Around the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to get those bastards.

Gotta admit, one of those numbed heads was mine. The central problem (okay, one of the central problems) with the administration's response has been in acting as if there is a finite number of "those bastards," who, apparently, were simply born evil. Knock all of them off, and you're done. Thus, the administration, in attempting to eliminate that finite number, and torturing anyone who they even suspect might be one of them, has simply created more and more bastards who would feel perfectly justified in crashing highjacked airplanes into American skyscrapers, or worse. And, the thing is, the leaders of Al Queda aren't idiots, nor are they oblivious to American politics. Can there be any doubt that they knew exactly how Bush, Cheney, and co. would react, and the extent to which in would bring new footsoldiers to their cause?

We have become our own worst nightmare, we are that "rough beast", slouching toward the world at large, even as the underpinnings fall away. We are those Good Germans who did nothing (even if we did talk about it a lot, some of us); we too too polite, decent people, who sat back and watched and allowed this Atlantic Abomination to take form and do its dark and evil work.

Unless we fully recognize our responsibility to at the very least prosecute and punish those who have committed this atrocity against our own greatest and most admirable American ideals, we will have no one to look to when the end result of this pogrom comes for us.

yearning for power. that's why the primary enemy of any people is not their neighbor, but their government. the cure is democracy, the rule of the people over the clerks who carry out political functions. until americans assert their rule of the nation, there will be an unending stream of 'cheneys,'' bushes,' and 'nixons.'

but for the slow learners, the pressing problem is this: should the government be allowed to nominate who is a criminal, of any kind? the constitution says 'no'. if you think the government will stop with defining terrorists as 'persons of middle-eastern appearance', you're mortal ignorant of history, and it will kill you.

serves you right, but you're bungled genocidal grasp for middle-eastern oil is making life harder for by-standers. indeed, it commonly ends life for bystanders. so pretend to be civilized, if you can.

why does it take so long for the Credentialed Respectable American Press to actually say something?

I mean, really say something- not just occasionally weaving bits and pieces of jaw-dropping evidence into a larger nest of euphemisms, qualifiers, pre-emptive apologism, and other filler, crafted to blunt the impact and veil the import of facts that actually speak much more plainly to the truth.

Instead, we get books, years after the fact, that end up laying out the same narrative that Internet websites like Antiwar.com, Consortiumnews.com, Counterpunch.com, Democracynow.com, Prorev.com, Globalresearch.com, Commondreams.com, and Historycommons.com chronicled for their readers years ago.

I realize that many of those websites have ideological themes that fall outside of the Democratic-Republican "two-party system", thus putting them at the margins of American political discourse. That doesn't change the fact that they were nearly always the journalists who got it right first. What their detractors have long sneered at and dismissed as "Bush hatred" has increasingly been shown to simply be a lack of the sugar-coating of the practices of the Bush administration- in contrast to the treacle and icing shoveled on the stories and op-eds run by the Credentialed Respectable American Press.

With all due respect to Jane Mayer (and NYT reporter James Risen, author of the 2006 book State Of War- I'm not blaming the reporters, the blame clearly lies higher up- the Internet news sites got the scoop. Not the New York Times.

(re: Risen's book State Of War- http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/06/01/rev06002.html)

[link at my screen name "cabdriver", highlighted in blue]

Worse yet, neither the Washington Post or the LA Times has even been in the running- except in the other direction, away from any hint of controversy or reportage upsetting to the Powers That Be.

The reportage on these controversial matters in smaller papers like the Baltimore Sun and the Sacramento Bee has surpassed them time and again- and even overtaken the NYT, on occasion. I hope newspapers like that never get crowned with the same mantle of Respectability as the New York Times and the Washington Post- the only two news dailies that seem to matter at all, to the People Who Matter. Especially inside the Beltway.

Television is an even bigger problem, of course- one that I don't think will respond to anything short of a seriously effective sustained mass boycott. If only half of the people who voted for Democrats in 2006 would turn their TVs off and leave them off for a year or so, it would be a pointed wake-up call to people like Roger Ailes and Leslie Monves.

But I have a pretty good hunch of what I'm up against by advocating for that bit of activism. People might actually have to deprive themselves of a luxury. (A luxury? Did I really say that?) Poisoned though it may be. (Poisoned?)

I know what it's like to live without television for years on end- do you?

I say let's fight them over there in the White House before we have to fight them here in our own neighborhood.

Terrorism has grown stronger since 9/11, not weaker. More Americans have died in Iraq than have died in New York. Then add at least 30,000 wounded, and add how many Iraqi civilians killed and wounded?

I cannot conceive of a punishment severe enough for our current Administration and our useless Congress.

Anyone who thinks Bush and Cheney care about beating the truth out of Al Qaeda has rocks in his head. This President's truths are pre-fabricated before the prisoner even undergoes torture, and all that's required is that the prisoner play along by saying what George Bush wants to hear. Obviously, no information of use has been extracted, otherwise bin Laden would have been captured years ago.