This was a courageous move by Feingold and one that should be acknowledged and supported. It remains to be seen if this will be a watershed moment towards regaining some sanity in our governemnt, if it will be a turning point for the Democratic leadership to fight back, or if he will simply be stoned and left lying in the road to die.


REMARKS OF SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD - INTRODUCING A RESOLUTION TO CENSURE PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
As Prepared
March 13, 2006

Mr. President, when the President of the United States breaks the law, he must be held accountable. That is why today I am introducing a resolution to censure President George W. Bush.

The President authorized an illegal program to spy on American citizens on American soil, and then misled Congress and the public about the existence and legality of that program. It is up to this body to reaffirm the rule of law by condemning the President’s actions.

All of us in this body took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and bear true allegiance to the same. Fulfilling that oath requires us to speak clearly and forcefully when the President violates the law. This resolution allows us to send a clear message that the President’s conduct was wrong.

And we must do that. The President’s actions demand a formal judgment from Congress.

At moments in our history like this, we are reminded why the founders balanced the powers of the different branches of government so carefully in the Constitution. At the very heart of our system of government lies the recognition that some leaders will do wrong, and that others in the government will then bear the responsibility to do right.

This President has done wrong. This body can do right by condemning his conduct and showing the people of this nation that his actions will not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

To date, members of Congress have responded in very different ways to the President’s conduct. Some are responding by defending his conduct, ceding him the power he claims, and even seeking to grant him expanded statutory authorization powers to make his conduct legal. While we know he is breaking the law, we do not know the details of what the President has authorized or whether there is any need to change the law to allow it, yet some want to give him carte blanche to continue his illegal conduct. To approve the President’s actions now, without demanding a full inquiry into this program, a detailed explanation for why the President authorized it, and accountability for his illegal actions, would be irresponsible. It would be to abandon the duty of the legislative branch under our constitutional system of separation of powers while the President recklessly grabs for power and ignores the rule of law.

Others in Congress have taken important steps to check the President. Senator Specter has held hearings on the wiretapping program in the Judiciary Committee. He has even suggested that Congress may need to use the power of the purse in order to get some answers out of the Administration. And Senator Byrd has proposed that Congress establish an independent commission to investigate this program.

As we move forward, Congress will need to consider a range of possible actions, including investigations, independent commissions, legislation, or even impeachment. But, at a minimum, Congress should censure a president who has so plainly broken the law.

Our founders anticipated that these kinds of abuses would occur. Federalist Number 51 speaks of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances:

“It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Mr. President, we are faced with an executive branch that places itself above the law. The founders understood that the branches must check each other to control abuses of government power. The president’s actions are such an abuse, Mr. President. His actions must be checked, and he should be censured.

This President exploited the climate of anxiety after September 11, 2001, both to push for overly intrusive powers in the Patriot Act, and to take us into a war in Iraq that has been a tragic diversion from the critical fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates. In both of those instances, however, Congress gave its approval to the President’s actions, however mistaken that approval may have been.
That was not the case with the illegal domestic wiretapping program authorized by the President shortly after September 11th. The President violated the law, ignored the Constitution and the other two branches of government, and disregarded the rights and freedoms upon which our country was founded. No one questions whether the government should wiretap suspected terrorists. Of course we should, and we can under current law. If there were a demonstrated need to change that law, Congress could consider that step. But instead the President is refusing to follow that law while offering the flimsiest of arguments to justify his misconduct. He must be held accountable for his actions.

The facts are straightforward: Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as “FISA”, nearly 30 years ago to ensure that as we wiretap suspected terrorists and spies, we also protect innocent Americans from unjustified government intrusion. FISA makes it a crime to wiretap Americans on U.S. soil without the requisite warrants, and the President has ordered warrantless wiretaps of Americans on U.S. soil. The President has broken that law, and that alone is unacceptable. But the President did much more than that.

Not only did the President break the law, he also actively misled Congress and the American people about his actions, and then, when the program was made public, about the legality of the NSA program.

He has fundamentally violated the trust of the American people.

The President’s own words show just how seriously he has violated that trust.

We now know that the NSA wiretapping program began not long after September 11th. Before the existence of this program was revealed, the President went out of his way in several speeches to assure the public that the government was getting court orders to wiretap Americans in the United States – something that he now admits was not the case.

On April 20, 2004, for example, the President told an audience in Buffalo that: “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way.”
In fact, a lot had changed, but the President wasn’t being upfront with the American people.

Just months later, on July 14, 2004, in my own state of Wisconsin, the President said that: “Any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.”

Last summer, on June 9, 2005, the President spoke in Columbus, Ohio, and again insisted that his administration was abiding by the laws governing wiretaps. “Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the U.S.”
In all of these cases, the President knew he wasn’t telling the complete story. But engaged in tough political battle during the presidential campaign, and later over Patriot Act reauthorization, he wanted to convince the public that a systems of checks and balances was in place to protect innocent people from government snooping. He knew when he gave those reassurances that he had authorized the NSA to bypass the very system of checks and balances that he was using as a shield against criticisms of the Patriot Act and his Administration’s performance.

This conduct is unacceptable. The President had a duty to play it straight with the American people. But for political purposes, he ignored that duty.

After a New York Times story exposed the NSA program in December of last year, the White House launched an intensive effort to mislead the American people yet again. No one would come to testify before Congress until February, but the President’s surrogates held press conferences and made speeches to try to convince the public that he had acted lawfully.

Most troubling of all, the President himself participated in this disinformation campaign. In the State of the Union address, he implied that the program was necessary because otherwise the government would be unable to wiretap terrorists at all. That is simply untrue. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t need a warrant to wiretap terrorists overseas – period. You do need a warrant to wiretap Americans on American soil and Congress passed FISA specifically to lay out the rules for these types of domestic wiretaps.

FISA created a secret court, made up of judges who develop national security expertise, to issue warrants for surveillance of suspected terrorists and spies. These are the judges from whom the Bush Administration has obtained thousands of warrants since 9/11. They are the judges who review applications for business records orders and wiretapping authority under the Patriot Act. The Administration has almost never had a warrant request rejected by those judges. It has used the FISA Court thousands of times, but at the same time it asserts that FISA is an “old law” or “out of date” in this age of terrorism and can’t be complied with. Clearly, the Administration can and does comply with it – except when it doesn’t. Then it just arbitrarily decides to go around these judges, and around the law.

The Administration has said that it ignored FISA because it takes too long to get a warrant under that law. But we know that in an emergency, where the Attorney General believes that surveillance must begin before a court order can be obtained, FISA permits the wiretap to be executed immediately as long as the government goes to the court within 72 hours. The Attorney General has complained that the emergency provision does not give him enough flexibility, he has complained that getting a FISA application together or getting the necessary approvals takes too long. But the problems he has cited are bureaucratic barriers that the executive branch put in place, and could remove if it wanted.

FISA also permits the Attorney General to authorize unlimited warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States during the 15 days following a declaration of war, to allow time to consider any amendments to FISA required by a wartime emergency. That is the time period that Congress specified. Yet the President thinks that he can do this indefinitely.

The President has argued that Congress gave him authority to wiretap Americans on U.S. soil without a warrant when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force after September 11, 2001. Mr. President, that is ridiculous. Members of Congress did not pass this resolution to give the President blanket authority to order warrantless wiretaps. We all know that. Anyone in this body who would tell you otherwise either wasn’t here at the time or isn’t telling the truth. We authorized the President to use military force in Afghanistan, a necessary and justified response to September 11. We did not authorize him to wiretap American citizens on American soil without going through the process that was set up nearly three decades ago precisely to facilitate the domestic surveillance of terrorists – with the approval of a judge. That is why both Republicans and Democrats have questioned this theory.

This particular claim is further undermined by congressional approval of the Patriot Act just a few weeks after we passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The Patriot Act made it easier for law enforcement to conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists and spies, while maintaining FISA’s baseline requirement of judicial approval for wiretaps of Americans in the U.S. It is ridiculous to think that Congress would have negotiated and enacted all the changes to FISA in the Patriot Act if it thought it had just authorized the President to ignore FISA in the AUMF.
In addition, in the intelligence authorization bill passed in December 2001, we extended the emergency authority in FISA, at the Administration’s request, from 24 to 72 hours. Why do that if the President has the power to ignore FISA? That makes no sense at all.

The President has also said that his inherent executive power gives him the power to approve this program. But here the President is acting in direct violation of a criminal statute. That means his power is, as Justice Jackson said in the steel seizure cases half a century ago, “at its lowest ebb.” A letter from a group of law professors and former executive branch officials points out that “every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting the Commander-in-Chief’s authority, it has upheld the statute.” The Senate reports issued when FISA was enacted confirm the understanding that FISA overrode any pre-existing inherent authority of the President. As the 1978 Senate Judiciary Committee report stated, FISA “recognizes no inherent power of the president in this area.” And “Congress has declared that this statute, not any claimed presidential power, controls.” Contrary to what the President told the country in the State of the Union, no court has ever approved warrantless surveillance in violation of FISA.
The President’s claims of inherent executive authority, and his assertions that the courts have approved this type of activity, are baseless.

But it is one thing to make a legal argument that has no real support in the law. It is much worse to do what the President has done, which is to make misleading statements about what prior Presidents have done and what courts have approved, to try to make the public believe his legal arguments are much stronger than they are.
For example, in the State of the Union, the President argued that federal courts have approved the use of presidential authority that he was invoking. I asked the Attorney General about this when he came before the Judiciary Committee, and he could point me to no court – not the Supreme Court or any other court – that has considered whether, after FISA was enacted, the President nonetheless had the authority to bypass it and authorize warrantless wiretaps. Not one court. The Administration’s effort to find support for what it has done in snippets of other court decisions would be laughable if this issue were not so serious.

In the same speech, the President referred to other Presidents in American history who cited executive authority to order warrantless surveillance. But of course, those past presidents – like Wilson and Roosevelt – were acting before the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that our communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, and before Congress decided in 1978 that the executive branch could no longer unilaterally decide which Americans to wiretap. I asked the Attorney General about this issue when he testified before the Judiciary Committee. And neither he nor anyone in the Administration has been able to come up with a single prior example of wiretapping inside the United States since 1978 that was conducted outside FISA’s authorization.

So the President’s arguments in the State of the Union were baseless, and it is unacceptable that the President of the United States would so obviously mislead the Congress and American public.

The President also has argued that periodic internal executive branch review provides an adequate check on the program. He has even characterized this periodic review as a safeguard for civil liberties. But we don’t know what this check involves. And we do know that Congress explicitly rejected this idea of unilateral executive decision-making in this area when it passed FISA.
Finally, the President has tried to claim that informing a handful of congressional leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, somehow excuses breaking the law. Of course, several of these members said they weren’t given the full story. And all of them were prohibited from discussing what they were told. So the fact that they were informed under these extraordinary circumstances does not constitute congressional oversight, and it most certainly does not constitute congressional approval of the program.

Indeed, it doesn’t even comply with the National Security Act, which requires the entire memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee to be “fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States.” Nor does the latest agreement to allow a seven-member subcommittee to review the program comply with the law. Granting a minority of the committee access to information is inadequate and still does not comply with the law requiring that the full committee be kept fully informed.
In addition, we now know that some of the Gang of Eight expressed concern about the program. The Administration ignored their protests. One of the eight members of Congress who has been briefed about the program, Congresswoman Jane Harman, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, has said she sees no reason why the Administration cannot accomplish its goals within the law as currently written.

None of the President’s arguments explains or excuses his conduct, or the NSA’s domestic spying program. Not one. It is hard to believe that the President has the audacity to claim that they do.

And perhaps that is what is most troubling here, Mr. President. Even more troubling than the arguments the President has made is what he relies on to make them convincing – the credibility of the office of the President itself. He essentially argues that the American people should trust him simply because of the office he holds.

But Presidents don’t serve our country by just asking for trust, they must earn that trust, and they must tell the truth.
This President hides behind flawed legal arguments, and even behind the office he holds, but he cannot hide from what he has created: nothing short of a constitutional crisis. The President has violated the law, and Congress must respond. Congress must investigate and demand answers. Congress should also determine whether current law is inadequate and address that deficiency if it is demonstrated. But before doing so, Congress should ensure that there is accountability for authorizing illegal conduct.

A formal censure by Congress is an appropriate and responsible first step to assure the public that when the President thinks he can violate the law without consequences, Congress has the will to hold him accountable. If Congress does not reaffirm the rule of law, we will create another failure of leadership, and deal another blow to the public’s trust.

The President’s wrongdoing demands a response. And not just a response that prevents wrongdoing in the future, but a response that passes judgment on what has happened. We in the Congress bear the responsibility to check a President who has violated the law, who continues to violate the law, and who has not been held accountable for his actions.

Passing a resolution to censure the President is a way to hold this President accountable. A resolution of censure is a time-honored means for the Congress to express the most serious disapproval possible, short of impeachment, of the Executive’s conduct. It is different than passing a law to make clear that certain conduct is impermissible or to cut off funding for certain activities. Both of those alternatives are ways for Congress to affect future action. But when the President acts illegally, he should be formally rebuked. He should be censured.

The founders anticipated abuses of executive power by creating a balance of powers in the Constitution. Supporting and defending the Constitution, as we have taken an oath to do, require us to preserve that balance, and to have the will to act. We must meet a serious transgression by the President with a serious response. We must work, as the founders urged us in Federalist Number 51, to control the abuses of government.

The Constitution looks to the Congress to right the balance of power. The American people look to us to take action, to speak out, with one clear voice, against wrongdoing by the President of the United States. In our system of government, no one, not even the President, is above the law.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the resolution be printed in the Record following my remarks. I yield the floor.

THE PRESIDENT AND MR. MILLER

THE PRESIDENT AND MR. MILLER
Tom Watson

Bode Miller was the perfect candidate for the packaged American Hero, a good-lucking lad who played the rebel to perfection for the image-makers, and ran with the hype and the credit card ads to the 2006 Olympics. Miller was a portable symbol of American lone rangers, the guy who did it his way and reached for the gold. Except he didn't reach. He turned up hollow and empty and unwilling to sacrifice. He skiied off the course, and he skiied off the story-line.

Just as the Bridge to Nowhere is the perfect metaphor for rudderless national leader of the Republican Party, so the ski bum Bode Miller and his devil-may-care attitude toward spectacular failure on the world stage makes a fine stand-in for the President of the United States.

Compare the scorecards. Downhill, Combined, Super-G, Giant Slalom, Slalom ... 5th, Disqualified, Did Not Finish, 6th, Did Not Finish. Spygate, Iraq, Katrina, Torture, Port Security. Or pick your own issues, any issues. No medals, folks - just ignominy and embarassment before the world. What Bode Miller is to Olympic triumph, George Bush is to Presidential history, flopping off the slick course of national politics like James Buchanan in Team USA spandex.
Of course, it's one thing to be an over-hyped, overweight slalom slacker hanging out till all hours in the bars of Turin, letting down your sponsors, your teammates, and your fans. To me, athletes never really let their countries down - that nationalistic stuff is just for T-shirt sales. The Olympic movement is about as idealistic as the Nike advertising budget. In the end, Bode Miller really disgraced no one but himself. His stupid little episode will fade, and his moment on the public stage is nearly at an end. George Bush's incredible failure will be with us for many, many years. Increasingly isolated (if that's possible) and with his dream team riddled by buckshot and scandal, our national ski bum has the country on the icy, dangerous downhill towards disaster.

George Bush in the flight suit on that carrier was Bode Miller in the Nike ads before the Olympics, all image and promise. No substance and sacrifice, no guts and inner fire. Here's what Mr. Miller told the (obviously angry) team at NBC Sports:

"The expectations were other people's. I'm comfortable with what I've accomplished, including at the Olympics ... I wanted to have fun here, to enjoy the Olympic experience, not be holed up in a closet and not ever leave your room. I got to party and socialize at an Olympic level ... I just did it my way. I'm not a martyr, and I'm not a do-gooder. I just want to go out and rock. And man, I rocked here."

Replace Olympics and Olympic with Presidency and Presidential, and how far are you really from the life and times of George W. Bush - who, after all, can always say he got to party and socialize on the Presidential level after a life partying and socializing on the silver spoon circuit.
Bode Miller is right. He is not a martyr. And he has absolutely nothing in common with the American men and women who are dying in our name in the streets of Iraqi cities as the Bush-triggered civil war rages. He has nothing in common with the 2,500 killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is nothing like the young Americans in military hospitals in Germany and Maryland and Texas and elsewhere, kids missing limbs and suffering paralysis and blindness, young people who time and time again tell the politicians and reporters who come around their beds: "I just want to get back to my unit."

Bode Miller is just another selfish American, another potent symbol of our self-satisfied society, but at least he doesn't ask more from others than he is willing to contribute himself. His failure is his own.

George Bush's failure is ours.

IT’S MUNICH IN AMERICA. THERE WILL BE NO NORMANDY.

A powerful presentation of where we are headed if we can't stop the forces in power right now. This is a warning, It Can Happen Here. In fact, it is and it is just a question of whether we have the will to turn the tide.


IT’S MUNICH IN AMERICA. THERE WILL BE NO NORMANDY.
by David Michael Green

This is it, folks. This is the scenario our Founders lost sleep over. This is the day they prepared us for.

Outside the Philadelphia convention Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues were crafting. His reply? “A republic. If you can keep it.” And that is just the question at issue today. Can we keep it?

Sure, it can sound melodramatic to use the f-word (no, not the one Churlish Cheney hurled at Patrick Leahy), and I have mostly avoided doing so for just that reason. Especially where the politically less informed are concerned, arguing that America is slipping into fascism can be the first and last point they’ll hear you make.

But, nowadays, even George F. Will is worried. You know you’re in a seriously bad place when that happens.

America may not be a fascist country today, but it’s not for want of trying. I have no question but that through Dick Cheney’s dark heart courses the blood of Mussolini. No wonder the damn thing’s so diseased. And I have no doubt that Karl Rove has only admiration and envy for Joseph Goebbels. Hey, why can’t we do that here? (Hint: We are.)

America is not a fascist country (if it was, you wouldn’t be reading this), but pardon me if I don’t defer to Bush defenders and ringside Democrats who consider me hysterical for worrying about the direction in which we’re heading.

These are the same people who’ve spent the last two decades denying the existence of global warming, while we now learn with each passing week how much worse than we had ever imagined is that environmental wreckage. These are the same people who said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and planned accordingly. These are the same people who prepared us for 9/11, the Iraq occupation, Hurricane Katrina and the prescription drug plan, and who have set new records for ineptitude in responding to those crises. These are the people who can’t get body armor on our troops, three years after launching the war, and who are getting flunking grades in terrorism preparation from the 9/11 Commission four years after that attack. These are the same people who have turned a massive surplus into a record-setting debt, and coupled it with equally breathtaking trade deficits. And now they want to cut federal tax revenue even more.

Yes, he is the president, but golly gee, Sargent Carter, he sure seems to make an awful lot of mistakes!

So forgive me if I don’t trust their judgement on matters of rather serious importance. Forgive me if I don’t stand by hoping they’re right as the two hundred year-old experiment in American democracy goes down the toilet. Besides, I thought being a conservative meant taking the prudent course, anyhow. Even if there was only a one in a hundred chance that a grenade was live, would you play with it? Wouldn’t it have been better to have acted ‘conservatively’ with the fate of the planet at stake, and assumed that global warming might be real? And, likewise, shouldn’t we worry about what is happening to American democracy now, while we still can?

The truth is, there is a government in office which seeks such complete power and dominance that even some conservatives have started to notice. Too blind to see the true intentions of this bunch, they can at least figure out that an imperial presidency created by George Bush might one day be inherited by Hillary Clinton (complete with her plans for a revolutionary dope-smoking lesbian Marxist state and global UN domination, enforced by an armada of black helicopters), so now even these fools are getting nervous about where this goes. They know that the only difference between the monarchism our Founders so reviled and contemporary Cheneyism is that the technology of our time allows George Bush to turn George III into George Orwell.

It’s Munich in America, people. We can dream the pleasant dream that if we just stand by quietly while the Boy King gobbles up some of our liberties, he won’t want any more, but that would be a lot like Chamberlain dreaming that a chunk of Czechoslovakia would be enough to appease Hitler. It wasn’t, and it won’t be.

Do I overstate the concern? The New York Times recently editorialized “We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers – and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.” The Times should know. Between rah-rah’ing the war for Bush, sitting on the Downing Street Memos as if they were banana import trade policy documents, and covering for Judith Miller while she covered for The Cheney Gang, they have about as much blood on their hands as does Donald Rumsfeld. But if even the Times can work up the concern to print a line like that, we’re in a world of hurt.

And we are, in fact, in a world of hurt. Those shreds of parchment on the floor of the National Archives aren’t from Mrs. Washington’s shopping list, I’m afraid to say.

It is true, of course, that other presidents – even the best of them – have taken enormous liberties with the Constitution, especially during wartime. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR jailed Americans on the West Coast for the crime of having Japanese ancestry, Truman and Eisenhower stood by while McCarthyism ripped a gaping hole through American civil liberties, and Nixon and his plumbers went to work on his political enemies in the name of national security. Of course, we now look back on those episodes as among the most shameful in American history. But the present crew is even more dangerous for their intentions of creating permanent war to justify permanent repression.

Already they’ve torn large chunks out of the Constitution.

Article One creates the legislative branch, that which the Founders intended to be the most powerful and consequential. Today, we have a president who makes the stunning assertion that he is the “sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs”. This Congress seems mostly to agree, even though the Founders gave them the power to declare war, to fund all governmental activities, to ratify treaties and to oversee the executive. Who, us? Bye-bye Article One.

Article Three creates a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes (especially over governmental powers) and to protect the Constitution. But BushCo can’t be bothered to follow even the Court’s tentative interventions into due process concerning Guantánamo and beyond. And why should it? By the time they get done with loading the damn thing up with ‘unitary executive’ fifth-column shills like Roberts and Alito, it will be a moot court, just like the ones in law school. Once the Supreme Court becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the executive branch (about one vote from now), it’s bye-bye Article Three.

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble in protest. But protest is a joke in Bush’s America. People are kenneled off into pens so far from the president he is never confronted with any contrary views at all, apart from the odd funeral he has to show up at but Rove can’t script. The halls of Congress are ground zero for American democracy, much boasted about at home and jammed down the throat of the world (except when the results don’t favor American corporate or strategic interests). But go there and sit in the balcony wearing a t-shirt with the number of dead soldiers in Iraq printed on it and see how fast you get a lesson in Bush’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And that little display at the state of the union address was no freak event, either. That kind of thing happened all the time during the 2004 campaign. At Bush rallies, people were getting arrested for the bumper-stickers on their cars.

The First Amendment also protects freedom of the press. That freedom has not been eliminated, per se, but it has been effectively neutered beyond effectiveness. Between the White House intimidating most of the press, coopting the rest, stonewalling information requests, planting stories in the American and foreign media, and buying off journalists, today’s mainstream media has too often become a pathetic megaphone for White House lies, and that includes those supposed bastions of liberalism, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bye-bye First Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees “against unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation”. Can you say “NSA”? “Guantánamo”? “Abu Ghraib”? It’s bad enough that Bush has authorized himself to bug anybody, arrest anybody, convict anybody and silence anybody, but his NSA chief doesn’t even appear to have read the Fourth Amendment. That whole thing about probable cause was lost on him, as he and his president simultaneously trampled the separation of powers and checks and balances doctrines by eliminating two out of three branches of government from their little surveillance loop.

Meanwhile, informed estimates repeatedly assert that the majority of detainees rotting away in Guantánamo are there either because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time simply and got swept away like so much garbage into a dustpan, or were reported as al Qaeda so that one Afghan clan could use the US military to burn another. And so there they sit, unable to be charged, to be tried, to exercise habeas corpus, to have representation, to confront witnesses – unable now even to starve themselves to death in protest. If this wasn’t precisely the fear of the Founders when they put this language into the Constitution, then Dick Cheney is a poster boy for the ACLU. Strike the Fourth Amendment.

And take with it the Fifth (no one shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), the Sixth (“the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”, the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense”), and the Eighth, providing against “cruel and unusual punishments”). Boom, boom, boom.

In a disgusting display of legal sophistry, the administration would argue that these provisions don’t apply because of jurisdiction, which of course was the entire purpose for putting their gulag in Guantánamo in the first place. As if it is not American territory since we ‘lease’ it from Cuba. As if Castro could send in the police to clean up the open sore of Bush’s human rights travesty there, and the US could do nothing about it, since it is Cuban land. Right.

But even if Fun With Domestic Jurisprudence is to be their game, the actions of the administration also represent a massive breach of international law, since the Geneva Conventions prohibit precisely these sorts of horrors which the Creature from Crawford has visited upon the poor SOBs caught in his dragnet.

Your scissors are probably getting a bit dull by now, but this means that not only is international law in scraps, but you can also go ahead and cut out Article Six of the Constitution as well, which provides that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land”. Ah, how ‘quaint’. How very ‘obsolete’.

Such treaties may be the supreme law in some land, but apparently not in Bush Land. Or, at least not if you don’t mind another cute legal charade, in which a new category of POWs called “unlawful combatants” is fabricated with the intention of rendering – with disingenuousness extraordinaire – the detainees as falling outside the Geneva provisions.

That’s precious, as if a ‘lawful’ Bush all of a sudden got religion for the fine points of international jurisprudence. Except, of course, when it came to the need for obtaining a Security Council resolution to invade Iraq. Except when it comes to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush junta has been desperately trying to undermine at every opportunity (gee, I wonder why, given the Court’s mandate to prosecute war criminals). Except for nuclear nonproliferation. Except for the use of white phosphorus in Falluja. Apparently the only legal distinctions these guys follow are the ones Bush orders Alberto Gonzales, that paragon of legal independence and the rule of law, to create for him out of whole cloth. That international law.

There’s not much left of the Constitution now that these guys have tortured it as if it were some personal project in Lynndie England’s basement. Of course, they’ve made damn sure that the Second Amendment is fully protected, to the point where John Ashcroft wouldn’t investigate the gun purchase records of the 9/11 hijackers. You gotta love that. I wish they gave the rest of the Bill of Rights a tenth of the attention the Second Amendment gets. Heck, for that matter, I wish they’d even interpret the Second Amendment properly. Maybe in my next lifetime.

Meanwhile, arguably the three most brilliant inventions of the Constitution are separation of powers, the guarantee of civil liberties, and federalism. Even the latter – which has least to do with foreign affairs or checking executive power, and therefore has been least assaulted – is under duress as the Bush Gang attack state power any time it strays from their regressive political agenda, for instance with respect to euthanasia, medical marijuana or affirmative action.

In fact, all three of these key constitutional doctrines are suffering under a brutal assault from a regime which finds democracy and liberty fundamentally inconvenient to their aspirations for unlimited power. The administration absurdly claims to be bringing democracy to the Mid-East. (After that whole WMD thing went MIA, and Saddam’s links to al Qaeda proved equally credible, what the hell else were they going to say?). But far from the ludicrous claims that they are agents for the spread of democracy abroad, they are busy unraveling it with furious industry here at home.

It is, I’m afraid, Munich in America, and now we must decide whether to appease the bullies and pray for happy endings, or fight back to preserve a two hundred year-old experiment in democracy. Despite all its flaws and failures, Churchill was still right about it: Democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others. And that makes it worth fighting for.

But the spot we’re in now is actually worse than Munich, because there will be no Normandy in this war, and no Stalingrad. No country with the deterrent threat of a nuclear arsenal can ever be invaded by another country or group of countries, regardless of the magnitude of the latter’s own military power.

That means we’re on our own, folks. If we flip completely over to the dark side, nobody will be storming our beaches and scrambling up our cliffs to liberate us from our own folly. Hell, if they weren’t so worried about the international menace we represent, they’d probably be laughing at us, anyhow, thinking how richly we deserved the government we got.

But there’s nothing funny about this situation. Hitler dreamed of a thousand year reich, but didn’t count on the resilience of an endless army of Slavs, or the technological prowess of a nation of shopkeepers’ great-grandchildren hammering his would-be millennium down to a decade. If the US goes authoritarian (or worse), on the other hand, who will play Russia or America to our Germany? The answer is no one, and it is not apocalyptic paranoia to fear a very, very long period of unrelenting political darkness, once the curtain comes down.

Is this the beginning of the end for American democracy? Maybe. I have no doubt that unchecked Cheneyism intends precisely that. It’s therefore up to the rest of us to stop it. It’s up to us to say yes to Philadelphia, and no to Munich. Because there will be no Normandy.

Now we find out if we can keep Mr. Franklin’s republic, after all.

TOP 10 'CONSPIRACY THEORIES' ABOUT GEORGE W. BUSH

Maureen Farrell takes a look at what, in normal times, would be considered fantasies of the black helicopter crowd. Now, unfortunately, they represent probable realities.

TOP 10 'CONSPIRACY THEORIES' ABOUT GEORGE W. BUSH
by Maureen Farrell

"It is incumbent upon journalists, I think, to distrust conspiracy theories. But the problem with the conspiracy theory of the machine that lifted George 'Dubya' Bush to high office is that it never lets you down. . . ."
-- Ed Vulliamy, the Observer, Aug. 24, 2003

"This is a government takeover and Bush and Cheney are running it."
-- The Chattanoogan, Dec. 21, 2005

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, a friend sent me an obscure book featuring predictions by a blind Native American shaman. It was a thoughtful, but annoying, gesture. For all I knew, this "seer" could merely be a James Frey-sized figment of the author's imagination and these so-called prophecies could be nothing more than a patchwork of hunches. A prediction that the Red Sox would win the World Series would have been impressive. But wars? Economic downturns? Environmental disasters? Yawn.

This was the age of forged Nostradamus quotes and apocalyptic visions, however, and, with debunking in mind, I plodded ahead. Some predictions, which were reportedly made in 1982, were decidedly silly. Others, however, don't exactly ring foolish. Among the more noteworthy:

* Propaganda and terrorism will increase.
* Religious zealots will use the courts to try to force their views upon the general public.
* The Supreme Court will make unfortunate decisions that don't benefit the people.
* Several undeclared wars will be waged simultaneously.
* There will be high-level secrecy and clandestine agreements between nations.
* America will eventually become a police state.
* The draft will be reinstated.
* Americans will learn of government duplicity and cover-ups.

Whether or not this list is the result of guesswork, fabrications or something else, nearly a quarter of a century later, such musings have gone from the fringe to the forefront. Police state predictions? Check. Rumors of wars? Check. Clandestine agreements between nations? Check. Discoveries of government duplicity and cover-ups? Triple check.

Predictions are not the same thing as conspiracy theories, of course, but both can occur simultaneously. Sept. 11 commission co-chair Lee Hamilton's prediction that another terrorist attack is all but certain, for example, when combined with concerns about George W. Bush's imperial ambitions, creates the kind of speculation the founding fathers engaged in, long before FOX News was there to pooh-pooh concerns about tyrannical designs.

And though predictions and conspiracy theories are often speculative and contrived, it must be remembered that the term "tin foil hat" has its roots in historical fact and the tendency to tag a "gate" onto scandals proves that some conspiracy theories do, in fact, turn out to be true.

With the most secretive, power-hungry administration in recent history, George W. Bush has generated a cornucopia of theories. Many of them are ridiculous while others, like the assorted conspiracies relating to Skull and Bones, simply confirm suspicions about frat boys and prove that privilege and networking do, in fact, catapult people into high places.

Some theories, however, have Tina Turner-strength legs. For your consideration:

10. A Second Terror Attack Will Allow the Bush Administration to Complete the "Coup" that Began on Sept. 11, 2001

"September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler's hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush's claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?"
-- Former Reagan administration official and Wall Street Journal and National Review assistant editor Paul Craig Roberts, Jan. 2, 2006

"The 9-11 attacks provided the rationale for what amounts to a Bush family coup against the Constitution."
-- James Ridgeway, The Village Voice, Dec. 30, 2005

Six years ago, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration would use terror to achieve pre-packaged goals would have been laughed out of Dodge. The signs were there, however, going all the way back to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's stints in the Ford administration through their participation in Reagan-era Doomsday drills.

Initially, there were vague murmurings over foreign airways. "There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government," a mysterious American told the BBC in Nov. 2001, regarding allegations that the FBI was told to "back off" the bin Ladens. "Unnamed sources" eventually morphed into real people, however, and by the time Pentagon insider Karen Kwiatkowski came forward with revelations about what she called "a coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon," and respected journalist Seymour Hersh proclaimed that "cultists" had "taken the government over," this theory gained traction.

Despite attempts to discredit true believers as "full-mooners," revelations continued. And now that a former Bush administration official is saying that a "cabal" led by Rumsfeld and Cheney "hijacked US foreign policy" and a former Reagan administration official is saying that America is now an "incipient dictatorship," the ideology of Loon Land is capital T Truth to some very smart people.

Gen. Tommy Franks, you might recall, famously predicted that another terror attack will militarize our society and obliterate the Constitution, former White House counsel John Dean has warned of "constitutional dictatorship" and Paul Craig Roberts has openly wondered if another terror attack will lead to a total usurpation of constitutional government and "allow the Bush administration to complete its coup."

Roberts, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan, also believes that a "Jacobin coup" took place after Sept. 11 and that a "police state" is fast approaching. Joining the host of others raising concerns about questionable elections and a Supreme Court poised to give the executive branch unprecedented power, he sees "America's descent into dictatorship" as the "result of historical developments and of old political battles." But, he also contends that President Bush "is unlikely to be aware that the Constitution is experiencing its final rending on his watch."

Others are not so certain.

9. President Bush is Trampling the Constitution and Turning America into a Dictatorship

"The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history... There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship." -- The Nation, Jan. 9, 2006

"After September 11, we did not, for example, change from a democracy to a dictatorship, from a nation of laws to a nation in which one man endows himself with the authority to act above the law, immune to its dictates and limitations. We are not that country. We must never become that country. However, to hear President Bush, we are that country already." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 20, 2005.

To understand the origins of this theory, one would have to go back to America's founding, when James Madison wrote that the accumulation of power in any one of the three" separate and distinct" branches of government was the "very definition of tyranny." Fast forward to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's dream of "restoring the imperial presidency," George W. Bush's jokes about an American dictatorship, and arguments regarding the "Unitary Executive Theory of the Presidency," and suddenly Thomas Jefferson's observation that tyranny is the natural progression of all governments seems frighteningly apt.

Similar conspiracy theories were circulated during the Clinton years, too, you might recall, and when the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff called President Clinton a "serial violator of the Bill of Rights," he was tapping into an authoritarian trend that diehard Democrats preferred to ignore. (Republicans who gladly ignore the Constitution and rule of law are also guilty of putting power over principle.)

But even so, under Bush, authoritarianism thrived. "According to Bush doctrine, there are no checks and balances in American government anymore. A president can do what he pleases in the name of national security, and neither Congress nor the judiciary can stop him. At the end of the day, that is the real threat to American democracy," the Minneapolis Star Tribune explained.

Just how much of a threat? In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush installed a shadow government and restricted access to presidential records. Posse Comitatus, the law forbidding the military from being used to police US citizens, is on its last legs, -- and a new provision in the Patriot Act will create a federal police force with unprecedented power. A former Bush White House insider has described "decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy," and the Supreme Court is poised to further tilt the balance of powers towards the executive branch. Need more proof that the idea of "representative government" is an illusion? Since 9/11:

* US citizens have been detained for years without formal charges or trial.
* The president's "signing statements" have neutered bills passed by Congress - expanding presidential authority through a "unitary executive" doctrine.
* Bush has declared that he, as "commander in chief," can ignore the Geneva Conventions and laws such as the McCain amendment prohibiting torture.
* The Justice Department has concluded that there are "no limits" to the president's war-making authority.
* News of secret prisons and secret laws have come to the fore.
* The Pentagon has spied on groups that disagree with Mr. Bush's policies, including dangerous militants such as the Quakers.
* The F.B.I. has spied on the Catholic Worker's Group, Greenpeace and PETA.
* The Bush administration has ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without oversight -- and did so even before Sept. 11.

Before his death in 1989, All the King's Men author Robert Penn Warren predicted that the day might come when an America president would possess too much power. "Well, it'll probably be someone you least expect under circumstances nobody foresaw," he said. "And, of course, it'll come with a standing ovation from Congress."

8. President Bush Planned to Go to War with Iraq before 9/11

"A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001. The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC)"
-- The Sunday Herald, Sept. 15, 2002

"Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography. 'He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,' said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. 'It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.'. . . "
-- Russ Baker, GNN, Oct. 28, 2004

In 2001, the Onion ran a satirical inauguration speech, wherein Bush promised to run up the deficit, tear down the wall between church and state, and "engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years." Truth is often stranger than satire, however, and it was later discovered that well before Bush's selection as president, plans for war in Iraq had been drawn up and were waiting in the wings. "For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans," Ed Vulliamy wrote, referring to the cast of characters tied to the Project for a New American Century, whose memos and documents signaled a hunger for battle and foretold a future of wars on multiple fronts. (And possibly even a reinstatement of the draft.)

Yes, long before George Bush vowed to uphold the Constitution, plans were in the works -- going back to the last Gulf War, when the realists in George H.W. Bush's administration felt that unseating Saddam would bog the U.S down in an un-winnable guerilla war, and the neoconservatives disagreed to the point of obsession.

This turmoil was evident in 1992, when the radical Wolfowitz Doctrine, which called for a "go-it-alone" military strategy and a policy of preemption, was leaked to the press. And by 1998, right about the time George H.W. Bush was explaining why his administration did not remove Hussein from power, Paul Wolfowitz was testing the "cakewalk theory" before Congress, shilling for the Iraqi Liberation Act and promising that the U.S would not need to send major ground forces into Iraq to do the job.

How did George W. Bush, who promised a "humble" foreign policy during the 2000 campaign get mixed up in this? Mickey Herskowitz, Bush's ghost writer on A Charge To Keep, says that Governor Bush began talking about invading Iraq in 1999, in part, he believes, due to a Reagan-era credo ascribed to Dick Cheney: "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

"'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it," Bush told Herskowitz in one of two taped interviews. "If I have a chance to invade . . . if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

PBS' highly informative War Behind Closed Doors also examined how Bush's ideas might have taken root:

EVAN THOMAS, Asst. Managing Editor, "Newsweek": When George Bush was running for president, he essentially went to school. And various great and worthy men trooped down to Austin to teach George Bush about the world. And by and large, they told him that Iraq was unfinished, basically, but they had to be a little careful about it because, of course, George Bush's father was the one who hadn't finished the business. And if George W. Bush was elected president, he may end up having to do what his father didn't do or couldn't do, and that is killing off Saddam Hussein.

NARRATOR: In Bush, Wolfowitz saw a chance to get his ideas about a tougher American stance in the world implemented. But W, as he was known, was also being advised by Colin Powell. And during the campaign, neither side really knew where they stood with the candidate.

WILLIAM KRISTOL, V.P. Chief of Staff '89-'92: I wouldn't say that if you read Wolfowitz's defense policy guidance from 1992 and read most of Bush's campaign speeches and his statements in the debates, you would say, "Hey, Bush has really adopted Wolfowitz's world view."

Before the war began, Scowcroft penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Don't Attack Saddam" and both Herskowitz and author James Risen have chronicled ways George H. W. Bush counseled his son not to invade Iraq (Risen says at one point, George W. "angrily hung up the phone" during one of these conversations.). And, of course, who can forget Bob Woodward's revelation that Bush relied on "a higher father" instead of taking his earthly father's advice?

But regardless how many times administration officials say "Sept. 11 changed everything," the war in Iraq was a foregone conclusion long before Mohamed Atta became a household name. "From the very beginning there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told 60 Minutes in Jan. 2004, adding that the plans to invade Iraq began days after Bush's inauguration. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"

And the rest, as they say, is history.

7. The Bush Administration Conspired with Britain and Used Deliberate Deception to Make its Case for War with Iraq

"Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white...and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity. It has been a hard learning . . . that folks tend to believe what they want to believe. . . Thanks to an unauthorized disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from official documents . . . this time authentic, not forged. . . "
-- Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern, referring to the July 2002 Downing Street Memo, TomPaine.com, May 4, 2005

"The president of the United States caught conspiring to create a modern-day version of the sinking of the Maine? Talk about an impeachable offense."
-- David Corn, referring to a Jan. 2003 memo of a conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair, the Huffington Post, Feb. 2, 2006

In March, 2002, a full year before the start of the war in Iraq, former U.N. official Denis Halliday told Salon that "Saddam Hussein is not a threat to the U.S." and that "the whole weapons inspection issue is really just a ruse," echoing the sentiments Colin Powell had expressed earlier in Cairo, when he said that Hussein had "not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction" and was "unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Six months later, members of the intelligence community began speaking out against "cooked information" and false intelligence "from various Iraqi exiles" -- assertions which were soon backed by revelations about Ahmed Chalabi's "faulty intelligence," and the U.S. government's willingness to believe a less-than-credible agent named Curveball. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," a CIA official wrote in Feb. 2003, one day before Colin Powell made his regrettable presentation before the UN.

And while the Office of Special Plans (otherwise known as "the Lie Factory") generated damning evidence all by itself, the true smoking guns were found in memos uncovered by the British press. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," the Downing Street memo read, confirming what many suspected -- that Bush wanted war and would lie to get it. (When Rep Jim McDermott said as much in Sept. 2002, the Weekly Standard and right wing hacks went on the warpath).

A subsequent memo, written in Jan. 2003, indicates that not only was Bush trying to "fix" the facts around the policy, but was willing to create another Gulf of Tonkin type crisis in the skies over Baghdad. "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach," Bush reportedly told Tony Blair, indicating that he hoped to deceive Saddam in order to provoke an attack, even as he was pressing for a second UN resolution authorizing war.

Other evidence supporting this "conspiracy theory" include revelations that:

* The President made a list of false claims including the assertion that "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases." Declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document later proved that the Bush administration knew this information was less than credible.
* Ten days after 9/11, during a highly classified briefing, President Bush was told that there was no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the terror attacks. The State Department also pinpointed countries where al-Qaeda was known to operate, and Iraq was not listed among them. Even so, the president often uttered "Iraq" and "Sept. 11" in the same breath, a ploy that would best resonate with traumatized Americans.
* Joseph Wilson wrote his op-ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa," refuting the infamous "16 words" in the President's State of the Union speech, proving that faulty information made its way into high pronouncements. (Bush also repeated the aluminum tubes lie, which had also been discounted). The Bush administration countered by "outing" Wilson's CIA agent wife.
* The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's weapons programs and former senior US weapons inspector David Kay said that major stockpiles of WMD probably didn't exist in Iraq.
* Former US Congressman and eventual Sept. 11 co-chair Lee Hamilton told the Christian Science Monitor that he feared the Bush administration was twisting the facts. "My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," he said in 2002. In 2005, when the Downing Street memo was leaked to the press, Hamilton was proven prescient.

Thanks to lies and innuendo, by the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 70% of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet Dick Cheney, our beleaguered vice president, still contends that accusations that the Bush administration misled the public are "dishonest," "reprehensible" and "not legitimate".

6. President Bush Knew 9/11 Was Going to Happen

"George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, US government sources said yesterday. In a top-secret intelligence memo headlined 'Bin Laden determined to strike in the US', the President was told on 6 August that the Saudi-born terrorist hoped to 'bring the fight to America'. . ."
-- The Guardian, May 19, 2002

"By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US,' the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. . . In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports 'Bin Laden planning multiple operations,' 'Bin Laden network's plans advancing' and 'Bin Laden threats are real.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 13, 2004

Did Bush know Al Qaeda was going to attack the U.S.? Yes. Of course he did. If this sounds "out there" to you, I have a bridge to sell you in Stepford. The fact is, Bush either knew an attack was coming, or has the reading comprehension of a 2-year-old. In April and May, 2001, President Bush received a string of reports regarding bin Laden's plans, while in July, a CIA intelligence report for President Bush read, "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests."

That same month, when Bush attended the G-8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, the security measures were extreme -- considering the reports that Osama bin Laden might try to assassinate him -- possibly by flying a plane filled with explosives into a building. And on Aug 6, 2001, the President received a briefing entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US."

These are but a handful of the reports pointing to foreknowledge:

* "President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday." -- ("Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says," The New York Times, April 10, 2004)
* "Even though Bush has refused to make parts of the 9-11 report public, one thing is startlingly clear: The U.S. government had received repeated warnings of impending attacks -- and attacks using planes directed at New York and Washington -- for several years. The government never told us about what it knew was coming." -- James Ridgeway, ("Bush's 9-11 Secrets: The Government Received Warnings of Bin Laden's Plans to Attack New York and D.C.," The Village Voice, July 31, 2003)
* "It seems very probable that those in the White House knew much more than they have admitted, and they are covering up their failure to take action . . . After pulling together the information in the 9/11 Report, it is understandable why Bush is stonewalling. It is not very difficult to deduce what the president knew, and when he knew it. And the portrait that results is devastating." -- John Dean, ("The 9/11 Report Raises More Serious Questions about the White House Statements On Intelligence," Findlaw.com July, 29, 2003)
* "President Bush and his top advisers were informed by the CIA early last August that terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden had discussed the possibility of hijacking airplanes." ("Bush was Told of Hijacking Dangers," The Washington Post, May 16, 2002)
* "U.S. Had a Steady Stream of Pre-9/11 Warnings." -- (PBS, Sept. 18, 2002)
* "I saw papers that show US knew al-Qaeda would attack cities with airplanes'" -- FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, ('I saw papers that show US knew al-Qaeda would attack cities with airplanes": Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent," The Independent, April 2, 2004)

Other headlines read: ''Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes," (The New York Times, May 15, 2002); "Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings: Reports Preceded August 2001 Memo," (The Washington Post, April 13, 2004); and "Bush Knew of Terrorist Plot to Hijack US Planes,"(the Guardian, May 19, 2002). And in case you think the "liberal media" is the lone voice saying "they knew" prominent Republican members of the Senate Committee investigating Sept. 11 and the Sept. 11 Commission have made similar observations. "I don't believe any longer that it's a matter of connecting the dots. I think they had a veritable blueprint, and we want to know why they didn't act on it," Senator Arlen Specter said.

While it's clear "Bush knew," nobody really knows "why they didn't act on it." Was it laziness? Incompetence? Or something worse? Former British MP Michael Meacher has questioned if "US air security operations" might have "deliberately stood down on September 11" while Gore Vidal wondered if the "Bush junta" intentionally ignored 9/11 warnings to advance its preset agenda. Citing PNAC's observation that a "New Pearl Harbor" would be needed to enact the muscular foreign policy they foresaw and the fact that Bush's National Security Strategy, did, in fact, read like a PNAC wish list, advocates of this "let it happen on purpose" theory also cite Paul O'Neill's assertion that President Bush was looking for a reason to invade Iraq just days after his inauguration.

Others have also pointed to Operation Northwoods to substantiate their claims. "The Operation Northwoods plan shows the Pentagon was capable, according to [James] Bamford, "of launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting a (war on Cuba)," a Canadian TV show argued. "Can we be sure, therefore, that complicity by the Pentagon in the events of Sept. 11th is entirely out of the question?"

Conspiracy theorists have also wondered about John Ashcroft's "security concerns," Mayor Willie Brown's pre-9/11 warning, and Pentagon staffers' Sept. 11 flight cancellations. Throw in obvious propaganda, "problematic" explanations, class action lawsuits and the fact that George W. Bush just sat in that Florida classroom for minutes and you've added hefty speculation to the fire.

Yes, there is proof "Bush knew." But as for letting it 9/11 happen on purpose? As Robert Steinback recently pointed out in the Miami Herald, it will be years before documents concerning JFK's assassination are made public, and even longer before the Warren Commission's files are finally released. Why should anyone expect unanswered 9/11 questions to be answered any time soon?

Steinback nevertheless points to a group of PhDs who call themselves "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" who are currently asking the "hard questions" many prefer to avoid. Even so, admitting that there are inconsistencies within the official story is a far cry from accusing the U.S. government of complicity in the attacks. Suffice it to say that some questions may never be answered and some suspicions will never be laid to rest.

5. The Bush Administration Manipulated the Media to Disseminate Propaganda

"Much of the problem is the media itself, which serves as a disinformation agency for the Bush administration. Fox 'News' and right-wing talk radio are the worst, but with propagandistic outlets setting the standard for truth and patriotism, all of the media is affected to some degree. "
-- Former Wall Street Journal and National Review assistant editor Paul Craig Roberts, Jan. 30, 2006

"There is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. You never even get that idea floated in the mainstream media. If you bring it up, they hate the messenger."
-- Janeane Garofalo, the Washington Post, Jan.27, 2003 (two months before the war in Iraq began)

Given that the Government Accountability Office found that the Bush administration violated the law by engaging in "covert propaganda" within the U.S., the notion that the Bush White House manipulated the media is not even a conspiracy theory any more -- it's a conspiracy fact. In case you were out of the loop, the story went something like this: The Bush administration produced phony stories hyping everything from Medicare to federal student loan programs, which ran on American TV disguised as "news." It then turned around and paid columnist and frequent TV talk show guest Armstrong Williams $241,000 to promote its No Child Left Behind legislation. "This happens all the time," Armstrong told the Nation's David Corn, adding that "there are others."
Though columnists Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus were also on the White House payroll, speculation regarding "the others" ran rampant following one news conference, when Jeff Gannon, of Talon News and GOPUSA, asked President Bush how he could deal with Senate Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality." Bloggers immediately smelled a rat and within a month, the mainstream media also began to question how Gannon, a gay escort, was given clearance to attend White House briefings -- even before he was a reporter. "Planting or even just sanctioning a political operative in the WH press room is a dangerous precedent," CBS reported, pointing to Karl Rove, The who seemed to have Gannon's egg on his face.

To be fair, there is a time-honored tradition of government and media war-time collaboration. Whether reporting on the Maine or the Lusitania or the USS Maddox, the press has historically done what was needed to help the war effort. During the first Gulf War, Americans were treated to Propaganda Plus, when a PR firm was hired to sell the war to both the Senate and the public.

The PR campaign, we later learned, actually continued throughout the 1990s, with the government covertly working to sell regime change in Iraq. The Weekly Standard did its part, devoting an entire special edition devoted to taking out Saddam in 1995. As Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post revealed in Jan. 2003, "the Dec. 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, headlined its cover with a bold directive: Saddam Must Go: A How-to Guide. Two of the articles were written by current administration officials, including the lead one, by Zalmay M. Khalilzad, now special White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, now deputy defense secretary."

By the time Andrew Card explained why the Bush administration waited until Sept. 2002 to "market" the impending war in Iraq, American TV complied, coming up with powerful soundtracks and visuals that read "Showdown With Saddam" and "Countdown to Iraq" while making it appear as if an actual debate were taking place. When Phil Donahue tried to present the "other side," however, his show was cancelled, despite having MSNBC's highest primetime ratings. His crime? According to a study commissioned by NBC, Donahue seemed "to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives" as the competition was "waving the flag at every opportunity."

Other networks also felt the pinch, with CNN's Christine Amanpour saying that intimidation "by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News" led to "a climate of fear and self-censorship" and the unquestioning propagation of "disinformation." Those who raised questions were often smeared or worse, as Scott Ritter and Valerie Plame would later learn. "As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with indecency," Howard Stern said on his radio broadcast on March 19, 2004. "I have two sources inside the FCC. They know exactly what is going on. They had a meeting two weeks ago, freaking out. I seem to be making enough noise that people are realizing we could hurt George W. Bush in the elections. So they are trying to figure out at what point do they fine me."

Media manipulation goes way back, of course, but since the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which paved the way for Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, propaganda has dominated the airways, making true democracy all but impossible. "The whole idea that we can govern ourselves and have an intelligent debate, free of cant, free of disinformation, I think it's dead." author John MacArthur said, with the "swiftboating of John Murtha" recently proving his point.

The culprit is not just the conservative media, however, as The New York Times was especially helpful during the push for war. Judith Miller, in particular, came under fire. See if you can connect the dots:

* In 2000, a memo from a former colleague described New York Times reporter Miller as "an advocate," whose work "is little more than dictation from government sources . . . filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies." James Bamford later asserted that Miller "had been a trusted outlet for the INC's [Iraqi National Congress'] anti-Saddam propaganda for years."
* A story by Miller, containing disinformation indicating that Saddam Hussein sought high-strength aluminum tubes to develop a nuclear bomb, ran on the front page of the New York Times. Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice took to the Sunday morning talk shows, repeating Miller's assertions -- with Rice telling CNN, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
* Miller went to jail for refusing to name her source in the Plamegate investigation, (Scooter Libby) where she was visited by John Bolton, whose nomination for UN ambassador had been called into question by "claims that he tried to manipulate US intelligence to support his hawkish views." Libby, who was later indicted in the Plame case, wrote her this cryptic letter: "You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby."
Was Miller duped? Was she a pawn? Was she one of those CIA moles Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein warned of? Who knows? Regardless what drove Miller's reporting, one thing is clear: The New York Times has been a conduit for disinformation in the past and it was invaluable in helping this administration sell the war in Iraq. The "liberal media" strikes again.

4. G.W. Bush Conspired with Others to Steal the 2000 and 2004 Elections.

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . .Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, ESPN, Nov. 27, 2000

"[The Bush Family's] sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution."
-- Former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips, BuzzFlash, Jan. 7. 2004

While some believe a coup began on Sept. 11, others will tell you it began with the 2000 election. Even though George Bush's first cousin declared him the winner and his brother Jeb assured him he'd won Florida, many Americans remained unconvinced.

First there was the surreal sight of the Bush family on national TV, as staged and phony as Susan Smith's tearful plea to return her "kidnapped" children. Then came the well-groomed thugs, sent on Enron and Halliburton planes to stop the Florida recount. But it wasn't just James Baker's ploys or the Supreme Court's ruling that signaled something was amiss -- it was the attitude of ordinary citizens who were more concerned about their "team" winning than about democracy itself.

Unless you rely solely on FOX news (the modern equivalent to "living under a rock"), the shenanigans that occurred in pre-election Florida are now old news, and have been dissected at length in documentaries, magazines and to some degree, in the mainstream press. A St . Petersburg Times op-ed later deemed the election "stolen," the Associated Press reported that Florida had "quietly" admitted "election fraud," and Vanity Fair devoted a sizable portion of its Oct. 2004 issue to exactly how Team Bush pulled it off. By the time CNN sued the state of Florida for its ineligible voters list in 2004, the underbelly of the beast was plainly visible.

But in Nov. 2001, when Greg Palast uncovered then Secretary of State Katherine Harris' role in the shameful voter roll purge in Florida, the news was explosive. The New York Times -- the paper that would later print front page disinformation to sell the war in Iraq -- took a pass, however, until three years later, when it was too late to do anything about it.

At first, election irregularities were featured as anomalies, like when the Washington Post covered computer glitches that literally subtracted thousands of votes from Al Gore and gave them to a Socialist candidate. By the time similar problems were reported during the 2002 midterm and 2004 primary elections, people were understandably skittish, with e-voting failures having "shaken confidence in the technology installed at thousands of precincts" -- with as many as 20 states introducing legislation calling for paper receipts on voting machines.

In early 2004, Mother Jones predicted that "Ohio could become as decisive this year as Florida was four years ago" and sure enough, Americans awoke the day after the election without a decisive winner. And though John Kerry later conceded, questions have since been raised by computer programmers, mathematicians, journalists and others. "Was the election of 2004 stolen?" columnist Robert Koehler asked, before addressing the many "numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don't make sense."

There were warnings before the election, of course, with red flags being raised by researchers at prestigious Stanford and John Hopkins Universities. But despite Diebold's CEO's promise to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's prominent role in the Bush/Cheney campaign, and the suspicious election night lock-down in Warren County, Ohio, many still believed election angst could be attributed to a super-sized case of "sour grapes."

When Christopher Hitchens, who is admittedly not a Kerry fan, also weighed in, however, that excuse flew out the window. "Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. . . ," he wrote.

Rep. John Conyers and the Government Accountability Office also found widespread irregularities, and when statisticians picked apart the election results, Bush was not the legitimate winner. Pollster John Zogby compared the 2004 election to 1960's suspicious contest, and University of Pennsylvania professor Steven F. Freeman put the odds that exit polls were that wrong, in that many states, at 250 million to one.

The evidence was so compelling, in fact, that NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller took it upon himself to tackle the proverbial suggestion "somebody should write a book." His extensively-researched yet largely ignored Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) shines a crucial light on the "stealthy combination of computerized vote theft, bureaucratic monkey business, systematic shortages of viable equipment and old-fashioned dirty tricks. . . " that led to democracy's last debacle, and will most likely lead to the next.

Ohio's 2005 election also failed the smell test, and by late Jan. 2006, the Washington Post looked into allegations of election tampering -- without the dismissive, lazy reporting usually afforded the subject. Describing tests conducted by Florida's Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho, using "relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques," the paper quickly uncovered how easy it is to steal an election. "Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" election officials asked test participants, and though two marked their ballots "yes" and six said "no," by the time they went through Diebold's optical scan machine, the results read seven "yes" votes and one "no."

"More troubling than the test itself was the manner in which Diebold simply failed to respond to my concerns or the concerns of citizens who believe in American elections," Sancho said. "I really think they're not engaged in this discussion of how to make elections safer."

Hmmm. You don't say.

There is a reason, you see, that "None Dare Call It Stolen," and that reasons extends beyond the preponderance of evidence. "If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution," former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts wrote. "Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose."

James Madison predicted a similar scenario. "The day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility," he reportedly told the New York Post. "It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few."

Those would be the "one percenters." And chances are, you aren't one of them.

3. Candidate G. W. Bush Promised to Tear Down the Wall Between Church and State.

"Whatever else it achieves, the presidential campaign of 2000 will be remembered as the time in American politics when the wall separating church and state began to collapse."
-- The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 30, 2000

"Thomas Jefferson, one of our Founding Fathers, said that we should build a wall between the church and state. That wall is being deliberately and ostentatiously, not secretly, broken down. . . "
-- President Jimmy Carter, the Daily Show, Dec. 5, 2005

Remember Bill Clinton's impeachment? Back when the rule of law mattered? Some say that the drive for impeachment did not begin with Monica Lewinski, but the Religious Rights' long held desire to takeover American politics. ("I'm for evangelicals running for public office and winning if possible and getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government," the Rev. Billy Graham told viewers of the 700 Club in 1985).

According to Rolling Stone, the idea to impeach Clinton reportedly took root during a meeting of the Center for National Policy (CNP) in June 1997, and by 1998, disgraced House majority leader Tom DeLay -- who earned a 100% approval rating by the Christian Coalition -- provided fundamentalists with a "direct lobbying line to the U.S. Congress."

Some Senators were also on board and, with Supreme Court vacancies waiting in the wings, the Religious Right needed an executive partner.

Enter George W. Bush.

The crowning moment for America's fundamentalists reportedly came in 1999-- when candidate Bush made his "king-making speech" before CNP, wherein he was rumored to have promised to take a "tough stance against gays and lesbians" and appoint Religious Right-approved candidates to the Supreme Court. The Democratic National Committee requested a copy of the speech, but was denied, while ABC News and other organizations started asking questions, declaring CNP, which has included John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell among its influential members, as the "most powerful group you never heard of."

While Bush's trip to Bob Jones University made headlines, he also made a scantly noticed pilgrimage to meet with about two dozen fundamentalist leaders who called themselves the Committee to Restore American Values, which was headed by Left Behind series co-author and CNP founder Rev. Timothy LaHaye, who Rolling Stone reported, "played a quiet but pivotal role in putting George W. Bush in the White House."

How valid is this theory? The National Council of Churches, which represents America's mainstream Protestant churches, has said that Bush is the first President since George Washington to snub traditional churches while giving unparallel access to evangelicals.

Walter Cronkite and Jimmy Carter have both expressed dismay over what Carter calls the "increasing merger in this country of fundamentalism on the religious side [and] fundamentalism on the political side." And in the aftermath of the 2000 election:

* ABC News openly speculated that Christian conservatives were responsible for Bush's presidential nomination.
* The Washington Post described Bush as the first U.S. President to double as the Religious Right's "de facto leader."
* The Guardian reported that U.S. fundamentalists are "at the heart of power."
* The Village Voice reported that the Bush White House consults with apocalyptic Christians to make sure that U.S. foreign policy conforms to End Times prophecies.
* Karl Rove consulted James Dobson (the man "Focus on the Family" co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle called "a tremendous threat to the separation of church state") regarding President Bush's Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.
* The Marriage Protection Act passed in the House, using an untested provision that further weakens the wobbly wall between church and state.
* The Constitutional Restoration Act of 2004, which states that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over "any matter" regarding public officials who acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government" was reintroduced in 2005.

In Sept. 1960, Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy eased concerns that his Catholicism would interfere with his presidency. "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him," he said.

During the 2004, election, however, the GOP was caught dipping its pen into God's inkwell when the Bush campaign asked user-friendly congregations to hand over their church directories. And while one pastor even told parishioners to "vote for Bush" or leave, the IRS targeted one liberal church for giving an antiwar sermon.

While the Abramoff scandal has underscored ways the GOP has manipulated the folks Lee Atwater once referred to as "extra chromosome conservatives," concerns over "apocalyptic politics" cannot be overlooked. Today, one third of all Americans believe that Israel will soon be destroyed to make way for the second coming of Christ, sharing the same theology as the Islamofascists America's democratic quest is supposedly disarming. "And as far as the imminent apocalypse is concerned, [America's fundamentalists are] on the same page as the Mullahs in Tehran," conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan pointed out. "Just in case you were sleeping soundly at night."

2. George Bush is a Front Man for the Military Industrial Complex.

"In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about how 'we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.' That complex's recent mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under George W. Bush ... with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to have been in the Bushes' blood for nearly a century."
-- Former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 8, 2004

"The book [the Iron Triangle] opens up with a mention of Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech, in which he warned the country against the formation of this military-industrial complex. And I think that that is exactly what we're seeing today. We're seeing a very tight-knit group of companies and private military contractors that are virtually indistinguishable from various administrations and the political infrastructure of Washington, D.C. -- so much so that it's not clear whose interests we're acting on when we go to war. "
-- Dan Briody, BuzzFlash, June, 23, 2003

When Why We Fight documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki recently appeared on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked him if President Bush will be as candid as Dwight D. Eisenhower when he leaves office. "Do you see, perhaps, President Bush doing the same? Maybe coming out and say 'Beware of me. And my friends?'" Stewart asked, referring to Ike's famous and prescient parting warning against the "military industrial complex" and threats to our democracy.

Stewart was only half joking.

Eisenhower's daughter Susan later revealed that her father's insight evolved during his service as Supreme Allied commander during WWII -- when he realized that the arms race not about national defense or protection, but instilling a permanent, highly profitable national security state. (Ike's children also confessed that the "military-industrial complex" was originally called the "military-industrial-congressional complex," for reasons all too obvious).

Even before Eisenhower spoke out, Vice President Henry A. Wallace issued a similar warning against WWII war profiteers who were "clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war" and hoped "to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends." Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, was one such individual, forging a relationship with the Nazis that continued until 1951.

Kevin Phillips, a former GOP strategist, has written in length about how the Bush family was "present at the emergence of what became the U.S. military-industrial complex," modernizing Ike's warning with one of his own. "Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links," he wrote in 2004.

Since the Sept. 11, The Christian Science Monitor, Boston Herald, the Guardian and a host of others have connected the dots between Bush administration cronies and the windfalls of war. But the most stunning accusation came from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Pointing to the "extremely powerful" influence of the "Oval Office Cabal" of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he flat-out dubbed them "member[s] of what Dwight Eisenhower [called] the military industrial complex" and warned that they have "a concentration of power that is just unparalleled." And though Halliburton's subsidiary Brown and Root was part of the military-industrial complex back when Lyndon Johnson was the company's main man in Washington, when it comes to "entanglement and money-hunting in the Middle East," Phillip reminds us that "No previous presidency has had anything remotely similar. Not one."

How bad is it? "The complex is so pervasive, it's become invisible," says Sen. John McCain, and all anyone need do is research FDR and Harry Truman's attitudes towards war profiteering compared to those of today's "public servants" -- and the "revolving door" between the Defense Department and defense contractors looks especially crusty. Or better yet, go back and read some of Eisenhower's speeches, juxtaposed against our present reality. For a stunning sense of how entrenched the military industrial complex has become, consider this snippet from a speech Ike delivered in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower sounds like socialist compared to today's compromised Republicans and Democrats, doesn't he?

1. Bringing Osama bin Laden "to Justice" Was Never the Objective of the War on Terror.

"The White House has always seemed less compelled to capture Osama than to use him as a pretext for invading Iraq and as a political selling point. Karl Rove, coming out of his 'please don't indict me' crouch, tried to chase away the taint of the Abramoff scandal with a new round of terror-mongering for 2006: 'We need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of this moment. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for many Democrats.'"
-- Maureen Dowd, the New York Times, Jan. 21, 2006

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not
that important. It's not our priority."
-- President George W. Bush, March 13, 2002

Remember after Sept. 11? When President Bush promised to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive?" Or how about when he promised that Osama and his cohorts could run, but that they could not hide? Oh, sure, we've captured and "killed" Osama's head honchos a few times now (just how many lives does Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have anyway?) But it seems that reports of their deaths have often been greatly exaggerated.

With the catalogue of fibs we've been told, it is no wonder that conspiracy theories thrive. Soon after the War on Terror began, buzz about bin Laden began. It went something like this:

1. Catching Osama was not really the goal in Afghanistan, but building a pipeline to the rich oil reserves in the Caspian Sea basin was.

Though Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Dick Cheney and Enron have all been mentioned in conjunction with this theory, the meat of the matter lies in three easily-connected dots. Beginning with a Taliban delegation's trip to Texas to meet with Unocal officials to discuss a pipeline through Afghanistan, through a Unocal official's testimony before Congress, (in which he says Unocal's plans cannot go forward until a recognized government is in place in Afghanistan), this conspiracy theory concludes with president of Afghanistan and former Unocal employee Hamid Karzai's signature on such a deal. Taking a cue from Donald Rumsfeld, who said in Oct. 2001 that he doubted the U.S. would catch Osama, people who buy into this theory could have predicted early on that bin Laden would fall through the cracks in Tora Bora.

2. Catching Osama was not really the goal, but selling the pre-planned war in Iraq was.

George Bush repeatedly insinuated a link between Iraq and 9/11 -- despite the fact that ten days after 9/11, he was told there was no connection between the two. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda," he said, adding that his administration never said that Saddam was responsible for Sept. 11. Through innuendo and spin, however, he and his administration made their case for war, and by the time Operation Iraqi Freedom began, 70% of all Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was tied to the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush's assertion that his "last choice" was "the use of military power" also flew in the face of everything the Downing Street memo and subsequent evidence would later prove.

3. Catching Osama was not really the goal, but keeping Americans in a perpetual state of fear was.

Ever since John Ashcroft brought us the "Jose Padilla and the Dirty Bomb Show,"
the suspicious timing of bin Laden tapes and color-coded terror alerts have not gone unnoticed.

This is not to diminish to the terrorist threat. Most experts believe another terror attack is likely. And it's important to remember that al-Qeada has a habit of striking at five year intervals. And ironically, thanks to Operation Iraqi Freedom, equipment that could be used to make a nuclear bomb may have ended up in some very wrong hands.

Yes, terrorism is part of our new reality. We are at war, as they say, and chances are we will get hit again. But the more urgent threat -- as truly brave Americans see it -- comes from within. After all, terrorists can't defile the Constitution or take away our freedoms. Our "leaders" are the only ones in a position to do that.

There are two ways to look at this: One, that all "conspiracy theories" are garbage and the concerns outlined here are unsubstantiated nonsense. Or that the phrase "conspiracy theory" is often used to diffuse hidden truths. (Well-trained citizens scoff at the idea that anyone ever conspires to do anything, even though the US government charges people with "conspiracy" all the time.)

If all is fine and well, editorial boards across the country have simply lost their minds, and the country will "go back to normal" in time. More, likely, however, is that many US citizens will remain blind to assaults on our Constitution and democratic principles, which will become as illusive as Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis who were going to greet us as liberators.

The most pressing question, it seems, is not whether or not we'll be attacked again or who will win the next election. After all, if historian Chalmers Johnson is correct, a Democrat isn't going to save us from the "entrenched interests of the military industrial complex" either.

The question is actually an old one, first posed by a certain Mrs. Powel, at the close of the Constitutional Convention. "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" she asked Benjamin Franklin, who famously answered, "A republic if you can keep it."

The grand experiment is over, it seems, and it's time to lay the Republic to rest. "After a 230-year run, the 'unalienable rights' -- as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Founding Fathers -- are history," Robert Parry recently wrote.

All of this must sound remarkably "conspiratorial" to a nation distracted by Scott Peterson, Natalee Holloway and America's Next Top Model. Which brings us to the final, saddest, question of all: When all said is and done, will we even realize we lost our country to try to save our own skins?