Finally, Action! Ron Paul Introduces Bill to Defend Constitution!
Naomi Wolf, 10.18.2007

On Monday, Rep. Ron Paul introduced the AFA's legislative package into Congress. This beautifully argued document feels historic and has the ring of great power to correct great injustice.

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Apocalypse Now? Stephen Holmes | According to Chalmers Johnson, Bush's imperial presidency may be the final chapter in the collapse of American democracy.

Pelosi's Stark Rebuke Katrina vanden Heuvel | It's not surprising that the House Speaker criticized Pete Stark for his comments about the S-CHIP bill's defeat. But aren't there worse things to criticize--the war, for instance?

Hillary's Mystery Money Men Russ Baker & Adam Federman | The men behind the money that made Bush now want to claim the Clinton campaign. Is someone cooking the books at Hillary Inc.?

Iraq: The Other Surge Robert Dreyfuss | Across the political spectrum in Iraq, a nationalistic bloc is emerging to challenge the Kurdish and Shiite separatists who have held sway under US tutelage.

A green light to oust Al Qaeda
The Christian Science Monitor - Fri Oct 19, 4:00 AM ET If the United States had a hand in Thursday's return of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan, it was for good reason. Pakistan needs a new democratic alliance if it is to oust Al Qaeda and Taliban chieftains – and their terrorist training camps – from the tribal, mountainous areas.

• Rudy, Romney Pray For Acceptance From Religious Right The Nation - Sat Oct 20, 12:06 PM ETThe Nation -- In a speech before 2,000 "Value Voters" today, Rudy Giuliani decided to cherry-pick from his past instead of entirely ignoring it. Giuliani's decision to draw upon his time as New York Mayor had some success though it was a less crowd-pleasing approach than Mitt Romney, who last night gave little indication he used to be Massachusetts Governor.

• Epitaph for a Congress The Weekly Standard - Fri Oct 19, 7:40 PM ETWashington (The Weekly Standard) Vol. 013, Issue 07 - 10/29/2007 - Perhaps the Democratic sweep in last November's elections was providential. Consider what might have happened if Republicans had suffered setbacks on November 7, 2006, but had narrowly maintained control of Congress.

• About that Muslim Letter to the Pope Mona Charen - Fri Oct 19, 3:00 AM ETCreators Syndicate - With a good deal of fanfare, a group of 138 Muslim clerics from around the globe released a statement to Christian leaders earlier this month calling for peace and understanding between the two religions. American and other Western newspapers and media lapped it up. "Muslim Leaders Reach Out to Christians" announced the Los Angeles Times. "Muslim Leaders Send Peace Message" headlined Time magazine.

Iran Warns It Can Fire 11,000 Rockets In One Minute If Attacked
Tehran (RIA Novosti) Oct 22, 2007 - Iran has the capability to fire 11,000 rockets at enemy bases within one minute if the country is attacked, a top commander in the Revolutionary Guards Corps said on Saturday. "Within the first minute of any attack by enemies against our country, the missile and artillery unit of the ground force is capable of firing 11,000 missiles and shells at targets that are known to us," Gen. Mahmoud Chaha ... more

Ahmadinejad tightens grip after nuclear resignation
Tehran (AFP) Oct 21, 2007 - Five months ahead of crucial elections, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tightened his grip on Iranian politics after the resignation of his top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, analysts say. The surprise Saturday resignation of Larijani, a conservative who nonetheless harboured significant differences with Ahmadinejad, is the latest development in a series of moves that have seen Ahmadine ... more

Cheney: Iran faces 'serious consequences' over nuclear drive
Lansdowne, Virginia (AFP) Oct 21, 2007 - Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the United States would not permit Iran to get nuclear weapons and warned of "serious consequences" if it refuses to stop enriching uranium. Cheney, considered the US administration's toughest hardliner on Iran, did not mention the possibility of military action amid reports that President George W. Bush could be laying the stage for war with the Islami ... more

Friction between EU, Egypt over nuclear-free Middle East
Vienna (AFP) Oct 21, 2007 - The refusal by most EU countries to back Egypt's call for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East at a UN conference last month appears to be causing some friction between Cairo and the 27-nation bloc. Egypt has sent a letter to the countries concerned asking them to explain themselves, diplomatic sources in Vienna told AFP. In the letter, Cairo expressed "surprise and regret" at the deci ... more

+ Larijani: Iran's man for all crises bows out
Tehran (AFP) Oct 20, 2007 - Ali Larijani, whose shock resignation as Iran's top national security official was announced on Saturday, is a conservative who maintained Tehran's tough line over its nuclear drive but was never a natural ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As secretary of Iran's supreme National Security Council, Larijani led talks with the European Union over the Iranian nuclear programme, refusing to ... more

+ Most Afghans want foreign troops to stay: poll
Montreal (AFP) Oct 19, 2007 - Most Afghans see NATO troops' presence in their country as positive, and want them to stay, a poll published in Canadian media Friday found. The survey done by the company Environics for CBC, The Globe and Mail and La Presse, questioned more than 1,500 Afghans. According to the survey 60 percent of those polled saw the presence of foreign troops in their country as positive while 16 perc ... more

NKorea envoy in Syria amid nuclear talk
Damascus (AFP) Oct 21, 2007 - A top North Korean official held talks in Syria on Sunday, amid reports -- strongly denied by both countries -- that Pyongyang was helping Damascus develop a nuclear programme. Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Naji Otri met Choe Thae-Bok, chairman of communist North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly and discussed efforts to boost relations between the two nations, the official SANA news agency ... more

No evidence Iran arming Taliban: Afghan foreign minister
Herat, Afghanistan (AFP) Oct 19, 2007 - Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said Friday there was no evidence that Iran was supplying weapons to Taliban militants waging a violent insurgency. Spanta's comments came after the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, said Thursday a convoy of explosives intercepted last month had arrived from Iran and probably with the knowledge of the Iranian military. ... more

Turkish campaign against Kurds faces many pitfalls
Istanbul (AFP) Oct 19, 2007 - Turkish troops face many risks if they cross into northern Iraq to chase Kurdish rebels, including renewed attacks on their own side of the border, Turkish experts said Friday. The risk of a cross-border incursion has grown since the Turkish parliament this week approved a one-year authorisation for the military to cross into Iraq to attack Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) bases. ... more

USAF Relieves Commanders Involved In Nuclear Weapons Incident
Washington (AFNS) Oct 22, 2007 - The Air Force has relieved three commanders and disciplined an undisclosed number of others in connection with an Aug. 29 "Bent Spear" incident in which nuclear-equipped missiles were unknowingly transported nearly 1,500 miles on the wing of a B-52 Stratofortress bomber. "Bent Spear" is a Defense Department reporting term referring to a nuclear-weapons incident that is serious but does not inclu ... more

China's Hu in control of rapidly modernising military
Beijing (AFP) Oct 20, 2007 - After five years in power, President Hu Jintao has finally gained unquestioned control of China's massive military while transforming it into wealthy, high-tech fighting force, analysts said. Although Hu was named Communist Party chief in 2002 and president in 2003, he did not inherit the mantle of commander-in-chief until a year later and questions had lingered over who commanded the allegi ... more

The Constitution and Foreign Policy
by Bart Frazier, Posted October 17, 2007 Protecting the country from invasion and securing individual rights are two of the vital functions of the federal government. At the same time the government is the greatest threat to our freedom. This was the subject of FFF’s June conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” An underlying theme, touched on by every one of the speakers, was the relationship between the state and the individual, for it is the individual who ultimately feels the effects of the government policies. For Americans, the rulebook for this relationship is the Constitution.

In the United States, the Constitution is the primary connection between the individual and the state. It is the law of the land and the document that trumps all others when determining what the state may and may not do.

The Constitution was designed to protect us, the people, from government. It is the government, however, that has advanced an overactive foreign policy for the past several decades, and it is the American people who now feel the adverse effects of the resulting blowback. It is the government that violates civil liberties, and it is the individual who feels the effects of government surveillance, detention, and torture.

The relationship between the individual and the state is a problem that is as old as history itself. Governments have been abusing and killing their citizens since men began to rule over other men. R.J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between war, genocide, state-induced famines, and the like, governments across the globe were responsible for the deaths of more than 262 million people in the 20th century alone. As Rummel states, if all of those people were laid head to toe, they would circle the Earth ten times. If the state’s treatment of the individual had to be described in one word, it undoubtedly would be “violence.”

This leaves us, the individuals, with a conundrum; we want the state to protect us from invasion, theft, and murder, but we don’t want it killing us or sending us to occupy another country to be killed by others.

That is a dilemma that the U.S. Constitution was devised to address.

How is the Constitution to do that? In a nutshell, the Constitution formed a national government that provided for the common defense while simultaneously protecting the individual from that very government it had brought into existence. It was acknowledged that individual rights, or natural rights, precede the existence of government and are inherent. Any government action that violated those rights was illegitimate.


Civil liberties
For those who cherish liberty, the Constitution is the best attempt at leashing the government that has ever been made. It restricted the power of the government while retaining the rights of the individual. A common misconception is that the Constitution grants us our rights. High-school students are routinely asked what rights the First Amendment gives them, but the question itself is in error. The Constitution does not grant the people any rights. Rights are inherent and inalienable. The Constitution protects rights, rights that precede all forms of government, rights that all of us would still retain even if we were living without government.

In order to protect civil liberties, the Founders wanted to make it explicit as possible what the government was and was not permitted to do. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution lists the powers that Congress can legally exercise. If a power is not enumerated in that list, Congress cannot legally perform it.

The meaning of the “enumerated powers” doctrine has long been lost on citizens and politicians alike, but there is no question that this is what the Framers intended to do.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817,

Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.

James Madison wrote at the Virginia convention to ratify the Constitution in June 1788,

[The] powers of the federal government are enumerated; it can only operate in certain cases; it has legislative powers on defined and limited objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction.

And even embedded in the Constitution itself is a provision to reaffirm what Article I, Section 8 already implied. The Tenth Amendment reads,

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Bill of Rights, of which, of course, the Tenth Amendment was a part, was not even thought necessary by some of the Framers because the enumerated-powers doctrine made it clear that the federal government had extremely limited powers, none of which included violating natural rights. But it was the Anti-Federalists who were adamant that the Bill of Rights be adopted — and it is a good thing that they so insisted, because the enumerated-powers concept underlying Article I, Section 8, has been a forgotten part of the Constitution for a century. The first ten amendments to the Constitution have been the bulwark against the government that has enabled us to retain many of our freedoms.

In a nutshell, the Bill of Rights clearly specifies what the government may not do to people. It may not punish us for speaking or printing our opinion or for protesting against the government. It may not take away our guns. It may not search us or our homes without a justifiable reason. It may not jail us without giving us a reason, and it must provide us with a quick trial so that innocent men are set free as soon as possible. The trial a man receives must be by a jury of his peers, if he so elects, so that corrupt judges cannot jail him unjustly. (For a detailed exposition of the Bill of Rights, see Jacob Hornberger’s 11-part series starting in the July 2004 edition of Freedom Daily.)

And to make clear that this list of protected rights wasn’t thought of as exclusive, the Ninth Amendment states explicitly that this enumeration of rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

This framework held fast until the beginning of the 20th century. As Progressivism and eventually the New Deal grabbed the imagination of the country, the federal government began to exercise its power over more and more aspects of everyday life, in the process infringing upon the liberties that people of the 18th and 19th centuries took for granted.


Foreign policy
The Framers also had a clear idea of how their country should act on the world’s stage. Fortune had brought them a country separated from most of the world’s wars by two vast oceans. They had recently waged a long-fought, hard-won war against an imperial government, and they simply wanted a government that would leave them alone.

Eights years after the Constitution was ratified, George Washington gave sage advice in his farewell address:

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our external relations to have with them as little political connection as possible....

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns....

James Madison knew that warfare, even incited from within the government, could be detrimental to the health of the republic, saying,

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

And John Jay warned in Federalist No.4

[The] safety of the people of America against dangers from foreign force, depends not only on their forbearing to give just causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to invite hostility or insult; for it need not be observed, that there are pretended as well as just causes of war.

So how were the Framers to protect this nation from unjust wars? They knew that too much power concentrated in the hands of any one man, or group of men, eventually leads to despotism. What provisions did the Constitution have that would attempt to limit the government to only the most necessary of wars? Like so many other functions of the Constitution, the powers that were needed to implement foreign policy were divided between the executive and legislative branches.


Declaring war
The power to declare war was given to Congress, but the president was the one with the power to wage it. The president might wish to wage war, but he needed to get a declaration of war from Congress before he could do so. And even if a president was successful in getting a war started, Congress had the power to stop it by cutting off the money that funded it.

The system of checks and balances so highly regarded by historians was supposed to prevent the ascension of a tyrannical government. Instead of enabling one man or one body of men to determine when the country was to go to war, the Constitution saw to it that different parts of the federal government would have to debate and ultimately agree among themselves that war was the proper route.

When war fever gripped the nation, which the Framers knew would inevitably happen, it was hoped that the built-in tension between the executive and legislative branches would enable cooler heads to prevail and avert nondefensive wars. In theory, special or fractional interests that were motivated to start war would be thwarted by the majority of those in Congress not willing to suffer unnecessary warfare. Unlike the monarchs that ruled most of the civilized countries of the world in the 18th century, America’s head of state had no authority to go to war.

When Congress did decide to take the nation to war, the president would then assume the power of commander in chief. In the event that he began to abuse his war power — for example, by invading other countries or even turning the army on U.S. citizens — Congress could pull the plug.

The Constitution mandates that if Congress raises an army, it cannot fund it for longer than a two-year period. This provides a relief valve in case the army or the president gets out of hand — the Congress simply refuses to supply the military with money when the two years are up.

This system — that is, separating the powers to declare war, wage war, and fund war — served our nation fairly well (we’ll leave aside for future discussion the War Between the States and the Mexican-American War) from its inception through the late 1800s. But as the new century dawned, Americans found that their government had imperial ambitions and that their army was spread across the globe. U.S. soldiers could be found supporting a puppet regime in Hawaii. With a cry of “Remember the Maine!” the government turned George Washington’s maxim of disentanglement on its head by declaring war on Spain and sending its soldiers to the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Seeking a canal across Central America, the U.S. military played an instrumental role in Panama’s secession from Colombia. More than 100,000 Americans lost their lives fighting in World War I, which of course was the war that would end all wars. There have been a few since then.

The words of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were a far cry from those of the Framers. Instead of “observing good faith and justice toward all nations,” Americans heard that they should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” They heard Woodrow Wilson tell them that “armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best.” And Franklin Roosevelt instructed that “we must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

During the period between the Spanish-American War and World War II, while the federal government was moving toward an imperial foreign policy, at least the declaration-of-war requirement was still being heeded. In the conflicts of those tumultuous times, the president asked Congress for a declaration of war because the Constitution required him to secure it. Presidents do not bother with such niceties any longer.

Congress has not declared war against any nation since World War II — a span of more than 65 years. Yet since World War II, U.S. troops have been deployed 71 times to 42 countries, with more than 98,000 U.S. dead and more than 279,000 wounded. A declaration of war was not obtained for any of these conflicts.

The Constitution no longer chains the military or the president as it was designed to do. The chains weakened as the Progressive movement gripped the country and as an imperial mindset sent American soldiers far and wide. When the U.S. government began to impose its will on the nations of the world following World War II, the Constitution was eventually ignored and forgotten. Most people today cannot even name the three branches of government, much less explain the separation-of-powers doctrine.


The Constitution today
In the span of 220 years, our republic evolved from one of enumerated powers, narrowly defined by the Constitution, to an extremely powerful, highly centralized, militant government that is forever extending the boundaries of its power.

Today, the U.S. military is an imperial behemoth with more than 700 overseas military bases in 130 countries. It has an additional 6,000 military bases in the United States and its territories. The budget for the Pentagon is larger then the 20 next-largest militaries combined.

As the federal government has become more militant, it has taken ever-bolder steps in trampling our liberties. On a domestic level, the government began inspecting our food. It tore apart companies it thought too large and powerful. It dictated prices for goods and services. It razed entire neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal.” It has spied on its own citizens. It has attempted to nationalize complete industries. And now, in the 21st century, it has moved to depriving us of us even the most basic civil rights, such as a right to a fair trial. Torture is now an accepted form of “justice.”

The Constitution was designed to prevent the state from doing these very things, but it has ceased doing so. This does not mean that the Constitution is flawed in design. No constitution, no matter how well designed, will work as intended if the citizens do not care whether their politicians observe it, or even understand its very purpose. The Constitution is an excellent framework for government; it just needs to be understood and observed.

Bart Frazier is program director at The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0707e.asp

The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know

Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.
Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Adminstration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over again.

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say.

"The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says Leverett. "They're basically saying, 'You've been trying to engage Iran for more than a year now and what do you have to show for it? They keep building more centrifuges, they're sending this IED stuff over into Iraq that's killing American soldiers, the human-rights internal political situation has gotten more repressive -- what the hell do you have to show for this engagement strategy?' "

But the engagement strategy was never serious and was designed to fail, they say. Over the last year, Rice has begun saying she would talk to "anybody, anywhere, anytime," but not to the Iranians unless they stopped enriching uranium first. That's not a serious approach to diplomacy, Mann says. Diplomacy is about talking to your enemies. That's how wars are averted. You work up to the big things. And when U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had his much-publicized meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this spring, he didn't even have permission from the White House to schedule a second meeting.

The most ominous new development is the Bush administration's push to name the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.

"The U.S. has designated any number of states over the years as state sponsors of terrorism," says Leverett. "But here for the first time the U.S. is saying that part of a government is itself a terrorist organization."

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. "If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of '08," says Leverett, "what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone."

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran's resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has been," says Mann, "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world."

Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be.

Flynt Lawrence Leverett grew up in Fort Worth and went to Texas Christian University. He spent the first nine years of his government career as a CIA analyst specializing in the Middle East. He voted for George Bush in 2000. On the day the assassins of Al Qaeda flew two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, Colin Powell summoned him to help plan the response. Five months later, Leverett landed a plum post on the National Security Council. When Condoleezza Rice discussed the Middle East with President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, Leverett was the man standing behind her taking notes and whispering in her ear.

Today, he sits on the back deck of a house tucked into the curve of a leafy suburban street in McLean, Virginia, a forty-nine-year-old white American man wearing khakis and a white dress shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. Mann sits next to him, also wearing khakis. She's thirty-nine but looks much younger, with straight brown hair and a tomboy's open face. The polish on her toenails is pink. If you saw her around McLean, you wouldn't hesitate:

Soccer mom. Classic soccer mom.

But with degrees from Brandeis and Harvard Law and stints at Tel Aviv University and the powerful Israeli lobby known as AIPAC, she has even better right-wing credentials than her husband.

As they talk, eating grapes out of a bowl, lawn mowers hum and birds chirp. The floor is littered with toy trucks and rubber animals left behind by the youngest of their four children. But the tranquillity is misleading. When Mann and Leverett went public with the inside story behind the impending disaster with Iran, the White House dismissed them. Then it imposed prior restraint on them, an extraordinary episode of government censorship. Finally, it threatened them.

Now they are afraid of the White House, and watching what they say. But still, they feel they have to speak out.

Like so many things these days, this story began on the morning of September 11, 2001. On Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Mann had just been evacuated from the offices of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and was walking home to her apartment on Thirty-eighth Street -- walking south, toward the giant plume of smoke. When her cell phone rang, she picked it up immediately because her sister worked at the World Trade Center and she was frantic for word. But it wasn't her sister, it was a senior Iranian diplomat. To protect him from reprisals from the Iranian government, she doesn't want to name him, but she describes him as a cultured man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair. Since early spring, they had been meeting secretly in a small conference room at the UN.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Yes, she said, she was fine.

The attack was a terrible tragedy, he said, doubtless the work of Al Qaeda.

"I hope that we can still work together," he said.

That same day, in Washington, on the seventh floor of the State Department building, a security guard opened the door of Leverett's office and told him they were evacuating the building. Leverett was Powell's specialist on terrorist states like Syria and Libya, so he knew the world was about to go through a dramatic change. As he joined the people milling on the sidewalk, his mind was already racing.

Then he got a call summoning him back to Foggy Bottom. At the entrance to a specially fortified office, he showed his badge to the guards and passed into a windowless conference room. There were about a dozen people there, Powell's top foreign-policy planners. Powell told them that their first job was to make plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The second job was to rally allies. That meant detailed strategies for approaching other nations -- in some cases, Powell could make the approach, in others the president would have to make the call. Then Powell left them to work through the night.

At 5:30 a.m. on September 12, they walked the list to the office of the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. Powell took it straight to the White House.

Mann and Leverett didn't know each other then, but they were already traveling down parallel tracks. Months before September 11, Mann had been negotiating with the Iranian diplomat at the UN. After the attacks, the meetings continued, sometimes alone and sometimes with their Russian counterpart sitting in. Soon they traded the conference room for the Delegates' Lounge, an airy two-story bar with ashtrays for all the foreigners who were used to smoking indoors. One day, up on the second floor where the windows overlooked the East River, the diplomat told her that Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally, a phrase that had seismic diplomatic implications. Unconditional talks are what the U.S. had been demanding as a precondition to any official diplomatic contact between the U.S. and Iran. And it would be the first chance since the Islamic revolution for any kind of rapprochement. "It was revolutionary," Mann says. "It could have changed the world."

A few weeks later, after signing on to Condoleezza Rice's staff as the new Iran expert in the National Security Council, Mann flew to Europe with Ryan Crocker -- then a deputy assistant secretary of state -- to hold talks with a team of Iranian diplomats. Meeting in a light-filled conference room at the old UN building in Geneva, they hammered out plans for Iranian help in the war against the Taliban. The Iranians agreed to provide assistance if any American was shot down near their territory, agreed to let the U.S. send food in through their border, and even agreed to restrain some "really bad Afghanis," like a rabidly anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, quietly putting him under house arrest in Tehran. These were significant concessions. At the same time, special envoy James Dobbins was having very public and warm discussions in Bonn with the Iranian deputy foreign minister as they worked together to set up a new government for Afghanistan. And the Iranians seemed eager to help in more tactical ways as well. They had intimate knowledge of Taliban strategic capabilities and they wanted to share it with the Americans.

One day during the U.S. bombing campaign, Mann and her Iranian counterparts were sitting around the wooden conference table speculating about the future Afghani constitution. Suddenly the Iranian who knew so much about intelligence matters started pounding on the table. "Enough of that!" he shouted, unfurling a map of Afghanistan. Here was a place the Americans needed to bomb. And here, and here, he angrily jabbed his finger at the map.

Leverett spent those days in his office at the State Department building, watching the revolution in the Middle East and coming up with plans on how to capture the lightning. Suddenly countries like Syria and Libya and Sudan and Iran were coming forward with offers of help, which raised a vital question -- should they stay on the same enemies list as North Korea and Iraq, or could there be a new slot for "friendly" sponsors of terror?

As a CIA analyst, Leverett had come to the view that Middle Eastern terrorism was more tactical than religious. Syria wanted the Golan Heights back and didn't have the military strength to put up a serious fight against Israel, so it relied on "asymmetrical methods." Accepting this idea meant that nations like Syria weren't locked in a fanatic mind-set, that they could evolve to use new methods, so Leverett told Powell to seize the moment and draw up a "road map" to peace for the problem countries of the Middle East -- expel your terrorist groups and stop trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, and we will take you off the sponsors-of-terrorism list and start a new era of cooperation.

That December, just after the triumph over Afghanistan, Powell took the idea to the White House. The occasion was the regular "deputies meeting" at the Situation Room. Gathered around the table were the deputy secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy director of the CIA, a representative from Vice-President Cheney's office, and also the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.

Hadley hated the idea. So did the representatives from Rumsfeld and Cheney. They thought that it was a reward for bad behavior, that the sponsors of terrorism should stop just because it's the right thing to do.

After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as Hadley's Rules:

If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or promises. We won't try to build on it.

Leverett thought that was simply nutty. To strike postures of moral purity, they were throwing away a chance for real progress. But just a few days later, Condoleezza Rice called him into her office, warming him up with talk of how classical music shaped their childhoods. As he told her about the year he spent studying classical piano at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Leverett felt a real connection. Then she said she was looking for someone to take the job of senior director of Mideast affairs at the National Security Council, someone who would take a real leadership role on the Palestinian issue. Big changes were coming in 2002.

He repeated his firm belief that the White House had to draw up a road map with real solutions to the division of Jerusalem and the problem of refugees, something with final borders. That was the only remedy to the crisis in the Middle East.

Just after the New Year, Rice called and offered him the job.

The bowl of grapes is empty and the plate of cheese moves to the center of the table. Leverett's teenage son comes in with questions about a teacher. Periodically, Mann interrupts herself. "This is off the record," she says. "This is going to have to be on background."

She's not allowed to talk about confidential documents or intelligence matters, but the topic of her negotiations with the Iranians is especially touchy.

"As far as they're concerned, the whole idea that there were talks is something I shouldn't even be talking about," she says.

All ranks and ranking are out. "They don't want there to be anything about the level of the talks or who was involved."

"They won't even let us say something like 'senior' or 'important,' 'high-ranking,' or 'high-level,' " Leverett says.

But the important thing is that the Iranians agreed to talk unconditionally, Mann says. "They specifically told me time and again that they were doing this because they understood the impact of this attack on the U.S., and they thought that if they helped us unconditionally, that would be the way to change the dynamic for the first time in twenty-five years."

She believed them.

But while Leverett was still moving into the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, Mann was wrapped up in the crisis over a ship called the Karin A that left Iran loaded with fifty tons of weapons. According to the Israeli navy, which intercepted the Karin A in the Red Sea, it was headed for the PLO. In staff meetings at the White House, Mann argued for caution. The Iranian government probably didn't even know about the arms shipments. It was issuing official denials in the most passionate way, even sending its deputy foreign minister onto Fox News to say "categorically" that "all segments of the Iranian government" had nothing to do with the arms shipment, which meant the "total government, not simply President Khatami's administration."

Bush waited. Three weeks later, it was time for his 2002 State of the Union address. Mann spent the morning in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and the new president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who kept asking Rice for an expanded international peacekeeping force. Rice kept saying that the Afghans would have to solve their own problems. Then they went off to join the president's motorcade and Mann headed back to her office to watch the speech on TV.

That was the speech in which Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea with a memorable phrase:

"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

The Iranians had been engaging in high-level diplomacy with the American government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking and profound.

After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly meeting in Geneva. But they came again in March. And so did Mann. "They said they had put their necks out to talk to us and they were taking big risks with their careers and their families and their lives," Mann says.

The secret negotiations with Iran continued, every month for another year.

Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal floated by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Calling for "full normalization" in exchange for "full withdrawal" from the occupied territories, Abdullah promised to rally all the Arab nations to a final settlement with Israel. In his brand-new third-floor office at the Old Executive Office Building, a tiny room with a very high ceiling, Leverett began hammering out the details with Abdullah's foreign-policy advisor, Adel Al-Jubeir. When Ariel Sharon said that a return to the '67 borders was unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the Saudis didn't want to be in the "real estate business" -- if the Palestinians agreed to border modifications, the Saudis could hardly refuse them. Al-Jubeir believed he had something that might actually work.

But the White House wasn't interested. Sharon already rejected it, Rice told Leverett.

At the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state to sign his proposal in a unanimous vote.

The White House still wasn't interested.

Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to increase, climaxing in an Israeli siege of Arafat's compound. In April, Leverett accompanied Colin Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon and finally Israel. Twice they crossed the Israeli-army lines to visit Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think he had authorization from the White House to explore what everyone was calling "political horizons," the safely vague shorthand for a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett holed up in a suite at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of senior American officials -- the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul general to Jerusalem, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs Bill Burns -- trying to hammer out Powell's last speech.

Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."

"This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."

"It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."

So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.

Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is it they're afraid of?" he demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"

"I don't know sir," Leverett said.

In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.

Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he could do.

Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."

No Arab leader had ever spoken to Bush like that before, Leverett says. But Saudi Arabia was a key ally in the war on terror, vital to the continued U.S. oil supply, so Bush and Rice and Powell excused themselves into another room for a quick huddle.

When he came back, Bush gave Abdullah his word that he would deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

"Okay," Abdullah said. "The president of the United States has given me his word."

So the meeting continued, ending with a famous series of photographs of Bush and Abdullah riding around the ranch in Bush's pickup.

In a meeting at the White House a few days later, Leverett saw Powell shaking his head over Abdullah's threat. He called it "the near-death experience."

Bush rolled his eyes. "We sure don't want to go through anything like that again."

Then the king of Jordan came to Washington to see Bush. There had to be a road map for peace in Palestine, the king said. Despite the previous experience with Abdullah in Crawford, Bush seemed taken by surprise, Leverett remembers, but he listened and said that the idea of a road map seemed pretty reasonable.

So suddenly they were working on a road map. For moderate Arab states, the hope of a two-state solution would offer some political cover before Washington embarked on any invasion of Iraq. In a meeting with the king of Jordan, Leverett made a personal promise that it would be out by the end of 2002.

But nothing happened. In Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, opposition came from men like John Hannah, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. In Rice's office, there was Elliott Abrams. Again they said that negotiation was just a reward for bad behavior. First the Palestinians had to reject terrorism and practice democracy.

Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving and Leverett was on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front of the giraffe enclosure. The White House patched through a call from the foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had just told him the road map was off. "Do you have any idea how this has pulled the rug out from under us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm the one that has to go into Arab League meetings and get beat up and say, 'No, there's going to be a plan out by the end of the year.' How can we ever trust you again?"

On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for an explanation. She told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections in Israel and asked Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett couldn't hide his exasperation. "You told the whole world you were going to put this out before Christmas," he said. "Because one Israeli politician told you it's going to make things politically difficult for him, you don't put it out? Do you realize how hard that makes things for all our Arab partners?"

Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If we put the road map out," she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."

"You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way."

"Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.

There was also an awkward scene with the secretary of defense. They were in the Situation Room and Leverett was sitting behind Rice taking notes when suddenly Rumsfeld addressed him directly. "Why are you laughing? Did I say something funny?"

The room went silent, and Rumsfeld asked it again.

"Why are you laughing? Did I say something funny?"

"I'm sorry Mr. Secretary, I don't think I know what you're talking about."

"It looks to me like you were laughing," Rumsfeld said.

"No sir. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was just listening to the meeting and taking notes. Didn't mean to disturb you."

The meeting continued, message received.

By that time, Leverett and Mann had met and fallen in love. They got married in February 2003, went to Florida on their honeymoon, and got back just in time for the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. Leverett quit his NSC job in disgust. Mann rotated back to the State Department.

Then came the moment that would lead to an extraordinary battle with the Bush administration. It was an average morning in April, about four weeks into the war. Mann picked up her daily folder and sat down at her desk, glancing at a fax cover page. The fax was from the Swiss ambassador to Iran, which wasn't unusual -- since the U.S. had no formal relationship with Iran, the Swiss ambassador represented American interests there and often faxed over updates on what he was doing. This time he'd met with Sa-deq Kharrazi, a well-connected Iranian who was the nephew of the foreign minister and son-in-law to the supreme leader. Amazingly, Kharrazi had presented the ambassador with a detailed proposal for peace in the Middle East, approved at the highest levels in Tehran.

A two-page summary was attached. Scanning it, Mann was startled by one dramatic concession after another -- "decisive action" against all terrorists in Iran, an end of support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, a promise to cease its nuclear program, and also an agreement to recognize Israel.

This was huge. Mann sat down and drafted a quick memo to her boss, Richard Haass. It was important to send a swift and positive response.

Then she heard that the White House had already made up its mind -- it was going to ignore the offer. Its only response was to lodge a formal complaint with the Swiss government about their ambassador's meddling.

A few days after that, a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia killed thirty-four people, including eight Americans, and an intelligence report said the bombers had been in phone contact with Al Qaeda members in Iran. Although it was unknown whether Tehran had anything to do with the bombing or if the terrorists were hiding out in the lawless areas near the border, Rumsfeld set the tone for the administration's response at his next press conference. "There's no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy."

Colin Powell saw Mann's memo. A couple weeks later he approached her at a State Department reception and said, "It was a very good memo. I couldn't sell it at the White House."

In response to questions from Esquire, Colin Powell called Leverett "very able" and confirms much of what he says. Leverett's account of the clash between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah was accurate, he said. "It was a very serious moment and no one wanted to see if the Saudis were bluffing." The same goes for the story about his speech in Israel in 2002. "I had major problems with the White House on what I wanted to say."

On the subject of the peace offer, though, Powell was defensive. "I talked to all of my key assistants since Flynt started talking about an Iranian grand bargain, but none of us recall seeing this initiative as a grand bargain."

On the general subject of negotiations with Iran, he responded with pointed politesse. "We talked to the Iranians quietly up until 2003. The president chose not to continue that channel."

That is putting it mildly. In May of 2003, when the U.S. was still in the triumphant "mission accomplished" phase of the Iraq war, word started filtering out of the White House about an aggressive new Iran policy that would include efforts to destabilize the Iranian government and even to promote a popular uprising. In his first public statement on Iran policy since leaving the NSC, Leverett told The Washington Post he thought the White House was making a dangerous mistake. "What it means is we will end up with an Iran that has nuclear weapons and no dialogue with the United States."

In the years that followed, he spoke out in dozens of newspaper editorials and a book, all making variations on the same argument -- America's approach to rogue nations was all sticks and no carrots, all economic sanctions and threats of war without any dialogue. "To bring about real change," he argued, "we must also offer concrete benefits." Of course states like Iran and Syria messed around in Iraq, he said. Iran was supporting the Iraqi opposition when the U.S. was still supporting Saddam Hussein. It was insane to expect them to stop when the goal of a Shiite Iraq was finally in reach. The only way to solve the underlying issues was to offer Iran a "grand bargain" that would recognize the legitimacy of Iran's government and its right to a role in the region.

But that was an unthinkable thought. The White House ignored him. Democrats ignored him. The Brookings Institution declined to renew his contract.

Then he started talking about the peace offer. By then it was 2006 and the war wasn't going well and suddenly people started to respond: You mean Iran isn't evil? They helped fight the Taliban? They wanted to make peace? He summed it all up in a long paper for a Washington think tank that happened to be scheduled for publication last November, a vulnerable time for the White House, just after the Democrats swept the midterm elections and the Iraq Study Group released its report calling for negotiations with Syria and Iran. When he submitted the paper to the CIA for a routine review, they told him the CIA had no problem with it but someone from the NSC called to complain. "You shouldn't have cleared this without letting the White House take a look at it," the official said.

Leverett told them he wasn't going to let White House operatives judge his criticisms of White House operatives and distilled his argument into an op-ed piece for The New York Times. This time he shared a byline with his wife, who had experienced the peace offer up close. They submitted their first draft to the CIA and the State Department on a Sunday in early December, expecting to hear back the next day.

The next morning, Leverett gave a blistering talk on Bush's Iran policy to the influential conservatives at the Cato Institute. The speech was carried live on C-SPAN. Later that day, he flew to New York and made the same arguments at a private dinner with the UN ambassadors of Russia and Britain. He was starting to have an impact.

By Tuesday, he still hadn't heard from the CIA review board.

They called on Wednesday and told him that there was nothing classified in the piece as far as the agency was concerned, but someone in the West Wing wasn't happy with it and would be redacting large sections.

"You're the clearing agency," Leverett said. "You're the people named in my agreement."

They said their hands were tied.

After consulting a lawyer, Leverett and Mann and a researcher worked through the night to assemble a list of public sources where the blacked-out material had already been published. They also took out one line that might have been based on a classified document.

But the White House wouldn't budge. It was a First Amendment showdown.

On Thursday, Leverett and Mann decided to publish the piece with large sections of type blacked out, 168 words in all. Since the piece had been rendered pretty much incomprehensible, they included a list of public sources. "To make sense of our op-ed article, readers will have to look up the citations themselves."

As they tell their story, Mann rushes off to pick up one of their sons from a play date and Leverett takes over, telling what happened over the following months:

Bush sent a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf.

U.S. troops started to arrest Iranians living in Baghdad, accusing them of working with insurgents.

Bush accused Iran of "providing material support" for attacks on U.S. forces, a formulation that suggested a legal justification for a preemptive attack.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia pushed through an amendment requiring Bush to get congressional authorization for an attack.

Colin Powell broke his long silence with a pointed warning. "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start.' "

Even Henry Kissinger started giving interviews on the need to "exhaust every possibility to come to an understanding with Iran."

From inside the White House, Leverett was hearing a scary scenario: The Russians were scheduled to ship fuel rods to the Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which meant the reactor would become operational by this November, at which point it would be impossible to bomb -- the fallout alone would turn the city into an urban Chernobyl. The White House was seriously considering a preemptive attack when the Russians cooled things down by saying Iran hadn't paid its bills, so they would hold back the Bushehr fuel rods for a while.

That put things into a summer lull. But by August, tensions were rising again. U.S. troops in Baghdad arrested an official delegation of Iranian energy experts, leading them out of a hotel in blindfolds and handcuffs. Then Iran said that it had paid its bills and that the Russians were ready to deliver the Bushehr shipment. In Time magazine, former CIA officer and author Robert Baer quoted a highly placed White House official:

"IEDs are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

Mann steps back out on the deck and starts collecting the scattered toys to prepare the house for a dinner party, the typical modern American mother multitasking her way through a busy day. "The reason I have to be so careful now is that I'm legally on notice and they will prosecute things that I say or do," she says, picking up a plastic truck.

"Because of that one article?"

"Yeah."

Outside, it's getting warmer. There's a heavy haze and floating bugs and for a moment it feels a bit ominous, a gathering silence, one of those moments when giant pods start to sprout in local basements.

"We're tired," Mann says. "Nobody listens."

It seems inconceivable to her that once again a war could be coming, and once again no one is listening. Another pair of lawn mowers joins the chorus and the spell breaks. A cab pulls in the driveway. The caterer comes to prepare for the dinner guests.

Find this article at: http://www.esquire.com/features/iranbriefing1107

Cheney's Law

Posted October 20, 2007 | 06:35 PM (EST)

Midway through the Frontline documentary Cheney's Law, which aired last Tuesday on PBS, a reporter summarizes a judgment the vice president conveyed to listeners in hiding in the hours after the bombings of September 11. "We will probably," he said, "have to be a country ruled by men rather than laws, in this period." The period, he implied, would last a long time; so the conclusion had all the Cheney markings: cool, complete, defying contradiction. What is astounding is how quickly he arrived at it.

With the testimony of witness after witness, Cheney's Law establishes an alarming fact. For the past seven years, starting not on 9/11 but the moment this administration ascended to power, the vice president has worked tirelessly, almost selflessly, in silence and seclusion, to destroy the American system of constitutional checks and to replace it with an executive government whose levers are operated by a few. In the new system (except where its builders are caught at their work and delayed) there is to be no restraint, no oversight, no accountability.

The Cheney mutation, in every instance, has had two characteristic steps. In the first, authority is usurped in secret, and power is transferred from its ostensible holder to an agent controlled by the Office of the Vice President. Power having thus changed hands invisibly, a custom-built justification is filed away, to be produced only if the trespass is discovered and questions are asked.

Aggrandizement of the executive by a sequence of shifts and transfers of power, vouched for by a rationale that is held in reserve: this has been the method; a protocol without a precedent in the history of democracy. It is in the nature of the engine to push and push again. Its forward motion has occasionally been slowed, by a court decision or a piece of actual legislation, but the delays have never lasted long.

Americans were brought up to think about a person mistreated by authority (however lawful the authority): "You can't do that to him!--a man's got his rights." The goal, in morals and manners, of the Cheney mutation is to replace that libertarian presumption by a timid, resigned, and docile acceptance: "Too bad; he must have done something wrong if they're doing this to him." The reform of manners is not yet complete, but, every day, bad laws assist the process of coarsening and brutalization.

Conspiracy is a word that Americans on the clever side of thirty tend to reject. We acknowledge, because history tells us, that there were conspiracies in the distant past, among the assassins of Julius Caesar for example, or the privy councilors of Charles II, who owed their nickname, "the Cabal," to the surnames Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. And there was the Night of the Long Knives. But there has not been an important conspiracy close to our time; certainly not in America: that is the doctrine.

We need another word, then, to describe a series of actions concerted by men of power, executed with elaborate concealment for a determined end, in violation of all the ordinary procedures of government and in deliberate defiance of the law.

Such was the path of the change devised in 2001-02 for the prisoners captured in the field in Afghanistan. The vice president and his lawyer, David Addington, held that captives were to be transported without notice to a prison sealed off from the jurisdiction of American laws, or any other system of laws. There they would be sorted and processed into Special Tribunals.

All discussions of the meditated change excluded the responsible officials in the department of state. Pierre-Richard Prosper, interviewed in Cheney's Law, reports that he studied the question for Colin Powell and reached a conclusion at variance with Cheney and Addington. He should have seen their proposal, but he never did. Rather, the executive order was routed through the corridors of the White House with the stealth of a burglar on a well-cased street. By the time it passed under the president's pen, it had changed hands four times; and these were not the usual hands. John Bellinger, the lawyer for the national security staff, never set eyes on the new understanding. Colin Powell first heard of it on the television news.

Warrantless wiretaps were meant to pass quietly into law by a similar circuit of evasion; but Cheney and Addington were tripped up by one of those accidents that haunt the most cunning of stratagems. A sick man in a hospital bed, who happened to be the attorney general, remembered he had sworn an oath to uphold the laws; and when he took that oath, he had not made a private reservation that the laws he upheld might just as well be laws contrived in secret. Cheney and Addington did not predict the cussedness or the integrity of John Ashcroft. Still, in the assault on FISA, it took the threat of more than thirty resignations from the justice department to convince the president to back down and compromise.

James Comey, the acting attorney general, fought off Cheney and Addington by literally obstructing the path of their agents, Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, beside the bed of the attorney general. We would be living in a different country today if at that critical time, John Yoo, author of the redefinition of torture requested by the vice president, had become, as he aimed to become, the head of the Office of Legal Council. But in October 2003, the position went to Jack Goldsmith: a friend of Yoo's, like him an authoritarian conservative and young dogmatist of the Federalist Society, but one whose ideas were complicated by the possession of a conscience.

So assiduous were Yoo's exertions to curry favor with authority by putting the iron of authority into the structure of the laws that he came to be called by Ashcroft himself "Dr. Yes." Yoo was infinitely obliging. He would go any length to find any reason that Cheney and Addington asked him to find. No reach of sophistry was beyond his grasp. No horror of tyranny curbed his appetite for "making new law" to supplant the outmoded refinements of democracy.

Addington (a large man, a fast thinker, and a shouter in closed meetings) declined to be interviewed by Frontline. Yoo, by contrast, now a professor of law at U.C. Berkeley, was willing to defend his recommendations. One is curious to see the man who wrote the torture memos; and the encounter quickens as the camera reveals a momentary shadow on Yoo's eager and expressionless public face. It happens when he is mocking the objections to the treatment allowed against prisoners at Guantanamo--as if, says Yoo, we should "read them their Miranda rights," as if we should let them "talk to a lawyer." A flicker of sadism--or is it nothing but a sneer?--crosses his face and halfway into his voice.

When the tortures at Abu Ghraib were brought to light, John McCain said unforgettably: "We should never simply fight evil with evil." And again: "This isn't about who they are, this is about who we are." And yet, on this issue too, Cheney and Addington pushed and bit by bit their opponent gave way. McCain won an overwhelming vote in the Senate for his bill prohibiting the use of torture; but then the vice president in person walked him through a special exemption for the CIA, and then an agreement that Guantanamo was off the map of the law. Since his capitulation in this matter, so close to his own experience, John McCain has not been the same man.

The pressure behind the new laws has never stopped. It makes a new conquest with every presidential nominee. "If waterboarding is torture," said Michael Mukasey two days ago, "it's not in the Constitution." Of the treatment of prisoners generally, Mukasey added: "If it amounts to torture, it is unconstitutional." These queer, para-logical formulae, spoken in his own voice by the nominee for attorney general, bear the signature of David Addington. Everything depends on the meaning of "if" in the first sentence above, and on the meaning of "amounts" in the second. Mukasey was really saying that our understanding of right and wrong may legitimately be warped by the executive branch. So, a cruel practice which the world regards as torture, and which we taught the world to regard as torture, and which the makers of the eighth amendment would have recognized as torture: this, in our endless emergency, may not amount to torture after all.

In the old Soviet Union, which neoconservative privy councilors have closely studied and learned from, the goons and thugs ran everything. Everything: from the machine of the state bureaucracy to the reasons given by obedient judges to the smallest humiliation extorted from a hapless citizen by a police detective or a customs official. Good people were kept out of public life, and out of public service, because Lenin's Law and Stalin's Law had no conceivable place for them. In our society, there have been goons and thugs, of course, but something about American democracy, a something that includes the reading of Miranda rights, seemed to give assurance that they would always be a furtive minority. The manners of the society itself discouraged overt hard-heartedness and cruelty.

Wrote Emerson: "Yes, we are the cowed,--we, the trustless." Why has "protect" become a favorite verb among our leaders, and "safe" a favorite adjective? How many of the trustless are willing to work the new machine? How many, with Comey and Goldsmith, will refuse? The offer the vice president and president have extended to all Americans is, from one point of view, as generous as it is benign. They want to be our protectors. All they ask in return is unlimited power. Yet this offer reveals a judgment that is indelibly mixed with contempt for something besides the law.

The GOP Purge
The War Party can't win the war in Iraq, so they're taking it out on the GOP by Justin Raimondo The ongoing hara-kiri of the GOP proceeds apace, with the latest being a concerted effort by the party's neoconservative wing to oust sitting Republican members of Congress who oppose the war. The latest examples: Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland. Rep. Jones attracted national attention when, at the height of the pre-invasion war hysteria, he led an effort (with now-jailed Rep. Bob Ney) to rename the French fries on the menu in the House cafeteria "Freedom Fries" – and then attracted more serious attention when he turned against the war he had championed, and began to denounce the president's war policies in no uncertain terms.

Jones is quite a character, an old Southern gentleman who emanates sincerity and class: he has personally written to thousands of military families who have lost loved ones in this futile and apparently never-ending war. What's more, he has taken an enormous political risk in reversing course, not because it's now the popular thing to do – it wasn't when he began speaking out – but because he's a man of principle who puts his conscience and his constituency before partisan considerations. What I like about him is that his denunciations of the war are invariably fiery, and shot through with a white-hot anger directed at those who lied us into war:

"At a local barbecue restaurant last week, he delivered a passionate speech defending his position – and slamming the administration's foreign policy. He approvingly read from Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold's 2006 Time editorial attacking the Bush administration for using '9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy.'

"He accused the 'neocons' – he repeated the phrase twice – of manipulating intelligence to sell the Iraq war to the public. He said he was more concerned with terrorists coming from South America than from Iraq.

"'Many people get their news from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity,' Jones said after the speech, referring to the popular conservative radio talk show hosts. 'I get my news in classified briefings with military experts and CIA experts. I have to make my decision based on what the experts say.'"

His primary opponent is one Joe McLaughlin, a financial planner, retired military man, and Onslow county commissioner who tends to ignore (and neglect) his constituents and has been accused of using his office to promote himself (no doubt a first for a politician!). McLaughlin stupidly accuses Jones of being a "leftist" – a charge that falls flat when confronted with the congressman's lifetime ACU rating of over 90 percent – and is making Jones' co-sponsorship of a congressional resolution condemning Rush Limbaugh for his "phony soldier" comment the main issue of the campaign. In McLaughlin's world, it's okay to diss a soldier who disagrees with him and Rush on the war, but it's not okay to criticize the pill-popping talk-radio icon who has never been anywhere near a battlefield. This is why, brays McLaughlin, Jones is a "phony Republican."

On his Web site, McLaughlin proclaims he's a "family values conservative," and yet rumor has it that, uh, maybe not… At any rate, local Republican activist Jim Kouri reports "one member of the NCGOP told this writer that 'not a day goes by without Joe [ McLaughlin] smearing Congressman Jones.'" It's incredible that McLaughlin is trying to portray the staunchly conservative Jones as some sort of left-wing subversive, but the clear implication of his most recent radio ad – which proclaims McLaughlin "supports the troops" – is that Jones does not support the troops. This accusation is especially toxic in a district with one of the heaviest concentrations of military bases in the country.

"His is a message of despair," says McLaughlin, "a message of defeat." Yet who is likely to arouse more despair, especially in the ranks of military families: those who say the five-year war in Iraq must stretch into 10 or more – or those who say it is time for the Iraqis to stand on their own legs and walk the walk?

Walter Jones supported this war in the beginning: he was, indeed, one of its most fervent advocates. It takes character for him to admit he was wrong – and a real sense of responsibility to go as far out on a limb as he's gone in order to make up for what he now recognizes as a grievous mistake.

Instead of appealing to the various signs and symbols of the fake Left-Right divide – Rush, Cindy Sheehan, and Dennis Kucinich (the latter two, McLaughlin unconvincingly avers, are Jones' good pals) – why doesn't McLaughlin engage Jones when it comes to the war issue, on its merits?

I'll tell you why: because McLaughlin doesn't know the first thing about the war, Iraq, or foreign policy in general. He's just a political opportunist circling Jones' seat like a vulture seeks out carrion. Yet Jones is far from being dead meat: for one thing, McLaughlin has yet to raise much campaign cash – although that could change.

Word is out that the Club for Growth – a right-wing neocon outfit rolling in dough – has met with McLaughlin and may be interested in funding his campaign. The Club is also bankrolling the campaign of another Republican primary challenger, state Sen. Andrew Harris, who is going up against antiwar Rep. Gilchrest.

The Club purports to be for "limited government" and "economic freedom," yet their major concern, these days, seems to be going after any and all Republicans who so much as breathe a word of criticism of the neocons' war. Yet what has provoked the biggest orgy of spending since the New Deal – and promises to cost us as much as $2 trillion before it's over? This rotten war.

I've even heard the Club described as "libertarian" – but this use of its resources as a battering ram against the real libertarian Republicans, such as Walter Jones, shows what these guys are really up to, which is to serve as the neocons' water boys. War trumps parsimony in the new GOP's hierarchy of political values, and the ongoing Republican purge is carving this principle in stone.

There have been rumors that Jones – who started out a Democrat, like his father., who once represented the district – might return to the party of his youth, yet nothing has come of that so far. Local Republicans are rallying to his cause, and the veterans whom he has stood by so steadfastly – especially the wounded, who have been the worst victims of government incompetence in this war – have come to his aid, even as party officials have abandoned him. VoteVets is running pro-Jones ads in which retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, lauds Jones for his "moral courage." Says Batiste:

"We are caught in the middle of a brutal civil war in Iraq without a focused national strategy. Congressman Jones is well-informed in challenging those politicians who are breaking our great Army and Marine Corps."

In the fifth year of a long, grinding war, the appeal of McLaughlin's demagoguery is increasingly limited, especially where it concerns his key audience: military personnel and their families. He attacks Jones for appearing with Cindy Sheehan, but remember, Cindy is a military mom, too, and the grieving mothers of North Carolina's 3rd congressional district have a lot more in common with her than McLaughlin might imagine. Recent polls suggest that the "solid South," once solidly for the war, is now turning against it: a majority now say it was a "mistake," and – along with much of the rest of the country – Southerners now support a decrease in troop levels (56 percent).

Nationally, Republicans are wavering in their support for the war, and that's why Ron Paul, the only antiwar candidate in the Republican presidential stable, is going from dark horse to a somewhat lighter hue. Jones has endorsed Paul's bid, and it is likely that the North Carolina congressman will benefit from the kind of dedicated nationwide support – from veterans as well as libertarians – that has come Dr. No's way.

The effort to oust Jones demonstrates the essentially parasitic – and destructive – character of the neoconservative virus in the GOP. For these guys, it's rule or ruin: they don't care about regaining control of Congress (they gave up on that distant possibility a long time ago) or saving a conservative vote on fiscal and other matters. They care about one issue and one issue only: war and more war, as far as the eye can see. When they've run the GOP into the ground and reduced it to a mostly regional party, they'll abandon the dried-up husk and emigrate back to where they came from – the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, where they can join Joe Lieberman, Joshua Muravchik, and Hillary Clinton's neoconservative fan club in ginning up a war with Iran.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11796

October 22, 2007
Neocons Surge Against
Antiwar Movement
by Tom Hayden

As thousands of Americans take to the streets this week, they will face a rising right-wing offensive to discredit and derail the antiwar movement. The cry of "troops home now" will echo in 11 cities as an intense year-long battle begins to sharpen. Not since 2002 will the antiwar movement – and dovish Democrats – face as virulent and lavishly funded a backlash as this one.

Consider the gathering storm:

* A powerful and persistent faction of hawks, centered in Vice President Cheney's office, is pushing for a military strike against Iran in the coming year.
* The orchestrated campaign for continuing the "surge" in Iraq, led by Gen. Petraeus, succeeded in restoring the nerve of the Republican Party and defeating the Democratic strategy of seeking Republican defections.
* The well-coordinated attacks on MoveOn.org were designed to destroy the group's proven ability to raise millions of dollars for antiwar messages and, in general, Democratic candidates. Seventy-five senators, including the likes of Barbara Boxer, rushed to denounce MoveOn, thus helping the effort to de-legitimize the organization.
* Ari Fleischer, the former Bush spokesman who warned Americans to "watch what you say," now heads an organization that spent $15 million to promote the war as patriotic.
* Pro-Israel and Christian Right groups are attempting to raise $200 million for a campaign calling for war with Iran.
* Rudy Giuliani, currently the Republican front-runner, has selected neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz as his national security adviser.
* David Horowitz is spending millions of dollars to demonize pro-peace professors and organize on campuses against what the neocons call "Islamofascism."

The neocons and hawks of all stripes are fighting back. They already have succeeded in gaining political traction for the escalation in Baghdad, counter-punching the Democratic critics into a corner, planting major stories of "success" in the media, and gaining top positions in Giuliani's presidential campaign. Their campaign for war in Iran (Podhoretz says he "prays" for it everyday, an apparent message to the Christian Right) is on track.

Their top priority is to isolate the antiwar movement and its Democratic allies as "too extreme." In 2002, when most of the American people were frozen by the 9/11 experience, it was a matter of trying to prevent the development of antiwar sentiment. In 2007, however, the neocons face a more daunting challenge: how to undermine the American majority favoring rapid withdrawal from Iraq?

As Podhoretz, Horowitz, and writers like Dinesh D'Souza constantly emphasize, the real war is at home, with the leftists and liberals who they believe to be the modern equivalents of "fellow travelers" during the Cold War era.

Their major target is MoveOn, with its vast resources and credibility. But ever in search of potential demons, they lately have been smearing and attacking Code Pink. The Canadian neocon ally Premier Stephen Harper ordered Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright stopped at the border last week.

The tactical purpose is clear, to make certain antiwar groups radioactive, or too hot to handle, thus damaging their efforts to push the mainstream along, forcing them from offense to defense. If they succeed in their plans for Iran, they believe Republican presidential chances may be enhanced in 2008.

All this suggests that antiwar activists face the challenge of being equally strategic. Impressive turnouts will be needed Oct. 27. Coalition-building will be a priority (already, many busloads of black congregations will be joining the Chicago event, Katrina victims will be turning out by the thousands in New Orleans, and protesters in Tennessee will be converging on the nation's major depleted uranium facility – welcomed by the mayor). Unsettled, however, are to key questions needing broad consensus among the diverse multitudes of marchers:

* What is the most effective public message for the antiwar movement in the run-up to the bombing of Iran, and what should the movement be doing in the hours, days, and weeks after such an attack?
* What is the most effective approach to the 2008 election if the choice is between a Republican extremist and a moderate Democratic hawk?

The marchers on Oct. 27, in twos and threes and larger workshops, will be considering the future of a movement at a crossroads.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hayden.php?articleid=11794

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