Why does the “land of the free” need to specially monitor and control the flow of incoming journalists? “Considering the fact that the United States has never licensed journalists, that in the United States anyone can be a journalist and that because most countries that require special visas for journalists tend to be totalitarian states, I think it’s kind of stupid,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Under the Visa Waiver Program, citizens of 27 countries — predominately from Western Europe — can visit the U.S. for up to 90 days without first getting a visa. Among the questionable characters ineligible for visa waiver are convicted criminals, people with communicable diseases, suspected terrorists, slave traders — and reporters. However, according to journalist advocacy groups, the law lay dormant until March 2003 when the Department of Homeland Security formally incorporated the Immigration and Naturalization Service and suddenly began enforcing it. (A spokesman for DHS said that while he could not cite specific cases, he did recall it having come up in the past.)

“It’s really a slap in the face to the entire industry,” said Kevin Goldberg, an attorney for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “Not to mention the treatment of these people who have come here — not just deported but really seized at the airport and violated at the airport. These are journalists, not terrorists, suspected terrorists. Their only weapon is their pen.”

The most recent incident occurred in early May when Elena Lappin, a British freelance journalist traveling to Los Angeles to work on a story for the Guardian of London, was detained, questioned, strip-searched, handcuffed and taken to a downtown holding facility for the night. Twenty-six hours after arriving, she was put back on a plane to England. Instead of writing the article she planned, she gave the Guardian 2,400 words on her Kafkaesque encounter.

Lappin’s case is not isolated. In 2003, 12 journalists were detained at and deported from LAX. Last March, a Danish photographer had DNA samples taken before he was deported. That same month, a Swedish reporter was turned away at a Washington airport, where he was photographed and fingerprinted, and not allowed to call his embassy. Last May, six French reporters in two groups were detained at LAX; they were on assignment to cover a video-game trade fair. All were deported, the first three “after being repeatedly questioned and body-searched six times,” according to Reporters Without Borders. Similar fates awaited a Swedish freelancer in May, a pair of Dutch reporters that same month trying to cover an awards ceremony for world film stunt champions, a British reporter in October and an Austrian in December. In many of the cases, the reporters were treated like criminals: handcuffed and taken to prison holding facilities where some were not allowed to sleep.

According to Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, detention and handcuffing of journalists is simply the product of following regulations. Once someone is rejected, the airline that brought them is required to return them, and in some cases flights are not available for 24 hours. “If they have to be transported to another location, then procedure requires that they be restrained,” Strassberger said. “It’s unfortunate because I know every time you hear about one of those things you cringe, but you do have that concern for officer safety.”

Strassberger denied that the law requiring special journalist visas — called “I visas” — had lain dormant, but nevertheless acknowledged that it is being more vigorously enforced, because, he said, “quite honestly, 9/11. It goes back to after the terrorist attack, the inspections process, the inspectors, the customs and border protection officers are just being a little more thorough, a little more careful about who’s coming in.”

Reporters Without Borders, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the International Press Institute have all raised a hue and cry, which prompted U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Robert C. Bonner to issue an advisory on May 20 allowing individual immigration officials to let “nonthreatening” reporters into the country without a visa — once. “We are an open society and we want people to feel welcome here,” Bonner said, apparently without any irony.

But as Goldberg, ASNE’s lawyer, pointed out, the underlying problems remain unsolved. What happens if a foreign reporter who’s had his or her one waiver needs to get into the U.S. to cover a breaking news event, like a real terrorist attack? “Another problem is that it opens the door to content review,” Goldberg said. Added Dalglish: “Once you start putting an immigration officer at an airport in charge of who in the world is entitled to be a journalist and who isn’t, that’s on the path to defining who’s an American journalist.”

The other unanswered question is: Whose idea was it to crack down on the supposed menace of invading foreign media hordes. “The Bush administration doesn’t like the press?” Goldberg asked rhetorically. “That’s the best I can come up with, frankly. They’ve been reluctant for almost four years now to give information out to the press. They don’t deal with the press on a level playing field. They’ve made life hard on other civil liberties. I can’t imagine them bending over backward to help the press.”

For those who missed it, Pentagon leaders briefed members of Congress Monday on an annual risk assessment by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers that concluded that another major conflict in the world would be won more slowly and at greater cost than if U.S. forces weren’t tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Myers’ report cited numerous concerns, including dwindling stockpiles of precision-guided munitions and overwork of reserve units. More broadly, according to the New York Times, which received a copy of the still classified report, Myers wrote that the military’s risk of being unable to handle an additional conflict is “moderate, but trending towards significant,” though he added that at the broadest strategic levels, the military’s risk is “significant, but trending lower.”

Apparently fearful that the revelations might inspire foreign evildoers to get uppity (“Our ability to manage the perceptions of our adversaries is critical,” Myers wrote), the Pentagon immediately deployed senior officials to mitigate the bad news, stressing that Americans would win any new conflicts, but that the victory “wouldn’t be as pretty,” as one anonymous official put it to the Washington Post.

But the problem these anonymous spinners have is that the Myers report is not an outlying blip in a sea of otherwise good news. Instead, it fits perfectly into the growing picture of the military’s broader problems. On Monday, for example, the Army announced that recruiters had missed their targets for the third month running. According to the Post, the Army met less than 60 percent of its target last month. (Might this be related to the Army’s decision in 2003 to deploy 2,500 recruiters to Iraq as trigger pullers?) The Marines also missed their marks in February and March. Overall, the active Army is 15 percent behind its recruitment goal this year, and the Reserve is 20 percent off pace, Army Secretary Francis Harvey told USA Today. And this is at a time when enlistment bonuses are higher (and about to rise again) and recruiting standards are lower.

The Army is stretched so thin that not only have units meant for a theoretical Korean conflict been deployed to Iraq, but the United States has had to send the “Old Guard,” a ceremonial unit from Fort Myer, Va., overseas. It had not been deployed since Vietnam.

Personnel aren’t the military’s only problem. The United States pre-positions Army and Marine equipment on ships around the globe to cut down on deployment times in an emergency. Roughly half of that gear has been used up. As of the end of 2004, projections were that it would take two years for the Army to repair and refit its forces — if the Iraq conflict ended immediately. And there hasn’t even been enough equipment to train stateside soldiers for duty in Iraq. “The Army in the aggregate is reporting readiness levels that are less today than they have been in the past,” Paul Mayberry, the deputy to the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, understated to the Post last month.

But perhaps the most infuriating thing about the current situation is how unnecessary it is. “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lectured to troops in December 2004. But under Rumsfeld’s bungled watch, the United States not only marched eagerly — and needlessly — into a prolonged occupation that many predicted would pin down and strain large chunks of the armed forces but did so with a strategy that maximized those problems. And with the exception of ivory tower neoconservatives who foresaw a brief occupation marked by grateful Iraqis tossing flowers (not improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), most military experts saw this whole mess coming.

Before the war had even started, then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress an occupying force in Iraq would require “on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, made little effort to hide their disdain for the decorated soldier, with Wolfowitz calling Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark.”

Many military strategists argue that a larger force could have brought order to the country more quickly and not given the insurgency time to fester. “What [the coalition forces] weren’t able to do was capitalize on that success,” Paul Van Riper, a retired three-star Marine general told me last year. “This is operations and tactics 101. You need to be able to exploit success and you need a reserve.”

As early as November 2003, the Congressional Budget Office found that without significant numbers of reservists being called up, “the active Army would be unable to sustain an occupation force of the present size [150,000 soldiers] beyond March 2004 if it chose not to keep individual units deployed to Iraq for longer than one year without relief.”

In February of last year, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was among the many worrying that the Army’s Reserve forces were in trouble. “From my conversations with the Guard and reservists around the country, you are going to see a very large exodus of the members of the Guard and Reserve because of the incredible deployment and a burden that has been laid upon them,” he told Rumsfeld.

And the warnings weren’t simply coming from outside the Bush bubble. Then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who is now running for secretary of defense) foresaw these problems as well. “Though [Armitage] believed they would put down the insurgency [in Iraq] and win in the end, the U.S. military was going to pay for ten years or more. The Army, in particular, was stretched too thin,” Bob Woodward wrote in his book “Plan of Attack.” “They were fighting three wars really — Afghanistan still, Iraq and the continuing global war on terrorism. It was not logical nor was it possible, in Armitage’s view, that this could be accomplished with a force of the same size that existed during the Clinton administration in peace time. But that was what the Bush administration was attempting.”

Perhaps the most damning criticism of President Bush’s mishandling of the U.S. military comes from his own prophetic words in his first speech on national security as a presidential candidate, at the Citadel military academy in September 1999, which was aimed at the Clinton administration. “This administration wants things both ways: to command great forces, without supporting them, [and] to launch today’s new causes, with little thought of tomorrow’s consequences,” Bush said.

The president would do well to remember those words in regard to his own performance as commander in chief.

Bond’s survival is essential for the Republican Party’s hopes of holding on to its one-vote majority in the Senate. Though he has never pulled in more than 53 percent of the vote in his three elections, Bond is strongly favored to win again next month, not because of conservative consistency but largely because of his pork-barrel fiscal values, reflected in big federal spending for his constituents. Bond’s work in bringing federal dollars to Missouri has also had the fringe benefit of helping him line his own pockets: When Bond used his influence to aid Kansas City Southern, he was also rewarding himself as a stockholder in the company.

Now Bond is squaring off against Democrat Nancy Farmer, the Missouri state treasurer. She figures to be badly outspent by her incumbent opponent, but is nonetheless an energetic campaigner.

Bond was elected governor of Missouri in 1972 at the age of 33, the youngest chief executive in the history of the Show Me state. He built a reputation as a moderate that would help him in later years, pushing affordable-housing programs and starting the state’s Parents as Teachers program, which trains new parents in how best to raise their children. “Bond has been able and continues to be able as a candidate to avoid being typecast as a particularly conservative Republican,” said Terry Jones, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. One veteran Missouri Democrat said, “The thing about Bond is, the less you know about him, the more inoffensive he is.”

“Pork is a mighty fine diet for Missourians,” a Bond spokesman told the nonpartisan, nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste in 2002. “It is low in fat and high in jobs.” Indeed, as a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee and the chairman of its subcommittee on VA/HUD-independent agencies, Bond has had a front-row seat at the federal trough. One of Bond’s greatest hits is the $1 million he obtained this year for the Missouri Pork Producers Association, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. And the large sums he brings in for urban renewal, including $2.5 million in 2003 for the Applied Urban Research Institute, have helped carve inroads among Democrats. “He uses the appropriations process to buy friends,” a Democratic operative explained matter-of-factly. Just last month, Bond’s office announced a total of nearly $50 million in new federal spending for Missouri, not including $2 billion in national spending for veterans.

Bond’s career has been a gyrating series of ups and downs. He lost reelection in 1976, but regained the Statehouse four years later. He took two years off after finishing that term before making a successful bid for the Senate in 1986, winning with 53 percent of the vote. Unlike other successful incumbents, however, Bond has not been able to broaden his support, winning with 52 percent in 1992 and 53 percent in 1998.

In the Senate, Bond has built a typical Republican record. In 2002, National Journal gave him an 84 percent economic conservative rating, a 57 percent social conservative mark and a 76 percent foreign policy conservative rating. He has been a reliable if unremarkable cog, supporting the Iraq war, for example, and opposing full funding for the No Child Left Behind Act.

Bond had a complicated relationship with the other Republican senator from Missouri, John Ashcroft, before Ashcroft was appointed attorney general. When President Clinton nominated distinguished black jurist Ronnie White to the federal bench, for example, Bond gave a warm, supportive statement at his confirmation hearing. But when the right-wing Ashcroft opposed White, Bond crumpled, joining in the vote against his nomination. Black leaders say that Bond had promised he would support White, an assertion Bond disputes. “He did not mislead us,” the Rev. B.T. Rice, president of the St. Louis Clergy Association, told the Associated Press, “he literally lied to us.”

In 1992, Bond’s inherited wealth was virtually wiped out when a blind trust that had two years earlier been valued at $1.3 million — and that Bond had used as collateral for large loans — was sold by creditors to cover his debts. He was forced to sell his splendid $1.25 million Washington home of five bedrooms, four fireplaces and servants’ quarters and move into a modest rental five blocks away. “The senator had hit lean times,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in 1993.

Bond claimed the trust had been drained dry by the malicious incompetence of his fund manager at PaineWebber, William Reik, and sued him for $11 million. The suit stated that Bond’s brother, Arthur Bond Jr., had checked on the investments in the trust in October 1989 and instructed Reik to diversify the holdings. Of course, legally a trustee of a blind trust cannot be influenced by the investor, even in the proxy form of a brother, a fact that Reik and PaineWebber noted in the case. In the end, the parties settled out of court; Bond received $900,000.

Many politicians use blind trusts to avoid the conflicts of interest inherent in having a stake in companies affected by their actions in government. Indeed, Bond had used them since his first gubernatorial run. But in the wake of his financial collapse, he soured on the idea. In 1995 he told the Post-Dispatch that putting finances in a blind trust was “stupid.”

Bond restored his solvency partly by investing in Missouri companies whose interests he has advanced before the Senate. Bond’s pattern of conflicts of interest runs back to 1993, when he bought McDonnell Douglas stock for his son while acting as the “heavy hitter” for the firm’s interests in the Senate, as the Post-Dispatch put it. Bond brushed off questions about the propriety of the purchase as “ludicrous.”

In February 1997, Bond bought between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of shares in Kansas City Southern, according to the financial disclosure forms he filed with the U.S. Senate. That same day, he purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 worth of stock for his dependent son, Sam. (Precise numbers are hard to come by, as government rules only require disclosure in broad categories.)

Two months before Bond decided to invest in the railroad company, it had hired Warren Erdman, the senator’s longtime chief of staff, who joined as vice president and chief lobbyist. Erdman still holds this position, according to records filed with the House and Senate, which also reveal that KCS spent $220,000 on his lobbying activities in the first six months of 2004. Erdman also happens to be the campaign chairman for Bush-Cheney ’04 in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

One of Erdman’s first tasks in his lobbying job was to win Senate approval for Kansas City Southern’s attempt to turn the defunct Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base into a major rail hub. The base was shut down after the 1994 round of base closings and was losing money as a general airfield. Kansas City leaders approached the company — which had just acquired a Mexican rail line — to see whether it was interested in acquiring the property and making it an “inland gateway to Mexico,” in order to take advantage of the newly enacted North American Free Trade Agreement.

Bond quickly swung into action. In July 1997 — five months after he had bought the railroad company’s stock — he inserted into a Senate bill a $500,000 grant for the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce to study the proposal. Closing the airport required formal approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, and Bond tried to circumvent the process by slipping a provision into an October 1997 spending bill to simply shut the airport down. The measure was removed by a House-Senate conference committee, forcing Bond and KCS to take the long route through the federal bureaucracy. Bond then arranged for city officials to meet with then Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater and personally pushed the project with the FAA and other federal bodies.

Critics, including some local officials, argued that the proposed rail hub was a bad deal: It would increase the number of trains and trucks rolling through the area, it would shut down a local airstrip used by small aviators and, as a member of the Kansas City Star’s editorial board wrote, it was “a sweetheart financial deal for the railway” arranged “with too little scrutiny.”

Apparently agreeing with that assessment, when the FAA decided to close the base in December 1998, it stipulated that Kansas City Southern would have to pay $15 million more in rent than originally thought — $74 million instead of $59 million — over the course of its 50-year lease.

Bond has been there for KCS on other occasions as well. In the mid-1990s, when the company opposed the merger of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, Bond held joint House-Senate hearings to examine the issue. Later he testified before the Federal Surface Transportation Board on the railroad’s behalf. And in recent years, when the railroad industry was pushing asbestos liability “reform,” which would cap the amount of damages culpable companies have to pay, Bond spoke out on the Senate floor on the legislation’s behalf.

Kansas City Southern has demonstrated its appreciation for Bond’s efforts with extensive campaign donations. From 1993 to 2004, 21 individual corporate officers and the company PAC contributed nearly $42,000 to Bond, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by OpenSecrets.org. That sum includes $4,000 — the maximum allowable — from KSC’s Erdman this election cycle. Members of the company’s board of directors have kicked in an additional $8,500 this cycle. In addition, the company helped underwrite Bond’s open-bar reception at the Union League during the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

To understand how Bond’s work has helped the company, all one needs to do is look at his stock portfolio. When in December 1999 Bond sold off between $1,001 and $15,000 of his KCS shares, he was liquidating part of a 250 percent profit, thanks to a 1997 three-way stock split and strong performance by the company.

According to information from the Motley Fool, the company’s split-adjusted price (a tool used to track stock value across splits) was $1.10 when Bond initially bought the stock and had increased to $3.84 when he sold it nearly three years later. His son did even better. When Bond sold between $1,001 and $15,000 of his son’s shares in May 2000, the split-adjusted value had risen to $4.36, an increase of nearly 300 percent.

Bond has bought and sold KCS shares numerous times since those early transactions, though he sold most of his stock in the company at the end of 2003, the latest period covered by the financial disclosure forms (which show that he held between $0 and $1,001 in each of two accounts).

This behavior “is a pretty clear conflict of interest,” said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics watchdog group in Washington. “There’s no other way to describe it. You’re not supposed to feather your nest while you’re a lawmaker.” Lewis added, “It’s not just another company that he’s helping — his former aide is there, and he has investments for him and his son, and the company did well after the actions he took. This picture seems fairly clear.”

“What bothers me is not so much that he has bought stock in the company — although that is somewhat troubling — but … that his former chief of staff is now lobbying,” said Celia Wexler, Common Cause’s vice president for advocacy. “Investments are a concern, but what is more of a concern is the relationships, personal relationships, that you find in Washington between … members [of Congress] and former staff members … How does this affect the public trust in elected officials? So [I'm talking about] a much higher standard than ‘Is this against a particular rule, even an ethics rule, or even the law?’”

The Bond campaign declined to comment for this article.

During the 1998 Senate campaign, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon, Bond’s opponent, said that the senator’s “going to bat” for Kansas City Southern raised ethical issues, but the incumbent brushed it off. “That’s ridiculous,” Bond said. “All of the leadership from Kansas City and the state were behind this. Erdman is a good friend, but he made a point not to discuss it with me.”

As it happens, KCS is not the only home-state company with which Bond has had close financial and professional relations. He has been a longtime supporter of Monsanto, the agrochemical giant headquartered in St. Louis, touting the bioengineered crops that Monsanto and other such companies produce. He said he wants to create a “Silicon Valley of biotechnology” in Missouri. Indeed, he made sure that the 2000 foreign aid spending bill included $30 million to promote the sales of these crops to developing nations.

In January 2001, he put his own money where his mouth was, buying between $1,001 and $5,000 of stock in Monsanto, one of three biotechnology companies in which Bond has invested since 1998.

Bond’s advocacy for Monsanto has continued since his stock purchases. In August 2001, on an official trip to Malaysia, Bond pushed the biotechnology agenda in a meeting with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. In December 2002, Bond cosigned a letter to President Bush criticizing the European Union’s ban on products made from genetically engineered foods. In May 2003, Bond got a Senate resolution passed criticizing the ban, taking to the Senate floor to call the Europeans “Luddites” and complain of “Euro-sclerosis.” When the Biotechnology Industry Organization in 2002 honored Bond with its Legislator of the Year Award, the presentation was made by then Monsanto president and CEO Hendrik Verfaillie.

Monsanto officers and the company’s PAC were Bond’s top overall source of campaign funds in the 1998 race, totaling $54,400. During the current election cycle, they have contributed more than $52,900 to his reelection campaign.

As for his contest against Farmer, Bond has out-raised her $7.6 million to $2.3 million. Bond has been advertising on television for weeks, while Farmer advertising had yet to go up as of the start of October.

Farmer is “articulate, she stays on message, she has a good presence and appearance,” said Jones, of the University of Missouri. “The problem is that she’s going up against a senator who has a base in the mid-50s.”

Perhaps most important for Bond’s reelection prospects are the inroads he’s made among some Democrats, particularly in Kansas City, where Mayor Kay Barnes has raised money for him. The situation is so peculiar that “St. Louis Democratic leaders openly wonder: Have Kansas City folks lost their minds?” according to the Pitch, a weekly Kansas City newspaper. But there are some St. Louis Democrats who are not immune to Bond’s favors. Prominent fundraisers like Kenneth Teasdale and Richard Baron have held events for the senator.

The predominant factor in Bond’s support is his pork-barrel politics. And that may well make the uphill struggle his Democratic opponent faces even more difficult. But the interplay between Bond’s public work and private finances — a throwback to backroom, self-dealing politics — is a story that remains largely untold in Missouri. Bond has not yet been forced to account for the capitalist cronyism that has made him the senator he is today.

For Coburn, the imminent danger facing America is apparently not terrorism but the “gay agenda.” His thumping about this menace within contributed to the pressure that led to Bush’s endorsement of a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. At a Republican meeting this spring, Coburn warned: “The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power … That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.”

In 1997, Coburn proposed a bill that would have ended anonymous testing for HIV/AIDS and required reporting the names of those who tested positive to public health authorities, among other draconian measures — including withholding Medicaid funding from states that failed to comply.

But an incident involving Medicaid from Coburn’s past as a physician may cloud his current ambition to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Don Nickles. He is squaring off against Democratic Rep. Brad Carson, who succeeded Coburn in the House in 2000.

According to records obtained by Salon, Coburn filed an apparently fraudulent Medicaid claim in 1990, which he admitted in his own testimony in a civil malpractice suit brought against him 14 years ago by a former female patient. The suit alleged that Coburn had sterilized her without her consent. It eventually was dismissed after the plaintiff failed to appear for the trial. In his sworn testimony, Coburn admitted he sterilized the then 20-year-old woman without securing her written consent as required by law. He blamed the omission on a clerical error, but maintained that he had her oral consent for the procedure. (Salon has been unable to contact the woman and is withholding her name out of respect for her privacy.) Coburn also revealed under oath that he had charged the procedure to Medicaid — despite knowing that Medicaid, also known as Title 19, does not cover the cost of sterilization for anyone under age 21.

This previously unpublicized episode from his medical practice cuts to the heart of Coburn’s political identity. He has built his congressional career on extreme gestures against government programs, exceeded in virulence only by his pronouncements on social issues, including advocating the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions under any circumstances other than those threatening the life of the mother. (And yet, as a doctor, he has performed abortions.)

Local political observers say the likely result of the Oklahoma Senate race is a tossup, with a possible slight advantage to Coburn because of Bush’s overwhelming support in the state. The latest poll, conducted Sept. 1 and 2 by the Democratic firm Westhill Partners, had the race within the margin of error, with Carson leading 44 to 42 percent.

Coburn was swept into Congress as a member of the Republican class of 1994 that gained control of the House for the first time in 40 years and installed Newt Gingrich as speaker. “He really drank the Kool-Aid with the class of ’94; he was one of the real far-right guys,” says Kenneth Hicks, a political science professor at Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla.

“He’s a principled, pompous member,” said a senior Republican staffer turned lobbyist. “He’s one of those ’94 guys, and there were a certain percentage of them who were so anti-system that they don’t want to play the game. And from a leadership perspective and a lobbyist perspective, we don’t like those kind of people … He’s going to be a frickin’ nightmare in the Senate [if he wins].”

In Congress, Coburn distinguished himself, even from other conservative Republicans, by actively opposing federal spending for his own state. After unsuccessfully trying to stop disaster relief after a 1999 tornado, Coburn called the measure “malarkey.” His dogmatism made him a thorn in the side of GOP members who might rhetorically denounce “big government” but still legislate plenty of pork. In 1996, after voting for provisions of an agriculture bill that aided Oklahoma farmers, Coburn told the Wall Street Journal that it made him sick for days afterward and that Washington was “a dirty place.” In 1997, he boasted, “I don’t ask for anything from Appropriations.” The year after that, he complained to USA Today that he was underpaid as a congressman: “You have to be able to earn more money to attract good people.”

As far right as Coburn is on fiscal issues, he is even farther right on social issues. “I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life,” he told the Associated Press in July. Last week, he told the Hugo [Okla.] Daily News: “We need someone who will speak morally on the issues and not run from the criticism of the national press … We need to have moral clarity about our leaders. I have a 100 percent pro-life record. I don’t apologize for saying we need to protect the unborn. Do you realize that if all those children had not been aborted, we wouldn’t have any trouble with Medicare and Social Security today? That’s another 41 million people.”

At a House subcommittee meeting on the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, which heard testimony on the danger of the parasite cryptosporidium, which had killed 104 and sickened 400,000 in Milwaukee in 1993 and killed 19 in Las Vegas in 1994, Coburn displayed his expertise as a doctor. The lethal spores, he held forth, “can sometimes … be very helpful — for doctors — because it helps us identify those people who in fact are immuno-compromised.”

A year later, Coburn gained a moment of national attention when he condemned NBC for televising the Academy Award-winning movie on the Holocaust “Schindler’s List.” According to Coburn, the film encouraged “irresponsible sexual behavior,” and he called for outrage against the network from “parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere.” He added, “I cringe when I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program.” Even conservative avatar William Bennett felt compelled to rebuke him: “These are very unfortunate and foolish comments.”

In 1999, after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, Coburn opposed President Clinton’s proposal for making adults liable if they allow their children to buy guns and harm others. “If I wanted to buy a bazooka to use in a very restricted way, to do something, I ought to be able to do that,” said Coburn.

Medical fraud has been one of Coburn’s signature issues. In his freshman term, he introduced the Health Care Anti-Fraud Act of 1995, which focused mainly on Medicare fraud but also touched on Medicaid. Speaking on the House floor on behalf of a Republican Medicare bill that year, Coburn said, “Our goal is to eliminate fraud and abuse. The way we do that is to make sure we change the expectation of those who are defrauding and abusing; that we, in fact, will catch them. If we change that expectation, then we will limit greatly the amount of people, and number of people, who attempt to defraud.”

Unsurprisingly, in proposing this legislation Coburn was careful not to raise his own case involving Medicaid fraud.

In the early hours of Nov. 7, 1990, Dr. Coburn was summoned to Muskogee Regional Medical Center to attend to a pregnant patient who had been admitted with severe pains. The patient was a 20-year-old woman in her third pregnancy. After each of her first two pregnancies, she had asked Coburn to perform a tubal ligation to ensure that she would not have any more children, but he had refused, according to his testimony, telling her that Medicaid did not cover elective sterilization for women under 21. “I told her that she was too young, that it was irreversible, that she needed to wait,” Coburn recounted telling the patient in December 1989. “I also told her that [Medicaid] wouldn’t cover it.”

Coburn found that she had an ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg is implanted somewhere other than the womb. In this case it was in her left fallopian tube. Coburn operated, removing both the left tube and the unaffected right one. The woman subsequently filed a malpractice suit, charging that he had tied her healthy tube without her permission.

In his Feb. 27, 1992, deposition in the case, Coburn insisted that the woman had repeatedly asked him to remove the second tube. In fact, she had signed a written consent form for the operation to deal with the ectopic pregnancy, but had not signed a consent form for the second procedure. Coburn testified that he had asked a nurse to obtain that form and that he did not know why it had not happened.

The suit was initially dismissed in October 1992 because it had been filed beyond the applicable statute of limitations, but was reinstated upon appeal. It was finally dismissed in December 1995 because, according to court records, the woman, for unexplained reasons, failed to show up for the trial.

In his deposition, Coburn also explained how he had gotten around Medicaid’s restriction against coverage of the costs of elective sterilization for a woman under 21: He did not report the ligation of the right tube on his discharge summary. “The reason that it was not dictated as both [procedures] is because she was under 21 and was being paid for by Title 19, and to have a tubal ligation under 21, Title 19 would not have covered that,” he said. He noted that under the law, sterilization even as an incidental operation accompanying a covered procedure — i.e., removing the left fallopian tube to deal with an ectopic pregnancy — would have nullified eligibility for federal reimbursement.

“I did not dictate [the second procedure] because of her Title 19 status,” he testified. “If I had dictated both, it would have been a sterilization procedure and she wouldn’t have had it covered.”

After the operation Coburn admonished both the woman and her mother not to discuss it. “She asked me, since she was under 21, how did I tie her tubes — since I told her I wouldn’t and Title 19 wouldn’t pay for it,” Coburn said in the deposition. “I said I did it anyway and that she shouldn’t talk about it because … I did a procedure that was not recognized under Title 19 reimbursement.” Thus Coburn admitted he had tried to silence his patient because he knew he was billing Medicaid illegally.

D. McCarty Thornton, former chief counsel to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services and a specialist in healthcare fraud, said that anyone claiming Medicaid funding has certain disclosure duties. He told Salon that in claiming funding, “the fundamental legal duty is that [you] must be honest and completely open about the claim and about the circumstances that led to the claim. That being the fundamental starting point, you can break that legal duty down into some pieces … There is a duty not to file a claim where you know that the services you provided are not reimbursable under the rules of the federal program … You have a duty to disclose all the facts that you know to be material to the government. You have a duty to accurately compile the underlying documentation, such as the surgical records. If you knowingly fail any of these duties, then that is healthcare fraud.”

Salon could not reach Coburn for comment. His campaign manager, Michael Schwartz, said that he was not familiar with the case and that it was “way off the radar screen” because the case happened 12 years ago.

At least, it is Coburn’s hope that the scandal passes below the radar in his contest with Carson, who is in almost every respect Coburn’s opposite. Unlike Coburn, Carson has fought hard to win federal funding for his district — for transportation, rural healthcare, education and environmental cleanup. For his efforts, he was reelected by 74 percent in 2002.

Carson is a sixth-generation Oklahoman whose mother’s family came to the state on the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears. His father worked for the Indian Bureau. Carson attended Baylor University, a conservative Baptist university in Texas, becoming its first graduate to win a Rhodes scholarship in 75 years. After finishing at the top of his class at the University of Oklahoma law school, he joined a major law firm, where he devoted one-third of his time to pro bono work. In 1997, he was a White House Fellow serving as a special assistant to the secretary of defense. A member of the Cherokee Nation, Carson helped establish a Native American Museum in Oklahoma City.

“This is a guy who knows how to wear cowboy boots with his Brooks Brothers suit, and he sounds like he’s from here,” says Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma. “He’s trying to thread the needle that all Democrats have to thread, and that is simultaneously satisfy this very extreme religious and social conservatism of Oklahomans but also make an appeal to the strong populism of the state.”

Although the candidates are from the same district in eastern Oklahoma, Coburn may have the advantage in building a statewide majority. “Tom Coburn delivered 4,000 babies over his career in the Second District,” one Democrat familiar with state politics said. “It may sound very naive for me to say this, but I really think it’s going to help him [there] a bunch.”

It remains a persistent problem for the Carson campaign that Coburn’s views don’t seem too far out of the mainstream to many Oklahomans. “A lot of positions that they’re going to try to make out as extremist are kind of semi-mainstream in Oklahoma,” says V. Burns Hargis, chairman of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce and a political commentator on television. “It’s just a hard sell to try to run to the left of the guy in Oklahoma.”

“It’s a great challenge,” Carson said in an interview with Salon. “We rarely point out the things that are truly wacky … We point out that [Coburn] treats politics like a game, as if it weren’t important, that you can go up to Washington and try to howl into the void and make points that make you feel a little better but never do anything for the people back home who are desperate for your help.”

According to Hicks, Carson is running a two-level campaign. “He’s on the air right now, and he’s trying to prove that he’s got Oklahoma values and is a conservative,” Hicks said. “Below the radar they’re doing a lot of GOTV [get out the vote], and they’re spending a lot of time talking about Coburn’s radical libertarianism on fiscal issues and his conservatism on social issues. They’re trying to say to individual voters, ‘This guy is really not in line with Oklahoma values. You may be a conservative, but he’s a radical.’”

Coburn, meanwhile, continues to spout off. Last week, he declared Oklahoma lagging in economic development because “you have a bunch of crapheads in Oklahoma City that have killed the vision of anybody wanting to invest in Oklahoma.” His spokesperson could not explain who or what Coburn was talking about. What’s more, Coburn proclaimed the Senate race a “battle of good vs. evil.”

“He’s on his own private mission with his own small band of followers,” Carson told the Washington Post. “With everything that’s going on in the world, using good and evil to describe a Senate race turns off voters.”

Whether the voters of Oklahoma regard Coburn as an exemplar of moral purity after learning about his false Medicaid filing may well determine not only the outcome of the contest there but the fate of the Senate.

A month later, on May 4, Rumsfeld responded with generic information. The Coalition Provisional Authority has paid $147 million to eight companies, he reported, and he offered a “current listing of known PSCs.” Sixty firms were listed, but CACI and Titan were not among them. Also missing from the list were companies like the Vinnell Corp., MPRI International, SAIC, Eagle Group and WorldWide Language Resources, which are involved in training the new Iraqi Army, according to a Web site set up by the Department of Commerce.

Since the prisoner abuse scandal first broke at the end of April, members of Congress have been trying to understand exactly what these independent contractors are doing in Iraq. But questions remain unanswered concerning precisely what contractors did at Abu Ghraib and what they still do in other U.S.-run prisons, to whom they are responsible and, more broadly, what they are doing on such critical missions as counterintelligence. Congress has received only a trickle of information from the Pentagon, and this information is often incomplete if not outright deceptive, according to members of Congress and their staffs.

Rep. Skelton is not alone in receiving sketchy or misleading information about the contractors from the Pentagon. Another House member asked the Pentagon for the general disposition of private security forces in Iraq — how many and where, roughly speaking. (Because the list is classified, the member cannot be named.) The member’s office got back a detailed roster of around 900 private security firm employees, but none were associated with well-known firms like Blackwater and Kellogg, Brown and Root (a Halliburton subsidiary), and roughly one-third were non-U.S. citizens. This figure contrasts greatly with 20,000 contractors — Rumsfeld’s often cited number — at large in the country.

The information blackout extends to other aspects of the Abu Ghraib issue. Defense Department officials turned over to Congress Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report on prisoner abuse in Iraq only after it had been posted all over the Internet. Days later they passed along the 6,000 pages of annexes backing up the report, but, according to one Capitol Hill staffer who has seen the annexes, the new material is incomplete. Some sections have cover pages, the staffer said, but nothing else. Notably, the enclosures to the statements of Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which was at Abu Ghraib, are among the crucial missing items.

Sen. Mark Dayton, a Minnesota Democrat who sits on the Armed Services Committee, recalled how until last month, members would receive regular briefings, all with the same message: Iraq was 95 percent pacified and the situation was improving. “Right now with the prison abuses, we’re getting something along the same lines,” Dayton said, that is: “This is one prison, a few incidents, caused by a few bad apples who weren’t following all the procedures, regulations and instructions that have been handed down from above. No one else knew about it, they should be punished, end of story. The Red Cross indicates, having visited 14 prisons, that it was far more widespread.”

He added: The Pentagon has “been minimally responsive to Congress — and only under duress and out of absolute necessity — from the very beginning, although I question the accuracy of enough of the information that we have received that I’m not sure whether [this] information is better than no information.”

Dayton is not alone in that view. “We have been treated as at best an inconvenience that they can avoid and deal with as they choose, and at worst we have been treated as though we are asking questions that are unpatriotic or causing problems for them,” said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

One Republican Senate staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, sarcastically echoed one of Secretary Rumsfeld’s famous maxims when asked about how forthcoming the Pentagon has been with information. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” the staffer said, adding, “The truth is that no one up here really knows what our overall strategy is, either politically or militarily, there. We find out in the newspapers.”

Indeed, the media generally seem to be a better source of information for members of Congress than does the Pentagon. Dayton described a classified meeting that Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had with roughly 40 senators at the end of April. “They didn’t mention one word on the ’60 Minutes II’ report that was going to be airing in literally hours” — the story that ignited the Abu Ghraib firestorm.

Nevertheless, members of Congress are determined to get the information they want. So, for example, they have inserted language requiring answers to Skelton’s questions into the military authorization bill that is moving through the House. “It’s ridiculous to have to put that into law,” one Democratic staffer told me. But members believe they have no other option.

Yet there’s no guarantee that even that will do any good. Consider the Pentagon’s record of informing Congress on how the billions of dollars in supplemental spending are being used. Starting with the first supplemental spending bill immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, Congress gave the Defense Department some flexibility, but required that it submit quarterly reports on how the cash was being spent. The reports came regularly for a while, but mysteriously stopped last year, just after the invasion of Iraq.

“The last one covered activity through February 28 of last year and was included in a report dated May 9, 2003,” said a Democratic staffer on the House Appropriations Committee. “That was the last report we got until about a week and a half ago. They didn’t meet all of the requirements of the law in terms of regular reporting on expenditures, and what they did tell us was so general that it was virtually meaningless.”

The uncommunicative, even secretive, attitude of the Bush-Rumsfeld Defense Department was perhaps best summed up at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month when Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for access to a report on Iraqi security forces by Maj. Gen. Karl Eikenberry. Wolfowitz said he would see if he was allowed to share the report. “We have just as much a right to this information as you do,” an outraged Reed told Wolfowitz. Reed is still waiting to see the report.

“We are a government intricately reliant on checks and balances,” Tauscher said. “This is not a kingdom with someone having complete fiat and decision power. This is a democracy, and people have got to have informed environments to make informed choices. But I’ll tell you, it’s very, very hard to keep someone accountable if the components of accountability are dismissed.”

“This industry really didn’t exist 10 years ago,” says Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.” A decade ago, mercenary soldiering was less the stuff of corporate America than the inspiration for Soldier of Fortune fantasies. Now, as Singer reported in Salon, the industry generates over $100 billion annually worldwide.

As little known as these companies are to the general public, they are only too familiar in Washington, where they have deployed a different kind of mercenary force — phalanxes of lobbyists — along with the ammunition of modern political warfare, campaign contributions. And they have found eager friends, particularly among Republican leaders in and out of Congress.

“The move into the political game tends to happen for three reasons,” Singer says. “One, this business is growing. Second, companies that are in other industries move into the sector, bringing influence and lobbyists to bear.” Examples include Halliburton and, in the case of private security firms and other companies that provide combat- or intelligence-oriented services, firms like CACI and Titan. Finally, Singer says, “A lot of firms have picked up lobbyists as they’ve gained a public profile.”

Blackwater, the firm that guards Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, and whose men were killed at Fallujah, has hired the well-connected Alexander Strategy Group to guide it through the current publicity storm and help influence Congress on whatever rules are generated to govern private militias in war zones, according to the Hill newspaper.

Alexander may turn out to be a clever choice: Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is Alexander’s chairman. Tony Rudy, another former top DeLay operative, and Karl Gallant, who once ran DeLay’s leadership PAC, are also onboard.

Blackwater also works other angles. One of the firm’s founders is Michigan native Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. His father, Edgar Prince, helped religious right leader Gary Bauer found the Family Research Council in 1988. Erik Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. But Blackwater is a relative newcomer to the Washington influence game, especially compared with CACI and Titan, which have been trailblazers.

For more than four years, CACI has employed the Livingston Group and its “strategic partner,” Louisiana law firm Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrere and Denegre, to represent the company’s interests in Washington. Since 2000, CACI has poured $160,000 into Livingston and $150,000 into Jones, Walker.

The Livingston who gave the firm its name is former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican designated as Newt Gingrich’s successor to the speaker’s gavel in 1998. Amid the House debate over the impeachment of President Clinton, Livingston dramatically announced his retirement because of his own sexual peccadilloes. “Livingston is the only former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee now in private practice,” reads a bio on his firm’s Web site.

Livingston’s former top staffers, who have joined him in the private sector, also work on the CACI account, according to lobbying filings with the House and Senate. In addition, the two firms employ former legislative liaisons (bureaucratese for lobbyists) from the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard — all registered to lobby for CACI.

More than 92 percent of CACI’s $843 million in revenues last year came from the federal government — 63 percent from the Pentagon alone. The company’s lobbyists are essential in the continuing effort to grease that wheel of fortune.

Titan’s lineup of lobbyists is even broader. Its in-house team includes chairman Gene Ray, a former top Air Force official; John Dressendorfer, a former White House lobbyist under President Reagan who also worked in President Nixon’s Pentagon; Lawrence Delaney, who closed out his service to the Clinton administration as acting undersecretary of the Air Force; and, for good measure, Susan Golding, a former Republican mayor of San Diego.

Titan’s hired guns include the law firm of Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and Shockey, which employs Letitia White, a longtime staffer to Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., to work on Titan’s issues. Lewis, by the way, is the chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The firm American Defense International, also employed by Titan, includes Van Hipp, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army under then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney who was later appointed the No. 2 lawyer in the Navy, and Michael Herson, a former special assistant to then Secretary Cheney.

What’s more, Titan has engaged the services of NorthPoint Strategies, composed mainly of former top staffers to Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif. Cunningham, a former member of the Armed Services Committee, as it happens sits on the Appropriations defense subcommittee as well as the Intelligence Committee.

All told, Titan has spent $1.29 million since 2000 on Washington lobbying. In 2003 alone, it paid NorthPoint $240,000. And its lobbying has paid off. Last year, the company had revenues of $1.8 billion, according to its annual report: “Our revenues from U.S. government business represented approximately 96% of our total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003.”

This revolving door between congressional staffers or retired military personnel and lobbying firms is not circumscribed by the requirements of the House and Senate lobby registration. Most of the private contractors operating in Iraq have high-ranking retired brass in their executive suites. CACI’s board of directors, for example, features retired Gen. Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff. Carl Vuono and Ronald Griffith, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of Alexandria, Va., firm MPRI, which is helping to train and equip the new Iraqi Army, are both retired generals.

But preexisting relationships are only one weapon in the Washington operator’s arsenal. Money remains one of the most important tools.

Not surprisingly, these companies have been very generous to the Republican Party. Titan’s PAC, for example, has contributed a dozen times more money to Republicans than to Democrats during this election cycle: It kicked in $182,000 to Republican committees and candidates, including $10,000 apiece to the leadership PACs of Lewis, Cunningham, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. (whose leadership group is called Peace Through Strength PAC). Titan’s PAC also gave the maximum $10,000 to the campaign committees of Cunningham, Lewis and Hunter. Democrats have received a mere $15,000 from Titan.

In addition, top executives with Titan have contributed in excess of $58,000 to political candidates and committees since 2000, more than $49,000 of that amount going to Republicans. Ray alone gave $28,000, the bulk of it to Republicans. Reps. Cunningham and Hunter each got from Titan executives at least $10,000 (not including the $3,000 given to Hunter’s Peace Through Strength PAC). The Democrat who has received the most money from Titan executives is Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee.

CACI executives gave a total of $29,250 over the same time period, $25,750 of it to Republican interests. J.P. “Jack” London, CACI’s CEO, alone gave $10,000, all to Republicans.

Some of the private security firms in Iraq are clearly fresh to the political game: Three executives from Triple Canopy — whose forces fought a pitched battle against Iraqi insurgents in April — each wrote $2,000 in checks to the Bush-Cheney campaign in March.

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has now testified on Iraqi prisoner abuse — some of it carried out by workers employed by private firms — no hearings have yet been scheduled on the widespread use of mercenaries to fill jobs once performed by U.S. soldiers. And deployment of such workers is unlikely to decrease as election year contributions grow: The number of hired mercenaries is expected to double after the June 30 hand-over of “limited sovereignty” to an Iraqi government.