representing Morse for free, argued that the justices should defer to the judgment of the principal. Morse reasonably interpreted the banner as a pro-drug message, despite what Frederick intended, Starr said.

School officials are perfectly within their rights to curtail student speech that advocates drug use, he said. “The message here is, in fact, critical,” Starr said.

Starr, joined by the Bush administration, also asked the court to adopt a broad rule that could essentially give public schools the right to clamp down on any speech with which they disagree. That argument did not appear to have widespread support among the justices.

Douglas Mertz of Juneau, Frederick’s lawyer, struggled to keep the focus away from drugs. “This is a case about free speech. It is not a case about drugs,” Mertz said.

Conservative groups that often are allied with the administration are backing Frederick out of concern that a ruling for Morse would let schools clamp down on religious expression, including speech that might oppose homosexuality or abortion.

The outcome also could stray from the conservative-liberal split that often characterizes controversial cases.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote several opinions in favor of student speech rights while a federal appeals court judge, seemed more concerned by the administration’s broad argument in favor of schools than did his fellow conservatives.

“I find that a very, a very disturbing argument,” Alito told Justice Department lawyer Edwin Kneedler, “because schools have … defined their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech that’s inconsistent with educational missions.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in the court’s liberal wing, said he was troubled a ruling in favor of Frederick, even if he was making a joke, would make it harder to principals to run their schools.

“We’ll suddenly see people testing limits all over the place in the high schools,” Breyer said.

On the other hand, he said, a decision favorable to the schools “may really limit people’s rights on free speech. That’s what I’m struggling with.”

After the arguments, two dozen sign-carrying demonstrators chanted, “Teachers should teach, not limit free speech.”

Scores of students waited outside the court early Monday for a chance to listen to the arguments.

Ninth graders on a class trip from Mosinee, Wisconsin, were in general agreement on the issue. Cari Kemp, 15, said Frederick’s protest was “just a joke” but that “the school took it too far.”

The justices, as they often do, sought to probe the limits of each side’s argument by altering the facts one way or another.

What if, Souter asked, a student held a small sign in a Shakespeare class with the same message Frederick used. “If the kids look around and they say, well, so and so has got his bong sign again,” Souter said, as laughter filled the courtroom. “They then return to Macbeth. Does the teacher have to, does the school have to tolerate that sign in the Shakespeare class?”

Justice Antonin Scalia, ridiculing the notion that schools should have to tolerate speech that seems to support illegal activities, asked about a button that says, “Smoke Pot, It’s Fun.”

Or, he wondered, should the court conclude that only speech in support of violent crime can be censored. “‘Extortion Is Profitable,’ that’s okay?” Scalia asked.

A clear majority seemed to side with Morse on one point, that she shouldn’t have to compensate Frederick. A federal appeals court said Morse would have to pay Frederick because she should have known her actions violated the Constitution.