John Biguenet’s NOLA Journal - What Have We Learned?

Oct. 30, 2005
What Have We Learned?
John Biguenet

It’s been two months since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. What have we learned?

First of all, we now know that on August 29, 2005, the region suffered not one but two distinct calamities: a natural disaster that devastated the region and a manmade catastrophe that destroyed much of New Orleans. The flattened communities in Louisiana’s St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast trace the path of a fierce storm. The destruction inflicted on New Orleans when its levees collapsed, however, was not an act of God but of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote in a front-page story confirming widely reported accounts of levee design flaws, “. . . the soil analyses of the levee and the ground beneath it show a picture of such weak support that failure of the wall under maximum loads was almost a given for the design that the Army Corps of Engineers chose to use: a single wall of steel sheet pile that was not driven to reach below the bottom of the canal.”

Second, we know that although four years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government is unprepared to respond to an assault on even a relatively small U.S. city. As New Orleanians suffered and died on sweltering rooftops after the incompetence of the corps allowed massive flooding of the city, neither military support nor federal disaster aid arrived for days.

Third, we also know that the failure of the federal government to address the urgent communications needs of police officers, firefighters, and other first responders to such a large-scale disaster is only a single aspect of the more ominous failure since 9/11 to put in place a public communications system that cannot be crippled by knocking out a few centralized hubs. As Clive Thompson noted in this paper on September 18, even employees of the mayor’s office were cut off and managed to maintain communication with the outside world only by breaking into an Office Depot and stealing “phones, routers and the store’s own computer server.”

Fourth, we learned the country needs a national 911 emergency dispatch center to handle sudden crises that incapacitate a region. During the storm and after, a few cell phones continued to work, and Wi-Fi was extremely reliable in areas that had access to it. But with the city’s telephone system out — almost a certainty in a large-scale disaster — we had no centralized outside phone number or Internet site to report people in need of rescue or any other information that might have been of help to the authorities attempting to respond to the crisis.

Fifth, we have discovered how unprepared the U.S. Postal Service is to deal with a delivery backlog related to a disaster. Despite having rented a P.O. box and filed a change of address form, I was directed to another post office yesterday to pick up my mail from the last two months. When I arrived, I joined a long line of others from flooded neighborhoods who were told the postal system has no idea where our mail is, that it’s probably safe somewhere, and that we should try back in a few weeks. As a writer, I depend upon the mail, and I’m sure all the other individuals and businesses that have gone without mail for eight weeks now are facing as many personal and professional problems as I am.

Sixth, we learned that the lack of a national registry of displaced victims made it impossible after the disaster to locate doctors, landlords, colleagues, clients, friends, and family members. More than two weeks after the hurricane hit, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that only 552 of 2,430 children separated from their families by Katrina had been reunited with their caregivers.

Seventh, we continue to find that victims of a major disaster need a single Web site that lists all forms of available aid with links to simple application forms. Untold hours have been spent by people in devastated areas trying to piece together instructions on how to access help.

Eighth, we discovered how deeply generous our fellow Americans are — even if their politicians are not. The reaction of compassionate conservatives may have been typified by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who, when confronted by the staggering bill to rebuild New Orleans, opined that “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” and the president’s mother, who assured the nation that many of us New Orleanians were actually better off in makeshift shelters than we were before the failed levees flooded our homes. But ordinary Americans all across the country opened their hearts (and wallets) to those of us who had been displaced. The last two months have left me enormously proud and grateful to be the countryman of such kind and truly compassionate people.

Ninth, we are learning that when you empty a city of its inhabitants and keep them from reentering for a month, many of them — perhaps as many as half — never return.

Tenth, we’ve come to understand that the difficult part of all this is only just beginning.

Smoke Gets in Our Eyes By BOB HERBERT

October 31, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Smoke Gets in Our Eyes
By BOB HERBERT

There’s a reason so many top officials of the Bush administration treat the truth as if it were kryptonite.

More than anything else, the simple truth has the potential to destroy the Bush gang.

Scooter Libby was one of the most powerful figures in the administration, Dick Cheney’s most highly trusted aide and a champion of the wholesale flim-flammery that led us into the crucible of Iraq. I haven’t heard anyone express surprise that he would lie in the service of the administration.

But if the federal indictment returned last week in Washington is to be believed, Mr. Libby lied with the kind of reckless disregard for his own interests that would suggest he had become unhinged. It was as if he’d waved red flags in front of the grand jury and cried, “Come get me!”

You will hardly ever hear of someone who is skilled in the art of government, and a lawyer to boot, telling the kind of transparent lies that Mr. Libby is accused of telling the F.B.I. and a federal grand jury.

The indictment says, for example, that he told the feds he’d had a discussion with N.B.C.’s Tim Russert in which Mr. Russert asserted that “all the reporters” knew that Valerie Wilson, the wife of the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, worked for the C.I.A. In fact, according to the indictment and Mr. Russert, no such discussion occurred.

Mr. Libby himself was spreading the word about Ms. Wilson and, as Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel investigating the case, asserted, “he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly.”

Who knows why Mr. Libby did what he did. Misplaced loyalty? An irrepressible need to be punished for his sins? Maybe he’s just a dope. Of greater consequence for the republic is the fact that Mr. Libby is no hapless functionary who somehow lost his way. He’s a symptom, the hacking cough that should alert us to a dangerous national disease, and that’s the Bush administration’s culture of deceit.

Scooter Libby was the main man of the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. The most important aspect of the prosecution of Mr. Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice is the tremendous spotlight it is likely to shine on the way this administration does its business - its relentless, almost pathological, undermining of the truth, and its ruthless treatment of individuals who cling to the old-fashioned notion that the truth matters.

Condoleezza Rice, for example, gave us nightmare fantasies of mushroom clouds and declared on television that aluminum tubes seized en route to Iraq “were only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” Perhaps she forgot that a year earlier her own staff had been advised that experts had serious doubts about that. In any event, she would be promoted to secretary of state.

Gen. Eric Shinseki met a different fate when, as chief of staff of the Army, he dared to speak an uncomfortable truth to a Senate committee: that it would take several hundred thousand soldiers to pacify postwar Iraq. There was no promotion for him. His long and honorable career evaporated.

That’s the game plan of this administration, to fool the people as much as possible (not just on the war, but on taxes, Social Security, energy policy and so on) and punish, if not destroy, anyone who tries to counter the madness with the truth.

Most members of the administration are more artful than Scooter Libby when they send out the smoke that is designed to hide the truth on important matters. They dissemble and give themselves wiggle room, like Dick Cheney when he said, truthfully but deceptively on “Meet the Press,” that he didn’t know Joseph Wilson. The vice president didn’t know him personally, but he sure knew what was going on.

The art of Bush-speak is to achieve the effect of a lie without actually getting caught in a lie. That’s what administration officials did when they deliberately fostered the impression that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and thus was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. This is an insidious way of governing, and the opposite of what the United States should be about.

It should tell you something that the administration’s resident sleazemeister, Karl Rove, who is up to his ears in this mess but has managed so far to escape indictment, continues to be viewed not as an embarrassment, but as President Bush’s most important and absolutely indispensable asset.

Ending the Fraudulence By PAUL KRUGMAN

October 31, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Ending the Fraudulence
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.

So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don’t share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it’s hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.

The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.

The point is that this administration’s political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.

Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush’s reputation, but his cult of personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration’s monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war.

Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.

And the Plame affair has also solidified the public’s growing doubts about the administration’s morals. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won’t be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It’s a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, telling us how policy was “hijacked” by the Cheney-Rumsfeld “cabal,” it’s hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won’t really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn’t we tell the public?

BBC Tribute to Rosa Parks

Includes archive footage and footage of Jesse Jackson’s tribute.

Rosa by Rita Dove How she sat there, the time …

Rosa

by Rita Dove

How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.

That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.

Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.

Rosa Parks, a spirit ’sent to us by God’ By Coretta Scott King and Bernice King

Actress Cicely Tyson pays her respects to Rosa Parks lying in repose at St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery, Alabama October 29, 2005. Thousands of mourners streamed past the open coffin of the civil rights icon in the city where her refusal 50 years ago to give up her bus seat to a white man helped lead to desegregation. Parks’ body was to be on display until midnight, then flown to Washington where she will be the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, a tribute usually reserved for presidents, soldiers and politicians.

Thirteen-year old Natasha Hardy of Montgomery signs a guest book after paying respects.

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada by FRANK RICH

October 30, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada

By FRANK RICH

TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you’d have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took “responsibility” for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, would name “the White House horrors.”

In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child’s name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That “Cheney’s Cheney,” as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration’s W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.

After the heat of last week’s drama, we can forget just how effective the administration’s cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald’s leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam’s W.M.D.’s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, “the big enchilada.”

The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a “sharp critique” by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee’s Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn’t, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with “crucial documents,” including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell’s notorious presentation of W.M.D. “evidence” to the U.N. on the eve of war.

Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation has prompted the revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out. But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration’s fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam’s uranium - is only one piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We’re a long way from putting together the full history of a self-described “war presidency” that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well.

There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it’s been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman’s parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?

These questions are just a representative sampling. It won’t be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon’s, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.

Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long before he played semantics on “Meet the Press” with his knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of U.S. “consequence management” in the event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.

That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney’s unreliable pronouncements about the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq to this summer’s declaration that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” Even before he began inflating Saddam’s nuclear capabilities, he went on “Meet the Press” in December 2001 to peddle the notion that “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that there was a direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never said it had been “pretty well confirmed.” When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own words even though there are millions of witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with murder.

Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq’s W.M.D.’s (”We found the weapons of mass destruction,” he said in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president’s list “involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out.” In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and similarly claimed that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects” and that “more than half” of those had been convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to, say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.

The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the hyping of Saddam’s uranium: in both cases, national security scares are trumpeted to advance the White House’s political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 “coincidences” in which “a political downturn for the administration,” from revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is “followed by a ‘terror event’ - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.” To switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite from Russia, that the government had “disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot” to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.

For now, it’s conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House’s infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate’s dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That’s a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson’s wife, declared that “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” were “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” That’s what Nixon administration defenders first said about the “third-rate burglary” at Watergate, too.

There he goes again with the ‘unseemly’. Argh.

October 30, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Time for the Vice President to Explain Himself

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I owe Patrick Fitzgerald an apology.

Over the last year, I’ve referred to him nastily a couple of times as “Inspector Javert,” after the merciless and inflexible character in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” In my last column, I fretted aloud that he might pursue overzealous or technical indictments.

But Mr. Fitzgerald didn’t do that. The indictments of Lewis Libby are not for memory lapses or debatable offenses, but for repeatedly telling a fairy tale under oath.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald was wise not to push onto mushier ground. It appears he was tempted to indict Karl Rove, but he’s right to refrain unless the evidence against Mr. Rove is similarly strong. If it’s a borderline call, as it seems, Mr. Rove should walk.

So where do we go from here?

First, Democrats should wipe the smiles off their faces. This is a humiliation for the entire country, and their glee is unseemly. Moreover, the situation is not that neocons are all crooks, but that one vice-presidential aide must be presumed innocent of trying to cover up conduct that may not have been illegal in the first place.

Second, President Bush needs to clean house. Just as special prosecutors should steer clear of questionable indictments, presidents should avoid questionable characters.

Mr. Rove escaped indictment, but he has been tarred. He apparently passed information about Valerie Wilson to reporters and then conveniently forgot about one of those conversations. He also may have misled the president, and the White House ended up giving false information to the public. It’s fine for Mr. Rove to work as a Republican political adviser, but not as White House deputy chief of staff.

Even more important, Vice President Dick Cheney owes the nation an explanation. According to the indictment, he learned from the C.I.A. that Joseph Wilson’s wife worked at the agency and told Mr. Libby that on about June 12, 2003. Why?

There may be innocent explanations. I gather from the indictment and other sources that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were upset in May and June 2003 by a column of mine from May 6, 2003, in which I linked Mr. Cheney to Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger. If Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby thought that my column was unfair, or that Mr. Wilson was exaggerating his role, they had every right to ask for a correction or set the record straight.

But they never raised the issue with me - nor, when Mr. Wilson went public, did they make their case publicly. Certainly the solution was not to leak classified information about Mr. Wilson’s wife.

Mr. Libby is now accused in effect of lying to protect Mr. Cheney. According to the indictment, Mr. Libby insisted under oath that he had heard about Mrs. Wilson from reporters, when he had actually heard about her from his boss. You can’t help wondering if this alleged perjury was purely his own idea and whether Mr. Cheney was aware of it.

Since Mr. Libby is joined at the hip to Mr. Cheney, it’s reasonable to ask: What did Mr. Cheney know and when did he know it? Did the vice president have any grasp of the criminal behavior allegedly happening in his office? We shouldn’t assume the worst, but Mr. Cheney needs to give us a full account.

Instead, Mr. Cheney said in a written statement: “Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.”

Balderdash. If Mr. Cheney can’t address the questions about his conduct, if he can’t be forthcoming about the activities in his office that gave rise to the investigation, then he should resign. And if he won’t resign, Mr. Bush should demand his resignation.

It’s not that there’s a lick of evidence that Mr. Cheney is a criminal. There isn’t. But the standard of the office should be higher than that: the White House should symbolize integrity, not legalistic refusals to discuss criminal cover-ups. I didn’t want technical indictments of White House officials because they inflame partisanship and impede government; for just the same reason, it’s unsavory when a vice president resorts to technical defenses and clams up.

At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in August 2000, Mr. Cheney won adoring applause when he suggested that Bill Clinton’s deceit had besmirched the White House. Mr. Cheney then pledged that Mr. Bush would be different: “On the first hour of the first day, he will restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office.”

Mr. Cheney added of the Democrats: “They will offer more lectures, and legalisms, and carefully worded denials. We offer another way, a better way, and a stiff dose of truth.”

You were right, Mr. Cheney, in your insistence that the White House be beyond reproach. Now it’s time for you to give the nation “a stiff dose of truth.” Otherwise, you sully this country with your own legalisms.

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how …

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. ln those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own. ~Fritz Williams

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for. ~Paulo Coelho

I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death? ~Eugene V. Debs

The Heresy That Made Them Rich

October 29, 2005
The Heresy That Made Them Rich
By JOSEPH NOCERA

A FEW weeks ago, Columbia Business School held its 15th Annual Graham & Dodd Breakfast. The guest speaker was Jean-Marie Eveillard, a successful (and now retired) mutual fund manager, who used to beat the market regularly by adhering to the “value investing” principles first articulated by the great investor Benjamin Graham and his co-author, the Columbia professor David L. Dodd, in their 1934 classic, “Security Analysis.”

The host was Bruce Greenwald, the Robert Heilbrunn professor of finance and asset management, whose value investing course is one of the school’s most popular offerings. Heilbrunn, a Graham disciple who died in 2001, donated the money for Mr. Greenwald’s chair, and also gave the university $5 million to establish a Graham and Dodd research center. Among the 300-plus value investors in the audience were the famed fund manager Mario J. Gabelli (class of ‘67), who is a strong backer of the Columbia program, and Paul D. Sonkin (class of ‘95) of the Hummingbird Value Fund and an adjunct professor at the school, where he teaches value investing.

And present in spirit, if not in the flesh, was another Graham devotee, the greatest value investor of them all: Warren E. Buffett (class of ‘51).

I hadn’t quite appreciated, before going to the breakfast, the extent to which Columbia Business School is an outlier in the world of academic finance. (A disclosure: for the last year and a half, I’ve taught a class at Columbia Journalism School.) Most business schools emphasize modern portfolio theory, which has as its central tenet that the market is so efficient it can’t be beaten with any regularity. Portfolio theory stresses, sensibly enough, diversification as the best way to spread market risk, but it also generally holds that because the market is efficient, those who beat it are lucky rather than skilled. As Mr. Buffett put it to me recently, “You couldn’t advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.”

Although Columbia has its share of portfolio theorists, the value investing program that Mr. Greenwald runs preaches something else: that the world is round. Or, more precisely, that the market can be beaten. Not easily, mind you, and not mindlessly. A “value” stock is, at bottom, a cheap stock. And a value investor is someone who has the facility to ferret out cheap stocks that don’t deserve to be cheap, the acumen to understand why certain such companies have what Mr. Buffett calls “a sustained competitive advantage” that will be borne out over time, the patience to wait for the market to come around to his view of things, and the discipline to stick to his value parameters through thick and thin.

“For a value investor, the only relevant questions are: Is it a good business? And will it be a better business in five years?” said Jason Zweig, a columnist with Money magazine who, a few years ago, published an annotated version of Mr. Graham’s other classic work, “The Intelligent Investor.” If this be heresy, the world could use a little more of it.

EFFICIENT market theory is basically dead,” Mr. Greenwald exclaimed, as he began to tell me the story of how he abandoned portfolio theory for value investing.

I’ve always found value investing appealing because it seems to reward virtue. If you put in the effort, focus more on the business than the stock, and have patience, you have a decent chance of making money. It seems right, somehow, that that’s how the world should work.

Mr. Greenwald, an economist and an expert on business strategy, likes to make grand, provocative statements that are likely to tick off the academic establishment, like saying efficient market theory is dead. I suspect that Mr. Greenwald finds value investing appealing at least in part because it puts him at such odds with his academic brethren.

In fact, Columbia’s value investing roots go back to Graham, who not only went to the school as an undergraduate, but taught there until the mid-1950’s. (Mr. Buffett took his course and worked for his small investment firm, Graham Newman, from 1954 to 1956.) By the time Mr. Greenwald arrived at Columbia in 1991, though, the business school had largely abandoned the field.

Not long after he arrived, Mr. Greenwald attended a series of lectures, as a courtesy, he says, by a retired professor named Roger F. Murray. Murray, who died in 1998, had taught value investing for 20 years after Graham, and one of his prize students had been Mr. Gabelli (whose 20-year track record at the Gabelli Asset Fund, in case you were wondering, is an annualized 14.11 percent). Gabelli was underwriting the lectures - and also videotaping them, a little like an anthropologist trying to capture a dying language while there was still someone around who spoke it.

To his surprise, Mr. Greenwald came away impressed. “I thought,” he recalled, “this is not stupid; there is a discipline and a process here.” In his own financial life, Mr. Greenwald was the rankest of speculators, to sometimes spectacular and sometimes dismal effect. Value investing was the opposite of that.

In addition, academic studies were beginning to be published that showed value stocks regularly outperformed the market. One important study, for instance, showed that a basket of value stocks outperformed a basket of growth stock about 80 percent of the time. Although finance professors have subsequently engaged in a furious debate as to why this is so, a debate that largely consists of trying to square these findings with efficient market theory, Mr. Greenwald became convinced that they told an unambiguous truth: value investing worked. By 1994, he had revived the school’s value investing course.

A decade-plus later, Mr. Greenwald has his own protégés, including Mr. Sonkin - just as Ben Graham once had Mr. Buffett as a protégé, and Murray had Mr. Gabelli. Among the many benefits for Mr. Greenwald is that he now gets to invest with some of the people he once taught -Mr. Sonkin’s fund, for instance, has an annualized return of 17.3 percent since January 2000. And, of course, as they become successful, they contribute money to the Graham and Dodd program.

Still, the Columbia program - and value investing in general - feels a little like a cult. Despite the obvious success of people like Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gabelli - and the studies that seem to bear out that success as something more than luck - it is not yet fully accepted by either mainstream Wall Street or mainstream academia. In his remarks at the breakfast, Mr. Eveillard said he thought that maybe 5 percent of professional money managers are true value investors.

But why? If it works, why don’t more investors use it? Everybody I spoke to had a different answer. Mr. Zweig said he thought the biggest issue was that value investing was just plain hard. “Buffett is looking to buy great businesses at good prices,” he said. “That’s not an easy thing to do.” He pointed to the example of Mr. Buffett buying a stake in Anheuser-Busch this year after having read the company’s annual report for 25 years. “He was watching and waiting for a quarter of a century,” Mr. Zweig said.

Mr. Buffett said he thought that most people regarded themselves as value investors, even if they weren’t. “Very few people will say they think they are buying something overvalued,” he pointed out. But he added that most people looked at the wrong measurements or were overly focused on short-term results, something value investors try to look past.

Mr. Greenwald thought it was because “people love the idea of getting rich quickly”- which is the antithesis of value investing. “People buy lottery tickets, too,” he said.

At the Graham & Dodd Breakfast, Mr. Eveillard’s remarks suggested that he thought it was all of the above. “It goes against human nature,” he said. “You have to be very patient. You’re not running with the herd - and it’s much warmer inside the herd.”

Toward the end of the breakfast, a young investor asked him whether he tried to look around for a catalyst - “such as a corporate raider” - when a stock he owned refused to move up, the way he thought it should. Mr. Eveillard laughed. No, he said, he just waited. “I’ve been frustrated forever,” he said. “I accept that.”

Would that we could all accept it. But then, that’s why he is a successful investor, and most of us are not.

Last week, I told an anecdote - probably apocryphal, I said - about the former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, firing the man who had run the Harvard Management Company in the 1980’s. Neither man returned my calls before the column went to press, but this week, Mr. Bok called to express his dismay that I had published the anecdote. “It never happened,” he said.

Who’s on First? By MAUREEN DOWD

October 29, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Who’s on First?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.

But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was very strict, very precise. He wasn’t totally gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint black-and-white notions of truth and honor (except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed to veer toward a “Who’s on first?” tangle).

“This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war,” he told reporters yesterday in his big Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The indictment was simply about whether the son of an investment banker perjured himself before a grand jury and the F.B.I.

Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the indictment. And not a clever one, since his deception hinged on, of all people, the popular monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to believe him instead of Little Russ?

Good luck.

There is something grotesque about Scooter’s hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he’s part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible.

Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a C.I.A. officer. “Valerie Wilson’s friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life,” he said.

He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under “light” cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the C.I.A.

“I can say that for the people who work at the C.I.A. and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected,” he said, adding: “They run a risk when they work for the C.I.A. that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don’t run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees.”

To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign.

The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the C.I.A., the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The C.I.A., after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.

The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney’s poker face has finally met its match - was whether this stops at Scooter.

No one expects him to “flip,” unless he finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he is searching for - like the ones who succeeded in getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now - and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss to save himself.

But what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn’t, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.

Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson’s name from the C.I.A. and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the C.I.A. to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.

Vice spent so much time lurking over at the C.I.A., trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.

This administration’s grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they’re promoting national security when they’re hurting it; they say they’re squelching terrorists when they’re breeding them; they say they’re bringing stability to Iraq when the country’s imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)

And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn’t have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to.

Parks’ Legacy Challenges New Generation

Parents who were active in the movement say they sense a disconnect when speaking with their children.

“I remember my son once said to me, ‘Why did you sit in the back of the bus? Why didn’t you just go up front?’ I said ‘I didn’t want to get killed,’” said Earl G. Graves Sr., 70, publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine. “He looked at me and blinked.”

Women Had Key Roles in Civil Rights Era

“There’s a Chinese saying, ‘Women hold up half the world,’” Bond said. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably three-quarters of the world.”

Willie “Flip" Williams was Executed on Tuesday

Today Willie “Flip” Williams was pronouced dead at 10:20 a.m. He was visited by over 20 family members - on Friday at Mansfield Correctional Institution and on Monday at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Vigils, services, witnesses were held throughout the state last night and early this morning. His arrangements will be private. [c/o IJPC]

From Youngstown’s paper “The Vindicator”:

Williams executed for ‘91 massacre
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Family members of the victims were dismayed that Williams didn’t apologize.

LUCASVILLE — Willie Williams expressed love for his family Tuesday before being executed by lethal injection for the slayings of four men in Youngstown in 1991 in a crime that became known as the “Labor Day Massacre.”

Clad in dark blue pants with a red stripe down the legs and a white short-sleeved shirt, the 48-year-old Williams, who was known as “Flip,” calmly entered the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility shortly after 10 a.m., laid on a table and looked at family members sitting behind a window nearby.

Williams used his final statement to recognize his family.

“I don’t want to waste no time talking about my lifestyle, my case, my punishment,” Williams said into a microphone held by Warden Edwin Voorhies.

“Mom, you’ve been there from the beginning and I love you,” Williams said, referring to his mother, Joyce Williams.

Williams said he loved his other family members.

“Y’all stick together,” Williams said. “Don’t worry about me, I’m OK. This ain’t nothing, I’ll be OK. That’s it,” Williams said before the deadly drugs flowed into his veins.

Ohio’s Third Execution this Year

Less than a month since Dale Ashworth was executed and just three weeks before
John Spirko is scheduled to be executed, Ohio executed Willie “Flip”
Williams on Tuesday October 25, 2005. In 2004, Ohio executed seven men, putting
us second behind Texas in the number of yearly executions. This year, Ohio
could see five executions, with four scheduled within eight weeks. Ohioans to
Stop Execution asks why the race to death, is Ohio safer now?

Since resuming executions in 1999, Ohio has executed 17 men. Of those 17, four,
Berry, Vrabel, Mink and Ashworth waived appeals. Mr. Williams took every legal
remedy available to him, yet did not choose to formally seek clemency.

Concerned citizens throughout Ohio joined Ohioans to Stop Execution at 8:30am
outside the death house in Lucasville. Xavier University Students for Life’s president Anne Feczko, “We attend the vigil in a spirit of prayer and support, both for Mr. Williams and his family, as well as for the families of his victims. Through our presence, we send the message that death row inmates are not forgotten and
certainly not unloved.”

Vigils with witnesses opposing this execution were held in cities throughout
Ohio, including: Akron, Athens, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Mansfield and
Toledo. “Vengeance is not justice,” notes long time Akron organizer Mac
Goeckler. “I witness that we, the State of Ohio, are again taking another life.
Of all God’s creatures, we are the only species that kills out of vengeance.” [c/o IJPC]

John Biguenet’s NOLA Journal - Two Cities–A Video Report

Oct. 27, 2005

Two Cities — A Video Report

When the levees crumbled in New Orleans, the flood that inundated the city and killed hundreds left some neighborhoods untouched and others ruined. As the dry sections have sprung back to life — like the Louisiana irises and other marsh plants that are turning parts of the city green again — the traces of Hurricane Katrina are quickly disappearing. Residents have returned, streets are crowded with traffic, and restaurants are jammed.

See the video.

But along the lakefront, in the Lower Ninth Ward, and across New Orleans East, a curfew remains in effect from 8:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. Abandoned cars strew the roads. Shattered windows gape unrepaired from walls stained white by the salty flood. Roofs are still pierced with the holes punched out by families trapped in their attics by rising water. Each house continues to announce in blue paint the grim tally of the living and the dead found by rescue teams after the water subsided. And everything is glazed with dust as gray as ash — all the color has been drained from these once vibrant neighborhoods.

So New Orleans has become two cities. The French Quarter, the Garden District, the university section, the business district, the West Bank will soon be as beautiful as ever, throbbing with the intense life we live down here. But the areas devastated by the flooding are another city, a ghost town.

My day swings back and forth between these two places. Now that Marsha and I have found a place to rent in Uptown New Orleans, we spend our mornings and nights amid the bustle of a reborn city. But the rest of the day, we rip sheetrock and insulation from our flooded home as we, quite literally, gut it.

You have to be here to grasp how much New Orleans has accomplished in the two months since defective levees collapsed and drowned the city — and how much remains to be done. The accompanying video offers you a tour of a place still half dead but well on its way back to life.

See the video.

John Biguenet’s NOLA Journal - The New New Orleans

Oct. 26, 2005
The New New Orleans

Just across from Audubon Park on the streetcar line, Loyola University, where I teach English, presents one of the most picturesque facades on St. Charles Avenue. Unscathed by Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, the university looks exactly as it did on the Friday afternoon before the storm hit when I locked my office door and left for what I thought might turn into an extended holiday weekend. So the university is as ready today as it was in late August to fulfill its educational mission. Chalk and erasers still on the ledge beneath each board, the desks still in neat rows, its classrooms lack only students and teachers.

But getting students and teachers back into those classrooms illustrates the myriad challenges facing every institution and business in the city. For instance, a ZIP code analysis of faculty and staff addresses indicates that the houses of roughly half of Loyola’s employees may be uninhabitable thanks to the flooding from the catastrophic failure of the levee system. Loyola has spent the last month assembling a housing database to assist faculty and staff in relocating back to New Orleans, and everyone seems to be pitching in to help homeless colleagues, either offering spare rooms or passing on information. Yesterday afternoon, I received a call on my cellphone from a member of the physics faculty, who had a lead on an apartment for me. I gratefully explained that Marsha and I had already found a place.

Housing isn’t the only problem. An estimated 200,000 cars may have been destroyed in the flood. Marsha and I, for example, are sharing her VW Beetle, having lost both my car and my son’s. So the university is compiling a transportation database as well to help faculty get to school every day, a task made more difficult by the fact that the St. Charles Avenue streetcars are not yet back in service.

Then we have to lure our students home from the universities where they have taken classes this semester. Though surveys indicate most can’t wait to return, the school is taking extraordinary steps to insure an easy transition back into life at Loyola. In addition to great flexibility when it comes to transferring credits earned elsewhere this fall, the university will offer a combination of regular and intensive semesters to meet the wide variety of student needs after the disruptions of these last few months. To make that possible, faculty will teach more courses in the spring and again in the summer than they typically do.

Despite all the challenges the university faces, there was a sense of excitement at a faculty meeting I attended on campus a few days ago. Interdisciplinary courses examining the effects of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath will engage students in a consideration of what happened, why it happened, and how the city will change in response to this unprecedented disaster. Similarly, some faculty members are already redirecting their research to the extraordinary laboratory New Orleans now offers to a range of scholarly disciplines, from the physical sciences to law to music to the social sciences to economics and the humanities.

That research, often conducted in collaboration with students in their courses, is one reason there is so much optimism on campus about Loyola’s future. We’re beginning to see that we can offer an education that schools elsewhere will not be able to match. At most universities around the country next semester, students will study the past. But at Loyola and other New Orleans institutions of higher learning, our students will also be actively involved in the creation of the future — of both a city and a region. Imagine the kind of students such an education will attract and the kind of leaders we will graduate.

It’s been only two months since the levees we believed we could trust collapsed all around us. So we’re still tallying our losses. But if Loyola University is any indication, we’re about to begin to figure out what the new New Orleans may offer in compensation for the old one that was washed away.

Bernanke and the Bubble By PAUL KRUGMAN

October 28, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bernanke and the Bubble
By PAUL KRUGMAN

By Bush administration standards, the choice of Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve was just weird.

For one thing, Mr. Bernanke is actually an expert in monetary policy, as opposed to, say, Arabian horses.

Beyond that, Mr. Bernanke’s partisanship, if it exists, is so low-key that his co-author on a textbook didn’t know he was a registered Republican. The academic work on which his professional reputation rests is apolitical. Moreover, that work is all about how the Fed can influence demand - there’s not a hint in his work of support for the right-wing supply-side doctrine.

Nor is he a laissez-faire purist who believes that government governs best when it governs least. On the contrary, he’s a policy activist who advocates aggressive government moves to jump-start stalled economies.

For example, a few years back Mr. Bernanke called on Japan to show “Rooseveltian resolve” in fighting its long slump. He even supported a proposal by yours truly that the Bank of Japan try to get Japan’s economy moving by, among other things, announcing its intention to push inflation up to 3 or 4 percent per year.

Last but not least, Mr. Bernanke has no personal ties to the Bush family. It’s hard to imagine him doing something indictable to support his masters. It’s even hard to imagine him doing what Mr. Greenspan did: throwing his prestige as Fed chairman behind irresponsible tax cuts.

All of this raises a frightening prospect. Has President Bush been so damaged by scandals and public disapproval that he has no choice but to appoint qualified, principled people to important positions?

O.K., seriously, many economists and investors feared that Mr. Bush would try to place a highly partisan figure in charge of the Fed. And even before the revelations surfaced about cronyism at FEMA and elsewhere, there was widespread concern that Mr. Bush would try to select a John Snow type - a businessman whose only qualification is loyalty - to run monetary policy. The naming of Mr. Bernanke was a sign of Mr. Bush’s weakness, and it brought a collective sigh of relief.

Obviously I’m pleased, too. Full disclosure: Mr. Bernanke was chairman of the Princeton economics department before moving to Washington, and he made the job offer that brought me to Princeton.

So should we all feel confident about the economic future, assuming that Mr. Bernanke is confirmed? Alas, no.

This isn’t a comment on Mr. Bernanke’s qualifications, although there is one talent, important in a Fed chairman, that Mr. Bernanke has yet to demonstrate (though he may have it). Mr. Greenspan, for all his flaws, has repeatedly shown his ability to divine from fragmentary and sometimes contradictory data which way the economic wind is blowing. As an academic, Mr. Bernanke never had the occasion to make that kind of judgment. We’ll just have to see whether he can develop an economic weather sense on the job.

No, my main concern is that the economy may well face a day of reckoning soon after Mr. Bernanke takes office. And while he is surely the best politically possible man for the job (all the other candidates I would have been happy with are independents or Democrats), coping with that day of reckoning without some nasty shocks may be beyond anyone’s talents.

The fact is that the U.S. economy’s growth over the past few years has depended on two unsustainable trends: a huge surge in house prices and a vast inflow of funds from Asia. Sooner or later, both trends will end, possibly abruptly.

It’s true that Mr. Bernanke has given speeches suggesting both that a “global savings glut” will continue to provide the United States with lots of capital inflows, and that housing prices don’t reflect a bubble. Well, soothing words are expected from a Fed chairman. He must know that he may be wrong.

If he is, the U.S. economy will find itself in need of the “Rooseveltian resolve” Mr. Bernanke advocated for Japan. We can safely predict that Mr. Bernanke will show that resolve. In fact, Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco has already predicted that next year Mr. Bernanke will start cutting interest rates.

But that may not be enough. When all is said and done, the Fed controls only one thing: the short-term interest rate. And it will be a long time before we have competent, public-spirited people controlling taxes, spending and other instruments of economic policy.

Driving Blind as the Deaths Pile Up | By BOB HERBERT

October 27, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Driving Blind as the Deaths Pile Up

By BOB HERBERT

Much of the nation is mourning the more than 2,000 American G.I.’s lost to the war in Iraq. But some of the mindless Washington weasels who sent those brave and healthy warriors to their unnecessary doom have other things on their minds. They’re scrambling about the capital, huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that their habits of deception, which are a way of life with them, don’t finally land them in a federal penitentiary.

See them sweat. The most powerful of the powerful, the men who gave the president his talking points and his marching orders, are suddenly sending out distress signals: Don’t let them send me to prison on a technicality.

This is not, however, about technicalities. You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit that gave us the war that never should have happened.

Oh, it was heady stuff for a while - nerds and naïfs swapping fantasies of world domination and giddily manipulating the levers of American power. They were oh so arrogant and glib: Weapons of mass destruction. Yellowcake from Niger. The smoking gun morphing into a mushroom cloud.

Now look at what they’ve wrought. James Dao of The Times began his long article on the 2,000 American dead with a story that was as typical as it was tragic:

“Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane from Iraq and an impish grin on his face, sauntered unannounced into his wife’s hospital room in Georgia just hours after she had given birth to their second son.”

The article described how Sergeant Jones, over a blissful two-week period last May, “cooed over their baby and showered attention on his wife.”

“Three weeks later, on June 14,” wrote Mr. Dao, “Sergeant Jones was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on his third tour in a war that is not yet three years old. He was 25.”

Three times Sergeant Jones was sent to Iraq, which tells you all you need to know about the fairness and shared sacrifices of this war. If you roll the dice enough times, they’re guaranteed to come up snake eyes.

Sergeant Jones told his wife, Kelly, that he had “a bad feeling” about heading back to Iraq for a third combat tour. After his death, his wife found a message that he had left for her among his letters and journal entries.

“Grieve little and move on,” he wrote. “I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves.”

In addition to the more than 2,000 dead, an additional 15,000 Americans have been wounded. Some of these men and women have sacrificed one, two and even three limbs. Some have been permanently blinded and others permanently paralyzed - some both. Some have been horribly burned.

For the Iraqis, the toll is beyond hideous. Perhaps 30,000 dead, of which an estimated 10 percent have been children. The number of Iraqi wounded is anybody’s guess.

This is what happens in war, which is why wars should only be fought when there is utterly and absolutely no alternative.

So what’s ahead, now that the giddiness in Washington has been replaced by anxiety and the public is turning against the war?

Even Richard Nixon’s cronies are crawling out of the woodwork to urge the Bush gang to stop the madness. In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, now 83, says the administration needs to come up with a clearly defined exit strategy, and fast.

Said Mr. Laird: “Getting out of a war is still dicier than getting into one, as George W. Bush can attest.”

But President Bush, who never gave the country a legitimate reason for going to war, and has never offered a coherent strategy for winning the war, seems in no hurry to figure out a way to exit the war.

Soon after the Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that the American death toll in Iraq had reached 2,000, the president gave a speech in which he said: “This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve. No one should underestimate the difficulties ahead, nor should they overlook the advantages we bring to this fight.”

Thousands upon thousands are suffering and dying in Iraq while, in Washington, incompetence continues its macabre marathon dance with incoherence.

Just How Nasty Is a Rat? It’s New York, Ask an Expert

October 26, 2005
About New York
Just How Nasty Is a Rat? It’s New York, Ask an Expert
By DAN BARRY

THE members of the inaugural class of the New York City Rodent Control Academy followed the signs adorned with drawings of rats to a lecture room yesterday morning. They slapped on name tags, collected spiral-bound copies of the curriculum - “Section 11: Using Exterior Bait Boxes for Rat Control: What, When, and How” - and squeezed into school desks.

Some wore neat pantsuits and some wore rumpled work clothes. Some had ties dangling from their necks and some had huge key rings dangling from their belt loops. Most were city employees, representing sanitation, or transportation, or housing. All had a professional interest in “controlling,” which is a nice way of saying “getting rid of,” a creature of insidiously perfect design: the Norway rat.

Edgar R. Butts, the City Health Department’s assistant commissioner for veterinary and pest control services, welcomed the students the way a college president might greet incoming freshmen. He had reason to be upbeat, given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had awarded the city a sizable grant to create this first-of-a-kind course, one that explains why rodent control is more than simply laying out bait.

A lot of thought and planning had gone into the academy, especially by two Health Department veterans of the city’s rodent war, Flavia Diaz and Karlette Sylvain. They had helped in everything from organizing the three-day curriculum to settling on navy blue for the matching “NYC Rodent Control Academy” hats and tote bags.

But the academy’s greatest coup, perhaps, was in acquiring the services of its first speaker and visiting scholar: Bobby Corrigan, a balding, unassuming man who writes poetry and putters around with his wife on their 70-acre farm in Indiana. He also happens to be the “superstar of the rodent-control industry,” as Robert Sullivan dubbed him in his seminal work on this squeamish subject, “Rats” (though the “superstar” did not complicate his appearance with divalike demands for, say, red-only M&M’s).

Dr. Corrigan thinks that one-rat-for-every-city-resident ratios are silly and misleading - the number is “unmeasurable,” he says - and realizes the Sisyphean element to his life’s work. But he is clearly committed. Not only is he the author of “Rodent Control: A Practical Guide for Pest Management Professionals,” a frequent columnist for Pest Control Technology magazine, and a former researcher at Purdue University, he has also been there: answering calls about rats in toilets, blending into the dark to study rodent behavior, tracking the greasy paths of rats through subway, sewer and high-rise.

With this combination of the practical and academic, coupled with a familiar Brooklyn-Long Island accent that betrayed his roots, he had his downtown audience at hello.

Halfway through his introductory session, the only sound in the darkened room was the scratchy tenor voice of Dr. Corrigan, spinning stories and lessons as he flashed one disturbing photograph after another onto a screen.

Here was one of a subway station. That little blur there? A rat, scurrying into a utility room. And this black greasy streak along the subway tiles? The rub marks of filthy rats, running back and forth in that spot thousands of times.

The Latin root for the word rodent, by the way, means “to gnaw.” And so what might that rat do in the utility room? Or in the wiring of airplanes, and cars, and buildings? “If it starts gnawing on wires,” Dr. Corrigan said, warming to his point, “we’ve got potential.”

Here was another photograph, a still portrait of sorts, showing a spice shelf in a kitchen, blackened by the repetitive visits of greasy rats. Imagine where that grease came from; imagine the potential for disease for the distraught tenant and her two children; and imagine what the landlord said about sound pest control. Too expensive, Dr. Corrigan recalled.

IT is the responsibility of everyone in this city to participate in rodent control, beginning with the proper disposal of food. But Dr. Corrigan flashed a large photograph of a black rat on the screen and told his students that “nobody is collecting that guy” - except the likes of the people in this room.

You protect the roof over people’s heads, he said. You protect the food that they eat, their health, their comfort, their safety. No other occupation can claim all those responsibilities, he said, except those dedicated to rodent control.

“Without pest control, this city would be in a hurt,” he said. “In a big, big way.”

Another speaker began the second session - “Rodents and Allergens” - and Dr. Corrigan stepped outside to sip his coffee. He admitted that his introductory talk was partly meant to boost morale.

“No one’s going around saying, ‘Do you want to grow up to be an exterminator?’ ” he said after the class. “No one has ‘Thank You Exterminator’ days.”

Then he returned to the classroom to lecture about “The Biology and Behavior of Rodents.” After that, lunch.

10 Reasons Terror Meets Silence From Muslims

10 Reasons Terror Meets Silence From Muslims
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

Mao Tse-tung famously remarked that, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” That sea, for jihadist Islamic fanatics, is the Muslim world.

Since the 9/11 attack on the United States, the West has been disappointed in that world’s failure to raise its voice against terrorism. Here are 10 reasons why moderate Muslims have remained largely silent in the face of the violent extremism that invokes Islam’s name.

1. Islamic militants, be they freelance suicide bombers recruited on the Internet or Qaeda operatives, are widely seen as the only genuine resistance to an intrusive and hypocritical United States that has, in Muslim eyes, co-opted the autocratic governments of the Arab world and favored Israel in its fight with the Palestinians.

2. The Bush administration now says it favors democratic reform throughout the Middle East. But its chosen initial instrument, the Iraqi invasion, is often viewed as an unacceptable occupation of Arab land, and the decades-long history of cynical American connivance with oil-providing despots has not been forgotten. Given a choice between militants fighting the Middle Eastern status quo and a new American policy also avowedly directed at change, many Arabs find the former more credible and sympathetic.

3. The Islamization of Arab societies over the past three decades came in response to the failures of those societies. Repressive and corrupt one-party regimes, condoned by Washington in countries from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, left the mosque as the only significant platform for political opposition. It is therefore not surprising that militants and terrorists who invoke an anti-Western Islamic ideology find a wide echo, even after the collapse of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the failures of the theocratic revolution in Iran.

4. Middle Eastern governments that are nominally America’s allies are playing a double game. It is still easier, and more popular, for these governments to encourage railing against America in Iraq, or Israel in the West Bank, than it is to embrace an American-backed transformational reform program that might bite them back, as recent events in Syria show. Hala Mustafa, an Egyptian writer and intellectual, said her access to Egyptian television was curtailed after she failed “to conform to the anti-American stereotype.” She added: “If you are pro-American, you are put under every kind of pressure. The regime regards you as an embarrassment.” Moderate Muslims receive little or no real encouragement from their governments or media to speak out against anti-Western jihadists. The Saudi royal family may call Al Qaeda “madness and evil,” but their money helped birth it and their power remains inextricable from a fundamentalist Islam whose anti-Western currents are strong.

5. Decades of repression have led to the depoliticization of many Arab societies. People are passive. They do not believe that by raising their voice, or taking to the street, they can make a difference. They are susceptible to conspiracy theories, chief among them any that demonize America. Islamization, exploited in various guises by many regimes, has encouraged this tendency. In God-given, as opposed to man-made societies, the individual carries little weight.

6. A sense of humiliation is widespread in the Arab world, fed by Israel’s victories, America’s invasion of Iraq, a history of Western colonization, and the economic and cultural failings chronicled by the United Nations in successive Arab Human Development Reports. The other face of humiliation is belligerence; the other face of misery is the quest for recovered pride. In this context, jihadists who embrace death over being demeaned are viewed as salvaging some vestige of Arab and Islamic honor.

7. All-conquering Western modernism, with its share of arrogance and prejudice, is widely rejected as an identity by young Muslims. When the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said Western civilization was superior to Islamic civilization, he was seen as being blunt about something widely felt. Similarly, when President George W. Bush spoke of a “crusade,” Muslims thought they were hearing the truth behind the circumlocutions. Their response: to embrace Islam as a culturally authentic alternative to the West and, in extreme cases, to decide to fight the West with bombs.

8. Islamic fanaticism has successfully imposed a realm of fear, on Muslim intellectuals and others. People are afraid to speak out against Islamo-terrorism for fear of being killed. Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim city councilor in Amsterdam, said he often asked groups of young Dutch Muslims if they would speak out if they learned that a member of their families was preparing to plant a bomb. The response was silence and evasion.

9. Fear of human reprisal for speaking out is sometimes complemented or reinforced by fear of divine reprisal. Osama bin Laden is a puritan Muslim. He points, not implausibly, to certain texts from the Koran in justification of his actions, including the beheading of the infidel occupying holy Arab lands. To denounce him and his movement in public is therefore to risk incurring the wrath of Allah.

10. Islam is far younger than the world’s other main religions. The Prophet Muhammad died in 632, less than 1,400 years ago. Perhaps Islam’s effervescence and violence may be compared to that of Christendom at the time of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that was followed by religious wars of devastating brutality in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not for centuries after that did Western colonialism, inseparable from missionary Christian zeal to convert the pagan unbeliever, reach its zenith. No wonder, then, that Muslims are reluctant to speak out about, or denounce, the bomb-bearing zealots who proclaim, however preposterously, Islam and its civilization as their cause.

All of the above suggests Bush may be naïve in arguing that the West’s only fight is with a “perversion” of Islam, a latter-day Fascist ideology. Rather, it is with a deep-rooted movement of Islamization for which the West bears significant responsibility. The Muslim sea is deep and wide and not about to yield its sharp-toothed fish.

Dick at the Heart of Darkness By MAUREEN DOWD

October 26, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dick at the Heart of Darkness
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.

At least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting.

If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he’ll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president’s office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon.

The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is.

It’s exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we’d actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it’s been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he’s been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.

According to a Times story yesterday, Scooter Libby first learned about Joseph Wilson’s C.I.A. wife from his boss, Mr. Cheney, not from reporters, as he’d originally suggested. And Mr. Cheney learned it from George Tenet, according to Mr. Libby’s notes.

The Bush hawks presented themselves as protectors and exporters of American values. But they were so feverish about projecting the alternate reality they had constructed to link Saddam and Al Qaeda - and fulfilling their idée fixe about invading Iraq - they perverted American values.

Whether or not it turns out to be illegal, outing a C.I.A. agent - undercover or not - simply to undermine her husband’s story is Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who got in its way.

Vice also pressed for a loophole so the C.I.A. could do torture-light on prisoners in U.S. custody, but John McCain rebuffed His Tortureness. Senator McCain has sponsored a measure to bar the cruel treatment of prisoners because he knows that this is not who we are. (Remember the days when the only torture was listening to politicians reciting their best TV lines at dinner parties?)

Colonel Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell, broke the code and denounced Vice’s vortex, calling his own involvement in Mr. Powell’s U.N. speech, infected with bogus Cheney and Scooter malarkey, “the lowest point” in his life.

He followed that with a blast of blunt talk in a speech and an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times, saying that foreign policy had been hijacked by “a secretive, little-known cabal” that hated dissent. He said the cabal was headed by Mr. Cheney, “a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces,” and Donald Rumsfeld, “a secretary of defense presiding over the death by a thousand cuts of our overstretched armed forces.”

“I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less,” Colonel Wilkerson wrote. “More often than not, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.”

Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior’s close friend, let out a shriek this week to Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, revealing his estrangement from W. and his old protégé Condi. He disdained Paul Wolfowitz as a naïve utopian and said he didn’t “know” his old friend Dick Cheney anymore. Vice’s alliance with the neocons, who were determined to finish in Iraq what Mr. Scowcroft and Poppy had declared finished, led him to lead the nation into a morass. Troop deaths are now around 2,000, a gruesome milestone.

“The reason I part with the neocons is that I don’t think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful,” Mr. Scowcroft said. “If you can do it, fine, but I don’t think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse.”

W. should take the Medal of Freedom away from Mr. Tenet and give medals to Colonel Wilkerson and Mr. Scowcroft.

Hurricane Fitzgerald Approaches the White House by Nicholas Kristof

I, for one, see NOTHING disgraceful, Mr. Kristof, in Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation. And to compare it to Ken Starr’s? I am repulsed, Mr. Kristof, at your equating treason and oral sex. I am loathe to post your column, but needs must.

October 25, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Hurricane Fitzgerald Approaches the White House
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Before dragging any Bush administration officials off to jail, we should pause and take a long, deep breath.

In the 1990’s, we saw the harm that special prosecutors can do: they become obsessive, pouncing on the picayune, distracting from governing and frustrating justice more than serving it. That was true particularly of Kenneth Starr’s fanatical pursuit of Bill Clinton and of the even more appalling 10-year investigation into inconsequential lies by Henry Cisneros, the former housing secretary.

Special prosecutors always seem to morph into Inspector Javert, the Victor Hugo character whose vision of justice is both mindless and merciless. We don’t know what evidence has been uncovered by Patrick Fitzgerald, but we should be uneasy that he is said to be mulling indictments that aren’t based on his prime mandate, investigation of possible breaches of the 1982 law prohibiting officials from revealing the names of spies.

Instead, Mr. Fitzgerald is rumored to be considering mushier kinds of indictments, for perjury, obstruction of justice or revealing classified information. Sure, flat-out perjury must be punished. But if the evidence is more equivocal, then indictments would mark just the kind of overzealous breach of prosecutorial discretion that was a disgrace when Democrats were targeted.

And it would be just as disgraceful if Republicans are the targets.

There is, of course, plenty of evidence that White House officials behaved abominably in this affair. I’m offended by the idea of a government official secretly using the news media - under the guise of a “former Hill staffer” - to attack former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. That’s sleazy and outrageous. But a crime?

I’m skeptical, even though there seems to have been a coordinated White House campaign against Mr. Wilson. One indication of that coordination is that, as I’ve reported earlier, I received a call at the same time, in June 2003, from yet another senior White House official, who chided me for two columns in which I discussed Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger but didn’t use his name.

My caller never said anything inappropriate or mentioned Mr. or Mrs. Wilson. But the White House was clearly on the warpath - even before Mr. Wilson went public in his July 2003 Op-Ed article - to defend itself from his allegations and from the idea that the administration had cooked the Iraq intelligence.

My guess is that the participants in a White House senior staff meeting discussed Mr. Wilson’s trip and the charges that the administration had knowingly broadcast false information about uranium in Niger - and then decided to take the offensive. The leak of Mrs. Wilson’s identity resulted from that offensive, but it may well have been negligence rather than vengeance. I question whether the White House knew that she was a noc (nonofficial cover), and I wonder whether some official spread the word of Mrs. Wilson’s work at the C.I.A. to make her husband’s trip look like a nepotistic junket.

That was appalling. It meant that any person ever linked to Mrs. Wilson or to her front company was at grave risk. And we in journalism have extended too much professional courtesy to Robert Novak, who was absolutely wrong to print the disclosure.

But there’s also no need to exaggerate it. The C.I.A. believed that Mrs. Wilson’s identity had already been sold to the Russians by Aldrich Ames by 1994, and she had begun the process of switching to official cover as a State Department officer.

To me, the whisper campaign against Mr. Wilson amounts to back-stabbing politics, but not to obvious criminality. And if indictments are issued for White House officials on vague charges of revealing classified information, that will have a chilling effect on the reporting of national security issues. The ultimate irony would come if we ended up strengthening the Bush administration’s ability to operate in secret.

One can believe that the neocons are utterly wrong without also assuming that they are evil. And one can yearn for Scooter Libby’s exit from the White House - to be, say, ambassador to Nauru - without dreaming of him in chains.

So I find myself repulsed by the glee that some Democrats show at the possibility of Karl Rove and Mr. Libby being dragged off in handcuffs. It was wrong for prosecutors to cook up borderline and technical indictments during the Clinton administration, and it would be just as wrong today. Absent very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors.

John Biguenet’s NOLA Journal - Pulp Fiction

Oct. 24, 2005

Pulp Fiction

I had always thought that when you lose everything, the irreplaceable mementoes of life must be the hardest to part with. And dredged up from the muck left by the receding flood, such things, ruined beyond repair, do wound me — the spontaneous gift of a beautiful bowl bestowed for no reason one evening by a friend now long dead, the self-portrait with green teeth by a second-grader now grown into his twenties, the battered music box that served as the first token of a love that has outlasted more than just this most recent disaster. But I could not have guessed that of all the things lost in the flood, my mold-encrusted books would weigh so heavily upon me.

When I kicked open my door the first time we returned to our house after the hurricane, what caught my eye was not the heavy sofa that had floated across the living room to totter upon the stairs, nor even the veil of mold that shrouded every surface. What I fixed upon was the copy of “Mary Reilly” my friend Valerie Martin had autographed for me that now lay at my feet, its pages black and waterlogged. The novel had been shelved at the top of the bookcase with other prized volumes by admired writers; I realized immediately that sometime during the three weeks my house had remained flooded four feet deep, the bookcase had pitched forward into the water.

So I knew the soggy pile of books sprawled across the floor and discolored by the mold must include the whole set of Janette Turner Hospital’s stories and novels I had been reading my way through this past summer, the collection of poetry John Balaban had insisted I take as a gift at a conference we both attended, the inscribed copy of Helen Scully’s first novel, the volumes by Angela Carter I had found here and there over 20 years, the boxed set of Tolstoy’s diaries I’d requested in place of a fee for a favor I had done a publisher, novels by Tim Gautreaux and Tom Franklin and Steve Stern and Ha Jin, Michael Henry Heim’s translation of Chekhov’s letters, Edith Grossman’s new translation of “Don Quixote.” Though I was surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars of damage, what pierced my heart was the swollen paperback of “The Tain,” the Irish epic, which Marsha and I had discovered in a British bookshop on our first trip to Europe 30 years ago.

The ruined books, heavy with water and slippery with mold, clung to one another. It was difficult work, lifting them into a garbage can to haul to the curb, then flinging them, often one by one, onto the common trash hill my neighbors and I have built. In fact, the ribs on my left side are still tender from the effort to finish the job this past weekend.

I keep reminding myself it’s foolish to regret a lost book. All but a few of those I’ve thrown away are probably available in new editions, in a library, in a used-book shop somewhere. And a book is just a temporary transition, after all, between two minds, the writer’s and the reader’s. So what have I lost, really?

But each book had its own story of how it had come to rest on one of my shelves. “The Tain” and the other volumes we found on that first trip to Europe came home in Marsha’s yellow suitcase, the one we emptied of clothes as we traveled to make more room for books unavailable in those days in the States. The American Merchant Seaman’s Manual had been my father’s. The thin volume of poems by grammar-school students, including the first poem ever published by a promising young versifier named Wystan Hugh Auden, was the very touching gift of an organization I had served that knew of my love for his later poetry. Now nothing but pulp, they have a new story to tell me of how quickly things pass. (And, of course, my own books rotting among the work of so many other writers have their own lesson to teach me about the glory of this world.)

One of the books I lost was “The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop.” Her villanelle, “One Art,” repeats a line I’ve learned is true: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” But she insists, over and over again, it’s never really a “disaster.” I know she’s right about that, too — though surrounded by my past, corrupting page by page, it’s a difficult truth to accept.

Goodbye, Rosa Parks, and Thank You

Rosa Louise Parks went on to her great reward in heaven this evening at 7 p.m. Her spirit will surely live on as she predicted when she said, “Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.” May we all learn as she did, that “when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

Did you know she served on the staff of U. S. Representative John Conyers D - Michigan) from 1965 until 1988?

How Scary Is This? by BOB HERBERT

October 24, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
How Scary Is This?
By BOB HERBERT

The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration’s arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.

“We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita … we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going “Tick, tick, tick . . .” What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

“The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were “presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”

Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, “You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.”

One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq - a war that the administration foolishly launched but now does not know how to win or end.

Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.

While not “evaluating the decision to go to war,” Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances “we can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t.” In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with “five million men and women under arms” within a decade.

Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by “the detainee abuse issue.” In 10 years, he said, when this matter is “put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.”

Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that “as a citizen of this great republic,” he has an obligation to do so. If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, “it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.”

There are particular moments in public affairs whe…

There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth can regain