Left News and Views

VoteVets.org and MoveOn.org have teamed up to post videos to use the power of the internet to spread the truth of how veterans and military families really feel about the war. Learn how you can really support the troops.

Yesterday, “Impeachment Summer” was to begin with a nationwide effort to spell “impeach” on beaches, highway overpasses, the sides of buildings, downtown street corners and anywhere else where Americans might get the message.

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it. After all, Nancy Pelosi said that when the Democrats took over Congress, impeachment wouldn’t be on the table. That said, I guess, the media in this country seem to be doing exactly what they did in the pre-Iraq debates. Those who tried to spread the message that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction were shunted aside and labeled as part of a fringe group. Now, it seems, the media are pretending that a large-scale movement to impeach Bush and Cheney doesn’t exist.

I asked the question in my post yesterday, how much damage do Bush and Cheney have to do before they are held accountable? At the moment I posed that question, I was unaware of a group called a28.org (much as I and most of the country were unaware of moveon.org when I stumbled on their movement to keep the U.S. out of Iraq in 2002).

What rankles me is that practically every morning I read my local newspaper, the New York Times, Washington Post and, when I have the time, a host of other smaller papers and blogs from across the nation. I forget now how I finally stumbled across moveon.org, but if it weren’t for the blogs I never would have heard of a28.org.

A28 stands for the group’s target date of April 28 to launch impeachment summer by encouraging people all across the country to become aware of the constitutional right to seek the impeachment of a public official, that is to seek the removal of a government official without that official’s agreement.

To say a28.org has an impressive number of groups supporting it would be an understatement. Public opinion polls indicate that nearly 70 percent of Americans feel the Iraq was is going badly and want to get the troops out of harms way. It would appear that this 70 percent is amply represented in the groups that have signed on to support the impeachment summer.

Likewise, an impressive number of impeach spelling events were planned for yesterday all across the country, including a number of planes that would be towing impeachment banners over areas of high visibility. One was supposed to fly over the New Jersey Capital building in Trenton.

And yet, as with our early rallies with moveon.org, I have been unable to find any publicity that led up to the event nor have I been able to find any media this morning that covered the launch.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich said in announcing the articles of impeachment he submitted against Cheney that, “I do not stand alone. Millions of Americans are standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law.”

I believe that a28.org and its supporting organizations may demonstrate this summer that Kucinich is right on the mark.

In the April 25, 2007 edition of Bill Moyers Journal, on PBS titled “Buying the War,” Moyers asserts that “the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television.”

Moyers documents case after case in which the press overlooked clear evidence that the administration was knowingly lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s capability to produce a nuclear bomb, and how members of the media were so easily manipulated by Bush and company.

A classic – and insidious – example of how the Administration turned lies into incontrovertible truth took place in September 2002 when Judy Miller, the New York Times’ reporter who came to be known as the Administration’s puppet, reported that classified documents indicated that Saddam Hussein was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.

This tactic became know as plant a story – such as the one that Saddam Hussein had acquired aluminum tubes needed for centrifuges to produce enriched, weapons-grade uranium – and then go on the Sunday news programs to point to the story in the New York Times or Washington Post – both of which were more than helpful in distributing the Administration propaganda during the run-up to the war – as proof that Iraq was close to creating a nuclear devise.

“Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?” Moyers asked Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable,” he continued. “Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the New York Times and then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the New York times. It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.”

The most damaging outgrowth of this cold-war-style use of propaganda by the Bush Administration is that it has become so hard today to separate true fact from the so-called well-known facts that so many of the hawks continue to peddle.

A good friend of mine – who is articulate and intelligent even if his brain has been a bit fried by Fox Noise – hit one of my raw nerve recently when he said that “everybody was convinced” before the invasion that Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

This belief arose from the fact that the media didn’t give any coverage to dissenters. In October of 2002, 100,000 people came together in Washington. It was one of the largest peace demonstrations in years and the Post put a picture on the metro page. I was among a group that held a peace vigil on the same day in which hundreds of us held our candles in a line along the road from Morrisville to Trenton – we covered the bridge and well beyond. And virtually no coverage came out of that.

Fortunately, much of the lying and skullduggery of the Cheney-Bush-Rove gang is finally coming to light – although unfortunately not in time to save the 3,337 American men and women and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died there since the war began.

Former CIA Director George Tenet, in a soon-to-be-published book, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials charging they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

And yesterday, Senator Richard Durbin admitted on the floor of the Senate that in classified briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee by Administration officials prior to the war he and other committee members learned that what Bush and company actually knew was totally ad odds with the information they were disseminiating.

As more and more of the lies of Bush/Cheney come to the surface, I am surprised that everyone is spurning Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s attempt to bring charges of impeachment against Cheney for his manipulation of pre-war intelligence. The lies of Bush and Cheney have led to more deaths than occurred after Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Towers. How much damage do they have to do before they are held accountable?

I guess you have to get a blow job before any action can be taken.

Pat Murphy is the representative from my district. This address from yesterday says it all.

In 1986, I was working for Jim Hurley, the president of the New Jersey Senate. In 1979, the Shah of Iran was overthrown causing an upheaval in the world’s oil supply. The price of oil rose rapidly and continued to rise. By 1986, the cost per gallon of regular in New Jersey had risen to $1.50 a gallon from the previous low of under $1. During that period, people coped by buying smaller cars, making fewer unnecessary automobile trips and a number of other things we fickle Americans do every time the cost of gas goes up.

Because of OPEC wrangling, the price for a barrel of oil collapsed in 1986 and the cost for a gallon of gasoline dropped back to below $1. As in the past, it didn’t take long for people to resume their wasteful ways. I suggested to Sen. Hurley that, as president of the Senate, he should take a leadership role and promote legislation to add a 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gas before people got too comfortable with the $1 a gallon price.

The idea could be sold, I argued, by pointing out that this was a plan to encourage continued conservation and, instead of the hike going to members of OPEC because of some crisis, it would be returned to the people of New Jersey through improvements in the infrastructure and mass transit.

I had lived through the worst energy crisis in our country. It was precipitated by the Yom Kippur War which started on October 5, 1973. The United States and many countries in the western world showed strong support for Israel. As a result, several Arab exporting nations imposed an embargo on the countries supporting Israel. (That was when Big Oil showed its true colors by honoring the embargo on the U.S. but continuing to do business as usual by delivering oil to non-embargoed nations.) The cost of gas skyrocketed – that is, if you could find any. People waited in lines to get gas for hours, often having to push their cars up to the pumps after their tanks ran dry in the wait.

The automobile industry reacted strongly to that crisis, designing smaller, more gas-efficient cars and down-sizing many of the behemoths that were symbols of America’s wastefulness. (If I am not mistaken, Cadillac really down-sized its line while Lincoln kept the monsters. As a result, people who didn’t care about the cost of gas or the energy crisis left Cadillac in droves for the bigger Lincolns.)

Eventually, of course, the cost of gas eased, the small cars ended up rusting in auto salvage yards and the behemoths returned. Many of us felt the U.S. had lost its chance to create a permanent change in attitudes through education and tougher regulation of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which were part of the Energy Policy Conservation Act, enacted into law by Congress in 1975.

Americans had started to make the same changes after the 1979 upheaval, but it was pretty clear to me and others that it wouldn’t take long for people to go back to their wasteful ways. I felt New Jersey could lead the way by imposing a 50-cent-a-gallon tax that would maintain the high cost of gas to encourage the continued movement toward energy conservation and, as I have said, this tax revenue could be plowed into infrastructure improvements as well as research.

Hurley’s answer was simple and short: I am not ready to commit political suicide.

Of course, he was right. And, of course, here we are 21 years later and more dependent on foreign sources of oil than ever.

If America is truly going to make any headway in becoming energy independent, we cannot rely on politicians to suddenly become enlightened. Their idea of strategic planning is focusing on raising enough funds for their next election campaign.

We need to become as angry over the deleterious effect our oil consumption has on our national security and the environment as we are now over the Iraq war. We need to work together to make it politically incorrect to buy big, gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

If you agree, look for an organization you can work with to actively change America’s wasteful ways. One that impresses me the most is Energy Independence Now. Visit them and get involved.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday that President Bush was in a state of denial over Iraq.

Bush’s statements concerning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week could make the case that W has crossed the line and is completely delusional.

According to a story in today’s New York Times, during a short question-and-answer session in the Oval Office, Bush said of Gonzales’s performance, “The attorney general went up and gave a very candid assessment, and answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer.”

The story pointed out, politely as the Times is wont to do, that Bush’s endorsement “was at considerable odds with an overwhelmingly critical assessment of his testimony by members of both parties.” The reporters would have been closer had they said that W’s comment was totally at odds with reality.

My wife and I both watched the testimony. She commented that the Senators’ attempts to get a cogent answer out of Gonzales was like trying to pin Jell-O to the wall. More than 70 times he used some version of the phrase “I can’t recall.” Some of the questions surrounded very important meetings with the President that took place in the not-so-distant past. I am surprised that at least one Senator, in total frustration, didn’t ask if the AG could remember what he had had for breakfast that day.

In reality, Bush, in my estimation, alluded to what had caused the AG’s lapse in memory when he said Gonzales had answered questions as honestly as he could. There is very little question left in anyone’s mind that Bush believes in degrees of honesty, which is why he uses phrases such as “honestly as possible.”

In the Gonzales’ case, I am thoroughly convinced that if he answered the questions honestly, this administration — and most notably Carl Rove — would be encountering serious legal problems. If a person can’t answer a question honestly — and he doesn’t want to be brought up on charges of perjury ala Scooter Libby — he must say “I can’t recall.” Hell, mobsters have known that for years and God knows we have more than a few thugs in this Administration.

But, where is Bush coming from with his endorsement of Gonzales’ performance? Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted that Bush hadn’t even watched the hearings. And, even some of his closest Republican allies said that Gonzales had lost all credibility and needed to step down.

Bush may be delusional, but Rove isn’t. I am sure he is being told that if he asks for Gonzales’ resignation, he will no longer have the protection of executive privilege and could easily bring the house of cards down.

Better to look the fool — and Bush is way past caring about this — than to subject some of his staff to criminal indictments and himself to serious consideration for impeachment.

How many ways can a nation find to honor and/or mourn the deaths of the 32 students at Virginia Tech? A national day of mourning. Ringing bells at noon. Candlelight vigils. Wearing the colors. Golf pros wearing Virginia Tech hats. Cars flying Virgina Tech flags.

The killing of 32 college students by a fellow student is a tragedy of mass proportions and it has galvanized the nation as little else has done in recent years. I have two nephews and a niece in college and the murders were as painful to me as I am sure they were to most others in this country. I mourn for their loss and for the horrible pain and suffering of their parents, families and friends.

What concerned me, though, was that while a nation grieved over the loss of these students, is that there isn’t even more outrage over the deaths in Iraq. More American men and women, many the same age as the Virginia Tech students with similar aspirations for the future, continued to die or be maimed in Iraq. Seven more died during this seven-day period. If they receive any recognition at all, it will be from the local media where they live.

Iraq is a war where the only sacrifice is from those serving there. We have other things to focus on and it appears we have become calloused over the daily death toll. Arlo Guthrie wrote in his song, When a Soldier Makes It Home:

And there won’t be any victory parades
For those that’s coming back
They’ll fly them in at midnight
And unload the body sacks
And the living will be walking down
A long and lonely road
Because nobody seems to care these days
When a soldier makes it home

The national media, which blithely stood by while this Administration lied and finagled its way into an illegal war and has only recently begun to shine a light on the abuses, has an opportunity now to use its power to help bring an end to this slaughter by focusing daily on the names and faces of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq. Merely reporting that “three more Americans died in Iraq over the weekend,” in my mind, denigrates this sacrifice.

The Washington Post has struggled valiantly to honor those who have died by putting names and faces on the numbers on their Faces of the Fallen.It’s time now for the network news broadcasts to follow suit.

Can you imagine the pressure our Congressional representatives and this Administration would be under to end this war if every night the news opened with the names and faces of those who died that day? If each week they suggested the nation come together in a candlelight vigil for those who died over the last seven days?

My wife suggested that Katie Couric should be encouraged to take the challenge. While Couric has been dropping in the ratings game, she is still scoring very high among women. Maybe only women power can bring an end to the carnage.

Couric’s evening news on CBS would be an ideal forum. She has been on the forefront of examining what the nightly newscast should be by focusing on the point that by dinnertime so much news has been heard and read that the traditional broadcast seems to be nothing more than follow-up stories.

Here’s a chance for her to really have an impact on our nation’s morals and integrity. And the possibility that something truly miraculous will result from the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

I took the day off yesterday to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee grill Alberto Gonzales. I guess I should have realized that all I would hear would be a litany of “I don’t recall.” It is rather surprising that the top law enforcement officer in the United States has such memory problems. One might think he is suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s.

Not since the Senate began its examination of Watergate some 34 years ago have we seen so many administration operatives suddenly having difficulties with their recall and having even more problems keeping track of papers that might shed some light on the machinations within the walls of the West Wing.

Rather than ongoing strategy sessions to determine what catch phrases will work best to demonize the Democrats, the new whispers one might hear on a tour of the offices in which the presidential staffers carry on their daily activities would probably be something like “damn, I didn’t mean to hit that delete key.”

Destroying evidence, after all, is hard work.

With all the documented abuses of power that can be laid at the feet of this administration, why is the firing of the federal prosecutors causing such an uproar? Isn’t the recent revelation that the FBI engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority in illegally collecting telephone, e-mail and financial records of American citizens worth its own set of hearings? Shouldn’t Congress take a closer look at the genesis of the illegal wire tapping program?

Of course there are a host of other abuses we could allude to and I suspect many will be the subject of hearings as Bush’s house of cards loses more and more of its stability. The lawyers in Congress recognize, however, that the politicization of the Department of Justice poses one of the greatest dangers we have ever faced.

In a speech in 1940, Robert H. Jackson, a former United States attorney general and widely considered by legal scholars as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices in the history of that body, said, “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. … The citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes.”

Think of it: The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. And we know from the e-mail messages uncovered in this investigation that the White House was intent in installing “loyal Bushies” in these posts. In fact, it appears as if they had developed a virtual loyalty chart to keep track of the activities of the 93 U.S. Attorneys to insure they pursued the political interests of the administration rather than the judicial needs of the American public.

We know how a few key races can turn the tide of an election. The e-mail messages and other documents seem to suggest that some administration officials were furious with some of the prosecutors prior to last November’s election because they weren’t aggressively pursuing investigations of Democrats or were too aggressively probing transgressions of Republicans.

Had Rove and company been more successful in bending the will of these prosecutors to his agenda, the Republicans would probably still have control of Congress and these abuses would never have been uncovered.

The firing of these seven prosecutors was, I believe, the first salvo to make sure Rove had full control over the actions of the Department of Justice prior to the ’08 campaigns.

Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund

April 16, 2007, will be remembered as one of the darkest days in the history of the Virginia Tech community and the world beyond.

To remember and honor the victims of those tragic events, the university has established the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to aid in the healing process and generate financial support.

The fund will be used to cover expenses including but not limited to:

• Grief counseling
• Memorials
• Communication expenses
• Comfort expenses
• Incidental needs

If you plan to give, please click the link below:

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, host Keith Olbermann pointed out that in the last 10 days, the number of young Americans who died in Iraq equaled those who were murdered on the campus of Virginia Tech.

As Olbermann said, this is not to take away from the horror, grief and suffering of the families and friends of the 32 victims of mass killings. But, those 32 who died in Iraq were of similar ages to the Virginia Tech students, had the same dreams and hopes for their futures and at least some were in the service as a means to attend college.

The President and thousands of mourners attended a memorial service for the Virginia Tech students yesterday. In the evening, thousands also gathered for a candlelight vigil. The entire nation is in mourning — as it should be — and public officials are vowing to find ways to minimize the possibility of this happening in the future.

And yet, 100 times as many young men and women have died in Iraq. Let me say that again, 100 times as many young men and women have died in Iraq. It is not unusual for 30 or more Iraqi civilians to be killed on a daily basis.

What puzzles me — and has for quite some time — is why there isn’t a sense of outrage or national mourning over these deaths. Three more families on Monday learned of the deaths of their loved one and suffered their loss without the support of a nation that cares enough to even learn their names.

First Lt. Shaun M. Blue was 25 and died in Al Anbar province. Lance Cpl. Jesse D. Delatorre was 29, and Lance Cpl. Daniel R. Scherry was 20. They too died in Al Anbar province in Iraq. Their flag-draped coffins will be flown home and unloaded in what passes as a shroud of secrecy — no photographs are allowed by a government that wants us to think of other things than the daily massacre that is Iraq.

Fortunately, the Washington Post maintains a web site that shows the faces of the fallen and tells their age and where they lived. It is a place where we as a nation can and should go on a daily basis to mourn the deaths of these courageous Americans who are dying so needlessly.

If the national media paid as much attention to these tragic deaths as they have to the killings in Virginia Tech, I believe the nation would indeed rise up and demand that Bush get our troops out of harms way now.

No comment today. Our thoughts and concern are with the families and friends of those who were killed, injured and traumatized in the Virginia Tech tragedy.

In today’s Washington Post, retired Marine Corps General John J. Sheehan, summed up the problems of Bush and his merry band of men’s adventure into Iraq, wrote a column entitled “Why I Declined to Serve.”

Sheehan was one of a reported four top military leaders the Bush Administration approached and offered a newly created post called the White House implementation manager for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — dubbed by the Post as “war czar.”

Not surprisingly, all four declined.

Sheehan summed the debacle of Iraq up by stating in his column:

There has to be linkage between short-term operations and strategic objectives that represent long-term U.S. and regional interests, such as assured access to energy resources and support for stable, Western-oriented countries. These interests will require a serious dialogue and partnership with countries that live in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. We cannot “shorthand” this issue with concepts such as the “democratization of the region” or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to “win,” even as “victory” is not defined or is frequently redefined.[Italics are mine.]

We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan — and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq.

If there are any Americans left who believe there is a chance of bringing this great nightmare to a successful conclusion — and sadly there are — this should help them see through the White House spin. Creation of a war czar post is a blatant admission that the person who currently holds that post — more commonly called commander in chief — needs to be relieved. Many of us knew that four years ago.

It’s not surprising that the first four people approached declined to take the job. Bush has had plenty of advice from those outside the war-mongering circle of Cheney and company, and rejected it all.

When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Ken Shinseki told the U.S. Senate Armed Services committee before the war in Iraq that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required for post-war Iraq, Bush fired him.

When Army General John Abizaid suggested that a surge in troops was not needed, Bush fired him.

He ignored the advice of the Iraq Study Group, disregards the expressed wishes of the vast majority of American people and mocks the U.S. Congress.

Given Bush’s choices in the past — “you’re doing a heck of a job” Browny, Gonzo Gonzales — it is unlikely that any competent person will be hired for the post and even more unlikely that any advice given will be heeded if it differs from Bush and Cheney’s grand view.

When I was a youngster and not the nicest older brother in the world, a friend of mine and I thought we would play a trick on one of my younger sisters. He had a pump action air rifle and we discovered that if you pulled the lever down and left it there, when you pulled the trigger, it would snap back with tremendous speed. We handed it to my sister with the lever down and told her to shoot it. We expected it would startle her and she would run off screaming like younger sisters are supposed to do. What we didn’t expect was that it would snap back on her finger and hurt her pretty badly.

What, however, would the case be if we did indeed expect that could happen — that we had a pretty good idea that she would get hurt when she pulled the trigger? Would we have been considered monsters? Would our parents have decided we needed therapy? Or would we have just been told that was a very irresponsible thing to do and we shouldn’t do it again?

What kind of monsters would we have been if, after realizing what could happen, we kept on doing it and kept on having the same result?

Now, apply this thinking to players on the national stage, in particular Bush and Cheney.

This dynamic duo was ready to launch their ill-fated attack on Iraq the moment they set up shop in the West Wing. Like the two 9-year-olds with their pump-action air rifle, Bush and Cheney had acquired their new toy — the U.S. military — and they were ready to put it to the test.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, at its first National Security Meeting on January 30, 2001, Bush and company opened their first discussions on Iraq. We now know that at the second meeting, the issue of regime change in Iraq took center stage. According to the web site Cooperative Research, officials at this meeting discussed a memo titled ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’ which talks about troop requirements, establishing war crimes tribunals, and divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.”

They got their excuse with the attacks on the World Trade Center seven months later, and through twisted logic and a host of lies managed to get a too-compliant Congress to authorize the invasion of Iraq. It’s four years later and 3,299 courageous troops have died and another 24,476 have been wounded, many grievously.

A very old and good friend of mine remains committed to this disaster. He is constantly sending me information or arguments to convince me that he is right to believe we should “stay the course.” Today, for example, he sent me a YouTube link that shows a number of our troops in Iraq, identifies them as father, mother, sister, brother, son and daughter and implores us to remember them.

If those who send these things around the World Wide Web really wanted people to remember the troops, they would remember the almost 3,300 who have died and join with those of us who want to get them out of harms way.

Which brings us back to George and Dick. By now only the delusional believe there is any chance of victory in Iraq. And yet these two continue to up the ante, the latest being their so-called surge, which has been tried at least three times in the past and failed. All they are doing is putting more of our troops in the middle of this civil war insuring that the death rate will climb. Ten more U.S. soldiers were killed last weekend and four more were killed on Monday, bringing the total to 45 already in April.

The American public has made it clear that they recognize the failure of this war and want the troops brought home. A Democratic House and Senate were voted into power last November on the party’s pledge to get the troops out. A bi-partisan Iraq Study Commission recommended beginning to withdraw the American forces and focusing on diplomacy, and the rest of the world is fed up with the American belligerence. And in spite of all this, Bush has vowed to veto the funding our troops need because the Democrats have demanded some accountability for a change.

My friend and I may not have thought it through when we handed my sister the air-rifle with the lever down, but we learned our lesson and never tried it again.

When someone keeps repeating the same mistake that doesn’t just cause injuries but leads to the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, then one can’t conclude that they are merely misguided; they are truly monsters.

In a comment on yesterday’s post, Bijhan Al-Attack wrote that the word “evil should be reserved for the mass murderers, the cold-blooded killers, and baby-rapists.” While I wouldn’t classify Bush or Cheney as mass murderers, cold-blooded killers or baby rapists, I think Mr. al-Attack’s definition of evil is a bit too narrow.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the definition of evil is: “1. The quality of being morally bad or wrong; wickedness. 2. That which causes harm, misfortune, or destruction: a leader’s power to do both good and evil. 3. An evil force, power, or personification. 4. Something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction: the social evils of poverty and injustice.”

While number 3 may be up for interpretation, there is no question that we can quote chapter and verse multiple actions of this Administration that fit the definitions contained in 1, 2 and, most particularly, 4.

Perhaps the most nefarious “evil” that can be laid at the feet of Bush and Cheney is the way this Administration has thrown out the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. Some blowback of that behavior can be seen in the treatment the British soldiers received when captured by Iran.

In the past year, Americans who cared were horrified to learn of a policy of this Administration in its “war on terror” known as “extraordinary rendition.” Simply put, according to a CBS News special Court Watch report, it is a case in which “our government decides that a particular suspect may have information that is of particular use, and that this information must be obtained quickly, [so] it farms the suspect out to governments that permit, or at least do not explicitly outlaw, torture. And apparently it does this despite a 1998 law that seems to prohibit the practice.”

What helped bring this barbarian tactic to light was the care of Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian engineer who was born in Syria. He was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport while changing planes after vacationing with his family in Tunisia and on his way home to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects.

According to The New Yorker, Arar “was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.”

The New Yorker reported, “Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, ‘just began beating on me.’ They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. ‘Not even animals could withstand it,’ he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. ‘You just give up,’ he said. ‘You become like an animal.’

“A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism.”

Arar is now suing the U.S. government and claims, as do many critics of this administration, that Bush and company know this practice is illegal and are merely dismissing the law as an unnecessary obstacle — as they have done with so many laws designed to protect human rights and privacy.

It is interesting to note, particularly in light of today’s investigation into Gonzalesgate, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales set this abuse of power into motion with a memo he wrote while in the role of White House counsel. When Arar’s case came to light, subsequent investigations indicated several hundred people had been subjected to “extraordinary rendition.”

If this isn’t evil, Mr. Al-Attack, I don’t know what is.

Post Script: At the end of 2005, the McCain anti-torture amendment was passed in spite of months of unrelenting opposition from the Bush administration, which relented only because of overwhelming support for the amendment by members of Congress. After the highly touted signing ceremony, it was learned that Bush had issued a signing statement which said, in effect, that he didn’t have to pay any attention to the restrictions contained in the amendment.

E-mail — you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

So many mornings I sit down at my computer and wonder how many spam messages I will have to clean from my inbox before I can really get down to work. I have pretty good spam filters, but with 30 e-mail addresses — I maintain a number for clients whose web sites I maintain — there are still a number that get through every day.

After I take several deep breaths and bring the frustration into check, I begin my day’s work, which involves a lot of e-mail communications. In my work, I send and receive several dozen e-mail messages a day — and I have a small, home-based business.

E-mail has become such a ubiquitous part of daily life in the 21st Century that many of us take it for granted. Too many of us are not careful about what we sit down and jot out to co-workers, friends or business associates. And it appears that Carl Rove and his band of merry tricksters may have not been as careful as they should have been.

As you may remember, while everyone was predicting a big Democratic victory during last fall’s campaign, Rove had “the numbers” showing the Republicans would maintain control of the House and Senate. His overconfidence – and hubris during the past six years – and his reliance on e-mail for communications may well prove to be more damaging to this Administration than the secret taping system was to the Nixon regime.

The Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into what is now called Gonzalesgate – the questionable firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – is shining a light into the dark corners of the Justice Department and White House because of the e-mails made available to the committee.

These e-mail messages are demonstrating how Bush and Rove, with the compliance of the integrity and intelligence challenged Gonzales, have been using the Justice Department as another tool in Machiavellian bag of tricks Rove has been using in his attempt to maintain Republican control of Congress.

The investigation has gained legs on voluntarily released e-mail messages. It is a sure bet that more damaging evidence of the evil machinations of this Administration is contained in the redacted portions of the e-mails it released and, more important, in the e-mails it didn’t release. The demands of the Judiciary Committee for these documents has apparently back the Administration into a corner.

Yesterday, Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott Stanzel reported that some of the e-mail messages requested by the committee may be missing. (Gee, what a surprise.)

Also yesterday, according to the New York Times, “the Senate Judiciary Committee empowered its chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, to serve subpoenas for documents that may explain the firings, and to compel testimony from Scott Jennings, a deputy political director in the White House whose e-mails, on a Republican National Committee account, have set off a separate inquiry into the use of political e-mail accounts for official government business.”

You see, since 2004, the White House had a policy of preserving all e-mail messages, not because they were concerned with transparency in the Administration, but because the Presidential Records Act, enacted in 1978, requires administrations to keep records of deliberations, decisions and policies.

It appears that Rove, in particular, began improperly using his Republican National Committee e-mail account, which was not subject to the Presidential Records Act, rather than his official White House account, to conduct official business in an attempt to keep these messages from public scrutiny.

The documents provided to the committee, the New York Times reports, revealed that a deputy to Rove, Scott Jennings, who works in the White House Office of Political Affairs, had used his Republican National Committee e-mail account, gwb43, to communicate about the dismissals of the federal prosecutors with a top aide to Gonzales.

Consider the following excerpt from yesterday’s Times:

In January, an assistant to Mr. Jennings used a gwb43.com account to circulate a document discussing Democrats who are being singled out for defeat in 2008.

“Please do not e-mail this out or let people see it,” the e-mail read, adding, “It is a close hold, and we’re not supposed to be e-mailing it around.”

Other messages have brought scrutiny as well, including exchanges between Susan Ralston, a former assistant to Mr. Rove, and Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist convicted of corruption charges.

Ms. Ralston apparently preferred to e-mail Mr. Abramoff and associates on her national committee Blackberry. In one exchange, Mr. Abramoff and a colleague worried about an e-mail message that wound up in the White House system.

“Dammit,” Mr. Abramoff wrote, “it was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.”

Those nasty little e-mails. They may well lead to the final collapse of Bush’s evil empire.