Some aspects of Japan's death penalty make ours look positively progressive in comparison. Prisoners are told of their execution only moments before they are hanged. Their families are told of the execution only after the fact and are then ordered to collect the body within 24 hours. The Ministry of Justice refuses even to release the names of those executed, except to their relatives, and won't confirm the number of prisoners on death row. I hope John Ashcroft isn't planning any trips to Japan. We wouldn't want to give him any new ideas.

The good news in the article involves a community of Japanese Christians who adopt prisoners to prevent them from facing total isolation. Because of the powerful role of shame in Japanese society, families are subject to ostracism, and usually disassociate themselves from criminal relatives. The Christians in Japan, with their abiding faith in atonement and redemption, have taken it upon themselves to provide support for people who have no other support.

Maybe sending John Ashcroft to Japan might not be such a bad idea after all. He keeps claiming to be a Christian -- it's about time he got to know some.

Okay, I've changed my mind again about the whole Pledge of Allegiance debate. I don't just think they should drop the words "under God." I'm beginning to think they should ban the whole damn pledge. It apparently makes people crazy.

Atrios' response to Salon's article on school vouchers makes some really good points. This morning I said that for some students -- particularly minority kids stuck in bad urban schools -- vouchers may offer the only hope. And yet Atrios is right -- although the polling data is skimpy and inconclusive, much of it shows that urban African-American parents, whose kids would seem to have the most to gain from vouchers (if you believe the hype) don't like vouchers any more than white suburban parents do. It's a bad sign when you're letting a few anecdotes make your argument for you.

The strongest argument in favor of school vouchers is that it offers some students the only chance they have of escaping bad schools. I can't dismiss that argument. There are undoubtedly students who have gained from having another option. My problem with the argument is that when those few students gain, they do so at the expense of all the students who are left behind.

The strongest argument against vouchers for me is that at a time when everyone is talking about accountability, they encourage the exact opposite. Private schools are not required to give the same standardized tests as public schools, and even when they do, they are not required to release the scores. Even the schools that do release scores sometimes play games with them. I know of one local religious school where almost all of children starting kindergarten are 6 or very close to it (they park virtually all 5-year-olds in a pre-kindergarten class). Public schools here in California are required to take children who will not even turn 5 until several months after the school year starts. Public school parents sometime hold out kids who are not yet 5, but it's extremely rare to find even one 6 year old in a kindergarten class, let alone a class that is made up almost entirely of 6-year-olds (some of them pushing 7). That means the religious school children's test scores are being compared to those of children a full year younger. The test scores are roughly equal Ñ but since the public school children are younger, that means they are really doing quite a bit better. But unless you know the religious school's scam, you would not realize that.

And that is not even taking into account the fact that the school picks and chooses its students, taking only the easiest to educate.

More thoughts on school vouchers: The Supreme Court's ruling is expected to encourage the growth of companies running public schools on a for-profit basis. But according to Josh Marshall, Edison Schools, the largest such company, has been doing some Enron-style accounting lately. This is the best we can offer kids?

PEOPLE I DON'T UNDERSTAND
What kind of person asks himself "What would Jesus do?" and comes up with the answer "Make obscene phone calls and send threatening e-mails to uppity atheists?" Did I miss that part of the Bible?

Another thought on school vouchers: The nastiness of the Pledge of Allegiance debate suggests to me that the last thing we want to do right now is send more children to schools where they will be taught that God is on their side.

A thought on school vouchers: Several years ago I lived in a town that had two hospitals Ñ one Catholic, one non-religious. My children were born in the non-religious hospital, because when I went to an informational meeting for parents at the Catholic hospital a woman asked a question about birth control and recieved an icy response. They didn't just tell her that because they are a Catholic hospital they don't give out birth control information, they tried to make the woman feel as if even asking the question put her immortal soul at risk. I didn't like the idea of being in a hospital where I was afraid to ask health questions. But that was my choice. I certainly have no problem with someone else making a different choice.

But here's the problem. The non-religious hospital recently closed. The people in that town now have no choice but to be treated at a Catholic hospital. When it comes to their health, they are forced to live by Catholic rules.

I don't know what to do about that. But I think about it whenever I hear someone say that vouchers offer parents "choices." In every case I've heard of, the vouchers are small, not enough to come close to covering the tuition of non-religious schools. That means that the only choice parents have is between their local public school and a religious school. Although that's more choice than the people in my old town have when it comes to health care, it's still not much of a choice.

The Supreme Court ruled that it was irrelevant that 96 percent of the children enrolled in the Cleveland voucher program were enrolled in religious schools, since that make-up was the result of parents' choices, not government edict. In theory, that sounds fine. In practice, I'm not convinced those parents really had the opportunity to make completely free choices.

How the court's Pledge of Allegiance ruling affects some non-traditional believers.

An interesting argument that taking the words "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance could make Americans more genuinely religious because "bestowing an aura of authority on religion doesn't always serve the enterprise best."

I'm having second thoughts Ñ or maybe I should just say firmed up and less tentative thoughts Ñ about the Supreme Court decision on inserting "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance. My first thought was that it really didn't matter much. But the truth is people don't make death threats over things that don't matter very much. The manic and sometimes vicious reaction to the decision demonstrates how important it is to keep politics and religion separate. I'm also disturbed by the fact that no public figure has had the courage to stand up for the separation of church and state, to accept the decision with the good grace that John Kennedy accepted the 1962 Supreme Court ruling throwing out prayer in public schools, when he said that even though people were understandably angry, we are a country of laws, and court decisions ought to be respected. Instead we've had politicians encouraging people to just ignore the ruling. The president used the decision as evidence that we need more "judges who understand that our rights were derived from God" and announced that those were the kinds of judges he was going to put on the bench Ñ thereby overturning the Constitution, which guarantees that no religious test will ever be used as a test for holding office. There is far more danger to democracy from representatives who say the hell with laws they don't like, and the hell with the Constitution when it's inconvenient than from the loss of two words Ñ out of place words at that Ñ from the Pledge of Allegiance.

I plan to write something eventually about school vouchers, but don't have the time to think it through right now. In the meantime, here are some useful articles.

NY Times: Supreme Court Upholds Voucher System That Pays Religious Schools' Tuition

The Refining of Religious Neutrality

NY Times Editorial: The Wrong Ruling on Vouchers

LA TIMES EDITORIAL: A Blow to U.S. Education

Voucher Backers See Opening for a Wider Agenda

Voucher Ruling Seen As Further Narrowing Church-State Division

Reactions to School Vouchers Ruling

SALON: While civil libertarians are furious over the Supreme Court's voucher decision, many low-income African-Americans are solidly in the conservative camp.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on school vouchers, one expert says dramatic change could be decades away.

Green Light, Red Flag: Opening the floodgates for school vouchers won't help Republicans.

Who's Vouching for Vouchers?

Target: Public Education

From personal experience, Bill Keller has written the most intelligent and moving piece on the moral complexity of abortion that I have ever read.

Reading about President Bush's desire to resume assistance to the Indonesian military, I can't stop thinking about one of my favorite George Orwell essays, Shooting an Elephant. In the essay, Orwell describes his experience as a police officer in Burma, despising both his position as a representative of a colonial power and the people he polices. What is fascinating in the essay is Orwell's insight that colonialism leaves the oppressor just as powerless as the oppressed.

Called out one day to stop an escaped elephant that is rumored to be ravaging the local bazaar, Orwell finds himself, rifle in hand, followed by a crowd anxious to see an elephant shot Ñ both for the entertainment value, and for the meat. Orwell notes that he had no intention of actually shooting the elephant. He had picked up the rifle merely for self-defense, if necessary. A working elephant is a Burmese farmer's most valuable investment, and shooting one would be a vicious thing to do if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

When Orwell and the crowd find the elephant, it is peacefully eating, not hurting a soul. The logical thing to do is keep an eye on it, to make sure its mood doesn't change, and let it wander home when it is ready. There's only one problem. By now, two thousand people have gathered behind Orwell, expecting him to shoot. And Orwell realizes that he really has no choice in the matter. If he doesn't do what he knows is both stupid and wrong, if he doesn't shoot the elephant, he will look like a coward and a fool to the crowd.

I have to quote Orwell here: "It was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him. "

We Americans have a strong sense right now that we are the only power that counts. We are the "leading actor." We don't need to listen to anyone else. We have the strength to act on our own. The irony is that we are being jerked around by every petty tyrant who can convince us that his little squabbles are our own. And so we, like Orwell, do what we know is both stupid and wrong.

In 1993 the Clinton administration, concerned about human rights violations, cut off American weapons sales to Indonesia. Even strict limitations on military aid were imposed in 1999. The army is the most powerful institution in Indonesia, and civilian control is a only a dream. It has the kind of power only money can buy, funded by a business empire , which includes airlines, hotels, banks and insurance companies, as well as prostitution and illegal logging in tropical forests. It's also not especially enamored of petty American values like human rights.

But recently a suspected operative of Al Qaeda was arrested in Indonesia and turned over to the United States. The Bush administration is using the arrest of this rogue elephant to pressure Congress to finance a new unit for the Indonesian Army. They seem likely to get money for nonlethal equipment like radios and computers and even allowing some Indonesian officers to receive noncombatant training in the United States.

The Indonesian military wants a great deal more. They are pressing for weapons and combat equipment, not radios and lectures on human rights. And they seem pretty certain that they are going to get what they want. Lt. Gen. Agus Widjojo, the military's senior member of Parliament, recently told an interviewer that the United States needs Indonesia more than Indonesia needs the United States.

The crowd is behind us, waiting to see if we will put aside our moral scruples and common sense and put ourselves on the side of business savvy thugs (who, by the way, have also been involved in training Islamic militias.) They're waiting to see if we have the guts to shoot the elephant.

More Pledge of Allegiance, religion and government stuff from Slate.

* When Benjamin Franklin proposed during the Constitutional Convention that the founders begin each day with a prayer to God for guidance, his suggestion was defeated.

* The Constitution mentions religion only to guarantee that godly belief would never be used as a qualification for holding office.

* It's unclear precisely where the idea of adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance originated, but one force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same.

* The Congressional hearing on adopting the phrase "under God" focused on how important it was to promote religion Ñ which of course IS undeniably unconstitutional.

* In 1962 The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to allow prayer. When asked about the unpopular decision, President John F. Kennedy replied that he knew many people were angry, but that the decisions of the court had to be respected. He added that there was "a very easy remedy"Ñnot a constitutional amendment but a renewed commitment by Americans to pray at home, in their churches, and with their families.

I have no comment on any of that, except for the last part: I wish we still had a president as calm, reasonable and intelligent as Jack Kennedy. Maybe I should pray for one.

A new winner in the contest for dumbest remarks on the Pledge of Allegiance decision: Senator Joseph Lieberman called for a constitutional amendment to enshrine "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and said, "There may have been a more senseless, ridiculous decision issued by a court at some time, but I don't remember it." Ñ Dred Scott? Plessy v. Ferguson? Korematsu v. United States? Bush v. Gore?

I was wrong. There are much dumber things to say about the Pledge of Allegiance decision than the Kit Bond quote I focused on yesterday. Christian right columnist Cal Thomas on the decision: "On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists."

There is no doubt there is bias in the media, but it's a lot more complicated than anything you can reduce to "liberal" or "conservative" bias. This article holds an example. The Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune recently ran a long puff piece on Katherine Harris, who is running for Congress. Democrats understandably complained that Democratic candidates didn't get anything remotely resembling the same treatment. The newspaper's managing editor responded with a stunningly honest e-mail. In a nutshell, she said that Katherine Harris is famous, and the Democratic candidates are "complete unknowns." Harris, the editor added, is going to win the election, so she isn't going to waste the newspaper's space covering the losers. Now that certainly sounds like a bias against Democrats, but wait. The editor also stated that she dislikes Katherine Harris and has no intention of voting for her. In fact, in defense of her journalistic integrity she notes that in spite of her own feelings about Harris, the newspaper ran what is seen as an extremely favorable piece about her.

That's not integrity. That's just a bias for celebrity over substance. And I'd suggest that media bias has more to do with that than it does with any ideological labels.

Why are we trying to undermine the International Criminal Court?

"Both left and right in America have moralistic streaks that are always admirable, often useful and sometimes disastrous." Ñ Nicholas Kristof
I just find that an interesting statement. Moralism in politics is certainly sometimes a wonderful thing, and sometimes disastrous. "Always admirable?" I'll have to think about that, but I doubt it.

The worst aspect of all the business/ political scandals that have erupted in the past eight months or so is that they are so huge and so convoluted that they're impossible for an ordinary person to wrap his mind around. I understand that Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom and all the other crooks stole more money that I can imagine by cooking their books. But I have no idea how, and I don't think many people do. The scandals exist under the national radar (while we all focus on meaningless symbolic issues like the Pledge of Allegiance, or salacious ones like the kidnapping of the teenager in Utah Ñ simple things we can understand) because while we all know that something stinks here, we're reluctant to say anything, because we know we really don't get it. Paul Krugman uses a simple analogy Ñ imagine they were all selling ice crearm Ñ and makes complicated business dealing clear even to a liberal arts major who can barely balance a checkbook.

Krugman makes an interesting point in this article Ñ all of the recent scandals involve shady accounting practices, but they were all different shady accounting practices. You can't easily write a law to cover all the ways people will cheat, because there are so many ways to cheat. We depend on regulators, on watchdogs. But politicians, stuffed with campaign contributions, are playing games with writing laws while eviscerating the watchdogs. Even while denouncing WorldCom, Krugman notes, George Bush is trying to appoint the man who drafted the "Enron exemption" Ñ a law custom-designed to protect the company from scrutiny Ñ to a top position with a key regulatory agency. There's no way we can deal with the business scandal unless we start with the political scandal.

MORE ON THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE CONTROVERSY
When people are angrily screaming the name of God, it isn't a good sign. When the words "under God" are a throwaway line in a patriotic pledge, that's not a good thing for religion. Right now, this decision seems to be bringing out that angry, nasty edge that often lies under the surface of religion Ñ and that's even worse.

I wonder if I'm the only person in the United States who has no strong feelings one way or the other about the court decision declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. Just a few (idle and contradictory) thoughts on the subject:

* It doesn't matter. Does anyone believe this decision will be upheld? It will be overturned even before the new school year starts in September. It will have no effect whatsoever on anyone.

* It doesn't matter for another reason. Even if it were upheld Ñ which is impossible to imagine Ñ it would have virtually no effect on anyone. Will either patriotism or religion wither if public school children fail to say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning? If anything, I suspect it might improve the state of both, since in the long run mindless recitations lead more to cynicism than to respect for what they promote. After eight years of reciting prayers in Catholic school, the one thing I thought I knew about God is that he was a bore. And maybe a little hard of hearing, since he needed you to repeat words over and over. I had to stop saying the mindless prayers before I discovered that wasn't true.

* The politicians' reaction to this is interesting, if a little depressing. Senators unanimously passed a resolution condemning the ruling and House members gathered on the Capitol steps to recite the pledge and sing "God Bless America." It sounds like some kind of superstitious ritual to ward off evil Ñ bad things are happening, let's sing a song. Republicans are scrambling to make political capital out of it. They know they have to do it quickly, of course, because the decision will probably be overturned very fast Ñ which doesn't give them a lot of time to milk this non-issue. (Although I wouldn't put it past them to continue trying to milk the issue even after it's dead.) Democrats are almost as absurd and desperate. Tom Daschle urged the entire Senate to be on hand this morning when they open with the pledge Ñ something senators usually don't bother to show up for. They're all terrified that the Republicans actually will get some traction out of this, and are trying to be the first to condemn it. The sad part is that there is so much important work to be done right now and our representatives are wasting time preening over an utterly meaningless, symbolic issue. What does it say about our priorities that the Senate halted debate on a military bill to work on a resolution criticizing the ruling? You can't entirely blame the politicians, though. Americans don't want to take the trouble to understand complex political issues, but they get all hot and bothered about stupid symbolic ones Ñ so that's what the politicians are going to focus on. Unfortunately, we have the government we deserve.

* First prize for the dumbest reaction by a politician: Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) said, "Our Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves. This is the worst kind of political correctness run amok." If the phrase "political correctness" has any meaning at all (and it's been used so randomly, I'm not sure it does), wouldn't it mean avoiding saying things that are true (or at least deserve to be discussed), but make people uncomfortable? On the left, it means avoiding racial issues, because things that should be said make people politically squirmy. On the left, enforcing "political correctness" means not allowing people to say anything that might hurt someone's feelings. But of course political correctness exists on the right too. When Ari Fleischer tells Americans to "watch what they say." When John Ashcroft says asking discomforting questions is akin to treason. That's an attempt to say that some political ideas are out of bounds Ñ that they are "politically incorrect." It seems to me that the only political correctness evident here is all the politicians falling all over themselves making sure they are seen taking the "correct" (that is, popular) political stance.

* I'm not sure if it's a valid legal decision, but it doesn't seem to me to be an unreasonable one. According to the LA Times, a number of legal scholars said that while they certainly expected it to be overturned, "it represented a plausible interpretation of U.S. Supreme Court precedent." I'm no lawyer, but it seems pretty obvious that if the government leads children in expresssing the notion that our country is "under God," they are establishing a religion. It's a pretty bland and vague religion, but it's a religion nonetheless. In fact, I object more to the idea of the government establishing a bland and vague religion than I do to the overall idea of establishing a religion. I don't like the idea of government promoting religion, but I hate the idea of government teaching children that religion is bland and meaningless. In 1984, several liberal members of the Supreme Court, including Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and William J. Brennan Jr., said references like "In God We Trust," which appears on United States currency and coins, were protected from the Establishment Clause because their religious significance had been lost through rote repetition. I find that really depressing: it's ok for the government to kill religion by reducing it to meaningless repitition. Is that what people of faith really want?

* The judge who dissented in the case wrote that the danger the phrase "under God" presented to the 1st Amendment was "picayune at most." Even though I don't see the court's decision as outrageous, I tend to agree with that dissent. The ironic thing is that I suspect most people who are angry about the decision would disagree. What the judge is saying is that having children recite the words "under God" doesn't really matter that much. The angry people think it matters a whole lot. And they're not all that enamored of the 1st Amendment anyway. If the 1st Amendment and the phrase "under God" really were in conflict, they'd seize "under God" and toss the 1st Amendment in a heartbeat.

* The dissenting judge went on to state that the ruling could jeopardize the singing in public settings of the nation's most treasured patriotic songs and even make vulnerable the words "In God We Trust" on coins and bills. " 'God Bless America' and 'America the Beautiful' will be gone for sure," he wrote. He's getting silly here, making people believe they aren't going to be allowed to sing "God Bless America" or "America the Beautiful." If the logic of the ruling were continued (and, once again, there's not a chance in hell of that happening), the government might not be allowed to lead people in singing those songs, but there's nothing to stop anyone from singing them in non-governmental public settings.

* Personally, I wouldn't miss "God Bless America." Ugly melody, simplistic and awkward lyrics and it always forms an image in my head of God dressed up like a World War I soldier. "America the Beautiful" is another story. There aren't many songs (and almost no patriotic ones) with melodies as soaring and lovely. And the lyrics are specific and poetic. Spacious skies. Purple mountains. It evokes a gorgeous image of a place you really believe God could shed his grace on.

*Personally, I wouldn't even miss the Pledge of Allegiance. I have nothing against its sentiments. Rather like them, in fact. I just hate reciting, especially group recitations. I like words, and when a lot of people try to say the same words at the same time, the fact that most people have no sense of rhythm becomes painfully obvious and the words turn to mush. I hate to hear "liberty and justice for all" (surely one of the noblest phrases ever) reduced to meaningles mush.

* And yet I love listening to children say the Pledge of Allegiance. Last year, I volunteered once a week in my daughter's kindergarten class, and the best part was the beginning of each school day, watching twenty 5- and 6-year-olds, with their hands over their hearts, pledging allegiance to ideals they've barely begun to understand. They looked so serious, sensing that they were doing something important, even though they weren't exactly sure what it was. It's an exquisite thing to watch. Maybe it's the transitory nature of that innocent faith in American ideals that makes it so beautiful. They will grow up. They will realize that "liberty and justice" are not fully available to all, and that at times we are all so cantankerous, even litigious, that we barely seem like "one nation" at all. They will become smarter and less innocent about America, hopefully not too cynical, but they will lose that look of awe. That's what growing up is all about Ñ but it's still a loss. I love watching small children pledge allegiance to the flag because while they are doing it, I can share a little bit of their innocent faith and their unquestioning awe.

* I'm not sure I understand why the man who brought this suit did so, unless he's just an eccentric professional complainer Ñ and there's some evidence that that's the case.. The court has already ruled that students can not be required to recite the pledge. It seems silly to object to his daughter even being exposed to the words "under God." Let's face it Ñ we live in a diverse country. Every child in school is, at some point, going to be exposed to an idea that his or her parents object to. The compromise is that we always give people the option of opting out. If your parents don't want you exposed to sex education, they can sign a form and have you sit in the library during the class. If they think Harry Potter promotes witchcraft, nobody's going to force you to read it. But you don't get to eliminate sex ed for everyone, or kick Harry out of the library because you don't like it. Isn't the same reasonable compromise called for here?

* The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. Pledging ourselves to "liberty and justice for all" is, after all, a pretty radical notion, one that conservatives, while they're anxious to be seen reciting the words, don't really embrace Ñ at least not in any way that a 19th century socialist would recognize. I can't help but be amused by right-wingers' attachment to a socialist pledge Ñ and wonder why they aren't worried that in reciting the pledge, they are endorsing not just religion, but socialism.

* Just a note: All the headlines are wrong. The court didn't rule that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. It ruled that the 1954 addition of the words "under God" to the original pledge was unconstitutional. There is a difference.

* Jerry Falwell immediately started a petition drive to urge the Supreme Court to reverse the panel's ruling immediately. I'm sure he knows perfectly well that doing so is a waste of time, since the decision is sure to be overturned anyway (and would we want the kind of Supreme Court that is swayed by petitions in any case?). I'm also sure that this will be a great money-making issue for Falwell.

* The fact that the Christian right is having heart palpitations over this decision makes the decision seem smarter than it otherwise would. The phrase "under God" seems pretty bland and meaningless to me, but if right wing Christians are certain that it promotes God, maybe they have a better take on it than I do. Maybe it DOES promote religion Ñ which would be an argument in favor of the decision.

* Atheists and agnostics don't like being asked to pledge allegiance to a country "under God." That's understandable. I don't think the press understands, however, that atheists and agnostics aren't the only ones who object. So do people who are religious, but not monotheistic. And so do people who see God as transcending national boundaries. The notion of a God tied to a particular nation is deeply offensive to many religious peple.

* Michael A. Newdow, the man who brought the suit, has already recieved threats and obscene phone calls. He says he is worried about his daughter and so am I. Nobody can sink as low as people who call themselves religious and patriotic.

Seventy three percent of Catholics favor criminal charges against bishops who knew of an allegation of abuse and didn't call the police or remove the priest from duty. Only one in 10 believes they should be allowed to remain as bishops. I'm surprised by those numbers. I know the media has been reporting how angry Catholics are, but I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I'm also well aware of how angry Catholics can get at anyone who criticizes the Church in any way. When nearly three-quarters of Catholics would like to see some bishops behind bars Ñ it's a new world. A world I never expected to see in my lifetime.

Beliefnet has scratched the "Teflon Cardinal." Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles has tried to pass himself off as a church reformer, but this article notes that in fact he's one of "America's worst bishops." Hypocrisy just got a little tougher.

When Colin Powell gets tired of being kicked around by Republicans, maybe he can come over to the Democratic Party Ñ he'll feel a lot more comfortable at the rational end of the political continuum.

BUSH TO CALIFORNIA: DROP DEAD
Awhile back, California Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed that during last summer's energy crisis the President and VP refused to meet with her. Meanwhile Dick Cheney was doing meetings left and right (well, mostly right) with representatives from Enron, who were busy ripping off the state. Today Congresswoman Lois Capps, who represents the once oil-slicked and now oil-shy Santa Barbara, wrote that while President Bush met recently with Bill Simon, the Republican candidate for governor, to discuss oil drilling, she can't get the President to meet with her or the state's senators.

The FBI is visiting libraries and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack. In and of itself, that doesn't bother me much. If the FBI has other reasons to suspect someone, knowing what they're reading may provide another piece of the puzzle. To want that piece of the puzzle seems entirely reasonable to me. The problem is, the FBI has a history of not being able to tell the difference between people who are genuinely dangerous and people who have ideas that are out of the mainstream. In the '60s they had a bizarre inability to see the difference between the Weather Underground and Martin Luther King (or even, for pity's sake, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr ). I don't want to take away their ability to get the information they genuinely need, but I don't want them going on fishing expeditions looking for people whose ideas they don't understand and don't trust either. History suggests we ought to at least keep a close eye on them as they collect information.

Evidence that the left can be just as stupid as the right: Salon reports that two Israeli scholars have been fired from their positions on editorial boards of European journals, as part of a boycott against Israel. The whole idea of a boycott directed against Israel seems wrong-headed to me. I don't like what the Israeli government is doing right now, but Israel is no South Africa. But the idea of firing scholars because we don't like their government's policies seems especially insane. What good can come out of silencing Israelis?

Andrew Tyndall, whose New York-based Tyndall Report monitors television news, argues CNN's sensitivity to suggestions that their Middle East reporting was not sufficiently pro-Israel has less to do with responding to legitimate Israeli objections than it does with losing more conservative Christian viewers to Fox. We've got a real problem when what we see on the news is determined by people waiting for Armageddon.

Yoel Marcus's piece in Ha'aretz on Israeli's disenchantment with Sharon contains a bizarrely interesting tidbit: Sharon never leaves the house without make-up. He is always ready for the tv cameras. Even when he visited the site of a suicide bombing recently Ñ spontaneously, according to his handlers Ñ he was in full make-up. I'm curious now to check out footage of American politicians at the site of the WTC ruins back in September. Were they all camera ready? God help us, but I suspect they were.

Ha'aretz's Yoel Marcus writes that Israelis are becoming sick and tired of Ariel Sharon. I have no idea if he's right, but I'll cling to the hope that he is. Israelis are beginning to realize, Marcus argues, that "Prime ministers are elected to solve problems, not to tell us that our enemies are bastards." I like that sentence. I'm looking forward to the time when Americans realize the same is true of presidents.

In The Atlantic, David Brooks suggests that attacking Arafat has only made him stronger. What interests him in money Ñ not because he has any personal interest in luxury, but because he has used it throughout his career to create a coterie of loyalists. Choke off his money supply, Brooks says, and you destroy his power. I don't know if he's right, but it's an interesting suggestion, and it fits in with what many other people have said about Arafat.

Jonathan Freedland notes, in The Guardian, that Ariel Sharon is not the only one pleased by Bush's speech on Monday.
It also cheered the religious fanatics of Hamas and Jihad, who were able to mock moderate Palestinians for ever believing that politics, rather than violence, might bring results.

Another one of my naive questions: How come President Bush is ordering the Palestinians, who in fact held an election (monitored by, among others, Jimmy Carter), to embrace democracy, but he isn't asking the same of his friends the Saudis? Just curious.

ISRAEL BARS JOURNALISTS
"ISRAEL has barred foreign correspondents from entering major occupied towns, while Palestinian journalists are stuck under curfew, vastly curtailing what the world can learn about the latest West Bank operation. Israel - citing reporters' safety - said the measures were legitimate in a combat zone. But critics see the restrictions as an effort to prevent unflattering coverage and to silence potential criticism of the major military push."

And while Israel is keeping reporters out of occupied towns, its supporters in the US are pressuring American news outlets to slant their reports in pro-Israel ways.

Another musing: Two thousand Palestinian academics and intellectuals signed a petition calling for an end to suicide bombings. Within the PLO there are a number of articulate, young, highly intelligent and educated figures who have advocated internal reforms and democratisation. What can be done to encourage these people?

Just a thought: In his Middle East speech, Bush said one thing that is undeniably true Ñ Yasser Arafat is an impediment to peace. Unfortunately, he didn't say two other things that are equally true Ñ Ariel Sharon is also an impediment to peace and people have a right to choose their own leaders. It's possible, as Bush demonstrated, to say something that is accurate and still be wrong.

Britain's Independent has an interesting profile of Yasser Arafat Ñ a man with the skill to "retain power in a feral, armed and unstable environment," but, unfortunately, without the skill to run a government. Although he has little interest in personal wealth, he's obsessed with personal power, which he uses to reward his family and those who are loyal to him. What's interesting in the article is the idea that the US and Israel have supported this corruption, until recently, because they believed it helped "shore up a compliant Palestinian leadership." Robert Fisk has more to say on this.

I don't completely understand the president's Middle East speech, and I don't think that's entirely my fault. It was so vague, people will be debating for months what in the world he was trying to say. But if Arial Sharon reads it as a "green light" to continue attacking the West Bank and Gaza that can't be a good thing.

"Downing Street noted that the cardinal rule of the Northern Ireland peace process had been to leave each community to choose its leader." Ñ The Brits have a lot more experience than we do dealing with people who are using horrible methods in support of a justifiable cause. Maybe we should be paying a lot more attention to what they have to tell us.

This is probably a dumb question, but I can't help but wonder. If international monitors are needed anywhere right now, it would seem to be in the West Bank. Where's the UN?

The Village Voice reports on prisoners held in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, a high-security federal prison to which many Arabs and South Asians have been taken. It is, according to The Voice, "a black hole... where immigrants disappear for months into extreme isolation and deprivation, only to come out the other end accused of no crime that justifies their jail time." The article focuses on a man who spent seven months at the center Ñ all but a half hour per day confined alone in a cell, shackled when he was outdoors Ñ without charges. For several months, no one in his family even knew where he was. He was eventuall deported back to his home (in Canada), but his belongings, including his identification documents, were never returned to him.

Thomas Friedman continues his fascinating reports on changes in Iran and explores several ways the US government could help support reform in that country. "Iran is the one Muslim Middle East country," Friedman notes, "that is politically alive, full of ferment, with certain overlapping interests with the U.S., and worth a fresh look as to how it might be nudged in the right direction -- not just branded evil and ignored."

Friedman offers optimistic and sensible suggestions. But I can't escape the feeling that this administration is incapable of acting on something like this. President Bush hasn't shown any sign that he's capable of understanding that within a brutal and undemocratic power structure, there can be enormous good that requires nurturing. Everything to him is good or evil. There are opportunities here, but it seems almost certain that they will be lost.

Maureen Dowd suggests that the fears of '60s radicals, which at the time contained more than a hint of paranoia, have mostly come true. Corporate crime. Government coups. Rigged elections. Secret government plans to suspend the Constitution and round people up without charges. Dowd quotes Bobby Rush, the Black Panther who became a Chicago Congressman: "Our young hunches are now becoming mature realities."

The problem is those of us who are old enough to remember the '60s and early '70s feel utterly paralyzed by this reality. It's an incredible irony: we fought back when we were young and the right-wing trampling of the Constitution was more fear than reality. Now it's a reality, but we've forgotten how to fight back.

An interesting thought in an article today's LA Times. The article is about how Morton Klein, a hate-mongering Zionist, is gaining support among more and more American Jews for his view that the Arabs are exactly like the Nazis. It's a very sad article. The messengers of hate seem to be winning on all sides lately. But within the article is an interesting comment from J.J. Goldberg, the editor of the Jewish Forward newspaper in New York. He notes that since World War II, to be anti-Semitic is to be a pariah. That's a good thing Ñ any form of racism ought to be unacceptable. But as Goldberg notes, that gives the people who wield the word "anti-Semitism" a great moral power. They have the power to destroy someone's reputation. With this power, Goldberg suggests, there is a concurrent responsibility: "There ought to be a premium on Jewish civility. Phrases like anti-Israel and anti-Semitism should be used with caution." Ñ a small piece of wisdom we should all keep in mind, no matter what epithet we wield.

"Some Israelis said Bush's speech was too vague on the process for achieving his ends; they warned that it did not create a vision but potentially a vacuum in which either the status quo will continue or extremist elements will prosper...The core problem, as some Israelis saw it, is that Palestinians face a list of significant and immediate demandsÑincluding a virtual order to abandon the father of Palestinian nationalismÑwhile rewards loom years away."

As I said before, what we need is not more soldiers but more scholars and scientists. If I had to chose between a fantastic army and a fantastic public health system, I'd take public health any day.

William Saletan points out that the president's "peace plan" for the Middle East not only demands the impossible from the Palestinians, but doesn't offer them much of an incentive if they somehow manage to achieve it Ñ just "a 'state' with no defined borders, powers, or timetable (and no right to be represented by its present leadership)"

In today's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof writes in favor of sweatshops. Actually, the point he's making is valid Ñ sweatshop labor is a step up for workers in many desperately poor countries, and boycotting companies that operate in those places, encouraging them to move to countries where the wages are slightly higher, and working conditions slightly better, only penalizes the poorest of the poor.

He's right, but the article is still wildly off base. One problem is that Kristof castigates anti-sweatshop activists for failing to understand this basic economic fact, when in fact, activists I've heard emphasize that boycotts don't work because they hurt the very people you want to help, and focus instead on letter writing campaigns and political pressure.

I suppose you could argue that political pressure and the threat of bad publicity also discourages companies from investing in very poor countries. But I'm not sure what the alternative is. Kristof is more than a little disingenuous when he offers, as an example of the kind of thing anti-sweatshop people get angry about, a BBC report that that three girls in one factory in Cambodia were under 15 years old. He makes it sound as if labor standards were simply not quite up to American standards. But the truth is, several human rights organizations, including Oxfam have documented not just low wages and child labor, but grotesque abuses and lack of concern for workers' basic health and safety. American companies have also worked with repressive host governments to keep workers from organizing to improve conditions through arrests and threats of violence. And it's not just clothing manufacturers. In Indonesia, Exxon-Mobil paid the military for providing security for its facilities. That military, which locals call "Exxon's Army," is "responsible for human rights abuses" including murder, torture, sexual crimes, and kidnapping according to both Human Rights Watch and Indonesian human rights groups. I'm sorry, but that can not be the face the United States presents to the world.

I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but demanding that the Palestinians reform their government while the place is being smashed seems more than you can expect from any human being. Reform is obviously essential. But the question is, what can we do to help create conditions that will allow, even encourage, reform?

One of the strongest arguments against an invasion of Iraq is the fear that a dangerous chaos would follow the removal of Saddam Hussein. Dusko Doder, in The American prospect, looks at some of the men who are clamoring to replace Saddam and finds to trust that fear.

Doder also suggests a different, non-violent model for toppling Saddam: President Clinton's program of political and propaganda assistance to the opponents of Slobodan Milosevic. According to Doder, "After spending billions of dollars on military action intended to bring down Milosevic, the Clinton administration finally succeeded through nonviolent means -- and at a cost of less than $40 million, which it funneled through nongovernmental organizations. The money was spent on schooling the Yugoslav opposition in such things as the techniques of nonviolent resistance, and how to monitor an election. It also went to support many kinds of nongovernmental media...The actual heavy lifting to overthrow Milosevic was done by key elements in the society -- the students, the trade unions, the middle classes. The combination of student demonstrations and a miners' strike ignited a popular revolt. The United States also assembled an international coalition which, at the crucial movement, exerted political and diplomatic pressures that helped topple the dictator."

I'm especially interested in Doder's suggestion that "stirrings throughout the Muslim worlds that reflect women's desire for greater freedom" might make women "a key agent of change."

ONE MORE THING GEORGE BUSH HAS IN COMMON WITH RICHARD NIXON

I'm amazed. We actually do seem to have a Congress. According to USA Today, Congress, which up to now has seemed to operate on the principle of nodding its head while the president does whatever he feels like doing, has decided that it wants a voice in what could be the next step in the war Ñ an invasion of Iraq. Henry Hyde, of all people, says, "As a practical matter, the president would not and could not undertake such a dramatic move in foreign policy without congressional approval."

Congressional leaders offer a few reasons why invading Iraq might not be such a great idea:

*House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., says there is "insufficient information" to justify a vote for military action against Iraq. (I'm not sure if he means we can't "justify" invading Iraq because we have no information connecting them to terrorism or no information that their "weapons of mass destruction" exist and pose a genuine threat to us Ñ but both appear to be the case.)

* Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., worries that a "premature" attack could "fracture the coalition" of nations helping the United States combat terrorism. (Translation: the dictators in the Middle East don't want the idea that a government can be overthrown to get too much traction.)

* Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., fears U.S. forces already are stretched to the limit. (And, I might add, they don't seem to be doing very well at the simpler job of keeping Afghanistan from falling into chaos Ñ that doesn't bode well for what they could accomplish in Iraq.)

* House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has other priorities. "Our focus should be Israel," he says.

It's interesting how few Democrats are among those urging caution.

In an open letter to Karl Rove, John Dean, who knows as much about secrecy in government as anyone, says, " The continuing insistence on secrecy by your White House is startlingly Nixonian. I'm talking about everything from stiffing Congressional requests from information and witnesses, to employing an executive order to demolish the 1978 law providing public access to presidential papers, to forcing the Government Accounting Office to go to Court to obtain information about how the White House is spending tax money when creating a pro-energy industry Vice Presidential task force. The Bush Administration apparently seeks to reverse the post-Watergate trend of open government."

Will women be better off in the new Afghanistan than they were under the Taliban? At first glance, the answer to that question might seem obvious. How could any government be worse for women than the Taliban? But recent news from Afghanistan suggests that the improvements will be minimal at best. According to The Washington Post, threats from conservative Islamic groups have forced President Hamid Karzai not to fill the Women's Affairs Ministry. It is not yet clear whether he will defy demands from Islamic groups to eliminate the ministry, which has been attacked by Muslim groups who strongly oppose the emancipation of women and believe that the presence of women in politics violates the tenets of Islam. Sima Samar, a women's rights activist who served as minister of women's affairs for the past six months, came under attack by conservative Islamic clergy during the loya jirga. They accused her of opposing Islamic law. Samar also reportedly received a number of threatening notes and phone calls.

Somehow I doubt that brave feminist icon, Laura Bush, will be giving another radio address to express support for the embattled women of Afghanistan.

Still more on women in Afghanistan: The Feminist Majority and other womenÕs organizations as well as the United Nations and the interim Afghan government have asked the Bush administration to expand US peacekeeping troops from 4,800 to 25,000 in order to protect the Afghan people. ÒTo do less. " says Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), "is to indicate that we do not care about Afghanistan and to underscore that we do not care about what is happening to the women of Afghanistan.Ó

And according to Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan's recently appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was quoted in press interviews as saying that Shari'a punishments including stoning and amputation would be retained. It is also worrisome that no one has been appointed to head the Ministry for Women's Affairs. This ministry is key to promoting and achieving Afghan women's rights.

More news on the precarious position of women in Afghanistan. The British troops who have been policing Kabul for the past three months will be gone within a few weeks. The Brits handed over control of the International Security Assistance Force to Turkey, a country with a less than stellar record on human rights in general, and women's rights in particular. What's worse, many of the warlords won't tolerate the ISAF in their territory and without international support, Afghanistan's leader, Hamid Karzai, has no option but to leave safety and human rights of Afghans in the hands of men who have a long history of brutality aimed especially at women. Under warlord rule, there have been frequent reports of intimidation of women by armed men on the streets. Women are being imprisoned for "crimes" such as seeking to marry a man of their choice. Northern Alliance members threaten to throw acid in women's faces if they fail to wear the traditional burqa. The United Nations has complained of attacks by gunmen, including the gang rape of an American aid worker. According to Human Rights Watch, the Taliban's special Police for the Protection of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice are still patrolling some remote parts of southern Afghanistan.

Karzai says he is prepared to "ask the international community" to intervene if the warlords refuse to disband their private armies. But it's unlikely he'd get a positive response Ñ especially from the United States, which has been paying some of these warlords for their "services" in the "war on terrorism."

Laura Bush told us we had done a great thing in liberating the women of Afghanistan and that we would continue "working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan." I hope she's telling her husband that if he backs out on them now, he's nothing but a lying, gutless hypocrite.

Someone I don't understand: An assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, who came to the United States as a refugee from Viet Nam, and whose current job is torturing the law to figure out ways to keep Muslim men in jail for an indefinite period on minor or no charges.

When will they ever learn? According to The Washington Times: "A provision in the bill seeking to create a Homeland Security Department will exempt its employees from whistleblower protection, the very law that helped expose intelligence-gathering missteps before September 11. The legislation now before Congress contains a provision allowing the director of the proposed agency to waive all employee protections in Title V, including the Whistleblower Protection Act. The act protects government employees from retaliation or losing employment for speaking out on waste, fraud and abuse." The way to make us secure is to make it harder for people to reveal when something is wrong? How Nixonian.

A lesson from history Ñ Richard Reeves on Watergate: "There will always be political scandal revealed in a country with a healthy free press."

We worry when we read about scandals. There's more of a threat when we are not hearing about them.

A surprising number: Sixty percent of the college students in Iran are women.

I think Maureen Dowd is saying something very similar to what I was suggesting yesterday: "What this president desperately needs is a few more geeky, scholarly analysts with thick glasses and shameful physiques, poring over memos and intelligence feeds at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. Toned bodies are well and good. But how about some toned minds?" In other words, cut all the macho posturing and listen to people who traditionally get very little respect Ñ women, scholars, geeks and nerds.

"The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open" Ñ Gunther Grass

I have a lot of heroes. I seem to semi-consciously keep my eye open for them. Sometimes they are people who are long dead. Sometimes they are people who have accomplished great things. And sometimes they are people like Sally Regenhard, the mother of a World Trade Center victim. Ms. Regenhard is the head of a group called the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, which has pressured the National Institute of Standards and Technology to conduct a technical probe of the trade center collapse. Her organization also works with some of the other dozen groups of terror victims' families who are demanding that an independent commission investigate all aspects of the attacks. The families are also mobilizing for the battle over what kind of memorial there should be at the site of the WTC Ñ trying to insure that honoring their family members has priority over getting back to business.

Over the past nine months, I have heard the words "hero" and "patriotism" far more than I want to. Obviously I have nothing against heroes and nothing against patriotism, but words are important to me, and "hero" and "patriotism" are words that are probably used dishonestly more often than they are used accurately and honestly. George Orwell Ñ another of my heroes Ñ believed that there was something deeply unethical and dehumanizing about distorting the meaning of words, and I agree. The word "hero" is so subject to abuse. It's hard to define. Everyone has his own definition Ñ and that's reasonable. But it seems to me that no matter what your definition, only someone who has done something can be called a hero. It doesn't make any difference whether it is physical or intellectual courage they've displayed, but unsought martyrdom makes a victim, not a hero. I've heard the terrorist victims described as heroes, and soldiers in the first battle against terrorism over and over, and it's an absurd description. To say that they were victims, not heroes, is in no way to dishonor them. It is simply being honest with words. In fact, I think it is a dishonor to them to describe them as something they were not Ñ to lie about them. I think it is deeply unethical for politicians to describe them as heroic soldiers rather than people doing their jobs and living their lives. Maybe in our increasingly militaristic society, politicians can see value only in soldiers, and can't think of a way to praise someone except as a hero in battle. Personally, I think living your life and doing your job well is a difficult and noble thing. Dying while you are trying to do that is simply tragic.

But many of the family members of those victims are heroes. I'm not just talking about their emotional endurance. Endurance is something you have no choice about. Sheep endure. Cows endure. But human beings, heroic human beings like many of the WTC victims' family members, band together to help each other endure and stay together to help each other find answers.

Right now it is their search for answers that I find so inspiring and heroic. And so American. I think that one of the things that distinguishes this country is that we fight for answers to our questions. (That quality explains why the Vatican is finding American Catholics so incomprehensible at the moment. When we ask questions, we expect to be told the truth, and we expect necessary changes to be made very quickly.) That doesn't make us "the greatest country in the world," but it makes us a great country Ñ a noble one, and a strong one. We don't just accept what leaders tell us. And changes that need to be made get made because we don't shut up until we're satisfied with the answers we're given. It's the source of our progress.

My favorite moment in this Washington Post article about terrorist victims' families is when Sally Regenhard nails Hillary Clinton after a rally to ask Ñ no, more like demand Ñ that she support the investigation into why the towers collapsed when fire engineering and safety experts suggested that the buildings need not have come down. Senator Clinton politely ducks the questions, the demands. Heroes can be pests (that may, in fact, be one of the primary attributes of a hero). But everything about Sally Regenhard makes you certain she will never back down, that she is going to get answers (answers that will benefit all of us, not just the victims' families). Clinton, and all the other politicians at the rally, work for Sally Regenhard (and the rest of us) and she will not let them forget it.

That, to me, is the absolute essence of what it means to be an American Ñ believing that the government works for you and not the other way around. What Sally Reganhard does is what patriotism is all about. John Ashcroft has suggested that to ask questions is to give comfort to terrorists. I'd like to hear him try to tell that to Sally Reganhard.

Bill Bennett is appalled that 79 percent of college students do not believe Western culture is superior to Arab culture. I am appalled that a former Secretary of Education could say something as banal as " this is the greatest nation in the world" and believe he is passing on some great wisdom that is not open to debate. An 18-year-old student in freshman composition wouldn't get away with a cliche like that, without explaining and justifying his terms (and shouldn't). What constitutes a "great" country? Wealth? Military power? The educational achievements of its citizens? Its art, music, and literature? The health, well-being and longevity of its citizens? Its ethical standards? The number of Nobel Prizes? The joy its people get from life? I'd say the United States ranks pretty high in all of those areas, but number one in only a handful of them. In a number of those areas, we're quantifiably not "the greatest" Ñ life expentancy, for example. There's no country that is "best" in all of them (and I'm sure there are many other indicators of greatness that don't immediately come to mind). Does that mean that maybe we should just drop the whole silly idea of insisting there is one "greatest" country.

Just out of curiousity, I'm wondering if Bill Bennett believes that this is "the greatest country in the world," does he have a country in mind for second place? Does he have a top ten? Also, is it necessary for every other country to acknowledge our undeniable superiority, or are they allowed to celebrate their own? Is an Irishman allowed to believe, for example, that Ireland is the greatest country in the world? Or would that be suggesting the unthinkable Ñ that truth depends on the viewer?

Two female delegates to the loya jirga in Afghanistan describe how the warlords won and democracy Ñ especially as it relates to women's rights Ñ lost. They still have hope for the future, but democracy will require " genuine international support for the rule of law."

Katha Pollitt argues that ratifying the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women is not just a matter of doing the decent thing. Women's rights are the key to human progress. Where women do well, everyone does well. As Pollitt points out, it's no coincidence that " Islamic fundamentalism flourishes in the parts of the world where women are most oppressed...The denial of education, employment and rights to women fuels the social conditions of backwardness, provincialism and poverty that sustain religious fanaticism."

Is there any way to make George Bush understand that giving women in poor countries a few more tools to fight for their rights is one of the best anti-terrorist investments we could make? And the cheapest as well Ñ unless the president is counting the cost of Christian fundamentalist votes and campaign contributions he might lose.

The Nation offers some persuasive reasons for not attacking Iraq.

*Since the Gulf War, Iraq's military capabilities have weakened significantly, to the point where they pose little or no threat to its neighbors.

*There is no evidence that Saddam has cooperated with Al Qaeda or other "terrorist groups with global reach." As the State Department said earlier this year, Saddam has not been involved in any terrorist plots against the West since his attempt to target Bush Senior during his 1993 visit to Kuwait.

*There is no reason for the Saddam to aid the apocalyptic goals of Islamic fanatics, who threaten his secular regime and his bid for leadership in the Arab world, and there is no evidence of Iraqi collusion with terrorist organizations.

* Not even Israel, which would be at the greatest risk of an Iraqi attack, seems to accept the priority of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ariel Sharon derailed the Administration's timetable on Iraq by pursuing its aggressive strategy in the West Bank.

*There is little danger that Saddam will put Iraqi weapons in the hands of Islamic terrorists. But in the event of an invasion, chaos could (in fact, almost certainly would) erupt. If US forces are unable to secure nuclear or biological materials, they could easily end up on the black market.

*There is no leadership waiting in the wings to help insure stability and to offer the beginnings of democratic rule. Iraq's collapse into anarchy cannot be ruled out.

Recently President Bush announced a supposedly "important new" anti-AIDS program for Africa. Compassionate conservatism at work. One problem: he was taking credit for money already approved by Congress, which he had, in fact, opposed, lobbying Congress to lower spending for this activity. Also, the funding doesn't come close to meeting the need. Kind of like patting yourself on the back for saving Afghan women while stalling on a treaty to help insure their rights. What a nasty game.

Here's a strange argument: John Ashcroft's opponents use his religion to slander him. Nonsense. No one is attacking his religion. What makes both secular and genuinely religious people angry is the way Ashcroft cloaks hate in the language of religion. He's really got the game down. It's the same principle he uses to shred the Constitution in the name of patriotism. Opposing that isn't attacking patriotism either. The problem with John Ashcroft is not that he's too religious and too patriotic, it's that he's neither, but steals the language of people who are.

Writing in Salon, Michelle Goldberg has more explanation of John Ashcroft's attempt to kill the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Seems we should blame Bush as much as Ashcroft. The administration is afraid of alienating the Christian right by signing the treaty, which would offer some protection of basic human rights for women around the world. Women don't need rights, the Christian right is arguing, all they need is the Bible. And they hold the rather odd belief that a document which states "Parties shall take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of prostitution of women" will somehow encourage prostitution.

By while appeasing the Christian right, the administration also doesn't want to undermine the State Department, which has already endorsed the treaty as one that is "generally desirable and should be approved."

Rather than being put in the position of having to piss off one or another group of supporters, the administration is playing a game Ñ asking for a postponement of Senate hearings so the Justice Department can "review" the treaty. Even if the Senate goes ahead and ratifies the treaty (which it seems likely to do), Bush can avoid signing it, without flat out opposing it, because he can simply say he wants to wait for the Justice Department to finish its ongoing investigation.

The treaty has no enforcement mechanism, but it's already had positive effects in some of the 169 countries that have ratified it. National governments have used it as a standard in dealing with women's rights in their country. Third world women's groups have found it useful in their work. Courts in Columbia, India, Tanzania and Nepal have all cited the treaty in decisions that protected women's rights in those countries.

It wasn't long ago that Laura Bush was on television giving the country a collective pat on the back for restoring Afghan women's rights. The feminist credentials of the Bush administration were always a bit laughable (I suspect the president sent his wife out to do the bragging because he could not have uttered the phrase "women's rights" without smirking, perhaps even gagging), but if the administration isn't willing to get behind a treaty that will help insure legal rights for women in places like Afghanistan where those rights, while somewhat improved, remain very weak, it really Ñ in all justice Ñ ought to stop claiming credit for having accomplished anything in that poor country.

Fifty-five percent of Americans say that they are unwilling to give up civil liberties in exchange for national security. I don't have a lot of faith in polls, but I find that number interesting. Not only am I not sure of exactly what people mean when they tell a pollster something like that, I suspect most people who answer the question haven't thought for themselves precisely what they mean. If you started pinning them down on specific rights, I think the rejection of the idea of giving up rights would start peeling away. I also suspect most Americans are more than willing to have OTHER people give up their rights, without seeing the connections to their own rights. But maybe I'm just being cynical. I'm also intrigued by the question itself, which seems to suggest that there's an obvious trade off to be made. It seems to me that we have given up many civil rights in the past nine months, with no gains in security to show for it. Patricia Williams has some interesting things to say on this subject.

It's becoming impossible to read any news from the Middle East without feeling hopeless. Ironically, the only people who can see any light are the people who view all that's going on as one-sided. If you care only about Israel, I suppose you can see some hope in the idea that the Israelis plan to just move in and seize the entire West Bank.

But those of us who wish both the Israelis and the Palestinians well read about Israeli settlers going on a rampage after the funeral of a mother and her three children, and killing a Palestinian man can't escape a sense of unending tragedy.

Talk of negotiations and peace plans seems both essential and utterly irrelevant.

There's an interesting article in today's Los Angeles Times about intelligence gathering in Afghanistan. It emphasizes how the "war on terrorism" is more reliant on linguists and analysts, and interrogators with great psychological instincts (reading body language and facial expression, for instance Ñ traditionally feminine skills), than people with more traditional skills of war, yet they don't get a lot of respect from their peers who go into combat. It's not macho work.

Of course, we've seen what happened at the F.B.I. when the people who break down doors and arrest people are respected a lot more than the people who translate and analyze information. The cult of the tough guy meant that the most important work didn't get done.

The interrogation unit at Bagram AF base commissioned a wonderful T-shirt Ñ it reads: "The greatest battle is the battle of wits."

Much of the article is about a female interrogator whose gender works to her advantage. Five feet tall and 21 years old (but looking more like a teenager) she can't physically intimidate anyone. But because she is not what prisoners are expecting, she throws them off guard and sometimes can get information a more physically imposing interrogator couldn't. One important prisoner, in fact, grew to trust her, revealing secrets someone who threatened him probably wouldn't have gotten. Most of the 70 or so prisoners this young woman has interrogated have been cooperative and even exhibited signs of gaining new respect for her gender.

This article intrigues me because I feel like we're quickly becoming a more militaristic society, with hard-edged, masculine values, and yet in reality even the military work is being accomplished by men and women with quieter, more analytical talents. I wonder how long it will be before the country will see translators and psychologists as heroes.

Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have all delivered the same message to President Bush: the Palestinians need hope. They need confidence that the Israeli occupation will end, and that there will be a viable Palestinian state. The irony, of course,is that people in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have even less chance of gaining viable democratic states than the Palestinians do. Nevertheless, they're right. One of the fascinating ironies of politics: you can be a slimy hypocrite and still be right.

Edward Said, in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, on the need for Palestinians to ignore the corrupt Arafat and the insane exortations of the "so-called martyrs" and reclaim their own struggle: "A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means," Said argues. And a functioning and just Palestinian state cannot be created unless the Palestinian people themselves (joined with " an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established.") "construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents." A good piece Ñ and good advice for all of us: find ways to work around the thugs that lead you, create your own justice.

Interesting. The British have their own problems with right-wingers attacking the head of government's intelligent and opinionated wife. I guess sexism (along with right-wing desperation) is universal.

Some Israeli's argue that to create a provisional Palestinian state now would be to reward the terrorists. The irony,of course, is that a Palestinian state is exactly what the terrorists of Hamas least want. Interestingly, The Jerusalem Post also sees the bombing as an attempt to undermine any peace proposal and keep " the fires of destabilization burning." But they also argue that this serves Arafat's purpose. I honestly can't see what Arafat gains from destabilization.

Certainly not the worst, but one of the saddest aspects of constant war is the way it brutalizes fundamentally decent people. And the license, even prestige, it gives to fundamentally brutal people.

Thomas Friedman's reports from Iran are feeding my optimistic side. As Iranians search for a way to balance religion and a democratic state, all decent people wish them well. Would it be politically (religiously?) incorrect to say I'll be praying for them?

The proposed Department of Homeland Security would remove the State Department's traditional authority to issue visas and transfer it to the new department, which would issue the rules for granting and denying visas, according to this morning's NY Times. Let's hope the first change they make in those rules deals with this loophole.

Something struck me as I was reading the NY Times report on the latest terrorist murders in Israel. According to the article, some Israeli officials urged that Israel refrain from retaliating for at least 24 hours, to avoid displacing in the news media the horrific images of the bombing with ones of an Israeli reprisal. What was interesting was that the way the NY Times article was written confirmed what they said. The Times is generally far more sympathetic to Israelis than to Paletinians, but the lead of the story is not the bombing, but the retaliation. You have to read to the very end of the article (which the majority of readers are not even going to do) before you find the heartbreaking images of teachers desperately checking their classlists to see who is missing and a twelve-year-old boy confronted with his bleeding, possibly dying friend. I despise Ariel Sharon, I think he and Arafat are a matched set of thugs, but I think it is extremely important that we be reminded of the savagery the Israelis' confront every day. What they are doing is self-defeating, but it's not monstrous or fascistic the way many Palestinians (and some of their supporters) make it out to be. Retaliation may be a dumb response, but it is also an understandably human one. By responding before the world had a chance to take in what they were responding to, I think the Israelis handed control of the narrative to the Palestinians. This despite the fact that, according to Ha'aretz, the Israeli government is so aware of the need to get out their side of the story that they are training rescue personnel to immediately get reporters to bombing sites. Ha'aretz also suggests that Ariel Sharon's appearance at the site of Tuesday's attack (his first appearance at the site of a bombing since taking office) was done primarily to attract press attention, to be sure the world did not fail to be aware of the enormous Israeli suffering. A worthy goal Ñ but all the major papers lead this morning with the Israeli announcement that it will retake parts of the West Bank.

"Arafat is of course no different than bin Laden. The P.L.O. and the Palestinian Authority is equal to the Al Qaeda." -- Uzi Landau, Israeli minister of public security.

Arafat is a thug, but he's no bin Laden. Sharon is a thug, but he's no Hitler. One of the surest signs of an ideologue is absurd comparisons like this that take no account of history and circumstances, and focus on superficial similarities while missing obvious differences.

This morning's Los Angeles Times reports that "hell is being frozen out" of religious sermons. Preachers are playing down the physical torments of damnation, and viewing hell as "separation from God." Many are even arguing that everyone eventually ends up in heaven, because, as Father Wilfredo Benitez of St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church in Garden Grove. asked, "How can something as wonderful as redemption ... be based on fear?"

I'll be stunned if there aren't a few letters to the editor in the paper in the next few days saying that's what's wrong with the world Ñ not enough people believe in hell, not enough people fear the wrath of God. Personally, I've always felt that being good only to escape punishment was kind of morally immature, but I'll have to write more about that some other time. Right now, let's just say I think this article is very good news.

Web gives a voice to Iranian women
I love this story. There are more than 1,200 Persian blogs, many of them written by women. For the first time in the contemporary history of Iran, women speak publicly (although, of course, anonymously) about themselves and how they see the world. One Iranian woman blogger said she had received e-mail from men saying she had completely changed their image of women in Iran. Combine this with Thomas Friedman's article in last Sunday's NY Times about changes in Iran, and there's real cause for optimism. As Margaret Atwood once said, "A word after a word after a word is power."

One more reason to pay attention to what women have to say: the whistle-blowers in huge recent scandals have mostly been women. Why? According to Stanford Professor Deborah Rhode, who chairs the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession: "If you're not one of the good old boys to begin with, it makes it easier when you see something flat- out wrong to raise your voice." Women have achieved enough power in the last generation to make them aware of what's going on, but retain an outsider status that allows them to follow their ethics without feeling they are betraying the team. I suppose that means that as soon as women really gain equality with men in the workplace, they'll be just as likely to play along with ethics violations. But complete equality is so far down the road it's out of sight. For the forseeable future the lesson is: Listen to women.

I admit to having virtually no understanding of the invade Iraq/ don't invade Iraq debate. But every now and then I come across an article that seems to contribute a little piece of the puzzle. Today's Guardian has one such piece. The president has made it pretty clear that the main thing he wants to accomplish as president is to get rid of Saddam Hussein (I'm sure he wouldn't put it quite that way Ñ but it does seem to be the thing that most animates him). Since the departure of the UN weapons inspectors in 1998, the sole source of information about what is happening in Iraq has been the Iraqi National Congress, a dissident group led by Dr Ahmad Chalabi in London. The INC has helped arrange the defection of several high-ranking officials with crucial information. The organization also has contact with a network of agents inside Iraq, some of whom have access to political and military secrets. The INC is funded by the US Congress, with money controlled by the State Department. Considering what they have to offer, that would seem to be one of the government's more intelligent investments. If we're trying to incourage and insurgency, information about what's going on in Iraq would appear to be pretty essential. So why in the world did the US government inform Dr. Chalabi last week that all funding would be cut off unless the INC stopped its information-collection program?

The authors of this article argue that the State Department is wary of the INC's "pro-democracy agenda." Now I'm really confused. If we managed to get Saddam Hussein out, wouldn't we want "pro-democracy" people to replace him? I'm sure that is a hopelessly naive question, but as I said, I'm still just trying to make a little sense of all this.

The Washington Post expands on The Feminist Majority report on the fundamentalist Christian-Islamic alliance. According to the Post, the Bush administration may consider Iran part of the "axis of evil," but they're so comfortable with their positions on the rights of gays, women, and children that officials from the two countries "huddled during coffee breaks" at the U.N. summit on children, apparently comparing notes and strategies. "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues," a U.S. official said.

Adrienne Germaine, president of the International Women's Health Coalition pointed out the irony of the US government's position: "On the one hand we're presumably blaming these countries for unspeakable acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves with them in the oppression of women."

The Feminist Majority Foundation has noted that some conservative American Christian groups have joined with fundamentalist Islamic governments to halt the expansion of political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences, and that these groups have had an influence on Bush administration appointments to key positions on US delegations to UN conferences on global economic and social policy. The conservative Christian John Ashcroft's decision to join with countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to kill any threat of basic human rights for women looks more like a pattern than a fluke.

Nicholas Kristof has given me another reason to fear John Ashcroft. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has been ratified by 169 countries so far. The treaty would have little effect on women in the United States. We already have the right to be protected by the same laws as men, the right to an education, to choose our husbands, to hold jobs, to run for political office. It was designed to help insure the basic human rights of third world women, who often lack any legal status. It would protect women in places like Pakistan, where young women are forced into marriage or domestic labor, where women are traded to settle debts, where they are subject to havng acid thrown into their faces on the street Ñ and the government does little or nothing to protect them. It would offer some protection to women in Nigeria, where rape victims can be charged with adultery and executed.

What does this have to do with Ashcroft? The United States is one of only 22 countries that has not ratified the treaty (others include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan.) It has languished in the Senate since President Carter sent it there for ratification in 1980. The Bush Administration Ñ or, more specifically Colin Powell's State Department Ñ expressed support for ratification. Unfortunately, John Ashcroft got wind of the treaty and now the Justice Department is looking into it, and, according to Kristof, trying to kill it.

Isn't it great to have a fundamentalist Attorney General who sides with religious fascists who view women as nothing but property?

"Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed." -- I.F. Stone

Why a First Strike Will Surely Backfire
"A preemptive all-out invasion of Iraq would represent one of the most fateful deployments of American power since World War II. Given the stakes, the policy discussion in official Washington has been remarkably narrow." Ñ Absolutely. I'm amazed at the way the Democrats all seem to be jumping on the invade Iraq bandwagon. The cases for and against haven't been made yet. Although this article offers one of the best against arguments I've seen.

The Telegraph reports speculation that Colin Powell may resign after the November elections because he is tired of being repeatedly undercut by the White House. The Telegraph doesn't seem to have any real news here, just speculation. But it seems only reasonable to wonder when Colin Powell will realize he's probably not really a Republican, and he's certainly not a right-wing Bush Republican.

ABC news reports that among the prisoners being held at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay are citizens of Britain, France, Australia, Sweden and Denmark. So, when are we going to start racially profiling Swedes?

Open Door for Saudi Terrorists
If you want a visa to come to the United States, you need to go to the US Embassy or consulate Ñ unless you live in Saudi Arabia. Resident Saudis Ñ whether or not they are citizens Ñ can apply for visas at travel agencies. All they need to do is submit a photograph and fill out a two-page form. The U.S. consulate in Jeddah reviews the applications, and reserves the right to interview anyone whose application doesn't pass muster, but interviews are rare. Even in the 30 days following September 11, the U.S. consulate interviewed only two of 104 Saudis who applied for visas, and no one was turned down. Keep in mind that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and that three of them had gotten their visas in Saudi Arabia under this special applicant-friendly program.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that has this privilege. A senior official at Consular Affairs, an agency within the State Department that oversees embassies and consulates, described the program as "an open-door policy for terrorists."

Why in the world are we coddling the Saudis this way?

I wrote yesterday about the SF Chronicle's investigation of how the FBI went after political activists (and even UC President Clark Kerr) at the University of California in the '60s, as well as aiding the political career of Ronald Reagan. I've been thinking more about this disturbing article and what it suggests about how easily intelligence agencies designed to preserve our freedom and safety can be turned to political purposes that have nothing to do with freedom or safety. Before anyone starts talking about giving the FBI more power, it seems reasonable to look at what they have done with that power in the past. Is this old history, something that could never happen again? Unfortunately, I can't think of any evidence that would lead to that conclusion. In fact, as Bruce Shapiro points out in today's Salon, we seem to be returning to the style of Richard Nixon's "imperial presidency," with its partisan secrecy, intimidation of critics, paranoia and unquestioning belief in unchecked political power. J. Edgar Hoover spied on religious and civil rights groups. Nixon used Hoover's intelligence to create an "enemies list" of people to go after. Bush, Ashcroft and company are the kind of people who look back to J. Edgar's time as the good old days. The rest of us do not.

Do I understand this?: "The problem with a full-scale invasion is that you lose the element of surprise, which is often critical in pre-emption," a senior official said today. "So the president wants to try everything short of that, because he knows that if we have to mount an invasion force, Saddam will see it coming." Discussions within the White House have dwelled on examples that suggest that the most successful pre-emptive actions were not the most drastic military options."

Is the president looking for alternatives to attacking Iraq? Actually being flexible and creative in his thinking? The focus of this article is on Bush changing to an official policy of attacking first if the U.S. feels its interests are threatened. The biggest danger in that is that just as every dictator in the world has used the "war on terrorism" to crack down even harder on its own dissidents, other countries could jump on the "I feel threatened, I think I'll attack" bandwagon as well Ñ which would lead to anarchy. And, and in fact, one of the dictators who could easily be pushed into a pre-emptive strike if he thinks he has nothing to lose is Saddam Hussein.

But being basically an optimist, I always keep an eye out for good signs, and if the Bush administration is considering ways to protect the country beyond full-scale armed interventions, that would certainly be a good, and utterly unexpected sign.

The San Francisco Chronicle's report on how the F.B.I. schemed to destroy anyone active in liberal or radical politics at the University of California in the '60s brings to mind the words Mario Savio, the voice of the Free Speech Movement, spoke on the steps of Sproul Hall in in 1964:

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare

The San Francisco Chronicle has spent 17 years trying to get records, under the Freedom of Information Act, of how the F.B.I. stuck its nose in University of California politics in the 1960s. What the documents reveal is disturbing, to say the least.

According to the Chronicle, the F.B.I. :

*spied on UC faculty members, staff and students (and even a journalist who reported on Berkeley's Free Speech Movement) whose political opinions J. Edgar Hoover despised Ñ and they didn't just look into their political activity, but also their personal lives, including keeping records of "illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking or other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability;"

*conspired with the head of the CIA and a senior member of the university's Board of Regents to pressure the board to "harass" faculty and students involved in legitimate protests;

*passed on negative information to journalists in an effort to manipulate public opinion about campus events and embarrass university officials;

*campaigned to destroy the career of UC President Clark Kerr (who Hoover regarded as too liberal, or, in the director's words, "pro-Communist") by passing on false information about him to conservative regents and to Lyndon Johnson, who was considering naming Kerr Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare (the information involved allegations the F.B.I. had investigated and found to be false, but passed on as gospel truth anyway);

*made a list of 72 UC faculty members, students and employees whom the FBI considered potentially dangerous to national security during a crisis and who should be detained indefinitely without judicial warrant.

One of the oddest and scariest revelations in the article is the close relationship between the F.B.I. and Ronald Reagan. Reagan became involved with the F.B.I. in the late '40s, passing on information about people in the entertainment industry who he suspected of being Communists (although one of the names Reagan passed on was that of a Los Angeles college student who questioned him after he gave a 1960 speech on behalf of Democrats for Nixon. The student, Reagan told the FBI, asked questions "right down the commie line."). When Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, Hoover gave Reagan's campaign a boost by endorsing his proposal to set up a new police training academy, essentially an "F.B.I. academy of California" (which, not coincidentally, would be located in Berkeley). Once Reagan was elected governor, Hoover protected him by not revealing information the F.B.I. had showing that Reagan had lied on the Personnel Security Questionnaire he had filled out as part of the security clearance he needed because of his access, as governor, to UC's atomic research data. Reagan asked Hoover for information on protestors and on Clark Kerr, as well as advance warnings of future protests. He got it, and used it to conduct a "psychological warfare campaign" against his political enemies. And after Reagan became president and expanded the FBI's domestic intelligence powers, the FBI was caught spying on more than 100 domestic groups that opposed Reagan's foreign policy.

In a piece today on the changing face of Iran, Thomas Friedman describes young Iranian women who have started wearing colorful scarves pushed back to show off their hair. The mullahs yell at them. The young women yell back. I think this is the best tidbit of news in the paper today. Great things happen when women yell back.

Give Peace A Chance? (2002 Remix)
"Classified investigations of the Qaeda threat now under way at the F.B.I. and C.I.A. have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States, the officials said. Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."

Let me get this straight: Bombing Afghanistan accomplished exactly nothing? It may have made things worse? Does anybody have Plan B ready?

I'm not trying to be facetious. I really find this article very disturbing. Although I don't think of myself as an absolute pacifist, I've always leaned in that direction. I don't believe, as pacifists argue, that violence NEVER solves a problem, but I don't believe it solves as many problems as militarists think it does either. I don't think that in and of itself it solves anything. But I think it's sometimes (very rarely) necessary as part of the solution to a problem. I thought this was one of those times. I was more than willing to give the Bush administration credit for destroying the al Qaeda base in Afghanistan. They're good at smashing things, as Thomas Friedman said in the NY Times last week, and that's nothing to sneer at. I understood that knocking out the training camps didn't eliminate the threat, but I assumed that it at least made a dent in it. I faulted them (as Friedman does) only for failing on the other side of the equation, for not being any good at building a peaceful alternative (and that's nothing to sneer at either). And now the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. seem to be saying that the pacifists were right all along Ñ the war in Afghanistan not only didn't eliminate the threat, but may have made things even worse.

I think I may start listening to my old John Lennon records again. Very smart man. I miss him.

"Every charlatan starts with a kernel of truth," state Sen. Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) said in an interview. "Everything that they pointed to had some kernel of truth to it, some credibility to it. That was the trouble with arguing your way through this thing. Everybody wanted a simple, philosophical, cut-and-dry answer. As opposed to the reality, which is that all these things they point to combine to create an environment that allows unethical, crooked people to take advantage of the circumstances." Ñ Sen. Peace is talking about how Enron officials skillfully lied as they manipulated California's energy market, but I think his remark is a good insight about life in general and politics in particular: "Every charlatan starts with a kernal of truth."

Some rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen (2000 Remix).
"One fall day in 2000, in the midst of the California energy crisis, S. David Freeman found himself debating by telephone with Enron's Kenneth Lay, chief executive of the then highflying Texas energy firm.

Freeman, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at the time, had joined other California officials in pushing the federal government for price controls as a means to rein in a runaway wholesale market.

Government intervention, Lay warned Freeman by telephone, would not work. Extended price caps would keep the market from correcting itself, and frighten away future investment in power plants. Lay, as Freeman recalls it, ended the conversation with this parting shot:

"Well, Dave, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you crazy people in California do, because I got smart guys out there who can always figure out how to make money."

Looking back on it now, amid revelations about "Death Star" and "Get Shorty" and other colorfully named tactics concocted by Enron traders, Freeman figures he should have paid more attention: "What he was telling me, in a sophisticated way, was that they were going to game the system."

I think Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has been taking lessons from the Bush administration in how to use power in an effective but sinister way. As most Southern Californians know, although Cardinal Mahony hasn't quite reached Cardinal Law levels of nastiness, he's got a pretty solid history behind him of covering up for priests. You would think that would make a man a little reticent about putting himself forward as a paragon of virtue and spokesman for reform. Silent Acts of Contrition would seem an appropriate response. But at the U.S. Bishops' Conference this week Cardinal Mahony pushed himself in front of every camera he could find, "forcefully advocating zero tolerance." Which would be great if he let on that he'd had a change of heart. But this is a man who ran an ad last summer in the LA Times patting himself on the back for always having a stronger position on child sexual abuse by priests than other cardinals Ñ even though he, like Cardinal Law, had passed at least one molesting priest from parish to parish, even after he was told about the abuse. Now why does this remind me of Bush? Because they both seem to be relying on the strange (but often useful) belief that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

Can a transnational company accused of corporate-sponsored terrorism hide behind the war on terrorism? Exxon-Mobil pays the Indonesian military for providing security for its facilities there. That military, which locals call "Exxon's Army," is "responsible for human rights abuses," according to both Human Rights Watch and Indonesian human rights groups. Is the oil company responsible for the murder, torture, sexual crimes, and kidnapping conducted by these soldiers? A lawsuit against the company is in a Washington federal court, but the Indonesian victims have two problems that have nothing to do with the merits of their case. First, they're Indonesians Ñ which means they live in a large Muslim nation in which some fundamentalist insurgents operate. Therefore the judge has asked the State Department's opinion on whether or not a ruling in this case might adversely impact the "war on terrorism." Is it okay for a country to terrorize its own people (paid for by an American oil company) if it claims to be doing so in order to fight terrorists? And will the answer to that question have anything to do with the fact that Exxon-Mobil was George Bush's second largest contributor (coming in right behind Enron)? Can a campaign contribution buy you the right to rape, murder and torture? If Exxon loses this case, my budding cynicism would start drying up fast. I'm not a cynic by nature, but I'm not hopeful.

The ideological sense of mission which propelled it through its first year is now proving a handicap, making it harder to cope with a set of complex problems. Ideology will do that to you. Really dealing with any problem requires an ability to juggle hundreds of duties, and recognize the complex interrelationships between tasks Ñ some of them contradictory. Smashing and building Ñ destroying terrorist training camps and at the same time dealing with the social and economic problems that create terrorists. If you can only do one of those, you might as well not bother, because the failures in one area will destroy any success you have in the other. You need to be mentally flexible to deal with any complex problem. And if there's one thing ideologues are not, it's mentally flexible.

FEAR FACTOR
"The silly color-coded gimmicks, the pre-emptive we-told-you-so's, the hype and spin and bluster and political opportunism, the willingness to make terrorism a lobbying prop for every cause on the Republican agenda Ñ these are eating away at the administration's credibility. How much confidence can you have in people who contrived a bogus claim of a Cuban bio-weapons threat just to embarrass Jimmy Carter when he visited Castro?"

Good question. When the administration plays politics with fear so boldly and shamelessly, and seems to worry less about the effectiveness of the way they deal with threats than about the political impact of their initiatives, it's impossible to trust that they are doing anything to insure our safety. The more frightening times are, the less you need a fear monger at the head of the government.

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not remotely qualified to judge the relevance of 16th century legal precedents in this defense of military justice in the Padilla case, but this whole argument seems unconvincing (and a little scary) to me. Civil libertarians aren't worried about Padilla "being denied access to the local public defender." They're worried, justifiably, about the government's ability to hold someone in custody for as long as this war lasts (however long it takes to eliminate all evil from the world Ñ that could take awhile) without having to offer any evidence that it is necessary to do so. If everything the government says about Jose Padilla is true Ñ and I have no reason to think it isn't (although, like a lot of people,I suspect Ashcroft has overplayed the threat quiet a bit) Ñ I'm grateful they caught him, I don't want him freed, and I don't want anyone's hands tied in questioning him. But the key word is "if." There is simply no way to know if the government has a case for holding him unless they make the case. If they don't owe anyone an explanation for anything they do, they have absolute power. There's nothing holding them back.

According to USA Today: "Since 1995, at least 27 Americans have attended four Pakistani religious schools, called madrassas, that preach a radical form of Islam calling for the destruction of the United States." Ñ Explain to me again how racial profiling is going to solve anything.

SPEAKING OF THE ARROGANCE OF POWER
Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., has filed a lawsuit against Bill Clinton, James Carville and Larry Flynt for $30 million, claiming "loss of reputation and emotional distress." The "emotional distress" was caused when Flynt (in a conspiracy, Barr believes, with Clinton and Carville) pointed out that this man, who lead the fight for Clinton's impeachment, not only had an affair himself, but had his wife (who was also his secretary) make phone calls arranging his dates with his mistress. Lied about it (under oath) as well. He also paid for his wife's abortion, while making virulantly anti-abortion speeches. I guess it would be emotionally stressful to have someone point out that you're a liar, a hypocrite and a scumbag, even if it's true.

There are two ironies here (well, actually, there are lots of ironies, but let's just focus on the most obvious ones.) One is that Barr is suing for $30 million. At the same time, he's been arguing in Congress for a bill that would limit non-economic medical damages Ñ awards for "pain and suffering" Ñ to $250,000. The second irony is even odder. Barr is suing for violations of a statute known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which lets citizens sue anyone who deprives them "of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws." A congressman with ties to white supremicist groups is using a law designed to protect people from racist organizations. Amazing.

SMASHING VS. BUILDING, PART 2
I agree strongly with Nicholas Kristof: "President Bush has done nothing substantial so far to reduce the risks emanating from any of the four most dangerous places in the world: the Middle East, India/Pakistan, North Korea and (in the longer run) China/Taiwan. Mr. Bush's aides have quelled crises as they arise, but they have not sought aggressively to make peace in any of these places. It's time for the White House to take the initiative and prevent crises instead of just managing them." Ñ I'm not discounting the need to smash things sometimes. But smashing doesn't solve every problem. In fact, it solves very few of them. And smashing also leaves you with a responsibility to rebuild or replace what you've smashed. But building is harder than smashing, and unfortunately George Bush seems to think hard work is what the peons do.

C.I.A. and F.B.I. Agree to Truce in War of Leaks vs. Counterleaks
The New York Times has a warm and fuzzy article about how the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have decided to co-operate Ñ not in working together for the good of the country, but in keeping each other's secrets. I think I'm supposed to feel good about this, but all I see is two powerful agencies protecting each other, making sure we never find out what happened. Maybe they could take lessons from the Catholic bishops, who are experts at managing the secrecy thing.

I was trying to stick to one subject for a while Ñ at the moment, balancing security and civil liberties Ñ but this morning as I was reading this N.Y. Times article about the bishops' conference, I realized how interconnected seemingly disconnected events are. There's a fundamental issue in everything I've written in the past couple of days that has to do with the arrogance of power. And politicians aren't by any stretch of the imagination the only ones who have it. R. Scott Appleby, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, nailed the issue when he explained the Church's priest scandals this way: "Catholics on the right, and the left and in the deep middle are all in basic agreement as to the causes of this scandal Ñ a betrayal of fidelity enabled by the arrogance that comes with unchecked power." Arrogance is almost too mild a word. Even after all that has happened, the bishops are still virtually clueless. It is telling, I think, that the bishops gave Bishop Gregory, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a standing ovation, while the stories of victims, told through barely controlled tears, "were met with lighter applause." Bishop Gregory gave a good speech, but the courage of the victims in telling their stories deserved a great deal more respect than the bishop's long overdue apology. These overgrown, immature boys still have far more appreciation for each others' travails than with the victims they have left behind. According to another article on the topic, When David Clohessy, the spokesman for Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), passed around a photograph of a sex-abuse victim who had recently committed suicide, most of the bishops scanned it and passed it on. Cardinal Edward Egan of New York didn't even give it a glance: he just handed it to the bishop next to him. They don't even want to look at the damage they've caused. Who can tell whether they can't deal with their own consciences, or if, even now, they just don't give a damn, just don't want to be bothered dealing with it.

John Ashcroft: Minister of Fear
"The crazy thing is that Al Muhajir does seem to be an actual bad guy. And al Qaida is actually interested in using Òdirty bombs.Ó It is unquestionably a success that he was apprehended. Ashcroft didnÕt need to exaggerate the threat and scare us more than necessary to get some credit for that success." Ñ This may be what worries me so much about Ashcroft. He blows things so out of proportion that you end up blowing off every thing he says. The problem is that the danger remains real, even though his way of dealing with it is totally insane. The country has to deal with a threat and the only person we have to turn to is a man who seems to think it makes him important if he can scare people.

RANDOM AND STILL DEVELOPING THOUGHTS ON CIVIL LIBERTIES AND SECURITY

1. Nobody wants truly dangerous people out on the street. And yet sometimes, ironically, the safest place for them to be is out on the street, followed every step of the way, so you can find out more information about who else is involved, and exactly what the plans are. Ironically, that kind of good police work is also good from a civil liberties point of view. You don't lock somebody up on a hunch, you lock them up when you've really got something, and when you can prove you've really got something.

2. Most of us don't want to see innocent people locked away either. I started to write that "nobody" wanted to see this, but I realized that wasn't true. There are plenty of people out there who are more than ready to round up everybody who fits an ethnic or religious profile, and when that doesn't make them any safer, they'll add in a few more ethnicities, and when that doesn't work, they'll start locking up the "fifth column," which basically means anyone who disagrees with them. But I still think that no matter how scared they get, most Americans don't want to see innocent people jailed. (There's a little voice at the back of my head that tells me I'm overly optimistic in this belief, but I do my best to ignore it.)

3. I think #1 is just as true for ACLU types as it is for everyone else, but a lot of times they aren't very good at making that clear. They're afraid of seeming to give an inch on civil liberties, which is understandable, since (as John Ashcroft is making so clear) if you give powerful people more power, it just feeds their greed for power. I don't really mean to say we need to "give in" a little on civil liberties. What I mean to say is we need to do a better job of demonstrating that civil liberties are the basis of safety Ñ and a lot of cliches about how if we give up on the things that make America a great country (like the Constitution) the terrorists will have won won't do it. It's true, but it doesn't make anyone feel any safer.

4. An awful lot of things that make people feel safer don't actually make them one bit safer. George Bush bragged recently about how many people had been arrested. But rounding up thousands of people and holding them without due process is not just a nasty thing to do, it's incredibly stupid and wasteful if the people you're rounding up are nothing but visa violators, while the real terrorists are still out there. Pretending to be tough often covers up for a lot of incompetence.

5. Could there be circumstances in which it really is important to keep someone off the street, but for security reasons you can't make the case for it?

6. Does anyone really want to give the government the power to arrest anyone, even an American citizen, and hold them in custody for as long as they want, without having to explain to a judge why they are holding them?

Most political blogs exist as a place to store ammunition, to point out all the examples in the world each day of how the blogger is right and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong. I find some of those blogs useful, as links to interesting articles I would otherwise not find, but for the most part, I find the tone Ñ even of the blogs whose point of view I more or less share Ñ depressing. I have two basic beliefs when it comes to writing about politics. One is that questions ought to come before answers. The other is that any opinion ought to be tempered with the understanding that you might be wrong. Unless you're willing to question your own beliefs and consider the possibility that you're wrong, you can't get to any real understanding of an issue.

Which may explain why the things I wrote yesterday are so rambling and contradictory. I don't think of this writing as an attempt to bring the truth down from the mountaintop, but as an attempt to bring together little bits and pieces of information, along with some half-digested insights of my own, observe them, and see if patterns form. It's an attempt to find truths, not lecture on THE TRUTH.

BALANCING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND SAFETY
I said yesterday that everything I was reading about the Padilla case seemed extreme -- civil libertarians discounting the importance of secrecy, Ashcroftians willing to shred the constitution in a heartbeat. Finally, some balance.

"The Bush administration may well have legitimate concerns about charging Padilla with a crime and putting him on trial in a public forum. A trial could conceivably force the government to release sensitive intelligence information that could jeopardize efforts to uncover future plots against the United States. And in any case, preventing another terrorist attack is more important than punishing any single wrongdoer.

But that doesn't justify indefinite detentions simply on the basis of the attorney general and defense secretary's say-so. The Supreme Court has approved the concept of preventive detention for mobsters, sexual predators, and other persons who would likely cause harm to the community if allowed to remain at large. But such proceedings generally require, at a minimum, that the detainee be afforded counsel and the right to present evidence, and that an unbiased judge find a clear and convincing justification for the detention.

There is no reason why the government couldn't employ similar procedures in Padilla's case. If the government is relying on evidence that can't be made public for national security reasons, it could even ask to the relevant portions of the case filed under seal.

The government says it is confident that Padilla is a terrorist. If so, the Bush administration has failed a deadly plot against the United States, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives. But as long as Padilla remains in military custody without even a semblance of due process, the American public can never know for certain."

Just a thought: This administration tried to scare everyone awhile back by saying that another terrorist attack is "inevitable." I think that's just another way of saying that Plan A isn't working and nobody in the building is smart enough to come up with a Plan B. Smashing things isn't working. It's time to start building

One more thing about that Safire piece: when a right-winger like Safire notices how little is gained from "triumphant seizures of incoming hoodlums accused of "planning" to build a panic bomb," it's pretty obvious the Attorney General's game is failing. Not even the conservatives will defend him.

I almost never agree with William Safire, but nobody can be wrong about everything, and I think Safire gets it right today: the biggest problem in intelligence is obviously not the restraint of the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. in collecting information (nor is it fear of racial profiling, as Safire absurdly suggested a while back), but their inability to deal with what they collect. Basically, the big macho cops don't like, don't trust and don't value the work of the quiet, desk-bound analysts and translators. People keep talking about changing the culture of the F.B.I., but I suspect the most important change that needs to be made (and I haven't the vaguest idea how to get there) is for it to become more scholarly, more feminine.

Ashcroft is a bully and a thug who has no business being attorney general of the United States.
I spent too many years in Catholic school, with Irish nuns no less, to put it quite so rudely, but I wouldn't disagree.

William Saletan makes a good point in SLATE.: "Any cop who's ever worked a case involving more than one conspirator knows that you never want the bad guys to know how much you know. Once the second conspirator knows that you've caught the first, he might bolt or change his routines. Once he knows what the first has told you, he knows how to change his plans and his story. Thanks to Ashcroft's announcement and additional leaks by administration "officials," Padilla's co-conspirators now know plenty about what we know... Moreover, the government's stated reasons for choosing military detention rather than civilian prosecution directly contradict its rationale for releasing the story. The government's stated reason for avoiding civilian prosecution is that we couldn't prove Padilla's criminal guilt without divulging "intelligence sources" and "investigative details" we dare not expose. In the absence of such prosecution, its stated reason for detaining Padilla anyway is that we need to keep interrogating him and others to unravel future plots. 'We're not interested in trying him at the moment,'' said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 'We're interested in finding out what in the world he knows' and obtaining information to 'protect the American people from future terrorist acts.' If those are the government's reasons, why is it divulging intelligence sources and investigative details that impair its ability to interrogate plotters and possibly prevent terrorist acts?" -- Is John Ashcroft some conniving Rasputin or just a bumbler in a job that's way beyond his meager talents and intelligence? I think it looks more like the latter.

On Monday, John Ashcroft announced that the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Defense Department and other federal agencies (don't want to leave anybody out) had "captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device,or "dirty bomb," in the United States." He mentioned "radiation" or "dirty bombs" five times in a 14-paragraph speech. (Subtlety does not seem to be one of Ashcroft's virtues.) I don't know if Ashcroft is sticking by that story, but on Tuesday the White House disowned him, admitting that the Attorney General had "overstated the potential threat posed by 'dirty bomb' suspect Abdullah Al Mujahir." ''I don't think there was actually a plot,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told CBS on Tuesday. It's impossible to tell whether Ashcroft was just trying to scare everyone into backing the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. or if he just wasn't smart enough to see that there was a lot less to the story than he claimed. In either case though, the man doesn't need the threat of a bomb (dirty or otherwise) to scare me. In that same speech on Monday, Ashcroft was quoted as saying, "To our enemies, I say we will continue to be vigilant against all threats, whether they come from overseas or at home in America." What scares me is that this is a man who doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between a threat to Americans' safety, and a threat to his political career. I'd be wary of giving as much power as John Ashcroft has demanded (and gotten) to anybody, let alone a man who sees enemies and traitors every time he takes his eye off the mirror.

"The ACLU says that if the government has sufficient evidence of criminal conduct of a United States citizen then it should charge him in U.S. courts and that the desire to prosecute or detain suspects under the less stringent military standard for such prisoners does not justify an abandonment of its earlier assurances that citizens would not be subject to military jurisdiction." -- In theory, I agree. But nobody wants a potential terrorist to go free either. We need a reasonable way to deal with both sides of this, and I haven't seen anybody address that in a responsible way yet.

Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School argues that keeping Padilla in military detention might be better, from a civil liberties point of view, than a civil trial. The problem, Tribe says, is that even if there was little evidence, a jury would probably still convict him. That would create a really atrocious precedent: someone being convicted not of committing a crime or even of planning one in an ordinary sense, but just of thinking and talking about committing a crime. We'd have a precedent for convicting people, essentially of thought crimes. George Orwell is spinning so fast in his grave we could make him a source of alternative energy. I think Tribe has a good point, but I also think it's astonishing that a life-long advocate for civil liberties is arguing that military detention is preferable to a civil trial. It just goes to show how complicated the whole thing is. And how much more real conversation about this needs to take place.

The most frustrating thing about the debate over the balance that needs to be found between safety and respect for civil liberties is how little real debate is actually taking place Ñ or at least how little genuine conversation. I can't think of much that's more important right now. Lean too much one way and you put people's lives at risk; lean too much the other way and you have nothing worth fighting for. There's so much posturing going on over the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called "Dirty Bomber," starting, of course, with Bush and Ashcroft. If this were any previous president, and any previous attorney general, it would be reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the timing of the announcement that they had this guy in custody was a coincidence, not a politcally motivated scheme to push questions off the front page, and scare people back into unquestioning support for the administration. The problem is, they have such a long history of releasing information in politically beneficial ways that they make even the most idealistic and trusting of us into cynics. How can you not be suspicious, when, almost as soon as the announcement was made, "Republican lawmakers were using headlines about the dirty-bomb plot to try to hurriedly push through the president's homeland security makeover."? That "makeover" was obviously a hastily put together plan designed at least in part to push Colleen Rowley out of what would have been her position as the lead story in most papers. The re-organization almost certainly needs to take place, but a lot of questions need to be asked before this half-baked plan gets put into effect. If a potential terrorist is arrested, someone who talked about planting a dirty bomb, but apparently didn't have the means to carry out the plan, and the result of this is that a half-ass plan for "national security" that hasn't been thought through and hasn't been thoroughly debated gets rammed through, somehow I'm not going to feel more secure. They have a history of grabbing innocent people and stuffing them away for months without cause. I doubt very much that's the case here. I don't think they would be so public with the arrest if they didn't have sufficient cause to believe he's dangerous. I just fear that once we establish that they can get away with this next step, that becomes a norm, and the guilt of the next person tossed into military custody will be a lot more questionable.

The problem is that once you get over the immediate fear of what they've told you, and over the anger at being jerked around by having your fears manipulated, there are some real questions that need to be answered. They may be jerking us around, and they may be shredding the Constitution, but there's no getting around the fact that they're raising some legitimate issues, too. It seems that the main reason they've moved this guy over to a military court is that they haven't got much of a case against him. That could be a matter of incompetence. Arresting someone who talked about doing something but had no plan and no means seems pretty shakey, but of course there's always the possibility that the plan had gone farther than they can reveal. More importantly, they may be unable to bring a case because doing so would reveal intelligence sources that it would be foolish to produce in court. The problem is this: it isn't hard to imagine a situation in which you have a person who you can't make a case against, and who nevertheless is a genuine risk. If Jose Padilla is who John Ashcroft says he is (and the biggest problem here is Ashcroft's trustworthiness, which is not exactly stellar) then letting him go would be insane. But holding him in prison indefinitely, with nothing but Ashcroft's word to go on, with no way of judging whether or not there is a legitimate reason to hold him, is pretty frightening as well.

SMASHING VS. BUILDING
"Mr. Bush and his aides are very good at smashing things, but so far they've shown little ability to build anything abroad -- because they don't want to get deeply involved anywhere for very long." Ñ Thomas Friedman, NY Times