‘No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president's desperation. 

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists - in fact, all American Muslims, period - have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that "the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy." But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a "shameful act," it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab. 

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story - which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year - because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had "legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force." But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing "all necessary force" in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.’ 

Bush's Snoopgate

There is something George W. Bush should understand, being that he's a dry drunk; one is too many and a thousand never enough.  

That little rule of thumb is doubly true of torture and spying on fellow Americans. Justifying one water-boarding becomes justification for the next, and the next until, before you know it, torture becomes not just another tool in the box, but the tool of choice. 

Spying and Torture: Don't Go There

A Tortured Argument 

Kirk Anderson

‘The snow finally arrived in my little conservative pot-hole in upstate New York. As much as I detest winter and the cold, there’s something incomparably peaceful about a late December night as the snow falls. The quiet is so intense that you can almost hear the flakes touch the ground. The only thing breaking the silence is the sound of the chains of a lone snow plough in the distance or, if the hour is early enough, the bells of one of three churches in my neighbourhood chiming a Christmas carol. It’s kind of Norman Rockwell when you get right down to it. But there’s a problem.

Right now, on this very night while I take in the quiet warmth and comforting seclusion with my family this holiday season, somewhere out there is a man far from his loved ones. He wears a hood and his hands are bound behind his back. He lies bruised and naked in a dark, cold makeshift prison cell. The echoes of his screams still ring in his ears as immeasurable fear overtakes his very soul. 

We don’t know who he is anymore than his family knows where he is. No one knows if he’s guilty of anything nor does anyone know if he’s just one of those “errors in policy

Three Years To Go...

‘Violence in America is today a manifestation of our society and history, of a never ending thirst for blood, conquest, oppression and death that sprung from the first moment of Puritan arrival. Before and after the Revolutionary war Americans participated in one of the greatest acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing the world has ever witnessed. Millions upon millions of native Indians were slaughtered, raped and cleansed from the lands of North America. Manifest destiny ransacked from Atlantic to Pacific like a devastating hurricane, destroying everything native people thought precious and sacred. Wars against native populations extinguishing the energies of men, women, children and elderly alike.  

The American thirst for violence had been born.  

The addiction for blood would become insatiable and never ending.’ 

Of The Evil Empire

‘While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea.  

Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and - Lo! - the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.’ 

President Jonah