For the last couple of days, the news has become increasingly unwatchable to me, because it drives me stark raving nuts when everybody, and I mean everybody, who's speaking up on a news story has it wrong. Or, in this case, two news stories: Barack Obama's announced support for telecom immunity, and Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to reform and expand the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, elevating it even higher in importance in his administration than it was in this one. And all week long, almost every single reporter and analyst, regardless of their politics, has read these two stories the same way. Senator Obama, they have concluded, is "tacking towards the center," announcing policy positions that he doesn't believe or doesn't care about, in order to distance himself from the (presumably unpopular) Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, to make himself appear to be more "moderate" and therefore less "radical" or "liberal" to the (presumed to be anti-liberal) American voting public. Analyst after analyst has quoted the axiom that all Democratic nominees change their positions to appear more liberal while they're campaigning for their party's primary and then, once they have the delegate lead sewed up, change their positions again to be more "centrist;" that supposedly the Republicans do the same thing, tacking right in the primaries and tacking center-ward after the primaries.

Because obviously Barack Obama can't possibly mean what he says when he says he supports the warrantless wiretapping program that allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on any phone call, as long as what they at least say that they're trying to do is only pay attention to the calls that are between (actual or suspected) enemy agents and (actual or possible) enemy contacts overseas, he can't possibly really accept the argument, implicit in this bill, that if the NSA secretly tells a telecom company that the President approved this tap, the company should secretly and immediately comply, right? It's got to be just election-year posturing, right? Keith Olbermann and John Dean have both been going on all week about how they're just 100% sure that it must be a secretive conspiracy on Barack Obama's part to lull the Bush administration and the telcos into a false sense of security, then spring the trap on them with criminal, not civil, prosecutions next January. Right?

Wrong.

I think he actually means it.

And I'm a little bit disappointed, but not terribly surprised. And I'd rather he didn't, but I don't care enough to base my vote on it, not least of which because on this issue, there's no meaningful difference between him and John McCain. But that's not the point that I want to, that I feel that I need to, explain. Let me explain why I think he means it. (Again. I explained most of this, in part at least, when the warrantless wiretapping program first leaked to the public, I'm pretty sure.)

The fact of the matter is that going all the way back to the deployment of the telegraph, all the way back to the Civil War, in every war the US has ever fought, our spy services have spied on Americans in total violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But rather than detail it war by war, let me point out to you the history of the NSA's original warrantless wiretapping program: Operation Ivy Bells, 1957 to 1975.

The National Security Agency as we now know it was founded by President Truman in 1947, to collect most of our WWII signals-intercept capabilities into a single agency and retool it from spying on our German and Japanese enemies on behalf of our Russian allies (and ourselves), to spying on our Russian (and Chinese, but mostly Russian) enemies on behalf of our German and Japanese allies (and ourselves). You can't entirely keep a secret that big, certainly not once a department gets big enough to get its own huge headquarters building, but for the first roughly 18 years of its life, the long-standing joke was that the acronym NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything." Rumors got out, but officially the very existence of the NSA was classified Top Secret. During the Cold War they mostly specialized in intercepting and decoding radio signals, but they did have one very, very ambitious phone-tapping program. It used customized Navy submarines to "tap" the trans-Pacific phone cables. Originally they only tapped a local underwater cable, but it expanded to tap all deep water telephone cables going into the Soviet Union. Yes, all calls from anyone, including any innocent civilians, who called anybody in Russia, including ones they had no 4th Amendment right to hear, were recorded, brought back, skimmed for useful intelligence, translated, and if any was found, it was put to use; then the tapes were erased and reused. The program only ended in 1975 when one of the NSA's own people sold the secret of the program to the KGB for cash. But even then, the American public didn't hear about it.

Why do we know anything at all about the NSA, officially, now? Because in 1971, President Nixon ordered the NSA to eavesdrop on all anti-Vietnam-War groups, too, also without a warrant, on the shallow excuse that some of them might secretly be controlled by Soviet spies. This so offended someone, and we're still not even sure who, that they blew the whistle, eventually leading to Congressional hearings in October, 1975: the famous Church Committee. It was in the Church Committee hearings that the government was grudgingly forced to admit that the NSA even existed, and that it had been used to spy on Nixon's political opponents. Even then, Ivy Bell never came up, not until long after the statute of limitations had run out. But no further attempts to set up any program even vaguely like it were set up until 1978 or later. Why 1978? Because having abused the privilege of spying on Americans for political reasons, the NSA was put under a figleaf of court oversight, and I do mean a figleaf, their own captive and pretty much entirely complaisant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. At which point the NSA went back into the business of spying on Americans, in total secrecy, without ever being turned down once, despite never having to turn in anything resembling enough evidence for a real search warrant, for a bit more than a decade. And that whole time, there were people mounting legal challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, arguing (quite correctly) that it was a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And they got nowhere. You know why they got nowhere? Because the American government, including the courts, are run by grownups. And their attitude was, "who cares?"

They allowed FISA and the FISC/NSA to go forward, spying on Americans, because they knew that the real safeguard on Americans' actual liberty wasn't the FISC. It was the teleco employees themselves who'd have to install and maintain the taps, or who would inevitably discover them in the course of their work. It was the NSA's own employees, its own culture, who were trusted because the one and only time any White House ever abused the NSA for political reasons, somebody blew the whistle. And when they did, Nixon didn't have the guts to even try to make up a plausible national security reason for why he'd tapped Democratic Party offices and anti-war activists. I remember my Dad, and other adults I knew at the time, disgustedly arguing that if Nixon'd had the guts to say, "Yeah, I did it. I had evidence that wasn't good enough to get a warrant or to make a public accusation, but too good to completely ignore, that there was a Soviet spy in there somewhere, and I had to find out if it was true. So I had spies break into that party's offices. It turned out it wasn't true, so I didn't tell anybody because that would have unfairly tarred them with a false accusation, and we didn't use the information we got improperly. Would you rather I had ignored rumors of Soviet spies inside a major political party?", then he might have successfully finished his second term.

But anyway, afterwards, as far as everybody in any kind of a position of authority in Washington was concerned, the Watergate impeachment hearings and the Church Commission hearings proved that the FISC was a pointless exercise; that the real precaution was the guaranteed certainty that so many people would know if the White House was abusing its spying capabilities, one of the people who knew would have a conscience attack. And that's what's so uncomfortable about the whole Terrorist Surveillance Program at AT&T and other telecos, the warrantless wiretaps that let the NSA skim the entire Internet backbone and all long-distance phone lines for evidence of al Qaeda plots: nobody, and I mean nobody, has come up with even a suggestion that anybody in the NSA used those taps for anything but legitimate purposes, or even a hint that any information that they weren't supposed to be looking for was passed to the White House, or even a single clue that any actual American's privacy or political rights were impaired in even the tiniest way ... but somebody blew the whistle anyway. And that's not actually supposed to happen. Implicit in the relationship between America's spy agencies and America's telecom companies that goes all the way back to the original American Telegraph system in the 1860s is an agreement that everybody would keep their mouths shut unless something went wrong, and that agreement was breached.

So if you think that no matter what he was told or how famously fair-minded a man he is, Barack Obama can't possibly be really okay with a bill that forgives every telco for participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program if they claim that they at least thought that the President had ordered it? That he must only be claiming to be okay with it for political advantage, for fear of being called soft on terror, or to reassure swing voters, or to establish the appearance of some distance between himself and the left-wing blogosphere? I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.

(And an irrelevant aside: my Bush Countdown Clock from NationalNightmare.com reminds me that there are now only 200 days left in the Bush Administration. And for much of that time, Congress is going to be in recess. Rejoice that there's really not much harm that the man can do in that little time, with no more resources or authority than he has left.)

I got my season one Burn Notice DVDs in the mail a few weeks ago, and got to sit down with phierma and cos_x to go through them in one marathon sitting. (If you want to tape or DVR it and do so yourself, USA Network is airing them all back-to-back on July 3rd to prepare for the July 10th season two premier, check local listings for time.) The first time I watched these, I was taken by how well written they were, how witty and wry the voice-over narration was, by how well series creator Matt Nix is paying homage to the great "Florida caper" writers John D. MacDonald and Carl Hiassen, how many great throw-away references to classic non-fiction spy literature he threw in for those of us who share his obsession with the subject, and especially just how much fun Bruce Campbell and Gabrielle Anwar were having with their parts. And lord knows, I'm a sucker for watching actors have fun with their parts.

For those of you who don't know this series and don't remember me hyping it last season, Jeffrey Donovan plays Michael Westen, a one-man private contractor for the CIA in the War on Terror who's been unfairly accused of something awful (for most of season one, he doesn't even know what), convicted in a top secret hearing he wasn't even aware of, blacklisted, shanghai'ed, and dumped back in his home town, his address of record. His identity has been erased, his bank accounts and credit frozen, every government official and contractor with a secret or above clearance told to avoid him under penalty of law, and then he's given word: leave the greater Miami area and we'll send every police force and agency in the US to hunt you down like a dog. Oh, and at the end of the pilot, he finds out that in addition to his FBI tail, he's under really good 24-hour professional surveillance by someone even better than he is. He sets out to clear his name and get his job back. Practically the only assets he has left are his psychotic ex-girlfriend Fiona Glenanne (Anwar), a long-retired alcoholic ex-spy buddy named Sam Axe (Campbell), and what grudging help he can get out of his neurotic mother Madeline Westen (Sharon Gless). This doesn't worry him too much; he's finished field assignments this hard with even less help, before. And in the season one ending cliffhanger, after a dozen episodes of accumulating money and other assets by working as an unlicensed private detective, he has done just what he set out to do: forced the hand of the shadowy conspiracy that framed him for corruption and treason and thereby wrecked his career, with the camera fading to black just as he's about to meet them and find out what this is really all about.

This time through, something different struck me, and it's the way in which the three main characters of Fiona, Michael, and Sam personify one of the ugliest moral and political dilemmas of the War on Terror. Sam is (or at least was) a government agent, CIA covert ops at the end of and right after the Cold War. Fiona is (or mostly was) a terrorist, an Irish Republican Army bank-robber and gun-runner; in fact, at one point in the Cold War before he retired, Sam managed to screw up an arms deal that Fiona was brokering with Libyan intelligence. (One of those in-jokes for those of us obsessed with spy literature: the Reagan and Bush the Elder administrations spent a fortune trying to prove a connection between the IRA and Libyan intelligence. In Burn Notice, that connection turns out to have been the lead character's girlfriend.) Michael, though, is neither a terrorist nor a government agent, he's a private contractor. And it makes him feel awkward that Fiona looks at him and sees "one of us," and that Sam looks at him and sees "one of us." And in fact the main plot of the first season is driven by just how fine the line is between being the kind of mercenary Michael is and the kind of international criminal mastermind and terrorist Fiona is. Fiona at one point accuses him of being "a criminal with a government paycheck." In an earlier episode, Sam says that the kind of things that have happened to Michael in his career, including this, are why he's glad he got out long before the War on Terror: in the Cold War, it was easier to be sure who was on your side. Michael throws the other side of that argument back into Sam's face later: the difference between Sam and Michael is that Sam was a lot more comfortable taking orders. Fiona needles Sam even more often than Michael does over the same point; to her, Sam's unforgivable sin is how readily he keeps handing his conscience over to a government to tell him what's right and what's wrong.

If you want a clearer metaphor for this, one has occurred to me, from the Golden Age of (Caribbean) Piracy. If this is (figuratively) the Caribbean of 1680, Fiona is a pirate. Sam is (ex-)navy. Michael is a privateer.

Michael is a high-minded privateer, at least in his own mind, at least as much motivated by his urge to do what his country needs as he is by his urge to have the government pay what it costs to keep him on the opposite side of the planet from his dysfunctional family with enough left over to fund his mom's hypochondria. But still a privateer. And if you know any of your pirate history, you know this about privateers: an awful lot of them ended up being hanged for piracy. Whether they intentionally crossed the line, accidentally crossed the line, or found themselves mysteriously on the other side of a line someone else blurred for their own greedy reasons, the line between independent private military contractor (privateer) and terrorist enemy of all mankind (pirate) was (and is) way too easy to be on the wrong side of.

P.S. I wish I knew that a bunch of you were caught up on Burn Notice. If I'm reading between the lines of the season one finale correctly, the series creator made a fascinating, and possibly scurrilous, political accusation that I'd love to have readers to discuss with, a discussion I can't possibly go into without wandering way, way deep into spoiler territory.

There are probably fewer than ten books that I push off on anybody who will sit still for them; it is a mark of how much I suck that I have very mixed luck getting people to actually sit down and read them, even though these are all books that completely changed my way of seeing the world, books that opened my eyes to, and clarified, whole ranges of news stories, historical events, and global phenomena that were previously inexplicable to me. For example, almost nothing about American life and our economy makes nearly as much sense before you read Joel Garreau's Edge City as it does afterwards. It's almost impossible to put current political jeremiads in context without having read the best of jeremiads, once about a generation and time we now remember as heroic, Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers. I don't know how interested I am in hearing almost anything that people have to say about the politics of masculinity, as it is almost certainly shallow and ill-informed, if they haven't read Susan Faludi's Stiffed. I'm pretty sure that if I'm talking educational policy or history with you and you haven't read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I'm going to be constantly wishing you had. I'm not sure that it's aged well, but for a very long time I wasn't interested in hearing technological or cultural speculation from anybody who hadn't read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. If you have any kind of a pet theory about economics and you haven't read P.J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, I really have to wonder why not, and if you'd still think the same thing after you read it. For all the reasons I talked about the other day, Pfeffer and Sutton's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense is working its way onto my list of books that I think you really ought to have read.

But to get to the point, there's a book I've been hyping for almost 20 years now as the book about American history, the book without you having read it, I don't know how in the heck you manage to either understand anything about American history, or even keep it all straight in your head: Neil Howe and William Strauss, Generations. I know some of the reasons I've had a hard time getting people to actually sit down and read it. It is thick as a brick, and it starts out kind of slow and very, very deliberately. The reason it does so is the other reason why (until recently) you'd heard very little about it except from cranks like me; Strauss & Howe set out to do something that all professional academic historians had declared impossible, namely, identify an easily understandable and completely predictable recurring trend in American history, one with dominating and important influence over how the country's history has turned out, and will continue turning out. Grand Unified Theories of History were, and still are, frowned upon, so the first couple of hundred pages of Generations are grindingly methodical specifically in an attempt to prove to academic historians that no, we're not the only ones who noticed some parts of this, no, they're not all that controversial even within your field, no, we're not making as sweeping a set of assertions as you might think, and no, we didn't pull this out of our backsides without doing a ton of rock-solid statistical analysis first and developing a solid theoretical model.

And at the end, it goes further, and it won my heart thereby at the time, by adding, and no, they weren't expecting anybody to believe them yet. Instead, based on their theoretical and statistical analysis, they made not quite 90 years' worth of predictions for American history and said that if their theory was right, more of their predictions than could be expected by chance were going to come true; if substantial numbers of them did not, it would prove their theory false. As I said, it's been just shy of 20 years since Generations came out. And with very few exceptions, those 20 years have been very, very, very good to Strauss & Howe. In fact, their book and the work of its small but devoted cult of follow-on researchers who were impressed by them early on have become mandatory reading for political campaigns this year.

By coincidence, I've been going through it again myself for about a month now, slowly and carefully. phierma and cos_x and I have been getting together Tuesday nights to catch each other up on our favorite TV series and movies for a long while now, a chance to socialize while they get work done on their various projects. When we ran low on TV series and movies that one of us had that the other(s) were eager to catch up with, it turned out that they love to be read to, and I love to read aloud, so we started working on books, and their choice for the second book was Strauss & Howe, Generations. Last Tuesday night, we got to the first of the "prediction" chapters ... and I got halfway down the first paragraph and my own jaw fell right out of my head. You see, this would be my first time re-reading it since 9/11, and one of the things that I had failed to remember was that something very, very like 9/11 was something that they predicted. They completely failed to predict the exact timing; on the contrary, they specifically said that New York City being attacked, and a major chunk of it destroyed, by Islamic terrorists was a distinct possibility at any time. What they were specifically saying was that if their theory was true, how America would react would be different based on whether it happened in 1990, 2000, 2010, or 2020. And as I started going through the paragraph on how they predicted America would react and how America would change if we were attacked in the year 2000 or in the first couple of years thereafter, my jaw dropped right off all over again. They nailed it. In spooky, but in hindsight not astonishing, ways.

This is the point where, in order to make any sense out of the rest of this, I have to oversimplify their theory in an entirely unconvincing way, one that most of you will flatly refuse to believe because you haven't read the book and seen their extensive statistical and historical and scientific evidence for their argument. But here's the best I can do. They define a "generation" as a group of people, born in a consecutive range of years, who can't help having a lot of traits in common because they were all roughly the same age during major world-changing events. A major war, like say World War II, has different effects on elderly leaders and recent retirees, on people in mid-life career, on people of fighting age or people just enter the workforce, and on children. Individuals will differ, but everybody who was (again, same example) a child during World War II is going to have some things in common with other people who were children during World War II. Since a "phase of life" is roughly 20 or so years, they hypothesized, and their statistical research backed them up, that while demographic wobbles don't follow the same pattern, a new generation comes along about every 20 years. And as they statistically analyzed the generations on a wide variety of traits, they discovered that they can be generalized into only four types, and that they repeat in a specific pattern with one and only one important exception so far in American history going back to the 1620s. Because your attention is at a premium, rather than generalize, let me give specific examples, the four generations who made up most of the American population on September 11th, 2001, from oldest to youngest:

• John McCain's Silent Generation were aged 59 to 76 on 9/11. They were the kids who were just too young to be part of WWII, on average born ten years too late to be war heroes or to have made heroic sacrifices on the home front. They spent their young adulthood sucking up to the GI Generation who'd fought that war and who swept into unquestioned political power after the war. Then around 1965 or so, they were (this time) just barely too old to be part of the Consciousness Revolution, their average member just over that magic "over 30" line that the next generation after them, who dominated the Consciousness Revolution, defined as untrustworthy, and their youngest members already young adults with families and too many responsibilities to go chasing off after a cultural revolution. Not that that stopped them; embarrassing numbers of them spent the 1970s in binges of destructive behavior from trying to pretend they were still uninhibited teenagers (when they had been no such thing in their actual teenage years), leaving an amazing trail of broken marriages and substance abuse hospitalizations behind them.
  
  
• George W. Bush's Boom Generation were aged 41 to 58 on 9/11. Their childhood came just as the last of FDR's and Billy Sunday's Missionary Generation were dying off, and if some of them didn't know that, they did grow up noticing that America, while wealthy and powerful, was also smug, self-satisfied about its wealth and power, deeply corrupt, and completely lacking in any meaningful national conversation about values. They grew up as teenagers and 20-somethings to make that their mission, starting an all-out intra-generational war on campuses, mostly between the fundamentalist, reactionary, authoritarian right wing of their generation and the free-spirited, revolutionary, utopian left wing of their generation. The left wing won all the battles but lost the war, not that almost any of them ever admitted that. What really undid them was that by the late 1970s, the wreckage that the Silent generation had made of their kids chasing after the liberal Boomers' Consciousness Revolution, and the even more appalling wreckage the early-wave liberal Boomers had made of their own lives let alone their kids, sparked a massive counter-revolution, splitting them mostly by age: the first half of their generation generally fundamentalist Republican, the last wave (who were too young to see or experience the worst of the wreckage first-hand) still secular or New Age utopian socialists. Per Strauss & Howe, if you think they're the first idealist generation to experience this split, you are 100% wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s this split became known as the Culture Wars. But by the end of the 1990s, they were beginning to reach real positions of power, and it was starting to produce a counter-trend towards trying to find a "third way" within both ideological wings of their generation, a set of ideals they could (mostly) all coalesce upon, that would be the new national consensus. The project was, at best, half complete on 9/11.
  
  
• For Barack Obama's (and Lyndie England's) 13th Generation, aged 20 to 40 on 9/11, the wreckage the Silent and Boom had made of American family life, mostly by neglecting their kids (and sometimes outright despising them as annoying distractions from more important things, as if anything could be more important) during their various ideological and spiritual and religious and political crusades, wasn't something they had to read about in the newspaper. Even the relatively unscarred survivors like Obama knew plenty of casualties first-hand, people whose lives had been no different than their own who ended up dead, crippled, in prison, on the economic scrap heap, strung out on drugs, trapped in criminal gangs, or otherwise destroyed. A few of them, especially some of the ones who were raised on at least a little of the Boomers' early liberal spiritual values, tend to retain the compassion to attribute their own survival and success to luck; the rest, having been raised on a rising tide of reactionary right-wing spiritual values, attribute their own survival to innate superiority over the losers. (Again, if you think they are the first generation to come after an idealist generation and turn out this way, you need to go back and look at the Lost generation or the Gilded generation.) Still, on 9/11, almost everybody in that generation looked at it as their crisis; as young adults and rising adults, it was going to be them who did all the work and took all the risks. Typically, to the disgust of the process-and-fairness oriented Silent generation, they didn't ask "what's fair?" To the even greater disgust of both the left-wing and right-wing ideologues of the Boom generation, they didn't ask "what's right?" No, a generation that grew up fast and hard and mostly on their own cut straight to the bottom line and asked "how much is this going to cost?" Some believed the Boomers who said it wouldn't cost much, would result in power and glory and wealth, and rushed off to any old desert hellhole the Boomers asked them to go to. Some counted the cost a little more accurately, and better estimated the trivial gains, and took firm stands on pure cost-benefit lines: Afghanistan is worth it, Iraq isn't.
  
  
• The Millennial Generation's (no obvious name jumps out at me for an example) youngest members had only just been born on 9/11; their eldest members had just graduated high school. These (mostly) kids were told on 9/11 not to worry, and that everything we as a country was about to do was For The Children. This completely and utterly failed to surprise them; for their entire life, for as long as any of them can remember, everything has been For The Children, in hopes that they wouldn't grow up ill-educated, burned out, jaded, cynical, mercenary, amoral, and nearly unemployable like Gen X and Gen Y. They were assured that years later, it would be their turn to band together in teams with peer-enforced morality, like they had been since their first DARE classes in grade school, and clean up whatever mess the Boomers and the 13th Generation had made of world by then. 100% unshakably convinced that when they do, the whole US government and the entire US population will be on their side and give them everything they need to do so, few if any of them have complained about this.

Strauss & Howe's hypothetical threat of WMD attack on Manhattan took into account the statistically likely lifecycle trends and growing-up patterns of these four generations:

• If the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 1990s: The GIs would still be clinging to power, the Silent Generation would be at their most inclined to dither and debate rather than act, and the mostly still powerless Boom would still be in full-fledged ideological internal warfare, both within themselves and against the (then still mostly hated by the Boomers) GIs. The government would achieve very little, would be accused of lying about the threat, government evacuation plans would be elaborate, sophisticated, and completely unworkable. The few young 13er entrepreneurs who rushed to the scene of the catastrophe would mostly go unnoticed; the only ones who would make the news would be the ones pilloried for scalping the attack survivors during the rescue. We would end up rebuilding the damage sections of New York but doing little if anything else, leaving the main problem to be dealt with all over again decades later.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2000s: The Silent Generation might be in charge; at the very least, they'd make up a lot of the manpower in Congress and in the White House staff. More likely, they predicted, it would be a Boomer president technically in charge. They couldn't predict, in 1989, if it would be a liberal new ager or a reactionary fundamentalist. Either way, they predicted that the Silent generation White House staff and top military brass would draw up for him an elaborate, technocratic reaction, a carefully negotiated and calibrated proportionate response that could be made to look like a bigger response. The Boomer president would present it to the nation as a moral challenge, a war between right and wrong, but be mostly accused by most people of just saying so to shill for his own side in the ongoing argument with other Boomers. A 13er Generation military, seeing a chance to gain quick and easy glory kicking around impoverished third-worlders, would ride jauntily off into the desert. (Strauss & Howe's naive overconfidence in the American legal system is probably what prevented them from predicting how many of those 13er troops would actually be piratical mercenaries rather than in US uniform; an amazing oversight, since they do document the huge numbers of pirates and mercenaries in similar generations before them.) Whatever then went wrong would be blamed on their poor education, surly attitudes, poor morals, and the lawless gang-like behavior of their worst members, not Boomer ideological divisions or Silent generation poor generalship. And since generations like the 13th make rotten soldiers, historically, well, yes the result would be disastrous, so yes, there would be plenty of scapegoating afterwards. Some of it would consist of quests for the worst of the "bad apples" in the military. But the main result would be a re-ignition of the old ideological wars within the Boom Generation, a screaming match between liberals and conservatives over who lost the War on Terror, postponing for years any attempt to build a national consensus behind a single set of shared values. How intense a re-ignition of those conflicts? One possible outcome they present all too much evidence for is the possibility of religious civil war in the US some time in the 2010s, one that would use up and destroy the Millennials' optimism and teamwork habits instead of benefiting from them.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2010s, preferably late 2010s: A few elderly Silent might still be in Congress and in a few offices in the Pentagon, finding satisfying work making sure that there were good, fair procedures for dealing with captives. But the reigns of political power at nearly all levels would be in Boomer hands. A terrorist attack on American soul would be the final catalyst to end their internal squabble once and for all, and whether the result was called compassionate conservatism or third-way liberalism (two terms Strauss & Howe couldn't predict in 1989, but their description is clear enough) it would be the new American political consensus for decades to come. All internal American struggles over, the country would rally to war against the terrorists and any perceived allies of the terrorists, confident that we were right and broadly unified. Grizzled and old-before-their-time 13er veterans of some early 21st century brush-fire war would find that the new crop of Millennial soldiers were nothing like the grunts they served with, that these kids were great kids ... and enthusiastic and uncomplaining cannon fodder. Cynical 13er business executives, if curbed of their natural instinct to war profiteer, would turn their pragmatic attention to squeezing out maximum productivity to (profitable) national service, churning out a new generation of wonder-weapons (produced by research teams of bright, excited Millennial scientists) in amazing quantities. America would march a multi-million-man army into the Arab world equipped with insane numbers of ultra-tech vehicles and weapons, and Save The World.

That they got the results of 9/11 so eerily right was only the first thing that ran chills down my spine. If I get it done and on the queue before I leave for tomorrow night's party, I'll have the other one for you tomorrow morning; if not, the next night.

I'm from Missouri, born and bred, lived here my whole life, it's been where every bit of political activism I've ever done has been. And my growing up years in politics coincide very thoroughly with the era of John Ashcroft, aka "the Deacon:" Missouri state auditor 1972-1974, assistant Missouri attorney general 1974-76, Missouri attorney general 1976-1984, Missouri governor 1984-1992, Missouri US Senator 1994-2000. Those of us here in Missouri, especially those of us at all active in politics, saw an awful lot of "the Deacon" over those 28 years, and we know him well. I can't say that I know the man personally, myself, but I do know a bunch of people who do know him well, people who served with or under or alongside him in his various offices, people who've worked on his various campaigns, people who've worked with him on various charitable projects. And here's the thing that everybody who knows the man personally says about him, even his most determined political enemies: John David Ashcroft is flat-out one of the nicest guys in American politics.

This does not change the fact that his politics are deeply, deeply scary. John Ashcroft earned his nickname "the Deacon" not just because he is (or at least was? not sure if he still is) a deacon in an Assemblies of God church, but because in some ways, that's all he is. It is almost the entirety of his personality. When John Ashcroft uses the phrase "the founding fathers," he doesn't mean guys like Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he means guys like John Winthrop and John Cotton and Roger Williams and John Endecott, people that most Americans have never even heard of -- the Puritan founding fathers, the organizers of the 1620-1640 Puritan Migration that provided North America with its first truly large-scale white population. No, contrary to what he feels obligated to say, Ashcroft's level of commitment to founding US principles like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is nominal, at best; this is a man who believes that the only point in there even being a United States of America is to be New Jerusalem, Christianity's global capital, one nation entirely under Jesus Christ. He pays lip service to the idea that nobody should be forced at gunpoint to be a Christian, but he sees absolutely nothing wrong, or even out of the ordinary, about all levels of government tilting the playing field that way as hard as possible. He is the absolute epitomé of the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, an absolutely dangerous man and we are all much safer now that he is retired from public office, hopefully this time for good.

But all of that being said, even people who understand everything about why the man's politics are so scary, those among them who know him personally are without exception huge fans of his friendliness, his personal manners, his personal style, his sincerity, his legendary honesty, and his long reputation for personal kindness. And knowing all of that makes this widely-linked headline over at Daily Kos all the more interersting: Elsinora, "John Ashcroft Yelled at Me Tonight. No Joke," under "State of the Nation," 4/22/08. Capsule summary: on a very liberal college campus, the 6-person Campus Republican club raised enough money from the surrounding town, $15,000, to pay John Ashcroft's speaker's fee to come and address an open meeting of the Campus Republicans. What they couldn't have known when the issued the invitation and he accepted was that he would be appearing only a couple of weeks after ABC News broke the story that John Ashcroft is a war criminal: Jan Crawford Greenburg et al, "Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'," ABC News, 4/9/08. So when he walked onto a very liberal college campus, it is entirely unsurprising that almost all of the questions he faced in the Q&A session after his talk were about torture. And something truly remarkable happened: he lost his temper, completely lost it. And that's something that John Ashcroft is legendary for never doing, certainly never for so long, and absolutely certainly never in public.

Something very weird is going on here. And if John Ashcroft remembers his time as a prosecutor, and reflects honestly on how his own behavior resembles that of suspects he's held in custody before he rose to the top, even he must recognize something about himself: if any of the co-conspirators is going to crack, going to confess and testify against the others, it's him. He is clearly losing it. So I'm hoping that those of us who'd like to see almost the entire top ranks of the Bush administration brought up on charges somewhere, ideally at Nuremberg or The Hague but at the very least in front of a US federal court, on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges, not just liberal activists but some very serious and non-partisan constitutional scholars, I'm hoping that we manage to keep the pressure on him about this. He is, after all, the one who is also reported, in the same news coverage, to have been the only conspirator to express moral qualms about this at the time. And now he's the one who's acting out, emotionally, in ways he's never done before. Any police interrogator, any prosecutor, would tell you what that means: for now, stop questioning the rest of them; lean on him, because he's the one who's about to crack. And if he cracks, it'll blow the whole case wide open.

I should periodically remind you all that while I put a lot of thought, and a fair amount of research, and a mediocre to above average knowledge of history into my predictions? Sometimes I am not merely wrong, but spectactularly wrong. So let me document one of those times. You see, on September 11th, 2001, I was employed by the original, the legendary but no longer extant, private security company Pinkerton Security Systems. I wasn't actually on duty on 9/11 itself, but starting the next day I spent about half of my waking hours working overtime at St. Louis International Airport, trying to keep SUVs, vans, and similar-sized vehicles from driving within truck-bombing range of the main terminal and out of the multi-story parking garage. Not many months later, of course, everybody started hearing about a new, government-run airport security service called the Transportation Services Administration. A fair number of my cow-orkers were planning on applying, and they and my supervisor kept asking me why I wasn't.

What I told everybody, back in early 2002, was that the law requiring airports to hire the TSA instead of private security expired on Thanksgiving of 2002. And since TSA security was going to be no better than Burns, let alone any of the good companies like Pinkerton, and more importantly since it was predicted to cost airports about three times as much, I was nothing less than 100% certain that by January of 2003, or summer of 2003 at the absolute latest, there wouldn't be a Transportation Security Agency. Sure, I said, no airport will be eager to be the first to tell the government to fig off. But at the rate the airlines were already hemorrhaging money and cutting flights to try to make it up, I knew that sooner or later some airport would go so broke that it had no choice. And when the other airports saw that switching back to private security didn't hurt security at all, saw that the TSA was going to be nothing more than the same old Thugs Standing Around that every other agency hires going through the same procedures, the stampede to the exit would be swift and relentless.

I've been more wrong. But yeah, only a couple of times.

And it is in this context that I bring you the following (not entirely safe for work) video, which I saw on actual security expert Bruce Schneier's blog (schneiersecrty on LiveJournal): Windowpane Films' "TSA Gangstaz:"



Given that the agency in charge of Takin' Shampoo Away is now tied for dead last in government agency popularity in the USA? And given that we actually won the war on terror back almost seven years ago when we denied the terrorists national support and reduced them to penury (and more importantly, showed potential national sponsors of terrorism against the US what'd happen to their governments, and showed the terrorists that attacking the US on its own soil is counter-productive)? Given that we denied future terrorists the actual attack used on 9/11 before 9/11 itself was over, when the heroes of Flight 93 rose up to resist? Given that the TSA's own audits show that if the terrorists were actually trying to smuggle bombs and weapons past TSA checkpoints, 70% of them would get through, meaning that it would take at most two terrorists on separate flights to bring down one airliner?

Given that over the last year, it's been proven that every single terror plot the TSA's security procedures are responding to was (a) physically impossible and (b) something made up by somebody who didn't know any ongoing terror plots but who needed desperately to give the Bush administration something to get the torture to stop? Given the several occasions on which TSA negligence has undermined our real last line of aviation defense, the Federal Air Marshal service, by calling unwanted attention to the air marshals? Given that all of the passenger abuse and aggravation, and all the stuff stolen out of luggage we're no longer allowed to lock, was for nothing?

Why in the hell hasn't this been a campaign issue in the 2008 elections?

And what in the hell did I get so wrong? Because I still can't figure out why what I predicted didn't happen.

Also on the list of things I finally got around to reading while the graphics card was giving me trouble: the highly recommended H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by French philosopher Michel Houellebecq. I read it in translation, of course; I speak and read no French. That's mildly ironic, because one of the biggest sets of criticisms of this book by more recent Lovecraft scholars is that Houellebecq let himself be lead astray into some marginally untenable conclusions based on the limited number of Lovecraft's personal papers that were available to him in translation, in French.

By the way, it's a terribly sparse book, only 98 pages, padded in front with a rather cool essay on Lovecraft by Stephen King that made more of an impression on me in 10 pages than Houellebecq did in 98, and padded out on the back end by almost 120 pages of pointlessly reprinted H.P. Lovecraft stories. Is it worth it to you to pay collector's market prices for a 98 page essay? Probably not. But it did remind me of something I'd thought, myself. See, Houellebecq's thesis is that the second major formative experience of Lovecraft's life, the one that gave him the energy to write the particular set of stories that he's most famous for, was an intense and virulent explosion of racist feelings after spending a few years in New York. In Houellebecq's analysis, the formless, shapeless, odiferous extra-terrestrials that are seeking to destroy our world are all stand-ins for the African-Americans, and Slavic and Italian and Polish and so forth immigrants, that he resented. You see, Lovecraft had frankly indefensible notions of his own social class. Lovecraft, on no evidence whatsoever, believed himself to be entitled by birth to the life of an upper class gentleman; the closest he ever came to it, though, was when he married a career woman who was an enthusiastic fan of his early horror fiction. When Lovecraft's marriage was foundering over his need to find actual paying work after his wife's job went away, Houellebecq sets out to prove from the excerpts from Lovecraft's letters that he has that it deeply angered Lovecraft that employers were willing to hire dark-skinned lower-class people with bad breath to do their menial jobs, instead of a well-bred upper class white guy like Lovecraft, just because those dark skinned people had relevant work experience. Houellebecq is convinced that Lovecraft's belief that life is pointless and the world is doomed is a product of his anger that even his fellow rich white people didn't believe that an upper class white guy like him who was willing to learn could do any job he put his hand to.

Not a few more scholarly Lovecraft scholars insist that the best that can be said for Houellebecq's analysis is that it's an unfair oversimplification. But it dawned on me long ago that one thing is clearly true. It's not foreigners in particular that show up as the villains in Lovecraft's pieces and some of his most horrific villains are whiter than I am. What Houellebecq is picking up on, though, is that an awful lot of Lovecraft's villains, especially those in his most famous story "The Call of Cthulhu," are from what are called tri-racial isolate communities, a technical term for Native American and other indigenous tribes that were willing to take in, adopt into their tribes, and inter-marry with escaped black slaves and escaped white criminal fugitives. What the tri-racial isolates share with other stock Lovecraft villains, such as wealthy families who've lost all of their money and inbred Appalachian mountain clans, though, is something with particular relevance to the world that we live in now. They are people who do not benefit in any way from the world as it is now, and who can not be fooled into thinking that the world we've made has anything for them. The vision that Lovecraft had that scared him so was this: what if the people who cannot benefit in any way from our modern world were to acquire weapons of mass destruction?

The term "weapons of mass destruction" hadn't been coined as such when Lovecraft was writing, and he knew even less about the prospect of atomic fission bombs than, say, his science fiction-ish predecessor H.G. Wells did. And there were other things that haunted Lovecraft's nightmares, have no doubt about that. But an awful lot of his most famous work anticipates the same fear that makes guys like George Bush or Dick Cheney or Douglas Feith or William Kristol wet the bed at night and wake up screaming. It's the fear that comes from knowing that there are millions of people out there who want you dead. All too many of those people have already lost so much they have nothing left to lose; others just hate you so much that they don't care what happens to them, to any family that they have left, or even to the whole world so long as you die screaming, too. Now add to that the (probably irrationally paranoid) fear that they might not settle for a nice clean assassination, especially if your personal security detail is good enough to prevent that; that they might just risk killing all life on earth to do it. That they're just that angry.

I doubt that most of the paranoids even know that while their particular techno-thriller driven fantasies are implausible and violate important laws of physics, they are right to imagine that if enough people lose faith that some day they, too, will benefit from the modern world, if some critical mass of angry and permanently disillusioned people is reached, they might just do it. It would take a lot more of them than there are now. But notice how many people even here in America and in England and in Germany are losing the same faith, are also concluding that modern industrial (or post-industrial) democratic capitalism is a scam that will never pay off for people like themselves. There has been at least one point in human history that we know of (around 1200 BCE) where vast armies went on the march, not to change the world order, not to change who was in charge, but to so thoroughly wreck civilization that nobody could be rich, even knowing that wrecking the world would kill 2/3rds or even 90% of themselves and their families, too.

Which, interestingly enough, ties into another book that I picked up at random and read around the same time, if only in a weird way. When I get back to my apartment after a brief trip to the bass-ackward edge of civilization, when I get back from celebrating Thanksgiving in meth lab country with some friends, I'll have a thing or two to say about the politics of survival horror in general, after reading World War Z.

Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Day, is a total non-event for me. Centuries ago, a Catholic plot against the British government was foiled ... I'm supposed to care why? I'd have been rooting against both sides in that fight, which is near the top of the reasons why all attempts by my Anglophilic friends to interest me in any kind of Bonfire Night observations have been met by bland indifference. But once I was reminded that the date was coming up by a friend's party planning, about a week or so ago, I had this vague urge to use it as an excuse to watch V for Vendetta again, as soon as Countdown with Keith Olbermann was done.

Well, it turns out that Guy Fawkes was on Keith Olbermann's mind, too. As some of you might have heard by now, Olbermann gave another of his notorious Special Comment speeches last night: "The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy." The special comment segment wasn't about Guy Fawkes, no. But during the part of the show where he makes sarcastic comments about major anniversaries, he managed to tie Guy Fawkes into his main rant, and in a way that made me wonder if the movie V for Vendetta was on his mind last night, too.

I wasn't expecting this to be the subject, even after the cryptic teaser for it that was in the show's blog, thenewshole. The minor news story that has set Olbermann off this time is this: Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue, "White House Blocked Waterboarding Critic," ABC News, 11/2/07. We learned last week that in June of 2004, the Bush administration's own Department of Justice withdrew the now-infamous Gonzalez/Bybee "torture memo" that argued, based on incredibly specious logic, that despite centuries of law and precedent to the contrary it was legally permissible for the US to torture prisoners of war if the President declared them to be ineligible for Geneva Conventions protection. And as the White House began leaning on Congress to revise the law so that this would be legal, an acting US assistant attorney general named Daniel Levin was assigned to answer one particular question. There are, we know, at least five methods of "enhanced interrogation" that the US government, and allies of the US government operating under direct CIA observation, have used against captured al Qaeda members and suspects, that by all long-standing interpretations of the word as far back as 15th century Spain have been clearly labeled as torture: beatings, hypothermia, binding the subject's limbs into intentionally painful positions for long periods of time, intentional sexual humiliation, and simulated murder by drowning. Each of these was assigned to someone in the Justice Department to re-evaluate them and answer if, under US law, their particular assigned technique met the legal definition of torture. Levin drew the "waterboarding," that is to say simulated murder by drowning, assignment. Unable to make sense out of the conflicting arguments he was being given, Levin went to the school where the US Army trains its own people to survive being tortured and asked US counter-torture instructors to waterboard him. He came back, and answered in clear, simple, and unambiguous terms that there was no way at all that simulated homicide by drowning could be called anything less than torture, and was therefore clearly and unambiguously illegal under US law. For this opinion, he was fired by the Bush administration.

Keith Olbermann has seized upon this story for reasons that are entirely opaque to me. He has made it clear that he was lacking only this one piece of evidence before accusing President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard "Dick" Cheney, former senior White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, and former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of knowingly ordering the torture of captured enemy prisoners. What is completely unclear to me about Olbermann's reaction, what completely baffles me, is why this one more witness changes anything. Nobody, not even George W. Bush, can possibly have had any doubt in their minds that any of these techniques qualified as torture. Nor does it matter if they knew or not; nowhere in American law do we create a legal exemption for people who didn't know that what they were doing was illegal. Seriously, it does not matter at all whether Bush thought what he authorized to be done to those prisoners qualified as a war crime and a crime against humanity and a federal felony all in one, or if he didn't know that. Nor does it matter that his official attorney, long-time personal retainer Alberto Gonzalez, was telling him what the current nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey appears also to believe, namely that once there is a declaration of war, the President of the US is above all law and can safely and legally issue any order even vaguely related to the war, even in direct contradiction of US law or even of the constitution itself.

To a House impeachment committee and to a subsequent federal court, all that should matter are the elements of the law. Do these five techniques meet the legal definition of torture? Yes. Can they be shown to have been ordered by George W. Bush? Yes. OK, we just met all elements of the law, everything necessary to not merely impeach George Bush but to send him to a federal prison for up to five years ... whether or not Daniel Levin told anybody it was illegal torture, and whether or not Bush ever saw that legal opinion, are both irrelevant, so I don't really understand why Keith Olbermann chose right now to make this point, chose this particular news story to hang his point upon. Seriously, is there anybody left in the whole world, including America, who doesn't know for a fact and beyond all shadow of a doubt that George W. Bush and at least 3 of his immediate subordinates gave the clearly illegal order to torture prisoners? Anybody? Well okay then, what are we still arguing about?

In one regard, Keith Olbermann then stops short of where I've been going with this exact same topic for coming up on two years now: Olbermann stops at saying that Bush should be impeached and tried in a federal court and sentenced for conspiracy to commit felony torture. That, to me, is total nonsense. Conspiracy to commit felony torture on captured enemy prisoners of war is only one element of the clearly larger crime: a completely illegally waged war against a country that had neither attacked us, nor posed any imminent threat to us. That in the conduct of that war, and in an attempt to find justifications to enlarge that war to other countries this unelected so-called President and his fellow coup d'etat leaders also ordered captured prisoners to be tortured for as long as it took to get them to make up further fictional terror plots and equally fictional ties to other so called sponsor countries in order to get the torture to briefly stop is only part of a larger pattern of what the US itself taught the world to call a crime against humanity. It was for just these crimes that the similarly ranked leaders of the German government of the early 1940s were sentenced, not to ordinary jail for ordinary crimes, but for life imprisonment in solitary confinement with no permitted contact between themselves and anybody else but carefully selected jailers in a special prison that the US persuaded the world to build just for them, Spandau Prison. Since the elements of the crime have all been met, since our leaders are guilty of exactly the same crimes, nothing less than that will do if actual justice is to be served.

Perhaps Keith Olbermann knows this, but chose not to say it, for the same reason that people ridicule me when I say it. Only once in the last hundred years has any leader of any government been put on trial for crimes against humanity unless he has lost a war. I cling to that one example to give me hope that I may live to see justice done. Spain is among the countries that claims "universal jurisdiction" when the crimes alleged reach the "crime against humanity" level, and on that basis spent the last eight years of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's life attempting to bring him to justice; they were thwarted in this by US and British interference, and eventually by Pinochet's natural death. Oh, and I suppose to be picky, one could count Cambodia's current attempt to bring the last surviving top official under its former dictator, Pol Pot, to trial on the same charges, but that's another case that's likely to go unresolved because justice was deferred so long that the guilty parties will all have died on their own before they could be sentenced. Not a legal history to inspire much optimism. Nor am I hoping that the UN will invade and liberate us from the Bush Administration and bring them to trial on crimes against humanity charges; no matter what I think of the Bush Administration, I would fight foreign invaders to the last drop of blood myself. So maybe that's why Olbermann isn't willing to go where I am; maybe unlike me, he lacks the necessary optimism to hope to see the Bush junta rotting in Spandau Prison for the rest of their natural lives.

But while Olbermann stopped short of where I want to go with this argument in one regard, in another direction he took it much farther than I can defend, and it was in this context that he invoked Guy Fawkes. Olbermann has been asking every single one of his guests on this subject for several weeks now, is it even possible that the Bush officials who ordered that suspected al Qaeda members be tortured didn't know what US military and civilian interrogators have all known since the 1940s, namely that torture doesn't actually work? He hasn't liked the answers he's gotten; so far literally everybody he has asked has told him, no, Keith, calm down. You don't have to keep grasping at straws to come up with some baroque conspiracy theory to explain why they would torture people knowing that torture doesn't work; these people really do think that torture works, all evidence to the contrary, because none of them are expert interrogators. But no matter how many people tell him this, Olbermann isn't willing to believe it. So last night he unveiled his ultimate conspiracy theory. Olbermann now speculates that Bush and his subordinates ordered al Qaeda suspects to be tortured, not because he thought they'd unveil real terror plots in progress, but in order to tap their imaginations for new plausible fictitious terror plots to scare the American public with.

Now I grant that this does answer one of my questions that I can't otherwise answer, namely given how long we've been holding him, is there any reason to think that any information we could get out Khalid Sheik Mohammed is still current? He hasn't had contact with his co-conspirators in 5 years, he can't possibly know what they're up to now, so what exactly are we still questioning him for? But still, it's a ridiculously over-wrought explanation. Remember the words of the all-time great conspiracy theory expert Robert Anton Wilson: paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are competent. Keith Olbermann thinks it's suspiciously convenient that a government that needs a constant stream of threats to scare the public with keeps getting them from expert terrorists that we're torturing; by analogy he also mentioned that, in hindsight, he thinks it's awfully suspiciously convenient that Guy Fawkes, when he was subjected to "enhanced interrogation," named as co-conspirators a lot of people that the then-current British government considered political enemies. Except that, frankly, even without the torture evidence there was plenty of evidence that Guy Fawkes' gunpowder plot was motivated by his anger, as a Catholic, over Britain's unconscionable persecution of Catholics; it's the height of paranoia to suggest that the only reason a Catholic named Catholic co-conspirators was because his British torturers kept at him until he did, disregarding any non-Catholic names he gave.

No, the real lesson of the Gunpowder Plot as it applies to this situation is that Guy Fawkes held out against torture for long enough for every single one of his co-conspirators to escape the country and reach freedom, and that no matter how much he was tortured, they couldn't get him to name even one co-conspirator who was within reach of British justice. And that, I gather, is what angered the British public so much that they still burn him in effigy every year now hundreds of years later; that despite torture (or perhaps because of it) he held out long enough to cheat them of justice. All the more example, that is, of why we shouldn't be surprised that every single supposed "torture plot" that has come out of CIA and US military torture cells everywhere from Iraq to north Africa to half of Europe to Guantanamo Bay has named only people we can't get to for the real plots, and only given us fictitious plots to waste our resources chasing; what Guy Fawkes could do, so can Khalid Sheik Mohammed and anybody else we're torturing. Which makes that particular element of the Bush administration's crimes against humanity all the more tragic, of course, because what they're doing is not merely monstrous, it's pointless. But again, this is all a distraction. We shouldn't be arguing about whether or not torture is pointless in any particular case; we should be bringing the torturers, and everybody in their chain of command, to justice. Not that I have much of any hope that I'll live to see that happen.

Today is, of course, the 6th anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on New York City. The man who funded the attacks, operationally planned them even if he didn't come up with the original idea himself, and gave the final orders is making a big deal out of the 6th anniversary. It seems an odd number to make a big deal out of, but it may just be that this year he has the luxury to do so. Despite all the ignorant talk of bin Laden being supposedly in a cave on the Afghan/Pakistan border, that video was shot in a comfortable looking conference room in a modern looking office. If I had to bet, I'd bet that it was shot in Karachi. Pakistan lies about this, but reporters in place have reported over and over again that Pakistan has given al Qaeda and the Taliban safe conduct throughout most of the country. And the $2,000,000,000 a year that the US is giving Pakistan's military, some of which is going to the Pakistani security services, most of that portion of which is going to the Taliban, and probably at least half of that portion going directly to bin Laden, means that the US taxpayers are, in effect, paying his rent on that office, and probably the Internet access fees and the audio video equipment budget too. Last year he didn't have it quite so good and next year he might not have it so good, so this is probably a good year for him to (almost certainly) hire an American speech writer and make a big deal out of his victories over us so far. Specifically, from the beginning of the first of his two speeches for the 6th anniversary commemoration:

"[D]espite America being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful and up-to-date military arsenal as well; and despite it spending on this war and is [sic] army more than the entire world spends on its armies; and despite it being the major state influencing the policies of the world, as if it had a monopoly on the unjust right of veto; despite all of this, 19 young men were able - by the grace of Allah, the Most High - to change the direction of its compass. And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader, and the effects and signs of that are not hidden. ¶ Since the 11th, many of America's policies have come under the influence of the Mujahideen, and that is by the grace of Allah, the Most High. And as a result, the people discovered the truth about it, its reputation worsened, its prestige was broken globally and it was bled dry economically, ...."

Yep. He's not wrong about this part, you know. What he can't quite say without admitting his own mistakes is that bin Laden didn't get everything he wanted out of 9/11, because he was wrong about one thing. He thought the lesson of Somalia was that if you humiliate the American military badly enough, America surrenders and gives you what you want; he's too proud to admit that he failed to anticipate that the effect of hitting us on US soil might be different than the effects of hitting us in Beirut or Mogadishu, places we really don't care about. But despite this strategic error on bin Laden's part, looking back over 6 years he feels pretty smug about the results. That one roughly quarter-million-dollar operation didn't achieve all of his goals overnight, no. But 6 years later, America is still terrorized enough to be doing really stupid things out of fear. If we'd been smarter, we would have limited ourselves to doing nothing more than finding and killing the people involved and anybody actively defending them, rebuilding the buildings, and then gone on with our lives as if nothing important had happened, with only minor tweaks to our aviation security procedures. What he thought we'd be afraid enough to do would be to retreat from the Middle East altogether, even abandoning our allies in the region like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Instead, we struck a middle ground ... but one that he not unreasonably thinks is in his favor.

Bin Laden then goes on to blame the same bogeyman that some of you blamed in the comments to yesterday's journal entry: corporations like Haliburton and Blackwater and the various weapons manufacturers. No, I'm sure that they're delighted that America's reaction to still being terrorized 6 years later has been to give them all blank checks without even token investigations into allegations of war profiteering and fraud. But that's not really what we're doing in Iraq. If that was all they wanted, they could have had that from what we really should have done, namely taken the war in Afghanistan more seriously. No, what the neocons have us in Iraq for is their second (and they hope final) attempt to End History. That's less ominous than it sounds. I'm referring to the neocon "Old Testament," Francis Fukuyama's 1989 early post-Cold-War essay "The End of History?" Everybody else massively oversimplifies Fukuyama, let me join the crowd. Fukuyama argued that all wars were over the question of who will rule the world, first between competing monarchies, then as the idea of hereditary absolute monarchy became discredited, competing governmental systems. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the embrace of capitalism by China, Fukyama was arguing that except for too few malcontents to matter, pretty much everybody, at all social levels, in all of the countries of the world, had reached a consensus position. There are differences between Chinese "communist" capitalism, British-style constitutional monarchy, American style democratic republicanism, and so forth. But unlike, say, the four-way fight between anarchism, fascism, monarchy, and communism that convulsed Europe over and over again in the 20th century, the differences are too minor to fight over.

If for no other reason, the differences are too minor to fight over because a citizen of any one of those countries can travel to any of the others and not feel as if they've gained or given up any major rights, to the point where idiotic local criminals in places like Britain or Japan demand their American-style (and locally non-existent) Miranda Rights and everybody understands what they mean and the cops more or less give them. Businesses transfer capital and manpower between the various countries with the supposedly different systems, with little or no fear that the local differences will make much difference. Everybody takes it for granted that governments will be democratically elected (except for the Chinese and the Vietnamese), that the appellate part of the judiciary will be merit-based, tenured, and independent, that the press will be free to report on official wrong-doing as long as they can prove it, that other than the power to tax governments will leave private property alone and will fairly compensate anybody whose property they need to confiscate for some rare but sufficiently important reason, that corporations will be supported but not supported too much, taxed and regulated but not taxed or regulated too much, and that there will be some branch of government that almost never directly rules that has the power to root out a corrupt or dangerous person who rises to the top, but that must then return control to the usual democratically elected structures in at most a couple of years via another election. Differences remain over what "merit based" means for the judiciary, what purposes for taking private property are sufficient, how much business support and taxation and regulation is the optimum amount, and just exactly where the line is for impeaching or otherwise removing a democratically elected official, but none of those are differences of kind, only of degree; none of them question the basic principles, only the implementation details.

But 9/11 jolted the neocons, and the rest of us, out of our complacency by reminding us that there is one important, populous, and resource-rich part of the world that has not joined that consensus: the many countries of the former Ottoman Empire, of the long-gone Islamic Caliphate. Even before their humiliating loss in World War I, leading thinkers and top military men of the Ottoman Empire had figured out what the rest of Europe figured out over the preceding couple of generations, what the Russians and the Spanish didn't figure out for themselves for another couple of decades: hereditary absolute monarchy absolutely sucks as a form of government, because it offers you absolutely no protection against the possibility of someone corrupt and/or stupid inheriting the throne and wrecking the whole country or even the whole empire. Hence the "Young Turks." They picked a horrible example to replace it with, real Islamic fascism (as opposed to what Bush mistakenly calles Islamofascism, which is not the same thing at all), so their replacement government lasted less than 20 years and resulted in the 3 nominal leaders of the Young Turks being convicted by the Turkish government of crimes against humanity and executed. But with the dissolution of the last of the Islamic Caliphates, followed by European occupation and the breakup of the region into what were mostly originally European colonies, each of those individual countries started down their own path towards asking one question: what, exactly, is Islamic government?

Their great prophet, Mohamed, was perhaps completely unique in world history: a founder of a world-wide religion who was also a successful military commander. By the end of his life, he ruled over the religious life of every Muslim convert and as the emperor over every Muslim local king, or emir, throughout his empire. But he left behind no clear instructions as to how his empire was to be governed after he died. Unsurprisingly, the result was a civil war between the bureaucracy and the various emirs, who wanted a say over the caliphate, and the supporters of the prophet's young son, who assumed that the prophet intended to leave behind what every emperor has always wanted, a hereditary monarchy with his family as the rulers of the whole empire. The family lost, badly, but what came out of that civil war was a system where everybody agreed there would be one Caliph, a king over kings, ruling over the local and regional emirates mostly through those emirs, obligated to respect and honor the supposedly meritocratic clergy who took over the religious duties of the empire, but not necessarily to obey them. As various royal families fell into the hands of the corrupt, the decadent, or the moronic, different families staged various restoration movements establishing new Caliphates, but hardly anybody questioned the idea that somewhere there had to be some Caliph. Not, at least, until the Europeans broke the Caliphate into its component emirates (more or less) and the local government around the last capital city announced the final dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924.

Since 1924, the citizens of the former Caliphate have tried just about every form of government known to man. Saudi Arabia established a sort of weird constitutional monarchy without democracy, by elevating the clergy to co-equal with the King. Iran flirted with socialism, got a military dictatorship imposed on them, and finally came up with their own pseudo-democratic theocracy, where the clergy control the appellate courts and have an absolute veto over the democratically elected parts of the government. Iraq's military, when they took over, invented what they called Baath Socialism, a form of Arab-nationalist state socialism that paid lip service to Islam, and it spread to a couple of other countries. Egypt's military got so tired of intervening in politics that they gave up and instituted permanent military dictatorship. Turkey flirted briefly with ethno-nationalist militaristic fascism, then came up with their own system under the leadership of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, Kamalist democratic republicanism, which has been successfully copied by several other countries such as Pakistan. These systems are not nearly as compatible with each other as the various forms of government in the rest of the world are; war is not permanently over in that part of the world.

America's neocons also do not recognize any of these forms of government as compatible enough with the rest of our governments to live peacefully among them. (Personally, I think they're wrong about Kamalism, although current Turkish and Pakistani politics go a long way towards legitimizing their opinion.) They're also mortally terrified that bin Laden's personal cult throughout the world may result in an eventual consensus in which something rather like Iranian theocracy, albeit probably with Sunni rather than Shiite clerics being the ones holding the reigns, will be the one that wins and unifies the Islamic world. They predict, probably not unreasonably, that if such a government were to conquer and unify the entirety of the Islamic world, war between that empire and the rest of us would probably be inevitable. Hence: the Iraq War. Their belief was that since all that was stopping us from conquering Iraq legally was an already-breached cease fire agreement, and that since they were being assured by a pro-US would-be leader that he was so popular in Iraq that if we just put him in the palace the Iraqi people would all flock to his banner, that here was the perfect opportunity to introduce the entire Islamic world to yet another possible model for Islamic governance: American-style republican democratic capitalism, only with Islam rather than Christianity as the culturally unifying force. They believed that such a system could be up and running in no time and at basically no cost. They believed that at that point investment from the rest of the free world would flow into Iraq and make it a wealthy, peaceful, and prosperous nation just like the rest of the free world, an Arab Tiger to go with the Asian Tigers and the Celtic Tiger. Once it did so, they believed that everybody in the region would see for their own eyes that not only is there nothing inherently anti-Islamic about such a government, but that the advantages to living under one are so vast that they'd all adopt the same reforms out of jealousy.

That it has all turned out to be much harder than they thought, so hard that it remains in question whether or not we even can succeed, does not change one thing in Bush's and the rest of the neocons' thinking. They continue to believe that if global war is to be prevented, the Islamic world has to adopt a system of government that is somehow minimally compatible with the governments of the rest of the free world. Therefore we have to win in Iraq. We have to somehow find some faction in the Iraq Civil War that is committed to American-style democracy, or that can be twisted at gunpoint into embracing American-style democracy, put them in charge, and keep them in charge until they succeed at making Iraq free, happy, and wealthy, no matter what it takes.

Unfortunately, that "no matter what it takes" is exactly why it can't work, why bin Laden is so confident that he's winning and we're losing. If the whole point of the exercise was to show the Islamic world how much better off they'd be with an Islamic version of American-style democratic republican capitalism, then the whole exercise has failed dramatically for at least another generation no matter who wins the Iraq Civil War. Why? Again, let's go back to bin Laden:

"And among the things which catch the eye of the one who considers the repercussions of the of your unjust war against Iraq is the failure of your democratic system, despite it raising the slogans of justice, liberty, equality, and humanitarianism. It has not only failed to achieve these things, it has actually destroyed these and other concepts with its weapons - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan - in a brazen fashion, to replace them with fear, destruction, killing, hunger, illness, displacement and more than a million orphans in Baghdad alone, not to mention hundreds of thousands of widows. Americans [sic] statistics speak of the killing of more than 650,000 of the people of Iraq as a result of the war and its repercussions. ¶ People of America: the world is following your news in regard to the invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedy of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions of dollars to continue the killing and war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment."

The neocons believe and hope that their war in Iraq will, upon its successful conclusion somehow, cause the people of the Muslim world to associate our system of government with peace, prosperity, and freedom. Instead, the fact that the neocons tried to do it on the cheap, without first getting the enthusiastic backing of the whole American people, and turning vast amounts of it over to private contractors that turned out to be more corrupt than the various Islamic emirs themselves, has caused them to associate the American system of government with endless war, with the PATRIOT Acts' and the Military Commissions Act's suspension of key American freedoms, with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib, with the poverty and misery of New Orleans and of the formerly wealthy city of Baghdad, with Haliburton, with the Orwellian and incompetent thrashing around of the Department of Homeland Security and its Transportation Security Agency, and above all else with the person of George W. Bush. At this point, Osama bin Laden feels absolutely no fear that the Islamic world would want to emulate that. And by scaring us, he got us to do all of that. So he's not entirely wrong to feel awfully smug right now.

About a year ago when V for Vendetta came out, I made the point (in my essay "V for Very Smart 'Mindless Terrorism'") that the brilliance of V's plan to topple the Sutlerite government of Britain is that he announced his target a year in advance. Why? Because the only thing keeping Sutler in power was that the British people were taking his word for it that he was the reason the country hadn't had a major terrorist attack. V demonstrated that Sutler had nothing to do with why Britain hadn't been attacked, by showing the British people that even knowing which building he was going to attack and even giving them a year's advance notice, they couldn't stop him, so why should you believe that they're competent to protect you from any actual secretive terrorists who might attack another random target?

That was, of course, the very first thing I remembered when al Qaeda in Iraq hit the Golden Mosque for a second time, just a few days ago, collapsing both minarets. (See Wikipedia, "Al-Askari Mosque bombing (2007);" see also "Al-Askari Mosque bombing (2006).")

The United States has roughly 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, not counting allies and "private security contractors" (mercenaries). If I remember correctly, all but about 30,000 of them are in Baghdad lately, the same city as the Golden Mosque. They have known since al Qaeda blew the roof off of the Golden Mosque back in February of 2006 that they would hit it again. (If they didn't know that al Qaeda keeps hitting the same highly symbolic target until it falls down, they need some New Yorker to remind them of this. Urgently.) I'm told that Americans are not allowed to patrol the mosque itself for religious reasons, but they do have unlimited free reign of the surrounding city. The mosque has also been closed to the public since the first attack, so anybody other than a few well-known Shiite religious officials moving into the mosque grounds can reasonably be assumed to be an attack suspect. But with 100,000 combat troops in and around Baghdad dedicated to stopping al Qaeda from further terrorist attacks on Shiite targets, knowing that it was just a matter of time before al Qaeda attacked this building again, the US still couldn't stop al Qaeda from sneaking up to two sturdy and highly prominent 10 story buildings and simultaneously detonating enough explosives to bring each of them down.

Is there any airport, border crossing, nuclear power plant, harbor, or national monument in the US that is guarded by 100,000 troops? Is any one such building, even the White House itself, guarded by that many troops? With the possible exception of the Pentagon and the Capitol building, is there any one building in the US that the US knows al Qaeda has attacked before and therefore should be assumed to be determined to strike again? Are any of the troops guarding those buildings as well equipped, physically fit, intensively trained, and competent at counter-terrorism as the 82nd Airborne or the 101st Airborne? I submit to you that the answer is "no." Which means that while we can debate and hypothesize as to why al Qaeda has not attacked us again, one thing is clear and unambiguous: despite all of the "security theater" in the world, including Cointelpro-style entrapment of over a dozen stupid and mildly crazy people or groups in physically impossible so-called "terror plots" that supposedly just coincidentally reached the arrest stage every time since 9/11 the Bush administration was facing a major scandal, it is not because the Bush administration has been keeping us safe.

On my most bitter days, I think we haven't really been attacked again because they don't need to attack us; we're demonstrably still terrorized. But then, the British were famously less impressed with the London subway bombings than we were with 9/11 (and good for them), and al Qaeda hasn't attacked them again, so that can't be it. My gut instinct, for the longest time, was that an attack the size of 9/11 required state sponsorship, that we prevented another 9/11 the day that we captured Kandahar. But now that Pakistan is all but openly conceding them 3 whole territories, and and now that the Pakistani military is providing them cover fire whenever the US catches them crossing the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, there goes that idea; they've got at least as much state sponsorship now from General Musharraf in Pakistan as they had from Mullah Omar's Taliban in Afghanistan. I could suggest that it's because 9/11 proved that attacking us doesn't get you what you want, but as Greg Palast pointed out a while ago, 9/11 did get them one of the things they wanted the most, namely US combat troops out of Saudi Arabia.

That leaves my last guess to be that it's for lack of money on their part. People think of 9/11 as "19 guys with box-cutters." But counting recruiting costs, travel costs, overhead costs back in Kandahar, bribes to money launderers, a year's worth of living expenses in the US for 19 guys, and the actual pilot training for the four pilots, the estimate we got after examining al Qaeda's office computers in Kandahar is that 9/11 cost somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000. For a government, that's a modest sum. But for a terror group, that's a lot of money. And one of the only things that the Bush administration did right in the aftermath of 9/11 was go after the money laundering networks, hard. All of this gives us, perhaps, the real motive for the Golden Mosque bombings. Right now, under substantial US pressure, Saudi Arabia is no longer providing government funding to al Qaeda, and is making at least a half-hearted attempt to stop wealthy Saudis from doing so privately. But Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has already said that there is one circumstance under which that would change, under which the Saudi government would openly and unlimitedly fund even al Qaeda, and that is if the Shiites in Iraq engaged in genocide against Iraqi Sunni Arabs.

Unsurprisingly, that's probably why Iraq's native Sunni population is suddenly eager to help us fight their former resistance allies, al Qaeda in Iraq: because they've figured out that what al Qaeda in Iraq specifically wants to do right now, being mostly from elsewhere and having little to lose, is incite genocide against their native Iraqi co-religionists -- because they need the money. Which, of course, makes the fact that we couldn't prevent them from blowing up yet more of the Golden Mosque even more disappointing, and even more worrisome.

Once again, it's been a bad couple of weeks for the Bush administration on the scandal watch. Oh, sure, they got their Iraq War funding. But last week Monica Goodling confessed to criminal behavior inside the Justice Department and accused her co-conspirators, including Bush's long-time bag-man Alberto Gonzalez, of perjury, obstruction of justice, and criminal conspiracy. This week, despite the drip-drip-drip of that scandal, Gonzalez boldly announced that he's not stepping down no matter what he gets accused of, that he'll still be here until the next inauguration. This coming week, Scotter Libby is scheduled to get sentenced on Tuesday for obstruction of justice to protect Dick Cheney in investigation into the blowing of a CIA agent's cover. Those of us who've lived under this administration long enough know what that means. Just as when Reagan had months like this it was time to announce another big science or engineering project, when Bush has months like this it's time to round up yet another group of people who want to be terrorists and parade them before the American people. It doesn't matter if they have no money, if they have no connection to al Qaeda other than having read their website, or if their plan violates important laws of physics: look, over there! terrorists!

Although speaking of this administra