For that billion, Reflecting Absence is to have two huge “reflecting pools” — “two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers” — fed by waterfalls “from all sides” and surrounded by a “forest” of oak trees; a visitor will then be able to descend 30 feet to galleries under the falls “inscribed with the names of those who died.” There is to be an adjacent, 100,000-square-foot underground memorial museum to “retell the events of the day, display powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of those who died.” All of this, as the Web site for the memorial states, will be meant to vividly convey “the enormity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss.” Not surprisingly, the near billion-dollar figure does not even include $80 million for a planned visitor’s center or the estimated $50 million to $60 million annual cost of running such an elaborate memorial and museum.

So what is Reflecting Absence going to reflect? For one thing, it will mirror its gargantuan twin, the building that is to symbolically replace the World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower. As the memorial is to be driven deep into the scarred earth of ground zero, so the Freedom Tower is to soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be precise, it is to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the nation that emerged from it; its spire will even emit light — “a new beacon of freedom” — for all the world to see and admire. Its observation deck will rise a carefully planned 7 feet above that of the old World Trade Center; and with spire and antennae, it is meant to be the tallest office building on the planet (though the Burj Dubai Tower, whose builders are holding its future height a tightly guarded secret, may quickly surpass it).

The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar price tag for a memorial whose design, in recent years, has grown ever larger and more complex, caused consternation in my city, led Mayor Michael Bloomberg to suggest capping its cost at $500 million, caused the Times to editorialize, “The only thing a $1 billion memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse of political and private leadership in Lower Manhattan,” and became a nationwide media story. Because the subject is such a touchy one, however, no one went further and explored the obvious: that, even in victimhood, Americans have in recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris. Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a billion dollars, one thing can be predicted. The memorial will prove less a reminder of how many Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that September day, or how many — firemen, policemen, bystanders who stayed to aid others — sacrificed their lives, than of the terrible path this country ventured down in the wake of 9/11.

If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, Americans have grown desperately tired of that path and, as a result, the whole construction project at New York’s ground zero is likely to become emotionally obsolete long before either Reflecting Absence or the Freedom Tower make it onto the scene.

Memorials Built and Unbuilt

Let me offer a few framing comparisons:

1) Sometime in the coming week or two, the number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will exceed the 2,752 people who died in or around the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 (including those on the two hijacked jets that rammed into the towers). With a combined death toll of 2,739, the war dead have already crept within 13 of that day’s casualties in New York. Here’s a question then: Who thinks that the United States will ever spend $500 million, no less $1 billion, on a memorial to the ever-growing numbers of war dead from those two wars?

2) Or consider the prospective 9/11 memorial in this context:

The National World War II Memorial (405,000 American dead): $182 million for all costs.

The Vietnam Memorial (56,000 American dead): $4.2 million for construction.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial (54,000 American dead): $6 million.

The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (2,390 American dead, 1,177 from the Arizona): $532,000.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial (168 American dead): $29 million.

The 1915 USS Maine Mast Memorial at Arlington Cemetery (260 American dead): $56,147.94

The Holocaust Museum in Washington (approximately 6 million dead): $90 million for construction/$78 million for exhibitions

The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.

3) Or imagine a listing of global ground zeros that might go something like this:

Amount spent on a memorial for the Vietnamese dead of their Vietnam Wars (approximately 3 million): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the Afghan dead in the civil war between competing warlords over who would control the capital of Kabul in the mid-1990s (unknown numbers of dead, a city reduced to rubble): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the victims of the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (at least 188,000 dead): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to Iraqis confirmed dead, many with signs of execution and torture marks, just in the month of April in Baghdad alone (almost 1,100), or the Iraqis confirmed killed countrywide “in war-related violence” from January through April of this year (3,525) — and both of these figures are certainly significant undercounts: $0.

The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.

The Victors Are the Victims

The dead, those dear to us, our wives or husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, children, relatives, friends, those who acted for us or suffered in our place, should be remembered. This is an essential human task, almost a duty. What could be more powerful than the urge to hold onto those taken from us, especially when their deaths happen in an unexpected, untimely and visibly unjust way (only emphasizing the deeper untimeliness and injustice of death itself). But where exactly do we remember the dead? The truth is: We remember them in our hearts, which makes a memorial a living thing only so long as the dead still live within us.

As an experiment, visit one of the old Civil War or World War I memorials that dot so many towns, undoubtedly yours included. You might (or might not) admire the fountain, or the elaborate statue of soldiers, or of a general, or of any other set of icons chosen to stand in for the hallowed dead and their sacrifices. I happen to like the Grand Army Plaza, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and dedicated to the Union Army, that fronts on Central Park in New York City, my hometown; but it is, in a sense, no longer a memorial. Decades ago, it turned back into a somewhat gaudy, golden decoration, a statue — as all memorials, in the end, must. The odds are that few today visit it to remember what some specific individual did or how he died. To the extent that we remember, we remember first individually in our hearts in our own lifetimes — and later, collectively, in our history books.

And, of course, for most human beings in most places, especially those who are not the victors in wars, or simply not the victors on this planet, no matter how unfairly or horrifically or bravely or fruitlessly their loved ones might be taken from them, there is only the heart. For those dying in Kabul or Baghdad, Chechnya, Darfur, the Congo, or Uzbekistan today, the emotions released may be no less strong, but in all likelihood there will be no statues, no reflecting pools, no sunken terraces, no walls with carefully etched names.

There has, in American journalism, been an unspoken calculus of the value of a life and a death on this planet in terms of newsworthiness (which is often, of course, a kind of memorializing, a kind of remembering). Crudely put, it would go something like: One kidnapped and murdered blond, white child in California equals 300 Egyptians drowning in a ferry accident, 3,000 Bangladeshis swept away in a monsoon flood, 300,000 Congolese killed in a bloodletting civil war.

Call that news reality in this country. It’s also true, as the recent World War II memorial on the Washington Mall indicates, that Americans have gained something of a taste for Roman imperial-style memorialization. (Though, to my mind, that huge construction catches little of the modesty and stoicism of the WWII vets like my father who did not come home trumpeting what they had done.)

Reflecting Absence and the Freedom Tower, however, go well beyond that. Their particular form of excess, of the gargantuan, in which money, elaborateness and size stand in for memory, is intimately connected not so much with Sept. 11, 2001, as with the days, weeks, even year after that shock.

To grasp this, it’s necessary to return to the now almost forgotten moments after 9/11, after the president had frozen in that elementary school classroom in Florida while reading “The Pet Goat”; after a panicky crew of his people had headed Air Force One in the wrong direction, away from Washington; after Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush (according to former counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke) started rounding up the usual suspects — i.e., Saddam Hussein — on Sept. 11 and 12; after the president insisted, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass”; after he took that bullhorn at ground zero on Sept. 14 and — to chants of “USA! USA! USA!” — promised the American public that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon”; after his associates promptly began to formulate the plans, the “intelligence,” the lies and tall tales that would take us into Iraq.

It was in that unformed, but quickly forming, moment that, under the shock not just of the murder of almost 3,000 people, but of the apocalyptic images of those two towers crumbling in a near-mushroom cloud of white dust, that an American imperial culture of revenge and domination was briefly brought to full flower. It was a moment that reached its zenith when the president strutted across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and, with that Mission Accomplished banner over his shoulder, declared “major combat operations” ended in Iraq.

The gargantuan Freedom Tower and the gargantuan sunken memorial to the dead of 9/11 are really monuments to that brief year and a half, each project now hardly less embattled in controversy, cost overruns and ineptitude than the war in Iraq or the post-Katrina rescue-and-reconstruction mission. Each project — as yet unbuilt — is already an increasingly controversial leftover from that extended moment when so many pundits pictured us proudly as a wounded Imperial Rome or the inheritor of the glories of the British Empire; while the administration, with its attendant neocon cheering squad in tow, all of them dazzled by our “hyperpower” (as other Americans were horrified by the hyperpower of al-Qaida’s imagery of destruction), gained confidence that this was their moment, the one that would take them over the top, the one that would make the United States a Republican Party possession for years, if not generations, the Middle East an American gas station, the world an American military preserve, and a “unitary” commander-in-chief presidency the recipient of the kinds of untrammeled powers previously reserved for kings and emperors. These were, of course, dreams of gargantuan proportions, fantasies of power and planetary rule worthy of a tower at least 1,776 feet high, that would obliterate the memory of all other buildings anywhere, and of the largest, most expensive gravestone on earth, one that would quite literally put the sufferings of all other victims in the shade.

As those two enormous reflecting pools were meant to mirror the soaring “beacon” of the Freedom Tower, so the American people, under the shock of loss, experiencing a sense of violation that can only come to the victors in this world, mirrored the administration’s attitude. In a country where New York City had always been Sodom to Los Angeles’ Gomorrah, everyone suddenly donned “I [Heart] New York” hats or T-shirts and became involved in a series of repetitive rites of mourning that in arenas nationwide, on every television screen, went on not for days or weeks but months on end.

From these ceremonies, a clear and simple message emerged. The United States was, in its suffering, the greatest victim, the greatest survivor, and the greatest dominator the globe had ever seen. Implicitly, the rest of the world’s dead were, in the Pentagon’s classic phrase, “collateral damage.” In those months, in our EveryAmerican version of the global drama, we swept up and repossessed all the emotional roles available — with the sole exception of Greatest Evil One. That, then, was the phantasmagoric path to invasion, war and disaster upon which the Bush administration, with a mighty helping hand from al-Qaida, pulled back the curtain; that is the drama still being played out today at ground zero in New York City.

But those 2,752 dead can no longer stand in — not even in the American mind — for all the dead everywhere, not even for the American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s time not just to cut back radically on that billion-dollar cost, but to do what we should have done — and, if we had had another kind of leadership, might have done — starting on Sept. 12, 2001. Taken a breath and actually thought about ourselves and the world; taken another breath and actually approached the untimely dead — our own as well as those of others around the world — with some genuine humility.

I know that somehow this memorial will be built; that, for some, it will touch the heart. But I also know that someday, maybe even yesterday in a country that now wants to forget much of what occurred as it was railroaded into a never-ending war, whatever is built at ground zero will mainly memorialize a specific America that emerged from the rubble of 9/11. That was the America that had stopped being a nation and had become a “homeland,” a country that should not have been using the numbers “1776″ in any way.

Facing a building so tall, who has any need to approach a declaration of only 1,322 words, so tiny as to be able to fit on a single page, so iconic that just about no one bothers to pay attention to it anymore. But perhaps, with that monumental invocation of its “spirit” in mind, it’s worth quoting a few of the words those men wrote back in the year 1776 and remembering what the American dead of that time actually stood for. Here, then, from a great anti-imperial document, are some passages about another George’s imperial hubris that you are less likely to remember than its classic beginning:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States … He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation … For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences … For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

Someday, those reflecting pools and that tower will mirror so much of the rise as well as the fall of the Bush administration — not least of all its heck-of-a-job-Brownie incompetence and its inability to fulfill civil promises of any sort. After all, almost five years past the catastrophe of 9/11, after all the grandiose promises and the soaring costs, after all that “enormity,” there is nothing 1,776 feet in the air, nor, as yet, any hint of a gravestone over the dead of the tragedy of that day.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

So far they’ve only made it as far as the poor dogfish, “steered” in captivity via electrodes keyed to “phantom odors.” As it happens, though, DARPA-sponsored plans are a good deal lustier than that: Next stop, the blue shark, which reaches a length of 13 feet. Project engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., says a team will soon be putting neural implants “into blue sharks and releas[ing] them into the ocean off the coast of Florida.” To transmit signals to the sharks, the team will need nothing less than a network of signaling towers in the area. This has “antiballistic shark system” written all over it.

Actually, it’s not the first time the military has invested in shark technology. As Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech pointed out last July, “The Navy has tapped three firms to build prototype gadgets that duplicate what sharks do naturally: find prey from the electric fields they emit.” One of them, Advanced Ceramics Research Inc., limned the project’s potential benefits this way: “If developed, such a capability might allow for the detection of small, hostile submarines entering a seawater inlet, harbor or channel, or allow objects such as mines to be pinpointed in shallow waters where sonar imaging is severely compromised.” And then there’s that ultimate underwater dream, the “Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System,” which could lead to all sorts of Navy breakthroughs, perhaps even — if you’ll excuse a tad of blue-skying on my part — blue shark/human tracking teams, or if not that, then lots of late-night-TV Aquaman jokes.

Of course, the Navy has been in nature’s waters in a big way for a while with its Marine Mammal Program in San Diego. There, it trains bottlenose dolphins as “sentries” and mine detectors. Such dolphins were “first operationally deployed” in Vietnam in 1971 and a whole dolphin patrol (like, presumably, the shark patrol to come) is now on duty in the Khor Abd Allah waterway, Iraq’s passageway into the Persian Gulf. To the embarrassment of the Navy, a dolphin named Takoma even went “AWOL” there in 2003, soon after the invasion of Iraq began.

As Nick Turse has pointed out, DARPA funds research into weaponizing creatures that inhabit just about any environmental niche imaginable — including bees capable of detecting explosives; “eyes” patterned after those of flies that might someday make “smart” weaponry even smarter; gecko wall-climbing and octopus concealment techniques; and electrode-controlled rats capable of searching through piles of rubble. In addition, between nature and whatever the opposite of nurture may be, there has been an ongoing military give-and-take. Consider, for instance, BigDog, highlighted in the same issue of New Scientist. Compared with a pack mule, goat or horse, this “robotic beast of burden” is being developed by Boston Dynamics to haul over rough terrain at least 40 kilograms of supplies soldiers won’t need to carry, while being able to take a “hefty kick” in the legs without crumpling to the ground.

From sharks to robots, from hacking into your nervous system to manipulating the weather, the Pentagon seems determined to exert “full-spectrum dominance” especially over that top-of-the-line primate, us. To achieve this, it sponsors blue-sky thinking with a vengeance. Nothing that moves or breathes on the planet, it seems, is conceptually beyond conscription by Uncle Sam into possible future-war scenarios.

This is undoubtedly what happens when you have an administration that considers the Pentagon the answer to all our problems and gives it a $439.3 billion budget to play with — and that’s exclusive of actual war-fighting money (which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated $120 billion for the year, will come in supplemental requests to Congress). And remember as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does not include the $9.3 billion the Department of Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the budget at least close to the $600 billion range. Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs estimated that all military-related outlays — that is, the real Pentagon budget — totaled closer to $840 billion.

Even taken at face value, the 2007 budget accounts for more than half of the $873 billion in federal discretionary spending — the funds that the president and Congress decide to spend each year. For 2007, education, the second largest discretionary budget item, amounts to just over $50 billion, a piddling sum by comparison. But there is probably no way to put any version of the Pentagon’s finances into perspective. Militarily speaking, it throws other military spending on the planet into the deepest shadow. As Frida Berrigan, senior research associate at the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center and coauthor of “U.S. Weapons at War 2005,” points out, “The Pentagon accounts for about half the world’s total military expenditures of $1.04 trillion, spending alone what the 32 next most powerful nations spend together.”

The United States is also by far the planet’s largest exporter of weapons and military hardware. An annual Congressional Research Service report found that, in 2004, global weapons deliveries totaled nearly $37 billion — with the United States responsible for more than 33 percent of them, or $12.4 billion, and it hasn’t gotten better since.

No other country puts anything like such effort, planning and dreaming into the idea of projecting planet-spanning military power, caught so grimly in that phrase, “full-spectrum dominance.” To Pentagon minds, this seems to mean: from 20,000 leagues down to 20 miles up (and everything that creeps, crawls, swims or flies in between). The phrase first gained attention with the release in 2000 of the Air Force’s Joint Vision 2020 statement — a supposed look into a future world of American war making. It’s one of those terms that stick with you — and not just because of the full-spectrum weaponry that’s now on the drawing boards. Those weapons range from hypervelocity rod bundles, meant to penetrate underground bunkers from outer space (ominously nicknamed “rods from God”), to the common aero vehicle, “an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that [by 2010] would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads” (Washington Post) anywhere on the planet within two hours, to that permanent base on the moon the Bush administration has called for by 2020 (and the array of “Star Wars”-style space-based weaponry that would ring it).

Full-spectrum dominance turns out to include even the United States, where, in 2002, the Bush administration established the U.S. Northern Command, or Northcom, whose Web site at present has the following from a visit by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale as its reassuring quote of the week: “I’m leaving with a clear sense of confidence in the vision and planning of U.S. Northern Command to deal with any emerging threat, whether an occurrence of pandemic flu, a 2006 hurricane … or a terrorist attack still being planned by our adversaries.”

While the Pentagon quietly begins to take over tasks that once were delegated to civilian agencies, its blue-sky weapons planning extends into the distant future. Take, for instance, the Air Force Futures Game ’05 held for several days last October in the Dulles, Va., office of consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. The exercise was dedicated to “looking at scenarios for the year 2025,” especially one in which a nuclear weapon is loose in a “Middle Eastern country” and a major war is in the offing. Like many other Pentagon war-gaming exercises, this one was largely committed to confirming the usefulness of as yet nonexistent or hardly existent weaponry, especially in the areas of “space access” and “electronic warfare.” According to Col. Gail Wojtowicz, Air Force division director of future concepts and transformation, the gamers were “also looking at one of the trickiest issues the Air Force or another service may have to face: what the Pentagon can do on American soil.” Indeed.

Military analyst William Arkin wrote about these particular Air Force games, meant to boost “laser, high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons,” at his Washington Post Early Warning blog. Such blue-sky exercises, he explained, advance new weapons systems (and their corporate sponsors) “along the familiar development path of boosters and patrons feeding information to war gamers who feed study participants who feed researchers who feed manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is hard to tell whether high powered microwaves and laser came into being because someone conceived it out of need or because its existence in the laboratory created the need.”

To let inventive minds roam free outside normal frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I bet there’s no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the government funding the equivalent for education 2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence 2025. To have this happen, I’m afraid, you would have to transform them into Northcom war games.

Now it’s true that much of the blue-sky planning may never come to be. Those U.S. Navy stealth sharks may not patrol our coasts, and a good, swift enemy kick to some unexpected spot on BigDog’s anatomy may fell the “creature,” if budgetary or high-tech wrinkles don’t do the trick first — just as an unexpected series of low-tech blows to our full-spectrum military has left the Pentagon desperate and the U.S. Army unraveling in Iraq.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if official blue-sky thinking didn’t always mean mobilizing finances, scientists, corporations and even the animal kingdom in the service of global death? Wouldn’t it be nice to blue-sky just a tad about life?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

This article originally appeared in tomdispatch.com. Special thanks for Pentagon facts and figures in this piece go to Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute’s invaluable Arms Trade Resource Center. To keep up with the latest Pentagon full-spectrum dominance projects, be sure to check out Noah Shachtman’s entertaining as well as useful DefenseTech Web site, heavily mined for this piece, and William Arkin’s Washington Post Early Warning blog.

Danner greets me at the door, which, thrown open, reveals a bay window with a dazzling vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay and through which the sun blazes goldenly. In a rumpled dark shirt and slacks, he ushers me out onto a small stone patio. “This is where the deer hang out,” he says and points to a small area just beyond our chairs where the grass is slightly pressed down. “They lie there contemplating me as I pace on the other side of the bay window. I feel like their Ping-Pong game.”

Facing this peaceable kingdom, Danner has a slightly distracted, out-of-the-washer-but-not-the-drier look to him, except for his face, strangely unmarked, which would qualify as lighting up (even without the sun). He beams in such a welcoming way and there is in him something — in this setting at least — that makes it almost impossible to believe he has reported from some of the least hospitable, most dangerous spots on the planet over the last decades: Haiti in the 1980s, war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq, which he’s visited three times in recent years, among other spots. He has covered the world for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and especially the New York Review of Books.

Danner, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA and the Bush administration. (His primer on the subject, “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror,” is a must for any bookshelf.) His cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume “The Massacre at El Mozote,” in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where more than 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S.-trained troops during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, “The Secret Way to War,” is due out in April.

We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and, turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.

I wanted to start with an area of expertise for you, torture policy. For me, the Bush administration’s decision to enter this arena so quickly after 9/11 was a reach for power. If you can torture, you can do anything.

When you look at the record, the phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is “take the gloves off.” We hear this again and again. The interesting thing about that phrase is the implication that before we had the gloves on, that the laws and principles that constitute our belief not only in democracy but in human rights left the country vulnerable. The U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. record of treating prisoners humanely that goes back to George Washington, laws like the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law passed to restrict the government’s power to surveil its citizens — all of these constitute the gloves-on American power, and 9/11 signaled to those in power that the system with “the gloves on” was insufficient to protect Americans. That seems to be their belief.

As you know, very shortly after 9/11, the then-White House counsel [Alberto Gonzales] proposed to President Bush that provisions of the Geneva Conventions had been rendered obsolete, even quaint, by this “new paradigm.” The Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the federal statutes against torture — these undertakings by the U.S. — represented restrictions that would unduly hobble the country in fighting the war on terror and, by extension, threaten[ed] the existence of the United States. And I think that’s where torture — “extreme interrogation” is the euphemism — goes to the heart of the reaction against the way this country has observed human rights in the past, a reaction, in a way, against law itself. What we have here is a conflict between legality and power.

Torture is a very direct route from human rights, which is to say, restricted power, to unleashed power. We see a movement here backward from ideals that were at the root of this country’s founding during the Enlightenment: the restriction of government power and the conviction that human beings had certain inherent rights, one of which was the freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment. Under this way of looking at the matter, those Enlightenment ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were given to Americans, were extended through the Geneva Conventions, through the Convention against Torture, to all people — and the administration, in pushing extreme interrogation, in going from a secret abuse of power to a public one

Wasn’t it really less an abuse of power than a proclamation of power?

Exactly. In what I’ve started to call Bush’s state of exception, we’ve now reached the second stage. Many of these steps, including extreme interrogation, eavesdropping, arresting aliens — one could go down a list — were taken in relative or complete secrecy. Gradually, they have come into the light, becoming matters of political disputation; and, insofar as the administration’s political antagonists have failed to overturn them, they have also become matters of accepted practice, which is where I think we are now. As we sit here, we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It would have been the very unusual observer, on seeing those photographs in April 2004, who would have predicted two years later that extreme interrogation would, in effect, have become accepted within the CIA. And though the Senate passed an amendment that forbade it, the president replied with a signing statement that essentially reserved his right to violate that amendment according to his supposed powers as commander in chief.

In effect, the president claims to believe that his wartime powers give him carte blanche to break the law in any sphere where he decides national security is involved. An added element is the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The only countervailing power we’ve seen since 9/11 really lay in the June 2004 Supreme Court detention decisions. In one of them, Justice O’Connor declared that the president’s power in wartime was not a blank check. Now, she’s been replaced by an admitted believer in a “unitary executive.” It was Alito when he was at the Justice Department who strongly pushed the strategy of presidential signing statements as a way to mitigate congressional assertions of power.

Weren’t you struck by the fact that, of all the things top Bush officials did, their urge toward torture, toward taking the gloves off, was first and fastest? It was an impulse at the top.

I think that’s an interesting way to put it, an impulse at the top. The president and the vice president have said that, after 9/11, they asked the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies to come to them with proposals. What should the U.S. do? Look, it’s time to take the gloves off and every one of you has to show me the way to do it. General [Michael] Hayden said in an interview just the other night that, with the NSA eavesdropping program, he was responding to a request from the White House.

Wasn’t it Rumsfeld, when they were “interviewing” John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in Afghanistan, who actually told the interrogators to take the gloves off?

According to a Newsweek report, Rumsfeld had someone essentially telephone the interrogators: Do what you have to do. Go as far as you have to go.

Torture hasn’t exactly been absent from U.S. government policy in our lifetimes, but one difference, it seems to me, is the degree to which our leaders have been involved. I think Rumsfeld was getting reports on the Lindh interrogation by the hour.

When we look at the techniques used by the CIA, these things go back a ways. Alfred McCoy and others have written about this. These techniques of torture, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, are reappearing. There is one very important difference: the explicit official approval and the determination to defend these techniques in the case of public exposure and public controversy. And torture has survived its exposure — a critical difference. The clear evidence of intent at the very top of the government is also striking. At a certain point, of course, you have to get into the realm of the psycho-political, which is a very mushy realm.

Let’s do it anyway.

The central question here is: Why did we have the kind of response we did after 9/11? The Bush administration, which professed itself so strong on national security, had let the United States suffer the most catastrophic attack on its territory in history. We have to remind ourselves of the effect of this. Remember, their major security programs were the Strategic Defense Initiative and confronting China. They thought that terrorism, which they didn’t care about, was a matter for sissies. Like humanitarian intervention, the threat posed by non-state actors — and many other concerns of the previous administration — all this stuff was, as they saw it, a kid’s view of national security, so they ignored it. And afterward they knew very well that reports existed showing how they had ignored it, most notably the PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was famously titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” This was a very human thing. Having proclaimed how strong they were on national security, they were attacked. I think that accounted, to some degree, for the ferocity of the counterattack. You don’t need to get too deep to see that. When you look at this idea of the gloves coming off, the implication is very much exculpatory. They’re saying, in effect: Before the gloves were on, so we weren’t able to detect and prevent this attack.

General Hayden has explicitly said, had this [NSA warrantless eavesdropping] program been in place, we would have prevented 9/11. There’s no evidence of that, but when you talk about the psycho-political roots of this stuff, I think it’s very revealing. It also dovetails with the concerns of several prominent officials, especially Rumsfeld and Cheney, that the government had been unduly hobbled during the late Vietnam War era. Cheney has said this explicitly. We’re talking about the War Powers Resolution, which was passed in 1973. FISA is out of the same complex of political concerns, though it was passed under Carter.

They chafed under FISA in the Reagan era.

Oh, indeed they did. Then there were the Church and Pike hearings of the mid-1970s, which, in their view, disabled the CIA. So part of this has to do with righting wrongs that they believe were committed in an earlier and very traumatic time in their lives. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense just after the Vietnam War. Cheney was chief of staff in a White House that was under siege. So history is coming back to haunt this era in a personal and vivid way.

You’ve often quoted a piece in which reporter Ron Suskind is told by an unidentified senior administration official that he’s in the “reality-based community,” after which that official says something striking: “We’re an empire now and when we act we create our own reality.” Care to comment?

I think that quote is immensely revealing. It underlines their policies in all kinds of areas, their belief that the overwhelming or preponderant power of the United States can simply change fact, can change truth. It is quite indicative of their policy of public information inside the United States. They don’t care about people who read the New York Times, for instance. I use that as a shorthand. They don’t care about people concerned with facts. They care about the broader arc of the story. We sit here constantly citing facts — that they’ve broken this or that law, that what they originally said turns out not to be true. None of this particularly interests them.

What interests them is the larger reality believed by the 50.1 percent that they need to govern. Kenneth Duberstein said this recently — he was chief of staff to Ronald Reagan — that this administration is unique in that they govern with 50.1 percent. He was referring not to elections but to popularity while governing. His notion was that Reagan would want to get 60 to 65 percent backing him, while the Bush people want a bare majority, which means they have a much more extremist policy because they’re appealing to the base. It makes them very hard-knuckle when approaching politics, simply wanting the base plus one.

On empire, what’s unusual about this administration isn’t only its focus on power, but on unilateralism. It’s the flip side of isolationism. The notion that alliances, economic or political, and international law inevitably hinder the most powerful nation. You know, the image of the strings around Gulliver. They said in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2005 version, that rivals will continue to challenge us using the strategies of the weak including “international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” They’re associating terror and asymmetric warfare with international law as similar ways to blunt the overwhelming power of the United States. That represents an attitude toward international law and institutions that, I think, is a real and dramatic break from past practice in the United States. In our history, certainly recently, there’s just no comparison to them — no government anywhere near as radical.

They’re really extreme American nationalists, though you can’t use that word in this country.

That’s true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That’s the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism — that is, weapons of the weak

Weapons of mass interference.

I should add that, in my view, the era of neocon leadership is clearly coming to an end. The impression that they were ever entirely in control is wrong in any event and the vanguard of the neocons has obviously been blunted by the great failure of Iraq — because their assumption of preponderant American power turned out not to be true. Napoleon had this wonderful line that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. Military power is good for blowing things up; it’s good for destroying things. It’s not good for building a new order. It takes a great deal more power, skill and patience to construct an enduring order in Iraq. The United States doesn’t have sufficient power; it doesn’t have the skill; and we know it doesn’t have the patience. One part of the “axis of evil” has been occupied — you can think of it as the part of the axis that has sacrificed itself to make way for the greater freedom (freedom from attack, freedom perhaps to build nuclear weapons) of North Korea and Iran. Although I think the U.S. has dealt with Iran rather cleverly in the last few months, they’re playing a very weak hand. After all, the use of military force against Iran is now out of the question in large part because of the disaster next door in Iraq and the way Iran’s hand has been strengthened by that disaster.

Here’s my hesitation: If these people are pushed to the wall, I could construct a scenario for you, I believe, in which Iran, crazy as it might seem, could be hit.

The difference we have on this just has to do with how willing we are to imagine the utter irrationality of the administration. When I look at Iran now, the upside of a military strike of a kind that they could do, with aerial bombardment, and the downside of such a step seems obviously to be so wildly out of proportion, I can’t believe even they would take that step.

You’ve talked about our current American world as one of “frozen scandal,” an interesting phrase. When you first used it, we were in the Downing Street Memo scandal and nothing was happening. Now, we’re immersed in the NSA and other scandals and nothing is happening.

The icebergs are floating by. I’ve used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we’ve come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as Step 1, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step 2 would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra and others. And finally, Step 3 would be expiation — the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, Look, we’ve corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we’ve got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.

You get revelation and repetition.

Yes, R and R. It’s been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there’s been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished…

Minor figures…

…who were silly enough to get themselves caught — for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they’re still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.

You’ve interviewed some interrogators, haven’t you?

Indeed, and I’ve had from them accounts of some of the things that were done. The great problem in the age of frozen scandal is that it’s as if we’re this spinning wheel, constantly confirming facts that we already knew, so the revelations become less and less effective in causing public outrage. The public begins to become inured to it, corrupted in its turn.

I’m going to suggest something grimmer. In what’s likely to be the dirtiest election any of us has experienced, if the Democrats actually took one house of Congress in November 2006 and begin to investigate, I think you’d enter the era of frozen investigation. The administration will claim commander in chief rights.

That’s a good prediction. The Bush administration is already stonewalling extremely timid Republican-led committees when it comes to the response to Hurricane Katrina or NSA eavesdropping. If the Democrats do take control of a house of Congress and mount real investigations, on the one hand, they’ll be very circumspect because they’ll be concerned about jeopardizing their chances in the elections of 2008. On the other hand, you’ll have the overwhelming claim of commander in chief power, which could completely handcuff investigations.

I came across this sentence today in a piece on the Plame case. “A spokesman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak was ongoing. The spokesman refused to give her name.”

[Laughs] A secret spokesman.

So you’ve got secrecy, lying and a third thing you’ve brought up before, a bizarre kind of frankness. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

There’s been an interesting ambivalence in the administration when it comes to all these actions they’ve taken in the name of national security — between the impulse to deny and stonewall and the impulse to come forward and very boldly assert that they took such actions in the name of national security. You see it in eavesdropping, where Karl Rove has clearly indicated a preference for declaring, in a very clever response to the NSA revelation, “If al-Qaida is talking to someone in the United States we want to know about it. Apparently some Democrats don’t.” Which is basically to say: If you’re concerned about this, you’re weakening the United States. All this human rights, Fourth Amendment stuff is so much hooey.

In essence, this is an assault on the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is in the Constitution because the framers understood that a lot of these rights, especially when under pressure in wartime, are not particularly popular. So they were put in permanently, so as not to be subject to majority control or majority abnegation. It’s politics of the most savagely bare-knuckle and dangerous kind when you use that gap between the country’s precepts as embodied in the Constitution and the fact that many of these become unpopular in time of war to destroy your political opponents, which is what this administration does.

There are many in the administration who want to come out four-square for these things. You saw that impulse also with interrogation. They could have come out after Abu Ghraib — there were hints of this — and said, “Yes, there are a few bad apples, but yes, we use extreme interrogation, we do it to defend the country.” And if they’d done this, they might have pumped up a majority who would, for example, have supported waterboarding.

When I talk about these matters, there’s an ambivalence on my part as well because one becomes extremely upset that they’re lying in public and doing these things in secret and denying them; but, on the other hand, I fear the kind of populist technique they could use if they declared these policies openly to rally support for themselves.

All this, of course, begs the question of a second attack. It’s the assumption of many people that a second attack would punch through everything, that there’d be a much more explicit assumption of powers.

And do you believe this?

It’s quite possible, sure. If it had happened a year after 9/11, I think that’s exactly what would have occurred. Now that time has passed, I’m not so sure. They’re in a much more defensive political position. It depends on what kind of attack it was, whether it was an attack of a kind that they should have anticipated — that is, one where it was at least conceivable that they should have prevented it.

It’s always dangerous to predict the future, but can you imagine, in quite another direction, this administration imploding or unraveling?

Well, as in so many things, Yogi Berra had it right: I never make predictions, especially about the future. When it comes to raw political power, the ramrod backbone of the administration is clearly national security. 9/11 restored to the Republican Party what they had lost with the end of the Cold War — this persistent advantage in national security. If there is one thing this administration has done brilliantly, ruthlessly, efficiently, it’s making political use of its war on terror. It remains to be seen whether they can go to that well one more time in the 2006 election. There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party, exactly because Americans, after four years of it, are tired of this rhetoric and they’ve been enlightened by the Iraq war, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the Medicare debacle, among other things, to the general incompetence of the administration and to its corruption.

Could the administration unravel? The notion many people on the left are putting forward about a move toward impeachment — it’s hard for me to imagine that. First of all, we’re coming to a point in the political calendar where Democrats, as at the time of Iran-Contra, are not going to want impeachment to get in the way of retaking the White House in 2008. Democrats also saw what impeachment did to the Republican Party in 1998. For the first time in memory in an off-year election in a president’s second term, the Republicans lost seats — leading, as you’ll remember, to the abrupt fall of Newt Gingrich. On the other hand, if the Democrats did take one house of Congress this November, I think there are a number of areas where an investigation could hurt this administration severely, and it’s hard to predict what the Bush people’s reaction would be if they found themselves the target of aggressive congressional committees actually investigating officials who faced being charged, convicted and sent to jail. Even with Congress actually doing its job, we would confront the central political reality of our time: Terrorism has embedded itself in our political system, which is to say that fear has become the most lucrative political emotion and the administration would retain a considerable power to promote fear. It has the power to suggest that an attack on the national security bureaucracy is an attack on the safety of the people.

I’d like to turn to Iraq now by backing up to an earlier moment in your career, a terrible massacre in El Salvador in the 1980s, whose aftermath you reported on, a massacre by Salvadoran troops trained and backed by the United States. Could you compare that early-age-of-Reagan moment to today, given that so much of the cast of characters has turned out to be the same, including…

Elliott Abrams…

…and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte and any number of others. I’d also like you to consider a more general question: How does the U.S. get up to its elbows in blood so regularly?

Oh boy. When I look back at the massacre at El Mozote, which happened at the beginning of the Reagan administration, what sticks out is the way it served to signal the renewed determination — of the incoming Reagan officials and the newly defiant Salvadoran military — to draw a line at Salvador and not let that so-called advance of communist interests within the hemisphere continue.

When I compare now and then, I think of the power of a determined government to deny the facts and, if it is ruthless, to make its denials stick. Because what reverberates now about El Mozote is that two reporters, Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, got to that massacre site within a few weeks and filed stories. These were published on the front pages of the two most powerful newspapers in the country.

Far more so then than now.

Exactly. At a time of real dominance by the Times and Post, and the administration came forward, denied the massacres took place, and was able to make its views stick. And remember we knew that the death squads were being run out of the Salvadoran government; that the American embassy knew all about this; that it was the public policy of the American government that this shouldn’t be happening and that aid would be cut off if it was. But every time a new outrage took place, the press obligingly reported the denial of the administration, the denial of the embassy in San Salvador that, in fact, they knew anything about the connection of the death squads and the government the United States was supporting.

That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it’s not the information, it’s the politics. It’s not that we were lacking information. It’s that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It’s gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It’s gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we’re doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the president declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it’s not the information, it’s the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It’s very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return.

Apply this to Iraq. You’ve been to Iraq three times. It must be startling to arrive in this described land and see the actual country.

One of the striking things about going to Iraq is the extraordinarily large chasm between what people know about the story here and what the story actually is. First of all, the lurid, security-imposed landscape of the country is very hard to convey to people here: the miles of concrete blast walls, the miles of barbed wire, the constant fear in driving around and trying to report, and the absolute, constant accompaniment of death. Most of the killings in Iraq are not reported here and yet American viewers think that they’re seeing the war when what they’re seeing is a television reporter doing a stand-up on the roof of a heavily guarded hotel, behind blast walls and barbed wire and countless armed guards, who may or may not have exited that hotel that day. Many reporters are doing extraordinary jobs under horrific conditions, but those conditions make adequate reporting, as we know it, nearly impossible.

The result is that the Iraq we see is a tiny, tiny sliver of a very complex, very violent reality, and the constant repetition of the bad news, of the continual deaths there, has been absorbed by the news system of the United States. By that I mean, whereas 10 deaths might have made the front page of the paper or been not “a tell” but an actual filmed report on a network newscast, now it takes more death than that. The country and the news media are gradually absorbing how badly the war has gone so that the normal pace of death there, which, had we predicted it before the war, would have been a horrible outcome — an outcome that, had we known, no one would have supported the war in the first place — this horrible outcome has become the baseline that we take for granted.

For the story to occupy the news space, a particularly catastrophic attack is necessary. Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency. This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on Page A12 of the New York Times. It wasn’t even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you’re an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans. In fact, the story has generally been migrating off the front pages and becoming a small version of Orwell’s famed distant and never-ending war between East Asia and Oceania.

I think it’s widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It’s also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it’s essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaida and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.

You’ve written, “I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning distance between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable.” Now, that yawning gap is available to everybody. And we’re in a strangely demobilized moment, it seems to me. I was wondering: If you’re a reporter, what’s the story now? Remind me?

Thank you, Tom, for putting a deeply depressing point in such a deeply depressing way. I congratulate you on that, and indeed that yawning gap is now available to everyone and it’s debilitating, partly because one is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn’t matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and ’60s — in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.

Are we in a kind of Brezhnev moment?

I’m not sure I would go so far as that because a Brezhnev moment means we’re talking about a system that has reached its geriatric debility. I’m by no means saying that the U.S. now is equivalent to Eastern Europe back then, but there is a similarity in this gap between what you know is true and officially recognized reality — and in the fact that that gap cannot be breached. On the other hand, the fall in Bush’s approval ratings, and especially the catastrophic decline in the all-important “do you think the country is on the right track” question shows that this has had a broad effect among a lot of people. And I take some comfort from that.

The Democrats are doing very well in a generic poll about who you would want to run the country. This doesn’t mean the midterm elections will turn out that way, of course. It does mean people have not been so dulled by fear as not to see that the war has been a mistake and that the administration has done a very bad job when it comes to, say, Katrina or the Medicare program. At the end of the day, the problem is that there needs to be a political alternative that is in some way viable and believable — and the political elite that opposes this administration has been unable to formulate a believable program in opposition to it.

At the heart of this is the problem of national security. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in poll after poll the American people say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to protect them. This is a clichi of polling. At this particular time, it’s been made worse by a paradox. If, with great skill, the Democrats attack the Republican handling not just of the Iraq war but of the more general war on terror — and the Bush administration has been brilliant in connecting those two — if the Democrats succeed in doing this, they are, in effect, igniting the overwhelming political emotion of fear. And the Republicans have been very successful in using fear; fear, whatever its cause, seems to benefit the Republicans and the self-described strong leadership they offer. Their basic strategy in the 2004 election was to say: Elect this guy Kerry with his surfboard, and he’s going to get you killed. Enough people were willing to believe that then. It’s unclear whether that old snake oil will still have as many willing buyers. I tend to doubt it.

As dusk settles in, let me end this way: You’ve reported on some countries in horrific situations over the years. You wrote somewhere that in State Department parlance they are called TFN, totally fucked up nations. Your mother, when you come home, has a tendency to say, “Can’t you go someplace nice for a change?” So here we are on this patio, the sun going down, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. This looks nice. My question is: Is it nice, or are you now reporting from and teaching in a TFN?

[Laughs heartily] Oh, you mean, this just a mask, a sunny, picturesque mask over what is, in reality, a totally fucked up nation? Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN, I think we have a long way to go. We’re at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I’ve certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I’ve seen nothing like it in my lifetime.

It’s a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don’t believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don’t believe that.

There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let’s try to live our lives. And that’s a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal — this, I think, is very tempting … very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don’t think that’s my job and I’m glad it’s not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.

You asked a little while ago what reporters should do in a time like this. I think it’s immensely important that people continue, with great determination, to report what is true, to investigate things like the NSA story, to make a record of all of this. Because, at the end of the day, that is what reporters do, and that is why their work is so valuable — so, if you’ll forgive this word, sacred. They try to tell what actually happened.

As I leave him at the now dark doorway and head up the stone steps to my car, he calls, “Watch out for the deer! They tend to be up there at this time of night!”

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

- – - – - – - – - – - –

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of “The End of Victory Culture, a History of American Triumphalism in the Cold War.” His novel, “The Last Days of Publishing,” has recently come out in paperback.

In addition, these withdrawals are — we know this thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, “Up in the Air,” in the Dec. 5 New Yorker — to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more “collateral damage” — that is, Iraqi deaths).

It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that the Bush administration can “stand up” an effective Iraqi army and police force (think “Vietnamization” again), capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and obvious loopholes, phrases like “if all goes according to plan and security improves…” or “it also depends on the ability of the Iraqis to…”

Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven’t already disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined. It’s clear, nonetheless, that “withdrawal” is on the propaganda agenda of an administration heading into midterm elections with an increasingly skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried about defending the president’s mission-unaccomplished war of choice. Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises of, followed by announcements of “major” withdrawals, possibly including news in the fall election season of even more “massive” withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with conditional clauses and “only ifs” — withdrawal promises that, once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel under no particular obligation to fulfill.

Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete — though less generally discussed in our media — than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multibillions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer “tasked with facilities development” in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction (“the numbers are staggering”). Since then, the base building has been massive and ongoing.

In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.

If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery, and sheer incompetence, and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq’s “Little America.” For the first time, we have actual descriptions of a couple of the “super-bases” built in Iraq in the last two and a half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon information restrictions, they are sobering. Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and “smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq.” In a piece titled “Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel,” Ricks paints a striking portrait:

The base is sizeable enough to have its own “neighborhoods” including “KBR-land” (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); “CJSOTF” (“home to a special operations unit,” the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by “especially high walls,” and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye’s, “an ersatz Starbucks,” a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and “a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage.”

Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in “air-conditioned containers” that will, in the future — and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future — be wired “to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access.” He points out as well that, of the troops at Balad, “only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi.”

Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another of the American “super-bases,” the still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase (“Football and pizza point to US staying for long haul”). He observes, of “the biggest Marine camp in western Anbar province,” that “this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of U.S. suburbia.” In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large — such bases may cover 15 to 20 square miles — that it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.

There are at least four such “super-bases” in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with “withdrawal” from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say — and they always deny that we seek “permanent” bases in Iraq — facts on the ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream “permanency.”

Unfortunately, there’s a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words “permanent,” “bases” and “Iraq” should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when 80 percent of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when “no” or “not” was added to the mix via any American official denial. (It’s strange, isn’t it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist in our papers in the negative.) Three examples will do:

The secretary of defense: “During a visit with U.S. troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said ‘at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases’ in Iraq. ‘It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.’”

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq: “We already have handed over significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq.”

Karen Hughes on “The Charlie Rose Show”: “CHARLIE ROSE: They think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? KAREN HUGHES: We want nothing more than to bring our men and women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish the job. CHARLIE ROSE: And do we not want to keep bases there? KAREN HUGHES: No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible.”

Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something closer to truth in advertising than did our major papers. At least, they called the big bases in Iraq “enduring camps,” a label that had a certain charm and reeked of permanency. (They were later relabeled, far less romantically, “contingency operating bases.”)

One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that reporting on our bases in Iraq has been almost nonexistent these last years, especially given an administration so weighted toward military solutions to global problems; especially given the heft of some of the bases; especially given the fact that the Pentagon was mothballing our bases in Saudi Arabia and saw these as long-term substitutes; especially given the fact that the neocons and other top administration officials were so focused on controlling the so-called arc of instability (basically, the energy heartlands of the planet) at whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact that Pentagon prewar planning for such “enduring camps” was, briefly, a front-page story in a major newspaper.

A little history may be in order here:

On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to “maintain” four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though “there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops.” Rather than speak of “permanent bases,” the military preferred then to speak coyly of “permanent access” to Iraq. The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance, Saddam’s 400,000-man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000-man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force. (In an otherwise heavily armed region, this insured that any Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on the American military and that the U.S. Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.) While much space in our papers has, of late, been devoted to the administration’s lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has been shown in the planning that did take place.

At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and Schmitt piece appeared, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was “unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term’ bases in Iraq” — and that was that. The Times piece was essentially sent down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built — including four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times article — reports about U.S. bases in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared from the American media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions of “permanent bases” in these last years at Internet sites like Tomdispatch or Global Security.org.)

In May 2005, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported that we had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro, in Iraq. Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being “stood up” as a far larger force than was originally imagined by Pentagon planners, leaving the U.S. with, Graham reported, just the number of bases — four — that the Times first mentioned over two years earlier, including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar Province. This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon thinking, but as a “withdrawal plan.” (A modest number of these bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit transferred to Iraqi military units, which, according to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)

The future of a fifth base — the enormous Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport — remains, as far as we know, “unresolved”; and there is a sixth possible “permanent super-base” being built in that country, though never presented as such. The Bush administration is sinking between $600 million and $1 billion in construction funds into a new U.S. embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad’s Green Zone on a plot of land along the Tigris River that is reportedly two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The plans for this “embassy” are almost mythic in nature. A high-tech complex, it is to have “15ft blast walls and ground-to-air missiles” for protection as well as bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will, according to Chris Hughes, security correspondent for the British Daily Mirror, include “as many as 300 houses for consular and military officials” and a “large-scale barracks” for Marines. The “compound” will be a cluster of at least 21 buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including “a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad’s city utilities.” It is being billed as “more secure than the Pentagon” (not, perhaps, the most reassuring tag line in the post-9/11 world). If not quite a city-state, on completion it will resemble an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, we will be building another more heavily fortified little Green Zone.

Even Tony Blair’s Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman (“Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently in Iraq”) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base — sorry, a base “for years to come” — near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking American “withdrawal” strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.

As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment blog, the Pentagon can plan for “endurance” in Iraq forever and a day, while top Bush officials and neocons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that would control the energy heartlands of the planet. None of that will, however, make such bases any more “permanent” than their enormous Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved to be — not certainly if the Shiites decide they want us gone or Ayatollah Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.

Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since the invasion of Saddam’s Iraq, those bases — call them what you will — have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s “reconstruction” of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain at the secret heart of Bush administration “reconstruction” policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine “withdrawal” from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press — with the exception of the odd columnist — won’t even put the words “base,” “permanent” and “Iraq” in the same paragraph.

It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but keep your eyes directed at our “super-bases.” Until the administration blinks on them, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com

- – - – - – - – - – - –

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of “The End of Victory Culture, a History of American Triumphalism in the Cold War.” His novel, “The Last Days of Publishing,” has recently come out in paperback.

On the other hand, determined as this administration has been to impose its version of reality on us, the president faces a traffic jam of reality piling up in the environs of the White House. The question is: How long will the omniscient and dominatrix-style fantasies of Bushworld, ranging from “complete victory” in Iraq to nonexistent constitutional powers to ignore Congress, the courts, and treaties of every sort, triumph over the realities of the world the rest of humanity inhabits. Will an unconstrained presidency continue to grow — or not?

Here are just a few of the explosive areas where Bush v. Reality is likely to play out, generating roiling crises that could chase the president through the rest of this year. Keep in mind, this just accounts for the modestly predictable, not for the element of surprise that — as with Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke — remains ever present.

Who, after all, can predict what will hit our country this year. From a natural-gas shock to Chinese financial decisions on the dollar, from oil terrorism to the next set of fierce fall hurricanes, from the bursting of the housing bubble to the arrival of the avian flu, so much is possible — but one post-9/11 truth, revealed with special vividness by Hurricane Katrina, should by now be self-evident: Whatever the top officials of this administration are capable of doing, they and their cronies in various posts throughout the federal bureaucracy are absolutely incapable of (and perhaps largely uninterested in) running a government. Let’s give this phenomenon a fitting name: FEMAtization. You could almost offer a guarantee that no major problem is likely to arise this year, domestic or foreign, that they will not be quite incapable of handling reasonably, efficiently or thoughtfully — to hell with compassionately (for anyone who still remembers that museum-piece label “compassionate conservative,” from the Bush version of the Neolithic era). So here are just four of the most expectable crisis areas of 2006 as well as three wild cards that may remain in the administration’s hand and that could chase all of us through this year — adding up, in one way or the other, to the political tsunami of 2006.

1. Iraq. Bush’s war (and occupation) of choice has shadowed him like a boogeyman from the moment that banner over his head on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln announced “Mission Accomplished” and he declared “major combat operations” at an end on May 2, 2003. On that very day, in news hardly noticed by a soul, one of the first acts of insurgency against American troops occurred and seven GIs were wounded in a grenade attack in Fallujah. As either a prophet of the future or a master of wish-fulfillment, the president was never more accurate than when, in July 2003, he taunted the Iraqi guerrillas, saying, “Bring ‘em on.” Well, they’ve been bringing it on ever since.

Unwilling to face the realities of its trillion-dollar folly of a war and dealing with presidential polling figures entering free fall, the administration did the one thing it has been eternally successful at — it launched a fantasy offensive, not in Iraq, but here at home against the American people and especially the media. A series of aggressive speeches, news conferences, spin-doctored policy papers, and attacks on the opposition as “defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right,” all circling around an election likely to put an Islamic theocratic regime in power in Baghdad, pumped up the president’s polling numbers modestly and, more important, caused reporters and pundits to back off, wondering yet again whether we weren’t finally seeing the crack of light at the end of that tunnel. (Wasn’t the president implicitly admitting to the odd mistake in Iraq policy? Wasn’t he secretly preparing his own version of withdrawal? Weren’t the Iraqis turning some corner or other?)

It’s been a strange, brain-dead media era in which, far more than the American people, the pundits never seem to learn. Most pathetic of all, in what might have been a straightforward parody of the famed moment when a group of senior advisors from past administrations (“the Wise Men”) met with President Lyndon Johnson and urged him to reconsider his Vietnam policy, the Bush administration gathered together 13 former secretaries of state and defense (including Robert McNamara and Melvin Laird from the Vietnam era) for a photo with the president. Also offered was an Iraq dog-and-pony show involving painfully upbeat reports from chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace and ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizhad. In return, the 13 former officials, including Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, got a full 5-10 minute “interchange” with the president or (as the Dreyfuss Report did the math) all of 23 seconds of consultation time per secretary. It was the Wise Men (and Woman) Photo Op and it caught something of Bushworld and its peculiar allure.

However complicated the situation in Iraq may be, here’s an uncomplicated formula for considering administration policy there in the coming year. After every “milestone,” from the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons and the capture of Saddam himself through the “handing over” of sovereignty and various elections, things have only gotten worse. Remind me why it should be different this time? In fact, while the president warned endlessly about violence before the recent election, the violence since has been far worse with 28 Americans and hundreds of Iraqis dying in just a single tumultuous four-day period. Or put another way, whatever government may be formed in Baghdad’s Green Zone, it will preside over a Bush-installed failed state, utterly corrupt (billions of dollars have already been stolen from it) and thoroughly inept, incapable of providing its people with anything like security. In fact, just the other day, two suicide bombers, dressed in the uniforms of “senior police officers” and with the correct security passes, made it through numerous checkpoints and into the well-guarded compound of the Interior Ministry where they blew themselves and many policemen up. Iraq’s government, such as it is, has also proved incapable of delivering electricity or potable water, or of running its only industry of significance, the oil business (overseen by, of all people, Ahmed Chalabi), which is now producing less energy than in the worst moments of the Saddam Hussein/sanctions era. The country is already in a low-level civil war; its American-supported military made up of rival militias preparing to engage in various forms of ethnic cleansing; its police evidently heavily infiltrated by the insurgency; and its most important leaders are Shiite theocrats closely allied with Iran. The insurgency itself shows not the slightest sign of lessening.

Meanwhile, at home, figures as disparate as Rep. John Murtha and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski are demanding a military disengagement by the end of 2006 and in Brzezinski’s case calling on the Democrats to come out against the war. (“Finally, Democratic leaders should stop equivocating while carping. Those who want to lead in 2008 are particularly unwilling to state clearly that ending the war soon is both desirable and feasible.”)

Iraq is a minefield for the Bush administration. Prepare for it to blow this year.

2. Trials (and Tribulations) of Every Sort. Of course some of the description of Iraq above has become increasingly applicable to the Bush administration as well. It is, after all, run by fundamentalists and presidential cultists, presiding over what increasingly looks like a FEMA-tized, failed state, riddled with corruption, and at war with itself. In 2006, Bush and his associates face a quagmire of potential scandals, exposures of corrupt and illegal practices, and trials and tribulations of all sorts. There is, as a start, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, still on the Plame case job.

After a brief flurry of activity in November when the National Law Journal’s 2005 “lawyer of the year” convened a new grand jury to hear further evidence, the Fitzgerald investigation dropped off just about everyone’s radar screen. Fitzgerald, however, is a dogged character, playing things very close to the vest. No one can know what exactly he will do, but he is reportedly preparing material on Karl Rove for the new grand jury. It would be reasonable to expect that, sometime in the next two or three months, he might indeed indict “Bush’s brain” and then, rather than winding down his investigation, turn from those who attempted to obstruct his view of the Plame case to the case itself. In other words, if you happen to be a betting soul, you might consider putting your money on the possibility that the Plame case investigation will reach ever higher in the administration — and Fitzgerald seems carefully shielded within the Justice Department from administration tampering.

At the same time, even though former House Majority Leader Tom (the Hammer) DeLay got hammered and officially ended his bid to regain his leadership post last week, the Texas and Washington parts of the DeLay corruption scandal are likely only to grow and spread. In Texas, DeLay’s money-laundering case was not, despite his deepest wishes, thrown out of court and is now expanding into an election spending scandal involving the National Republican Congressional Committee and linked to the Abramoff case. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who plied endless (mostly Republican) congressional reps with favors and perks in return for influence, pleaded guilty last week to public corruption charges and turned state’s evidence. He has claimed he possesses incriminating material on 60 congressional lawmakers (as well as many of their aides).

Last week, the Washington Post reported, federal prosecutors turned “up the pressure on a former senior aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Tex., in the clearest signal yet that the sprawling public corruption investigation is now focusing on House Republican leadership offices.” Though the career prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Integrity who turned Abramoff seem to have been reasonably insulated from administration pressure, the case threatens to hit the Republican Congress hard, just as the Plame case threatens to empty the higher realms of administration power. It looks like at least a limited number of cases will be brought against lawmakers this election year. Unlike Fitzgerald, however, the career prosecutors in the Abramoff case are overseen by a notorious Bush recess appointee, Alice Fisher. Her nomination was opposed even in a Republican-controlled Senate as she is without prosecutorial experience (though she has some experience in the subject area of Guantanamo interrogations and is tied to Tom DeLay’s defense team). So look for future fireworks, conflicts, scandals and plenty of leaks on this one.

In the meantime, the courts will be busy indeed. Just count a few of the ways: The question of whether Bush’s warrantless NSA wiretaps have polluted other terrorism cases will hit the courts this year, while the kangaroo “military” tribunals in Guantanamo have just started up again, and various cases having to do with the limits of presidential power (or the lack of them) are likely to arrive, not to speak of the four Texas gerrymandering cases (think, once again, Tom DeLay) the Supreme Court has agreed to take up before the 2006 elections that could put five now-Republican seats in the House up for grabs. (A court already tarred by the 2000 election might rule surprisingly on this one.)

3. War with the Bureaucracy. Until quite recently, with an oppositionless Congress, increasingly right-wing courts, and a cowed media, traditional constitutional checks and balances on administration claims of massive presidential powers and prerogatives have been missing in action. However, the Founding Fathers of this nation, who could not have imagined our present National Security State or the size of this imperial presidency, could have had no way of imagining the governmental bureaucracy that has grown up around these either. So how could they have dreamed that the only significant check and balance in our system since Sept. 11, 2001, has been that very bureaucracy? Parts of it have been involved in a bitter, shadowy war with the administration for years now. It’s been a take-no-prisoners affair, as Tomdispatch has recorded in the first two posts in its Fallen Legion series, focusing on the startling numbers of men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their governmental duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire or simply be pushed off some cliff. This administration has done everything in its power to take control of the bureaucracy. As Hurricane Katrina showed with a previously impressive federal agency, FEMA, Bush and his officials have put their pals (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”), often without particular qualifications other than loyalty to this president, into leading positions, while trying to curb or purge their opponents. At the CIA, for instance, just before the last election former Rep. Porter Goss, a loyal political hack, was installed to purge and cleanse what had become an agency of leakers and bring it into line. Administration officials have, in fact, conducted little short of a war against leaks and leakers. To give but a single example, the origins of the Plame case lie in part in an attempt by top officials to administer punishment to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for revealing administration lies about an aspect of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program. What those officials (as leakers, of course) did to his wife was clearly meant as a warning to others in the bureaucracy that coming forward would mean being whacked.

And yet, despite the carnage, as Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday, the New York Times reporters who finally broke the NSA story did so based not on one or two sources but on “nearly a dozen current and former officials.” Doug Ireland laid out in his blog recently how, despite fears of possible prosecution — the first thing the president did in the wake of these revelations was to denounce the “shameful act” of leaking and the Justice Department almost immediately opened an investigation into who did it — one of them, former NSA analyst Russell Tice, has gone very public with his discontent. He has already been on “Democracy Now!” and ABC’s “Nightline,” saying that “he is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.” He claims that the NSA spied on “millions” of Americans, including, it was revealed recently, a Baltimore peace group.

The war with the bureaucracy and even, to some extent, with the military — high-level officers, for instance, clearly leaked crucial information to Rep. Murtha before his withdrawal news conference — will certainly continue this year, probably at an elevated level. The CIA has been a sieve; the NSA clearly will be; at the first sign of pressure, expect the same from career people in the Justice Department; and an unhappy military has already been passing out administration-unfriendly Iraq info left and right. Administration punitive acts only drive this process forward. Any signs of further administration weakness will do the same.

The “warriors” in the bureaucracy will, in turn, fuel further media and congressional criticism. Congress, worried about next year’s election, is an exceedingly fragile pillar of support for the president. Conservatives, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, are alienated or worse; certain Republican senators are angry over the way the administration is sidelining Congress. Even some right-wing judges have been acting out. And, of course, there’s the possibility that, in some chain-reaction-like fashion, the dike will simply burst and we will catch sight of something closer to the fullness of Bush administration illegality — sure to be far beyond anything we now imagine.

4. Election 2006. Count on it being down and dirty. This could be a street brawl because, with the Republican loss of even one house of Congress, the power to investigate is turned over to the Democrats as we head into a presidential election cycle.

Consider points 1-3 above: Iraq as a rolling, roiling, ongoing disaster, Republican congressional representatives and administration figures under indictment, bureaucrats leaking madly, possible seats put into play in Texas, presidential polls dropping — all having the potential to threaten an administration already filled with the biggest gamblers in our history and capable of doing almost anything if they think themselves in danger. So what can the president and his pals draw on?

Administration Wild Cards

<I<Court-packing: As Noah Feldman pointed out recently in the New York Times Magazine, the rise of the imperial presidency has a history that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s decision to conclude the Louisiana Purchase, while the presidency’s outsize “war powers” go back at least to Abraham Lincoln. The president has long had powers unimagined by the Founding Fathers, but the Bush administration still represents a new stage in the obliteration of a checks-and-balances system of government. Last week, in an important, if somewhat overlooked, front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal (“Judge Alito’s View of the Presidency: Expansive Powers”), Jess Bravin reported on a speech Sam Alito gave to the right-wing Federalist Society in 2000 in which he subscribed to the “unitary executive theory” of the presidency (“gospel,” he called it) which puts its money on the supposedly unfettered powers of the president as commander in chief. This theory has been pushed by administration figures ranging from the vice president and his chief of staff, David Addington, to former Assistant Attorney General and torture-memo writer John Yoo. As Alito put the matter in his speech: “[The Constitution] makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that. The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power — the whole thing.” And Yoo put it even more bluntly while debating the unitary executive theory recently. In answering the question, “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?” he responded, “No treaty.”

Evidently, John Roberts subscribes to the same view of presidential powers (as Harriet Miers certainly did, at least when it came to George Bush). In other words, the administration is trying to pack the Supreme Court with judges who are, above all, guaranteed to come down on the side of the president in any ultimate face-off with Congress or the courts. This is surely the real significance of the Alito nomination, should it go through. In any constitutional crisis-to-come the “commander in chief” is trying to predetermine how things will fall out if his own power is at stake.

Terrorism: From Sept. 11, 2001, the terrorism/fear card has certainly been the most powerful domestic weapon in the administration’s arsenal. In the event of a major (or several smaller) terrorist strikes in this country, the Bush administration could certainly be the major beneficiary, but even that is no longer a given. History tends not to happen quite the same way twice and no one knows whether, under the shock of such an event or events, the post-9/11 moment would simply be repeated or whether Americans might feel that this administration had completely betrayed them. A terrible war, lousy government, hideous crisis management, and then, on the one thing they swore they did best — protecting the country from terror — failure. Still this is certainly an administration wild card.

Wag the Dog Strategies: In a crisis of power, there is no reason to believe that the officials who already led us into Iraq might not be willing to gamble on a Wag the Dog strategy — that is, launching an operation they had been hankering for anyway that might also turn attention elsewhere. Rumors and speculation about a massive air attack on Iran (or on “regime change” in Syria) have been kicking around since at least the spring of 2005. These have begun circulating again recently. Such a thing is certainly possible (more so, obviously, should Benjamin Netanyahu happen to win the Israeli election in March), but whether the effect of this on the administration’s fortunes would be positive for long is also unknown. It certainly seems one path to madness, not just in Iraq but also on the oil markets. (If you happen to be a devotee of oil at $100 a barrel, you might quickly get your wish.)

Is a Constitutional Crisis in the Cards?

Until 2005, it wasn’t that the Bush administration didn’t make more than its share of mistakes; thanks to 9/11, it simply had plenty of wiggle room. It could always turn attention elsewhere. It always had the fear and terror cards ready to be played. These days, turn people’s attention elsewhere and they’re likely to see yet more disaster, corruption, incompetence and illegality. In 2006, the administration has a lot less wiggle room than it used to. Polling figures reflect that vividly. When new disasters hit, whether in Iraq or New Orleans, it’s becoming harder to take American eyes off them.

Let me then offer one of those predictions — surrounded by qualifications and caveats — that all writers should be wary of. If in a bitter, dirty midterm election, filled with “irregularities,” one house of Congress or both nonetheless go to the Democrats, which I believe possible (despite their low polling figures at the moment), expect the investigations to begin. Expect as well that the Bush administration will then trot out that “obscure” presidential philosophy of power and claim that the Congress has no right to investigate the president in his guise as commander in chief.

That is why the Alito nomination is so crucial and why 2007 may prove the year of constitutional crisis in the United States.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

- – - – - – - – - – - –

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of “The End of Victory Culture, a History of American Triumphalism in the Cold War.” His novel, “The Last Days of Publishing,” has just come out in paperback.