Until now, most Americans, including even President Bush's political opposition, have accepted his basic vision of a reordered post-9/11 world -- a world fundamentally changed in almost every aspect.

The critics have nibbled at the edges of the vision, for example by questioning the extent of the tilt toward government power and away from personal liberty. They have tried to use the vision to further preexisting goals, for example by proposing AIDS treatment for Africans or schooling for Third World children as the best means to "drain the swamp" of terrorism. And they have launched oblique attacks by targeting, often in stinging and personal terms, those perceived as its chief theorists, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Alarmism is hitting new levels in American discourse. That, and a massive amount of denial and cognitive dissonance from the newspaper editors who foolishly believed everything the Bush Administration was feeding them. Noone is saying there were not reasonable and realistic reasons to fear WMD falling into the hands of terrorists, but an honest and critical review of the steps we have taken so far will show that we are currently only fighting phantoms. A rogue band of terrorists took advantage of poor airline security and managed to crash a few planes into prominent buildings. This has nothing to do with WMD. It should not fundamentally change our society. After that attack, a very suspicious anthrax attack followed, and even our own law enforcement suspects that it was carried out by domestic perpetrator(s). This involved WMD, but oddly enough is not the triggering event that everyone likes to talk about.

I will have more on this later, dissecting and skewering the entire piece by Hiatt. Something about his tone, and the dark kernel of his conclusions, greatly disturb me, as a freedom and democracy loving American. That his spiel is wholly unsupported by any evidence only makes it worse. I am preparing a thorough response, which will be up in a few hours. We are not surrendering our liberty because of a terrorist action. We just aren't. Forget about it Mr. Hiatt, or get off the editorial page. Mr. Hiatt should be held to account for this indignity, and made to explain and support with evidence his assertions, and not without challenge from his "oblique" critics. He is supporting the enemy, and the terrorist, by advocating such measures without due cause or supporting information. It's a shame, and beyond that it's a threat. We must put it down, and lift this nation from fear and loathing back into an appreciation of who we are and what we are about. The land of freedom. The home of the brave. That all men and women are created equal.

A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government, “there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn’t think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers.”

Update: It seems that ABC News has massaged the content and tone of the original AP article as well. Signifigantly. Yet they still cite the article as from the AP.

Update: This is not about ABC News. The network deserves much credit for running this story, in its many versions. After further review, it seems that AP keeps resending the story, which explains why ABC News has had 3 versions now, the 2nd and 3rd version differing only by headline. I would add that the headline for the 3rd version, "Bush, Blair Face Heat Over Weapons", is much better than the 2nd version headline. So good work there from the AP as well. Now, if someone would only explain why we have so many versions of this story, and why the content has radically changed from the first version. The links to each version follow:

1 - Ex-Official: Evidence Distorted for War
2 - Questions Linger Over Iraq Weapons Claims
3 - Bush, Blair Face Heat Over Iraq Weapons

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a joint resolution authorizing the use of U.S. military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake -- acts of war against another nation.

Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away -- unless, perhaps, they start another war.

That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public may strongly resist more of President Bush's warmaking.

Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.

Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the relevant issues.

Sobering words from John Dean over at CNN's FindLaw. What surprises me the most is that none of this was thought of as the distortions were taking place. I thought this war was fradulent all along, in terms of the actual reasons given, as well as the evidence backing it up, but once it was on I figured the administration had a way to cover its tracks. I thought it was a shame to this nation that our leadership had sunk to the level of citing evidence, at the highest levels of government, that in prominent cases was either plagiarized or forged, but I never suspected us to come to shame before the world, or screw up so badly in the Iraqi war aftermath.

What kind of leadership is this? I want to be proud of my leaders, of my country, what it stands for and what it does, but at least as far as our actions, and leaders, there is increasingly a feeling that we will not be able to escape responsibility, or shame, and that along with healing the wounds and trauma of 9/11, which we have not accomplished to any degree yet with our warmongering and color-coded fear reinforcement messages, we will also have to deal with this latest wound, which we have self-inflicted.

We really need to, as a nation, come to grips with being vulnerable again, for the first time on the homeland since Pearl Harbor, and do so in a way that is humane, civilized, and emotionally effective. To do this, we need strong and compassionate leaders who can "say no" to those who do not see, or feel, the larger issues, and who instead seek to further their own, sometimes long hibernating, agendas. We need to take the time to heal, and to reflect, so that we can determine the most soulful and sensible course of action. Reactive behavior is not called for, not in our best interests, and will not lead to peace or relief of grief and suffering. We need to act in our own best interests, with the light of all information shining on the decisions to bear, so that we can stand tall with our heads high behind our leadership and actions, no matter the end result.

"I continue to be disturbed by the statistic frequently cited in these hearings that five companies control 85 percent of our media sources," McCain said in a recent statement.

Critics of the more lax rules on media ownership say they also will meet this week to discuss what legislation they can get behind to try to block, or at least dilute, the new rules.

"We have a group as eclectic as any coalition anyone has ever seen," said Matt Keller, legislative director for Common Cause, a liberal public interest group, who counts groups from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women as his allies on this topic. "The top half of the first inning has just ended. This is where the game starts."

John McCain is on deck, along with Congress. The FCC has played into the hands of the defenders of freedom and democracy, by forcing the issue against the tide of public opinion, and their sponsors in Congress. We, the American people, will prevail.

The whole libertarian philosophy exists on the basis of pretending there's no such thing as market power (monopoly), negative externality (ie pollution), public goods (ie crime, safety) or asymmetric information (ie used car salesmen).

It's like how Marx responded to his critics, who told him that communism didn't account for human greed, by deciding that greed must have been created by capitalism and would vanish along with it.

It's the general human tendency that when your theory doesn't fit reality, you should change your perception of reality.

This general human tendency we call cognitive dissonance.

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organisation – the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) – will carry out secret missions designed to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts that would then expose them to ‘counterattack’ by US forces.

In other words – and let’s say this plainly, clearly and soberly so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld’s plan – the US government is planning to use ‘cover and deception’ and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice. No, it seems the P2s have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action, they can then take measures against the ‘states/sub-state actors accountable’ for ‘harbouring’ the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? The Pentagon programme makes it clear: ‘Their sovereignty will be at risk.’

The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots. In 1963, the US’s top military brass presented JFK with plans for Operation Northwoods, calling for a phoney terrorist campaign – complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – to provide ‘justification’ for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia-corporate fiefdom which had recently been lost to Castro. Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander scale – with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him....

From The Ecologist. Now, this treatment seems a bit incendiary compared to that from the Asian Times and Counterpunch (which has two...here is the second one). The bottom-line though is that this does seem to raise some troubling Constitutional questions, especially with the lack of oversight. Are we going overboard?

With that in mind, here is the original Defense Science Board PowerPoint presentation in regards to the P2OG, published by the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. Finally, here is the link to Arkin's article, on the rise of American Black Ops, that kicked it all off. Seems like we've rolled all the way back to the Reagan years already. Perhaps we should start a contest to see what to call the terrorist anti-terrorists this time around. Remember, "contras" is out, because that would be too audacious even for these guys.

The U.S. Constitution safeguarded the political system from abuse of power and from abuse of dogma. It forced each side’s concepts to face the light of pragmatic concerns. James Madison and his friends knew well that, to preserve liberty, power needed to be balanced and checked.

This concept of checks and balances is integral to American political philosophy. But strangely, it is apparently not considered relevant by the Bush Administration in the formation of its foreign policy.

This Globalist commentary raises the Founding Fathers' concerns for separation of powers, and checks and balances, in order to preserve liberty and stem distortions of power, through the lens of foreign policy. Power was seen as the great spoiler, the ultimate divider, the final corrupter of the expression of liberty. The Bush Administration has done much damage to this doctrine within this country, weakening liberty and distorting the balance of powers, both between the executive and legislative and the federal and state (for instance, see the medical marijuana debate, or any of Ashcroft's other single-minded approaches to law and order). Internationally, their aims are much more egregious, and makes the prevailing mind set about power over freedom and democracy clear.

Instead the administration has an overriding goal — which is to place America’s power beyond challenge. There is an almost celebratory feeling that America is now free to use its power in the world as it wishes — and that it is no longer shackled by the balancing forces of the Cold War.

Madison knew better. During the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787 — and later in the Federalist Papers — he argued that for the large states (such as Virginia or New York) to prosper, they needed to be courageous enough to share some power with the smaller states. America cannot continue as a nation that values the check on power as a protection of liberties within its own borders — but feels constrained by the same values internationally.