"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."

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That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well before the horrid incidents that recently shocked the nation.

The Red Cross complaint -- and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week -- raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.

According to the report, the organization's delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed "the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness" for days.

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The president has called the now exposed pattern of violence an isolated crime performed by "a few people." Yet the Pentagon's own investigation of the incident shows that not only was the entire Abu Ghraib prison out of control, but it was also the MPs' immediate military superiors who "directly or indirectly" authorized "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of the prisoners as a way to break them in advance of formal interrogations.

"Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," says the report. The report, completed in March and kept secret until it was revealed on the New Yorker Web site on Friday, also stated that a civilian contractor employed by a Virginia company called CACI "clearly knew his instructions" to the MPs called for physical abuse.

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That was the crucial question Vietnam combat veteran John Kerry put to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago, and it is the question that should be at the center of his presidential campaign.

Today, however, Kerry seems unable to admit that the war he voted to authorize in Iraq has been such a disaster, arguing only that we must "stay the course." Why, when that was the tragic advice from the best and brightest in the Lyndon Johnson administration?

In proposing a long-overdue appeal to the United Nations and NATO to make them real partners in the rebirth of Iraq and take -- in his words -- the "Made in America" label off what has become a very unpopular occupation, Kerry gets some things right that the president has gotten so wrong. Unfortunately, however, the Democrats' heir apparent is still taking far too much solace in the conventional wisdom, which brought us the sorrows of the Vietnam War.

"Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war," Kerry said in a national radio address April 17. "But it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals. All Americans are united in backing our troops and meeting our commitment to help the people of Iraq build a country that is stable, peaceful, tolerant and free."

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Of course, as a self-described "messenger" of God who was "praying for strength to do the Lord's will," Bush was not troubled about shredding a little secular document called the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution reserves to Congress the authority to allocate funds and to declare war. Thus it would seem to be an impeachable offense to misappropriate $700 million that had been earmarked to restore order to Afghanistan and put it toward planning an invasion of Iraq -- in a secret scheme hatched, according to Woodward, only 72 days after 9/11.

But not only has the president rejected the checks and balances installed by the nation's founders to avoid the "foreign entanglements" George Washington warned us about, he again is shown to have pursued a foreign policy that stands as a sharp rebuke to his more worldly and cautious father. During the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush wisely heeded the concerns of Congress, as well as a broad coalition of regional and international allies, and kept to clear, limited and sound goals.

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Now that thousands of rioting Shiites have been added to the persistent Sunni insurrection targeting the U.S.-led occupation, it is absurd to define the enemy as only foreigners or agents of the captured tyrant Saddam Hussein. The "coalition" forces are the foreigners, in fact, and the U.S.-financed quisling local government fools no one, regardless of the planned "handover" of power.

Under the false conceit that the adventure made sense as part of the fight against terror, the United States seized a country containing a major portion of the world's most valued and scarce resource. Yet our leaders expect the natives to believe that the corporate camp followers of the U.S. military are swarming over their country only for the purpose of humanitarian reconstruction.

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"Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism," Clarke said on "60 Minutes." "He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe he could have done something to stop 9/11."

Clarke's critique of Bush's leadership in a time of crisis is documented in a new book, "Against All Enemies," and will be amplified in testimony before the national commission on the 9/11 attacks.

And just in time, too. Bush's "I am the war president" speeches have made it clear that terrorism will be the central theme in his campaign. This is not surprising, since opinion polls suggest that Americans are unimpressed with the administration except when it comes to its response to 9/11.

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The Spanish people, like most of the world, knew all along that the Bush policy of preemptive war against Iraq, which had nothing to do with the terrorist attack of 9/11, was all wrong, but their craven leaders were browbeaten by Bush to ignore their own constituents and instead join the farcically named "coalition of the willing."

Upward of 90 percent of the Spanish public had told pollsters that the invasion of Iraq was an irrational response to 9/11, but their good sense was betrayed by the ruling party. In his first statement as the prime minister-elect of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero declared his intention to extract Spanish troops from Iraq, stating the obvious: "The war in Iraq was a disaster. The occupation of Iraq is a disaster."

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George W. Bush avoids being photographed with the dead and injured from his folly in Iraq, but hey, those flag-draped coffins of 9/11 victims make great TV ads. What a grisly low in political exploitation.

That's why the ads were condemned by a firefighters union and many of the 9/11 victims' relatives, whose various Web sites contain an impressive list of the unanswered questions concerning the tragedy. As Bob McIlvaine, whose son was killed in the Twin Towers disaster, put it: "Instead of playing on people's emotions with images of that day, the president would do right to cooperate more with the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks so we can learn the truth about what happened on that day and why."

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When I finally got the drift of what the true-believer hoodlums were saying, I was tempted to utter in plaintive defense, "No, only half of me did it!" -- meaning that my father was born in Germany and raised Protestant. But my father would have taken his belt to me had I employed that cop-out because of his intense shame over the genocide perpetrated by his Christian countrymen against my Jewish mother's people in Eastern Europe.

Unlike Mel Gibson's father, mine never underestimated the horror of the Holocaust. Nor do my Christian relatives in Germany, who have underscored the depth of wartime Germany's depravity by pointing out to me that the local minister had been one of the town's leading Nazi enthusiasts, even wearing his Nazi uniform under his clerical garb.

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Yes, Al Gore shares responsibility with the U.S. Supreme Court for the fact that George W. Bush ended up as president. But without Nader in the picture in 2000, Bush's narrow Electoral College victory would have been impossible to scam. The arguments that Nader made last time around seem absurd this time, when it is all too clear that there are significant differences between the Democrats and Republicans on the issues Nader has spent a lifetime effectively raising. The Republican Party marches lock step in a campaign against the environment, working people, the poor, civil liberties and world peace.

The vital issue in this election is that a Republican sweep may make permanent the damage to the constitutional principle of checks and balances. How dare Nader ignore the reactionary cast of Bush's judicial appointments and the refusal of a Republican-controlled Congress to challenge the mendacity of this president on issues as varied and important as global warming and the preemptive, deceit-driven invasion of Iraq?

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Quack, quack. Say goodbye to judicial integrity. Quack, quack. Forget about holding the nation's vice president accountable for his dealings. Quack, quack. Trash the right of citizens to transparent government. Quack, quack.

Bizarre as it sounds, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia quacked like a duck last week during his defensive denial that a duck-hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney was improper. According to Scalia, the visit of the two men to the private game reserve of a top oil executive was merely a pleasant social engagement.

But Scalia's glib response was disingenuous, coming shortly before the Supremes will rule on a White House appeal in a case involving private meetings of Cheney's energy task force. It's outrageous that he does not intend to recuse himself.

"It did not involve a lawsuit against Dick Cheney as a private individual," Scalia said of the appeal while speaking at Amherst College last Tuesday. "This was a government issue. It's acceptable practice to socialize with executive branch officials when there are not personal claims against them. That's all I'm going to say for now. Quack, quack."

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The enemies of the republic are everywhere, he says over and over, and only he stands between them and our utter ruin. Sunday on "Meet the Press," he could say nothing without also referring to military battles he is apparently fit to fight -- presumably based on his stealthy stint in the National Guard.

I am a "war president ... with war on my mind," he insisted to Tim Russert, dodging the newsman's every question, as if his trainers had assured him that the phrase was a talisman that would ward off all charges of ineptitude and bad-faith leadership. Yet it was hardly clear from his filibustering responses exactly what war it was that Bush thought he was fighting.

Surely he wasn't coming clean on his war against the 90 percent of Americans who will pay the price in starved government services and, ultimately, higher tax burdens as they pay off Bush's outrageous tax cuts for the super-rich and the corollary soaring budget deficits.

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Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his preemptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush -- misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations -- are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

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In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, both in preserving constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception in leading us to war on phony intelligence overshadows those scandals based on greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding administration, or those aimed at political opponents, such as Watergate. And the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to speak the truth.

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Led by clerics demanding real democracy, the protests have strongly raised this question: What right does the United States have to tell people that they cannot be allowed to rule themselves?

With the stated reasons for the U.S. invasion -- the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his ties to al-Qaida -- now a proven fraud, the Bush administration was left with one defense: It was bringing democracy to this corner of the Mideast. If we now fail to promptly return full sovereignty to the Iraqis, inconvenient as that outcome may be, the invasion will stand exposed as nothing more than old-fashioned imperial plunder of the region's oil riches -- and the continued occupation could devolve into civil war.

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A Los Angeles Times headline Saturday said it all: "Budget Ax Will Fall Heavily on the Poor, Ill." The story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget plan explained how it "promises higher costs and hurdles for thousands of Californians, from some children with cancer who will no longer get state help paying for chemotherapy to high school graduates who will be shunted to community colleges instead of universities."

Those kinds of cuts, including reneging on an already-approved cost-of-living increase for mothers and children on welfare, are not only hardhearted, but they won't save enough to dent the state's $14 billion revenue shortfall for the 2004-'05 budget. They are window dressing to give the governor the cover of making what he termed "painful" spending cuts while selling his $15 billion bond initiative -- which is a way of raising taxes without appearing to do so. Another scam involves the $1.3 billion in property tax revenue Schwarzenegger proposes to steal from cash-strapped local governments and school districts -- you know, the people who bring you police, firefighters, street repairs, schools, parks and all that other frivolous stuff.

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We all know that Robertson is a longtime supporter of Bush and that the president has adhered to the reverend's right-wing agenda, but would Robertson dare use the Lord's name in vain for partisan politics? Would he rip off God's clout just to boost his candidate's chances?

No, I don't believe Robertson, fearing eternity in hell, would be so bold, so I take him at his word: "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord that it's going to be a blowout election in 2004," he told his television flock, citing several days of prayer at the end of 2003. "The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and come out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad; God picks him up because he's a man of prayer, and God's blessing him."

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The work of the National Security Archive, a dogged organization fighting for government transparency, has cast light on the trove of documents that depict in damning detail how the United States, working with U.S. corporations including Bechtel, cynically and secretly allied itself with Saddam's dictatorship. The evidence undermines the unctuous moral superiority with which the current American president, media and public now judge Saddam, a monster the U.S. actively helped create.

The documents make it clear that were the trial of Saddam to be held by an impartial world court, it would prove an embarrassing two-edged sword for the White House, calling into question the motives of U.S. foreign policy. If there were a complete investigation into those who aided and abetted Saddam's crimes against humanity, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State George Shultz would probably end up as material witnesses.

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And now that the "fear factor" of Saddam's ghostly presence has been removed, there is no longer any valid explanation for why former members of Saddam's regime and key scientists cannot show us where all those infamous weapons of mass destruction went. After all, this invasion -- based on a new doctrine of preemptive war that bypassed United Nations inspectors -- was not pitched to the American people as a mercy mission.

We were told that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the world and was close to building nuclear weapons that he might give to al-Qaida. Occupying Iraq, it was stated over and over again by the White House, was a legitimate response to the horror of Sept. 11 and a way to prevent, as Condoleezza Rice once put it, "a mushroom cloud" from appearing over an American city.

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