The Rag Blog

There’s a new sheriff in town–and it’s neither the U.S. nor a U.S.-sponsored surrogate “invited” by the U.S. It’s another of those pesky international conventions the administration loves to hate and refuses to join–but still cannot stop from taking effect. Fifteen years in the making, the pact outlaws state terrorism of a type frequently practiced by the United States: “extraordinary rendition.”

On this topic, February was a month of unwelcome revelations (from the administration’s perspective) and long overdue (from the people’s perspective) media attention on the policies and programs the White House created and justified for incarcerating “known” or suspected terrorists in the extensive acknowledged and unacknowledged Defense Department and CIA prison systems created nearly 5 years ago.

This is an interesting juxtaposition of dates. Work on the treaty started some nine years before 9/11. This suggests at least two possibilities: the French (the chief UN Security Council sponsor of the treaty) were prescient about the flow of events to come, or they were aware that some governments (e.g., the United States), unknown to their people, were systematically and on a large scale violating (or at least were preparing to violate) fundamental human rights of individuals alleged to pose a dire threat to a country’s “national security.”

We may never know just how extensive these prison systems were prior to 9/11 anymore than after that date. Some numbers but few exact locations have come to light because of the abuses perpetrated in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s 14 (or more) “black sites” in Europe and other locations abroad. There are also a few U.S. legal residents and even citizens that have been incarcerated for aiding and abetting or providing “material support” for terror activities. Nonetheless, enough is known to suggest that the Bush administration has gravely over-reached itself in its claims that it is only exercising the inherent “right of self-defense” which absolves it of all counterclaims that its actions constitute international crimes. What does the record of the last few months show?

Exposing Overreach Abroad

The 2007 record chronologically opens on January 31 when German prosecutors issued warrants for 13 CIA agents suspected of engineering the “extraordinary rendition” of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese heritage, who was “disappeared” at the Serbian-Macedonian border in December 2003. Khaled says he was flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan where he says–as do many others who were caught up in the CIA’s global “black prison” complex–that he suffered abusive treatment for a number of months before being turned over to Lebanese security personnel.

As February opened, in Brussels, the European Parliament approved the findings of an internal European Union investigation ordered by the Council of Europe into the complicity of European nations in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program in violation of EU policy–citing Britain, Germany, and Italy in particular but also noting that others knew of but ignored CIA flights carrying drugged and kidnapped victims such as al-Masri through their national airspace.

While these two threads evolved, Italian courts were proceeding with preliminary enquiries in a criminal complaint against 26 CIA agents (in absentia) and five Italian security agents (present in court) accused of kidnapping and transporting from Milan to Cairo the Egyptian cleric and U.S. terror “suspect” Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr (also known as Abu Omar). Nasr, who entered Italy seeking asylum, claims in an eleven-page letter that he was tortured repeatedly by Egyptian security personnel.

By February’s midpoint, the Swiss government (the Federal Council) had given a green light to the country’s courts to begin criminal prosecution of anyone involved in transporting Nasr through Swiss air space. (Allegedly, the CIA flew Nasr from Aviano Airbase in Italy to Ramstein Airbase in Germany and thence to Egypt.)

Three weeks later, on March 6, Representative Ed Markey (MA) introduced “reciprocal” legislation intended to halt arbitrary kidnappings by the CIA. Entitled the “Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act,” the legislation (H.R. 1352) “prohibits the return or other transfer of persons by the United States, for the purpose of detention, interrogation, trial, or otherwise, to countries where torture or other inhuman treatment of prisons occurs.”

Ed. Note: For background on this story go to:
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23968.shtml

and

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24008.shtml

The top news stories out of Iraq March 5 and 6 showed that the occupation continues to make Iraq a deadly place for Iraqis and for the U.S. occupation forces. Nine GIs were killed, six north of Baghdad by a roadside explosion. And dozens of Iraqis were blown up or burned in explosions or killed by U.S. fire.

Up to two million Iraqis have fled the country, unable to bear the insecurity that the U.S. occupation has imposed on many areas of Iraq since the March 20, 2003 invasion, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. U.S. imperialism is a conquering power that has brought repression and humiliation to Iraqis without constructing a viable economy or a stable society.

A key event that has captured the attention and activities of the worldwide solidarity movement with Iraq is the attempt of the Iraqi government to schedule the execution of three women for their alleged participation in the resistance movement.

The women are 31-year-old Wassan Talib, charged with the killing of five police officers in an attack on the police; 25-year-old Zainab Fadhil, charged for an attack on a joint patrol of the Iraqi and U.S. armies in Baghdad; and 26-year-old Liqa Muhammad, charged with the killing of an official in the Green Zone in the course of a kidnapping.

All are in Baghdad’s Al-Kadhimiya Prison. Two are caring for their small children, who are with them in prison. The 1-year-old daughter of Liqa Muhammad was born in prison. All the women deny the charges for which they face death by hanging.

Fearing a quick execution on March 3, leading activists in the BRussell’s Tribunal in Belgium, from the Turkish anti-war movement, from the British anti-war movement, from the International Action Center in the U.S. and many others around the world, joined to wage a petition campaign to protest and stop the impending executions. (brusselstribunal.org)

As a result of the campaign, high officials in Turkey, Britain and the European Union protested to the Baghdad regime.

According to a March 2 statement signed by Hana Al Bayaty, Ian Douglas, Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Iman Saadoon, Dirk Adriaensens and Ayse Berktay, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated that “the three Iraqi women will not be executed until an appeals court has ruled on their cases.”

The statement continues: “This assurance came from Iraqi authorities. It is not enough. We demand to know the charges on which these three Iraqi women stand convicted. We demand to know the date of their appeal hearings. We demand that a public statement is made. We demand that they be afforded all due protections under international human rights and humanitarian law.”

And it makes what is the most powerful point: “If charged with resisting foreign occupation and aggression, we declare this charge illegal.”

The Bush administration has perfected the art of fall-guy selection. The more convoluted the plot, the more credible the fall guy must be. As Lewis “Scooter” Libby was the fall guy in Washington, Premier Nuri al-Maliki will be the fall guy in Baghdad.

The Baghdad conference on Saturday was a derivative talk-fest setting up three committees to prepare the way for another meeting at the foreign-minister level next month in Istanbul. The subtext, though never explicit, is more glaring: it is the absolute

US impotence to guarantee security or stability in Iraq, and the desperate search for a way out, now pitting the “axis of fear” (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates) against the “axis of evil” (Iran and Syria).

The spiraling equation in Iraq is stark. The more that a lone Sunni Arab mujahid with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher can take down a US$25 million Apache helicopter, the more Pentagon counterinsurgency tactics will include “surgical strikes” with minimal “collateral damage” on occupied civilians.

The more President George W Bush displays brute force in the non-stop surge, and the more Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army lies low, even in a monster slum like Sadr City (whose “street” name is Madinat al-Thawra, “City of the Revolution”), and the more Sunni guerrillas wreak havoc over unprotected Shi’ites (114 dead and more than 150 wounded pilgrims to Karbala last Tuesday; 31 pilgrims coming back from Karbala on Sunday – the day after the Baghdad conference).

The everyday safety of scores of Shi’ites used to be guaranteed by the Mehdi Army. The Jaish al-Mehdi’s main tasks are socio-economic, with a heavy focus on education and charity, but they also involve security, most of all in impoverished Baghdad. The Mehdi Army was already splintered into at least three factions. But now, as a consequence of the surge, neighborhood associations as well as commanders not totally faithful to Muqtada have decided not to lie low anymore – and in effect to reorganize Shi’ite civilian defense.

If a US Army base, rather a Fort Apache, is set up in the “City of the Revolution” – as is taken for granted in Baghdad – it won’t fall in the short term. But it will fall eventually – when the Mehdi Army totally unmelts from the civilian population. For the moment, the US Cavalry is bombing their houses (in Karbala) or raiding them (in Najaf) just to find nothing.

Munthir al-Kewther, born in Najaf, holding a PhD in Islamic philosophy from Kufa University and currently dean of a Dutch journalism faculty, has been adamant in denouncing a systematic US assassination spree targeting key Mehdi Army and Sadrist leaders. The best example, according to Dr Kewther, “was the assassination last December of Sahib al-Ameri in front of his wife and children in his house in Najaf. Al-Ameri was the secretary general of the Shahidollah Institute, a charitable organization that helps poor and displaced people. He had no connections whatsoever to the Mehdi Army” (see The Sadr movement ‘will eventually triumph’, Asia Times Online, March 7).

This fits in a much bigger picture – the apocalyptic devastation of a whole country directly or indirectly engineered by the Bush administration. No fewer than 4 million Iraqis have been killed directly or indirectly, or been forced into exile.

“Sunnis vs. Shi’ites, Why they Hate each other. What’s really driving the civil war that’s tearing the Middle East apart.”

So proclaims the cover of the March 5th, 2007, issue of Time magazine, U.S and Pacific editions. Presumably, they know better than to put it on the cover of the European edition.

It reminds me of the “Iraq at war with itself” cover of The Economist, May 2006, which featured the face of a bawling Iraqi man. I commented on it here.

Then it was the face of grief. Now it’s the face of hate.

In both cases, Iraqis are portrayed as unfortunately emotional before the typical reader of Time, whose “person of 2006”, let us recall, was You, the face of which is rationality itself, a computer.

Note the shades of “Why do they hate us?” which followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

There is now a rat’s nest of attacks and retaliation, causes and effects. But let’s start with the event which seems to have transformed a united Iraqi resistance to the occupation into a civil war, the bombing of the al-Askari mosque, a little over a year ago.

My own thoughts on this at the time are in The al-Askari mosque: who were those masked gunmen?

Is it true that the mood on the street following the destruction of the dome was anti-Sunni? Not according to Sami Ramadani, writing in The Guardian: The word on the street was (and is) that this was the work of the U.S. and its allies—U.S. and Israeli flags were burned in protest—not Sunni extremists. The mood was anti-occupation, not sectarian.

So who were those masked gunmen who took around 12 hours to plant the explosives under that dome, in the then U.S. controlled Samarra?

It’s a question many Iraqis are asking even now. It underlies Akram Abdulrazzaq’s Iraq’s Car Bombers—Who are They? Why is it that of the thousands of car bombs, not a single owner of these cars has been identified?

He goes on:

Before Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, the country had a sophisticated car registration system, and the authorities were able to identify the owner of any wrecked vehicle in a matter of minutes.

So why not now?

Don’t these cars have registrations and serial numbers? We have yet to hear of the authorities identifying the owner of a single vehicle used in a car bombing or even where it came from.

Iraqis, he argues, are not persuaded by the authorities’ “naive excuses”.

They need the Americans and the Iraqi authorities they support to tell them where in the world all these car bombs are coming from. How is it that they manage to sneak through so many American and Iraqi checkpoints and road blocks, especially in Baghdad?

With more than 80,000 American troops now in Baghdad, and every modern means of technology available to them, how indeed.

Amin al-Hashmee, in Hiding Iraq’s Death Squads is No Game, asks:

How can one ignore the fact that with all of their capabilities, the occupiers and the government failed to prevent a vehicle carrying hundreds of kilos of explosives from freely crossing the border, traveling the streets and passing through check point after check point? On top of that, the authorities have been unable to identify even a single car bomb or person who prepares them; and they have failed to inhibit their passage through government checkpoints on their way to park amid shops and innocent people.

Wouldn’t you think that the “security services” would make a special effort at the February 12 ceremony at the Shorja market to mark the one year anniversary of the bombing of the al-Askari mosque? Two car bombs. At least 80 people killed. [Link]

Hitting out at lawmakers who profess to back the troops but oppose Bush’s plans in Iraq, Cheney said proof of their commitment would come as they consider legislation to provide nearly $100 billion for the rest of this year’s costs of the wars.

The House plans to begin considering a bill this week that would fully finance the administration’s request. Senate action is expected to come later.

“When members of Congress pursue an anti-war strategy that’s been called ‘slow bleeding,’ they are not supporting the troops, they are undermining them,” Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

WASHINGTON – The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he believes he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of a Democratic state official.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias “in passing” to Gonzales.

“He doesn’t exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers,” Perino said, relaying Rove’s hazy recollection.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House.

Folks often ask, rather cynically, where are the students protesting the war? Well, the answer is that they are there–on their campuses and in the dorms–organizing speakers, rallies and teach-ins. The fact that folks off campus do not hear about these events does not mean that they aren’t occurring. What it does mean is that the media is choosing not to cover them. Here in Asheville, NC, the local SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) linked group at University of North Carolina-Asheville (UNCA) organized a counter-recruitment protest in January 2006, a walkout and march against the war last October and is now actively involved in getting students to go to the March 17th March on the Pentagon. At UNC’s Chapel Hill campus, six students were arrested on February 17, 2007 after refusing to leave Congressman David Price’s office in a protest demanding that he vote against further war funding. Meanwhile, on February 15th, students at campuses around the country held rallies and teach-ins against the war. While the movement has not reached the proportions organizers want to see, it is growing. The next student day of protest is scheduled for March 20th–three days after the March on the Pentagon. I recently connected with UNCA SDS member Kati Ketz over email. Besides her activities here in Asheville, Kati is also a spokesperson for the SDS call for the March 20th Day of Action Against the War. The exchange with Kati was an opportunity for me to learn what antiwar students have been up to and how they see the future. I share the transcript below.

Ron: First, what is the March 20th Day of Action? How did the idea originate?

Kati: March 20th is an SDS national day of student and youth action against the war in Iraq. The idea came out of an SDS-sponsored meeting of activists at the School of the Americas demonstration in Ft. Benning, GA. Over 100 students from 20 different campuses were at this meeting, and at the end we voted to make March 20th a national day of action, in order to take all of the local organizing we have been doing on our campuses and attempting to connect those struggles to make a larger impact on a national scale.

Ron: What do the organizers hope to accomplish? What would connote a successful day, here in Asheville and nationally?

Kati: We hope that this day of action will be a catalyst for students to rise up and get organized against the war in Iraq. Four years is four years too many, and it’s time that students in this country get organized against this war. In Asheville, we hope that our actions will draw in more people who want to get more involved in organizing against the war. We also hope that our actions contribute to building a grassroots student anti-war movement. Nationally, we hope that this will help build ties with other campuses and connect different movements together in order to work towards ending this war.

Ron: I notice that the majority of the campuses that have signed on for the March 20th action are from the southern part of the United States. Why do you think this is? In my mind it’s somewhat significant in that it goes against the idea so many US residents have about the south—you know, reactionary and pro-war.

Kati: I think it is very significant that a lot of schools from the south are organizing against the war. It goes against the stigma that the south is normally faced with – that all anti-war organizing happens in the north and that the southern US is largely ignorant of and not involved in any progressive movements. There is some exciting organizing going on in the south – for example, UNC SDS took part in organizing a demonstration against John Ashcroft, who came to speak at their campus. Members of both Alabama and Asheville SDS groups also have participated in a lot of events (MLK day marches, a 4th of July march in New Orleans) concerning race and national oppression, since that is something that is especially relevant to us in the south.

It’s amazing to see that, for March 20th, the schools signing on to the call are from all over the United States – from North Carolina and Alabama in the south to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara in the West to New York City and Boston in the northeast to Minneapolis, Chicago, and Ohio in the Midwest, to name a few.

Ron:What is your impression of the new SDS? Is it growing in numbers and influence?

Kati: I think that we as students finally have an opportunity to build an independent student anti-war movement through SDS. I talk with students on a regular basis that are either considering or have just affiliated with SDS, and the number of SDS chapters grows weekly. SDS groups are having regional conferences and connecting with each other through forum, conferences and actions. Now, we are connecting with one another as SDS through this national day of action. There is a felt need in the student movement for a national student anti-war organization, and SDS is it.

Ron: What are your hopes for its future?

03/11/07 “New York Times” — — EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

Mr. Libby’s novel was called “The Apprentice.” His memoir could be titled “The Accomplice.” Its first chapter would open in August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too fittingly, with the Congressional appearance of two Iraq veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

It was WHIG’s secret machinations more than four years ago that led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq’s supposedly imminent threat to America with “gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.” In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in “Hubris,” it was WHIG (equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that Saddam’s “smoking gun” could be “a mushroom cloud.”

Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies. (It also tried to hide the financial cost of the war by keeping it out of the regular defense budget, but that’s another, if related, story.) The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range. Now we can fully appreciate that bizarre incident on C-Span in October 2003, when an anguished Cher, of all unlikely callers, phoned in to ask why administration officials, from the president down, were not being photographed with patients like those she had visited at Walter Reed. “I don’t understand why these guys are so hidden,” she said.

Harry Belafonte at 80 has a real story to tell. He remembers, for example, a barely known political hopeful turning up at his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

John F Kennedy, who was trying to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency, wanted advice and endorsement from the biggest black star in showbusiness.

Nearly half a century on, Belafonte sits in an easy chair and reflects on the meeting: “I listened to him and I refused to endorse him, telling him that his best bet was that he should begin to seek out more details of our struggle and who our leaders were and begin to talk to them rather than just seeking to talk to celebrities.”

He advised JFK to seek out Martin Luther King, then a young activist preacher in Montgomery, Alabama. “He hardly knew who Dr King was. That pointed out to me that he was really distant from our struggle.”

But Kennedy listened and learned, and made contact with the black leader. In a tight election, the black vote split 70:30 Kennedy’s way, enough to tip the finest balance.

Under JFK and then Lyndon B Johnson , Belafonte was Dr King’s conduit to Washington, and also the financial provider at crucial moments, particularly when the civil rights leader had been jailed and needed to be bailed out.

The United States has been defeated in Iraq. That doesn’t mean that there’ll be a troop withdrawal anytime soon, but it does mean that there’s no chance of achieving the mission’s political objectives. Iraq will not be a democracy, reconstruction will be minimal, and the security situation will continue to deteriorate into the foreseeable future.

The real goals of the invasion are equally unachievable. While the US has established a number of military bases at the heart of the world’s energy-center; oil output has dwindled to 1.6 million barrels per day, nearly half of post-war production. More importantly, the administration has no clear strategy for protecting pipelines, oil tankers and major facilities. Oil production will be spotty for years to come even if security improves. This will have grave effects on oil futures; triggering erratic spikes in prices and roiling the world energy markets. If the contagion spreads to the other Gulf States, as many political analysts now expect, many of the world’s oil-dependent countries will go through an agonizing cycle of recession/depression.

America’s failure in Iraq is not merely a defeat for the Bush administration. It is also a defeat for the “unipolar-model” of world order. Iraq proves that that the superpower model cannot provide the stability, security or guarantee of human rights that are essential for garnering the support of the 6 billion people who now occupy the planet. The mushrooming of armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Somalia foreshadows a broader and more violent confrontation between the over-stretched American legions and their increasingly adaptable and lethal enemies. Resistance to the imperial order is on the rise everywhere.

The United States does not have the resources or the public support to prevail in such a conflict. Nor does it have the moral authority to persuade the world of the merit of its cause. The Bush administration’s extra-legal actions have galvanized the majority of people against the United States. America has become a threat to the very human rights and civil liberties with which it used to be identified. There’s little popular support for imprisoning enemies without charges, for torturing suspects with impunity, for kidnapping people off the streets of foreign capitals, or for invading unarmed sovereign nations without the approval of the United Nations. These are fundamental violations to international law as well as commonly held principles of human decency.

The Bush administration defends its illegal activities as an essential part of the new world order; a model of global governance which allows Washington to police the world according to its own discretion. The vast majority of people have rejected this model and polls clearly indicate declining support for US policies nearly everywhere. As former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski noted:

“American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, (but) the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.”

The United States is a nation in a state of irreversible decline; its foundational principles have been abandoned and its center of political power is a moral swamp. The Bush presidency represents the ethical low point in American history.