A new lengthy article in this morning's New York Times purports to set forth "new details about why the [CIA interrogation] tapes were made and then eliminated." Written by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti (who broke the original story), what the article primarily does is rely on anonymous sources to assign principal responsibility for the tapes' destruction to mid-level CIA official Jose Rodriguez. But in doing so, the article identifies, in passing, the critical question that remains unanswered: what was the involvement of George Bush and Dick Cheney in the videos' destruction?

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.'s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency's inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations. Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.'s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general's report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Shane and Mazetti previously reported that "several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed." In that article, they quoted one senior intelligence official "with direct knowledge of the matter [who] said there had been 'vigorous sentiment' among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes." The White House has simply refused to say whether they were behind the decision.

Just consider how significant that question is, and how striking it is that it remains unanswered. By the time Addington and Gonzales were discussing this matter, it was well known -- obvious -- that those interrogations tapes were critically relevant to a number of judicial proceedings and government investigations, including The 9/11 Commission's. It is thus highly likely, to put it mildly, that any decision to destroy that evidence would constitute the crime of obstruction of justice, the same federal felony for which Lewis Libby has now (in a different matter) been convicted.

And here are the two top legal aides to the President and the Vice President participating in a meeting where the destruction of this vital evidence was expressly considered, yet we do not know what it is that they said. Did they advise that the tapes be destroyed of give implicit permission for it? If so, it very likely means that Bush and/or Cheney (and certainly their top aides) committed serious felonies.

But does anyone really believe that we're going to find out the answers to those questions any time soon? And even if we did find out the answers, and even if they were incriminating, does anyone believe that there would ever be any consequences, any accountability, for this wrongdoing by anyone above a mid-level position of responsibility, such as Rodriguez?

* * * * *

In case after case, our political establishment has adopted the "principle" that our most powerful actors are immune from the rule of law. And they've adopted the enabling supplemental "principle" that any information which our political leaders want to keep suppressed is -- by definition, for that reason alone -- information that is "classified" and should not be disclosed.

The instruments used to secure these prerogatives are numerous and growing. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick this week summarized the Bush administration's 10 most egregious legal inventions to enable lawbreaking, including the "states secrets privilege" which has now "has ballooned into a doctrine of blanket immunity for any conduct the administration wishes to hide" and the claim that "everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege." All of these developments have a common strain, a shared objective: ensuring that our highest political officials and our most powerful corporations are beyond the reach of the law.

Thus, our establishment believes that any information that would shed light on whether our most powerful actors have broken the law is information that shouldn't be disclosed. In those accidental cases when -- via unauthorized leaks -- information is disclosed that demonstrates that crimes have been committed, our establishment bands together to insist that nothing be done, that there is no need to investigate or hold anyone accountable, and that the only real wrongdoing is by those "the leakers" who disclosed the lawbreaking.

This is the same pattern seen over and over: leakers reveal that Bush broke the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law, and every investigation -- legislative and judicial -- is successfully blocked, and Congress then moves to legalize the lawbreaking. The top aide to Bush and Cheney, Lewis Libby, is found unanimously by a 12-person jury to have lied deliberately with the intent of blocking an FBI and Grand Jury investigation into illegal leaks and is sentenced by a conservative judge to prison, yet is protected from jail time by the President while our media and political establishment cheer almost unanimously.

Our largest telecommunication corporations reap huge profits by brazenly violating numerous, long-standing federal laws (.pdf) for years by enabling government access to our communications without any judicial approval, and our political establishment bands together to demand that they be protected from any consequences and that any efforts to uncover what happened be squelched. Our government implements a secret torture regime that violates numerous laws and treaties and Congress acts to legalize it and provide retroactive immunity to the lawbreakers. Congress subpoenas numerous officials to find out why 9 federal prosecutors were fired and, when the subpoenas are literally ignored, nothing happens.

And now, our government just destroys evidence crucial both to all sorts of court proceedings and a comprehensive investigation into the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history -- part and parcel of its general pattern of destroying or "losing" key evidence -- and the Honorable, Independent Attorney General tells both the legislative and judicial branches that they have no right even to investigate. And although we know for a fact that the top aides to both Bush and Cheney were involved in discussions of whether the tapes should be destroyed, we have no idea what they said and are unlikely ever to know, and even if we did find out, it's impossible to envision anything happening as a result.

* * * * *

And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences. While exempting themselves, these same figures impose increasingly Draconian "law and order" solutions on the masses to ensure that even small infractions of the law prompt vigorous prosecution and inflexible, lengthy prison terms.

As Matt Stoller recently noted in an excellent post on the bipartisan orthodoxies that are untouchable in political debates, "there are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done" (buying and consuming illegal drugs) and "2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world." It's almost impossible for the non-rich to defend themselves effectively against government accusations of criminality, and judges have increasingly less sentencing discretion to avoid imposing harsh jail terms. Punishment for crimes is for the masses only, not for members in good standing of our political and corporate establishment.

Where our political elite break the law, our leading media stars and pundits fulfill their central purpose by dutifully arguing that establishment figures who have broken the law have done nothing wrong and deserve protection, even our gratitude, when they do so. In the view of our establishment, even mere civil liability -- never mind criminal punishment -- is deeply unfair when imposed on lawbreaking corporations, as we see in the "debate" over telecom immunity.

This same warped principle is also expressed in how our establishment scorns the work John Edwards did in representing maimed or dead individuals against the corporations which, through recklessness or negligence, destroyed their lives. From a letter from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Times today (h/t Jay Diamond):

There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney's and John Edwards's wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards's multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards's policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they're found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards' self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romeny's wealth, spawned by his CEO-father's connections, is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite.

Naturally, our establishment sees itself as Good, and thus, whatever their most powerful leaders do -- even when illegal -- is never really bad. It can't be, because they do it. Hence, George Bush's and Lewis Libby's felonies aren't really like the felonies of the "drug dealers" and the other street dirt. Neither the Law nor Jail are for the clean, good, upstanding establishment members, so sayeth Jay Rockefeller and Fred Hiatt and Joe Klein and David Ignatius and the rest.

* * * * *

Most revealing of all, anyone who insists that this should be different -- anyone who believes that our highest political officials and largest corporations should be held accountable when they break the law -- is a shrill "partisan," bent on vengeance and Guilty of obstructionism: trying to prevent the political establishment from operating in a harmonious, bipartisan manner to do their Important Work. At least under the Bush presidency, investigations into wrongdoing are bad and disruptive and mean-spirited, and calls for consequences for illegal behavior are shrill and nasty.

Digby yesterday analyzed the sudden emergence of the Bipartisan Centrism fetishists -- the David Borens and Sam Nunns and David Broders and other old System Guardians who are threatening to back the third-party candidacy of Michael Bloomberg unless they quickly see more "bipartisanship." As Digby notes -- and one should read her whole post -- these Harmony Mavens were nowhere to be found during the last six years when our government was fully controlled by a one-party machine that did what it wanted without the slightest consequence.

Only now that the prospect has emerged -- however small and remote it is -- that there appears to be some rumblings of dissatisfaction among the masses over the deep corruption pervading every pore of our establishment are they now decreeing that we need Harmony and Bipartisan Cooperation:

I wrote about it right after the 2006 election --- as soon as the Republicans lost power, I knew the gasbags would insist that it's time to let bygones be bygones and meet the Republicans halfway in the spirit of a new beginning. GOP politicians have driven the debt sky-high and altered the government so as to be nearly unrecognizable, so logically the Democrats need to extend the hand of conciliation and move to meet them in the middle --- the middle now being so far right, it isn't even fully visible anymore.

Digby's right that this is an effort to enforce establishment-protecting ideological orthodoxies. The campaigns of Edwards, Mike Hucakbee and Ron Paul each, in their own ways, signify that there is some intense unrest and deep dissatisfaction with our political establishment, and this has to be quashed by the concealing device known as "bipartisanship." But it is also an attempt to ensure that nothing of any significance is exposed, that none of the lawbreaking and corruption of the last six years -- which they all enabled and cheered on -- sees the light of day.

There is a mildly increased desperation that is palpable among our political and media elites to protect and defend their system. The extent of their wrongdoing over the last several years -- political, legal and economic -- is so extreme that the potential for upheaval in the event of accountability is extreme as well. Their chief weapon to protect those privileges is immunity from the rule of law, and most of our political controversies -- over presidential power and state secrets and executive privilege and torture and eavesdropping and these CIA videos -- really share the same root: the effort of the establishment to maintain their immunity from impropriety-exposing legal proceedings and, thus, from political consequences.

Just as the warantless eavesropping revelations did, the CIA video scandal presents an extremely clear and straightforward case of serious lawbreaking by our highest government officials. It's far less complex and far more serious than the scandals that brought down Richard Nixon. That a rational person would be highly skeptical about the prospects that we will find out what happened, let alone that there will be consequences for any of it, is pretty compelling evidence of the kind of country we are becoming

UPDATE: On a not unrelated note, the annual survey of worldwide privacy rights conducted by Privacy International and EPIC has been released for 2007, and the U.S. has been downgraded from "Extensive Surveillance Society" to "Endemic Surveillance Society," the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the U.S. now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons.

Evidence that we are becoming a lawless surveillance state is abundant. But let's forget all of that and figure out how we can best micro-manage the internal affairs of Pakistan and Iraq and Russia and Iran so that we can preserve Freedom and Democracy for the world.
(c) 2008 Glenn Greenwald.

MEPHISTO, the demon who bought the soul of Faust in Goethe's monumental drama, describes himself as "a part of that force which always wants the bad and always creates the good."

Yossi Beilin, who resigned this week as chairman of the Meretz party, is Mephisto's opposite: he always wants the good and all too often creates the bad.

THE "SETTLEMENT BLOCS" provide a glaring example. It was Beilin who invented this term a dozen years ago. It was included in the unofficial understanding that became known as the "Beilin-Abu-Mazen agreement.".

The intention was good. Beilin believed that if most settlers were concentrated in several limited areas near the Green Line, the settlers as a whole would agree to a withdrawal from the rest of the West Bank.

The actual result was disastrous. The government and the settlers jumped at the opportunity. The permit of the "Zionist peace movement" was displayed like a Kosher certificate on the wall of a butcher shop selling pork chops. The settlement blocs were enlarged at a frantic pace and became veritable towns, like Ma'aleh Adumim, the Etzion Bloc and Modi'in Illit.

For dozens of years, the United States had insisted that all the settlements violate international law. But the approval granted to the "settlement blocs" enabled President George W. Bush to change this stance and approve Israeli "population centers" in the occupied territories. Haim Ramon, who in the past had been Beilin's partner in the group of "eight doves" within the Labor Party, went even further: he initiated the "Separation Wall," which in practice annexes the "settlement blocs" to Israel.

But Beilin's brilliant idea did not in the least diminish the opposition of the settlers to a withdrawal from the rest of the West Bank. On the contrary: they continue to prevent by force the dismantling of the settlement outposts, even a single tiny one. Nothing good came out of this idea. The result was totally bad.

ONE CAN GO ON enumerating Beilin's brilliant ideas. As in the song of the former master comedian (and current orthodox rabbi) Uri Zohar:

"The Jewish head is inventing patents for us." In Israel's political and diplomatic arena, there is no head more fertile than Beilin's.

I don't know what exact role Beilin played in the invention of the patents displayed at the 2000 Camp David conference. For example: the idea that Israel should demand sovereignty over the Temple Mount, but only below the surface. It did not appease the Israeli Right, but it terrified the Palestinians, who feared that Israel was intending to undermine the Islamic holy shrines until they collapsed, thus making it possible to replace them with the Third Jewish Temple. The next step was Ariel Sharon's "visit" to this sensitive site, which triggered the outbreak of the second intifada.

After the 2006 elections, Beilin had another brilliant idea: to invite Avigdor Liberman to a well publicized friendly breakfast. The intention was no doubt good (even if I can't fathom what it was) but the result was calamitous: it gave Liberman a "leftist" Kosher certificate which enabled Ehud Olmert to include him in his government.

After that, Meretz announced that it would not, under any circumstances, sit in a government that included Liberman. But one cannot return Rosemary's baby to the womb of its mother. Liberman stays in the government, Meretz remains outside. Now Olmert explains to the Americans that he cannot dismantle even one settlement outpost, nor negotiate about the "core issues" of the conflict, because Liberman would then bring the government coalition crashing down.

Indeed, Beilin is very generous in dispensing Kosher certificates to extreme rightists. On the eve of one of the annual mass meetings of the "Zionist Left" in commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin, he announced that he was prepared to appear together with the leader of the most extreme Right, General Effi Eytam. Fortunately for him, nothing came of this.

There must be some connection between these ideas and his stand at critical junctures. For example: his support for Ariel Sharon's Separation Plan, without making it conditional on reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. The result: the Gaza Strip turned into the "biggest prison on earth."

Worse: the determined support of Beilin for the Second Lebanon War during its first and most critical stage. In the course of the war, he proposed attacking Syria, too. Only in the fourth week, after a dozen stormy anti-war demonstrations, did Beilin start to voice any criticism and have Meretz organize a demonstration of its own.

IN THE other pan of the scales lie two of Beilin's major positive contributions: to the Oslo Declaration of Principles and the Geneva initiative.

His input to Oslo was certainly significant. But he did not prevent two black holes in the agreement: the omission of the crucial words "Palestinian state" and the absence of an unequivocal ban on the continuation of settlement activity.

These two faults have buried the agreement. The negotiations for a permanent peace agreement, which were to be concluded in 1999, did not even start. The settlements were being enlarged rapidly while everybody was talking about peace.

The Geneva Initiative, on the other side, was entirely a creation of Beilin. It could have crowned his career. Its inauguration became an international event. The Great of the Earth gave it their blessing. It seemed that it would give a decisive push to the peace process.

This did not happen. Ariel Sharon brushed it from the table with the back of his hand: he announced the Separation Plan and diverted national and international attention away from Geneva.

That need not have been the end of the initiative. There could have been a sustained campaign in Israel and throughout the world, preaching it from every pulpit, putting it on the agenda again and again. But then Beilin made the greatest mistake of his life: he ran for the chairmanship of Meretz - and won.

THE ERROR was clear from the first moment: there is a basic contradiction between being a party chairman and being the Prophet of Geneva, a person totally identified with the initiative and its main advocate at home and abroad.

When the Initiator of Geneva became the leader of Meretz, he crippled the initiative by turning it into the platform of one small party. And, on the other hand, he turned Meretz into a one-issue party entirely devoted to the promotion of the initiative. Both the initiative and the party lost.

A smart person like Beilin should have understood that. But I suspect that he has two souls struggling for mastery: the soul of an ideas-man and the soul of a party operative. He is not satisfied with being only one.

The mistake carried a high price. This week, Beilin was compelled to announce his resignation from the Meretz chairmanship.

There is something mysterious in the character of this party: it devours its leaders, one after another. First its founding mother, Shulamit Aloni, was practically kicked out. The man who did this, Yossi Sarid, was compelled to resign in his turn, when the party shrank from 12 to 6 Knesset seats, turning from a medium into a small party. After the last elections, under Beilin, it was down to 5.

Under his leadership, the Meretz faction was a strange bird: neither a real opposition party nor a member of the coalition. Beilin grew up in the establishment, and even when he is formally in opposition he thinks and acts like a member of the establishment. Not only did Meretz, under his leadership, support Sharon's Separation Plan and Olmert's Lebanon war, but even since then Beilin has been openly flirting with the Prime Minister. Just when the great majority in the country has reached the conclusion that Olmert is unfit for his job, Beilin gives him a Kosher certificate.

He says that he believes that Olmert sincerely wants peace. He quotes with approval the sayings of the New Olmert: "My father was wrong and Ben-Gurion was right" (Olmert's father was an Irgun stalwart), and also "Israel is lost" if it does not implement the Two-State solution. Nice-sounding sentences - only Olmert moves in the very opposite direction, avoiding serious peace negotiations and waging war in Gaza. Now the Meretz people seem to have had enough.

When a party kicks its leader out, it is always a sad event. But this is not the first time it has happened to Beilin, and that invites some serious questions.

He grew up from early youth in the Labor Party and was one of the promising foster-children of Shimon Peres. As Deputy Foreign Minister he had the opportunity to give full scope to his untiring creativity. But then Ehud Barak came to power, with his uncanny ability to put the wrong person in the wrong position. Beilin was appointed Minister of Justice, a job that paralyzed his special talents.

On the eve of the next elections, the Labor Party banished Beilin to a hopeless place on its election list. In fury and frustration, he left the party, slammed the door behind him and joined Meretz. Now he has been practically pushed out of there.

Unlike Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid, Beilin has no intention of "going home." His fertile brain is already hatching new plans. In recent interviews he prophesies a fundamental change in the political landscape and the creation of a new political force including members from Kadima, Labor and Meretz. Presumably he imagines that this party would be headed by Olmert, and that Beilin would play a central role. It would be fighting against Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. An interesting idea, but its chances are close to nil.

BEILIN'S PROBLEMS go beyond his personal story. They symbolize the tragedy of the camp which calls itself the "Zionist Left." Probably the appellation itself already contains the problem.

This camp was born a hundred years ago, and it seems that it never once engaged in real self-criticism. In his last interview, Beilin uses all the terminology of the Zionist establishment. Like everybody else he calls the Palestinian fighters in the Gaza strip "terrorists." In his scale of values, "it is important that a boy attains the rank of an outstanding soldier." And, of course, "If Israel ceases to be a Jewish state, I will have no more interest in it."

With such views, the Zionist peace camp cannot become a political fighting force, engage in a real opposition struggle, bring about change in the country. And that is more than just one of Yossi Beilin's personal problems.
(c) 2008 Uri Avnery ~~~ Gush Shalom

Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I'd argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.

For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes.

On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That's understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what's happening on the other side - the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I'm not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P. candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.

Why would politicians support Bushonomics? After all, the public is very unhappy with the state of the economy, for good reason. The "Bush boom," such as it was, bypassed most Americans - median family income, adjusted for inflation, has stagnated in the Bush years, and so have the real earnings of the typical worker. Meanwhile, insecurity has increased, with a declining fraction of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers.

And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches. For a few years, the economy was at least creating jobs at a respectable pace - but as the housing slump and the associated credit crunch accelerate and spill over to the rest of the economy, most analysts expect employment to weaken, too.

All in all, it's an economic and political environment in which you'd expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration's economic policies and record - say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee - a peculiar case who'll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention - the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

To see the extent to which Republican politicians still cower before the power of movement conservatism, consider the sad case of John McCain.

Mr. McCain's lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war - which Mr. McCain fervently supports - and with income inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he's become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That's an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren't offset by spending cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here - if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be offset? - even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the time shows that he's trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it's better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn't always a rock-solid economic conservative.

So what does the conversion of Mr. McCain into an avowed believer in voodoo economics - and the comparable conversions of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani - tell us? That bitter partisanship and political polarization aren't going away anytime soon.

There's a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems.

Ecclesiastes was right when he wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. The Thursday assassination of Pakistani reformer Benazir Bhutto gives the world a fresh reminder of the old lesson that those who lead the way invite attack. Clearly Bhutto herself was aware of this grim reality, since she had discussed it months earlier in a letter to supporters laying the blame for her possible assassination squarely on the shoulders of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf.

The devilish details of Bhutto's death have all Pakistan raising hell with a wave of riots that could turn in to a revolution before all is said and done. Her frenzied supporters demand answers to questions that their government does not have the credibility to answer satisfactorily. Where was her security at the fatal moment? Who fired the shots that rang out across the crowd, the pistol waving gunman in grainy photos from the scene or the sniper reported by Bhutto supporters? After being shot and then suicide bombed, why does the official autopsy report released a day later claim that neither bullets nor bombs had anything to do with her death?

Some Middle East experts estimate that two thirds of Pakistanis believe that Musharraf and the corrupt Establishment upholding him were either guilty of committing the Bhutto murder, allowing it to happen or covering up details after it happened.

Domestic Deadliness

All the sound and fury from Southwest Asia would signify nothing in America if the vast majority of Americans believed that the United States of "unitary executive" Bush was fundamentally different from the Pakistan of military dictator Musharraf. The vast majority of Americans, though, believe that the Bush League is capable of any level of mischief. In fact, the two thirds of us who detest him also believe that Bush and the corrupt Establishment upholding him were either guilty of committing the 9/11 mass murder, allowing it to happen or covering up details after it happened.

In these troubled days, it is quite credible to innumerable US citizens that we have been neoconned into standing our republic on its head. The new millennium was dubbed the New American Century by Ivy League Bush Boyz and Israel-first Zionazis, then on 9/11 -- the date number coinciding with our national emergency code -- a manufactured terror spectacular began a counterrevolution against our Declaration and Constitution. Our new King George established secret prisons, torture chambers and imperial wars, while snatching away civil rights all the way back to Magna Carta.

To a sizable chunk of the American electorate, the radical analysis in the paragraph above seems to be a fair exposition of our current political crisis, and the inability of such views -- or indeed of any anti-establishmentarian views -- to find _expression in the mainstream media is just so much more proof that the System is flawed, the Establishment is inimical and the New American Century has always been a Bush League codeword for a dictatorial New World Order.

Paul's Peril

Since 9/11, the Internet has become the printing press of the Second American Revolution, fearlessly exploring issues that would never receive the imprimatur of the Globalist/Zionist mainstream media, political parties or apathetic academics. Its power is so unsettling to the elites and their pet projects of the Homeland State and Global War that in recent months the House and Senate have declared war upon it as an instrument of homegrown terror. To the elites the most dreadful of all netizens is Dr. Ron Paul, the 10-term independent Republican from Texas, whose bread and butter as a presidential candidate is the freethinking Internet user. Paul has boldly proclaimed his presidential bid "The Ron Paul Revolution," and lived up to this billing by proposing the abolition of Homeland Security and the Global War. He envisions and proclaims vastly increased individual liberty and vastly reduced taxation. Organized efforts by the mainstream media to restrict or ridicule his message have only made it and his political base grow larger. He has been dubbed "Dr. No" for his prescription of less government to heal our sickly body politic, and there is a real possibility that untold millions of Americans will say yes to Dr. No in the upcoming state primaries.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must own up to some tenuous personal connections to Al Gore, whose Carthage homeplace was about 20 miles or so from my home in Watertown. My cousin was one of his press officers for several years, back in Gore's House and Senate days. Gore was the very first person I ever interviewed as a college journalism student -- a sit-down (obtained through the good offices of my cousin, naturally) during one of Gore's swings through Knoxville during his first Senate run. And when Gore made his first run for the House of Representatives in 1976, in our Congressional district, he came to my father, who was a community leader, for his endorsement, and asked him to introduce him around town. My father had worked locally for the Senate campaigns of Gore's father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., so he always referred to Gore Jr. as "Little Al."

That's about it, beyond the yearly Christmas cards that my father (along with thousands of other people) still gets from "The Gores." I myself have not laid eyes on or spoke word with Gore in 25 years. I did have one brief encounter with his local Senate office in Knoxville (years after my cousin had left his employ), when I was pulling every wire I could find to get support for an emergency extension to the insurance coverage for my first wife, who had been hospitalized for a catastrophic mental illness. (She was actually my ex-wife by then, but we still lived together with our children.) I worked for the state university system then, so my insurance was through the state government, and I had to go to Nashville and appear before an appeals board and beg for an extension; otherwise, my wife would have been turfed out of the specialized hospital and we'd be left to fend for our own. I got letters of support from Tennessee's other senator at the time, Jim Sasser, and a couple of other high-level contacts who remembered my father from the old days. Gore's people said they'd passed the request on to Washington and something was in the pipeline, but it didn't arrive before the hearing, and it didn't matter anyway: the tribunal -- appointees of then-Governor Lamar Alexander, the feckless, frat-boy non-entity who now sits in the Senate himself -- turned down the appeal. The insurance ran out and she had to leave the hospital, despite her desperate condition; we declared bankruptcy, and she died a year later from cancer. Just another story of life on the ground in the shining city on the hill.

But I said all that to say this: when I lay into Al Gore, it's not something I do lightly. In some small way, it's like going after one of my own -- a vestige of the kind of "tribalism" that Arthur Silber has delineated so well. Indeed, I come from a long line of "yellow dog Democrats," and it takes a good deal of effort for somebody like that to resist the tribal pull and see the reality in front of our eyes. I trust I've demonstrated my resistance to this pull in my attacks on the Democrats over the years; at the same time, I think this heritage gives some added credibility to the attacks: they're not coming from someone predisposed to despise Democrats anyway, but from someone who has been compelled by reality to change their views and see the truth.

So now we come to Little Al's latest caper: his noble stand in the Bali climate change negotiations, denouncing the United States for blocking and sabotaging efforts to confront this global crisis. Fine words, true words -- but the messenger was perhaps not the most credible. George Monbiot lays it all out clearly in this piece: We've been suckered again by the US. So far the Bali deal is worse than Kyoto.

"After 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session."

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

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The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore's team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy "hot air" from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore's scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren't producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don't. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world cursed and stamped its foot. But his intransigence affected only the US. Gore's team ruined it for everyone....

In both cases, the US demanded terms that appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore's proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it...

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Gore's trading scams, the clean development mechanism. Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is traveling in the wrong direction.

Although Gore does a better job of governing now he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but American politics had made it impossible. In July 1997, the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones. Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans....

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the US act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media - particularly in the US - in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it. I won't bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday, there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after "Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity" and "Florida store sells 'Santa Hates You' T-shirt". >{? Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats...The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is signaling that a second Clinton presidency will follow the look-to-the-future, don't-worry-about-accountability approach toward Republican wrongdoing that marked Bill Clinton's years in office.

That was the significance of former President Clinton's remarkable Dec. 17 comment that his wife's first act in the White House would be to send Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush on an around-the-world mission to repair America's damaged image.

"The first thing she intends to do is to send me and former President Bush and a number of other people around the world to tell them that America is open for business and cooperation again," said Bill Clinton, who has accompanied the senior Bush on international humanitarian missions over the past several years.

What was perhaps most stunning about the remark was its assumption that Americans would be impressed that the country's two dominant political dynasties would team up in early 2009 to tidy up some of the mess created by the headstrong son of the senior dynasty, the Bush Family.

The Bushes and the Clintons - who have held pieces of the nation's executive power for more than a quarter century dating back to George H.W. Bush's election as Vice President in 1980 - essentially would be keeping matters within the board rooms of the Washington Establishment.

: In responding to Bill Clinton's remark, George H.W. Bush issued a statement making clear he would not join in any slap at his son's foreign policy. That also means Hillary Clinton's "first thing" is unthinkable if her new administration were trying to exact any accountability from George W. Bush for his wrongdoing.

So, to get the senior Bush's cooperation on the worldwide tour, there would have to be an implicit understanding that the second Clinton administration wouldn't investigate the younger Bush's crimes - from authorizing torture, ordering warrantless wiretaps, exposing CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, waging war under false pretenses and other abuses of executive powers.

If Hillary Clinton does get elected, you can expect to hear lots of talk about "leaving that one for the historians" or about the danger of increased partisanship if the Democrats were viewed as trying "get even" by exposing Bush's offenses.

The wise heads of Washington surely would nod in approval at this "bipartisanship" of a Democratic administration deciding not to get bogged down in "refighting the battles" of the second Bush administration.

The First Clinton-Bush Deal

That's exactly what happened in 1993 when Bill Clinton entered the White House after defeating George H.W. Bush.

Clinton and other senior Democrats shut down or wrapped up four investigations that implicated senior Republicans, including Bush, in constitutional abuses of power and criminal wrongdoing during the Reagan-Bush years.

The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages case was still alive, with special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh furious over new evidence that President George H.W. Bush may have obstructed justice by withholding his own notes from investigators and then ducking an interview that Walsh had put off until after the 1992 elections.

Bush also had sabotaged the investigation by pardoning six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve 1992, possibly the first presidential pardon ever issued to protect the same President from criminal liability. _ _In late 1992, Congress also was investigating Bush's alleged role in secretly aiding Iraq's Saddam Hussein during and after Hussein's eight-year-long war with Iran.

Representative Henry Gonzalez, a Democrat from Texas who had served three decades in Congress, had exposed intricate financial schemes that the Reagan-Bush administrations employed to assist Hussein. There also were allegations of indirect U.S. military aid through third countries, including the supply of dangerous chemicals to Iraq.

Lesser known investigations were examining two other sets of alleged wrongdoing: the so-called October Surprise issue (allegations that Bush and other Republicans interfered with Jimmy Carter's hostage negotiations with Iran during the 1980 campaign) and the Passportgate affair (evidence that Bush operatives improperly searched Clinton's passport file in 1992, looking for dirt that could be used to discredit his patriotism and secure reelection for Bush).

All told, the four sets of allegations, if true, would paint an unflattering portrait of the 12-year Republican rule, with two illegal dirty tricks (October Surprise and Passportgate) book-ending ill-considered national security schemes in the Middle East (Iran-Contra and Iraqgate).

Had the full stories been told, the American people might have perceived the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush quite differently.

But the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats dropped all four investigations beginning in early 1993, either through benign neglect - by failing to hold hearings and keeping the issues alive in the news media - or by actively closing the door on investigative leads.

Clinton let George H.W. Bush retreat gracefully into retirement. [For details on the scandals, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Joining the Cover-ups

In his 2004 memoir, My Life, Clinton wrote that he "disagreed with the [Iran-Contra] pardons and could have made more of them but didn't." Clinton cited several reasons for giving his predecessor a pass.

"I wanted the country to be more united, not more divided, even if that split would be to my political advantage," Clinton wrote. "Finally, President Bush had given decades of service to our country, and I thought we should allow him to retire in peace, leaving the matter between him and his conscience."

By his choice of words, Clinton revealed how he saw information - not something that belonged to the American people and had intrinsic value to the democratic process - but as a potential weapon that could be put to "political advantage."

On the Iran-Contra pardons, Clinton saw himself as generously passing up a club that he could have wielded to bludgeon an adversary. He chose instead to join in a cover-up in the name of national unity.

Similarly, the Democratic congressional leadership ignored the flood of incriminating evidence pouring in to the "October Surprise" task force in December 1992.

Chief counsel Lawrence Barcella told me later that he urged task force chairman Lee Hamilton to extend the investigation several months to examine this new evidence of Republican guilt, but Hamilton ordered Barcella simply to wrap up the probe with a finding that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign had done nothing wrong.

Some of the new incriminating evidence - including an unprecedented report from the Russian government about its knowledge of illicit Republican contacts with Iran - was simply hidden away in boxes that I discovered two years later and dubbed "The October Surprise X-Files."

The "Iraqgate" investigation met a similar fate under Clinton's Justice Department, which chose to ignore or dismiss evidence of covert shipments of war materiel to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s.

In 1996, when former Reagan national security official Howard Teicher came forward with an affidavit describing secret U.S.-backed arms shipments to Iraq, Clinton's Justice Department went on the offensive - against Teicher, trying to discredit him and bullying him into silence.

That same year, the Clinton administration did nothing when Reagan's 1984 campaign chief Ed Rollins wrote in his 1996 memoir Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms that a top Filipino politician had admitted delivering an illegal $10 million cash payment to Reagan from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

"I was the guy who gave the ten million from Marcos to your campaign," the Filipino told Rollins in 1991, according to the memoir. "I was the guy who made the arrangements and delivered the cash personally. ...It was a personal gift from Marcos to Reagan." __Rollins withheld the names of the Filipino politician and the Republican lobbyist who allegedly handled the pay-off.

The stunning anecdote did attract some press coverage in 1996 but the story died because the Clinton administration made no effort to follow it up.

(Rollins is now chairman of Republican Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign.) [For details on Marcos-Reagan case, see Consortiumnews.com's "Huckabee's Chairman Hid Payoff Secret."]

Proving Themselves

In the mid-1990s, even as the Republican attack machine pounded the Clintons with allegations about alleged ethical lapses and marital infidelities, the Clinton administration acted like it was determined to prove that it could be trusted with the nation's dark secrets, that it could cover up wrongdoing with the best of them.

The consequence for America, however, was different. With George H.W. Bush's dubious public record whitewashed, the door was opened to the restoration of the Bush Dynasty. If the full truth had been known about former President Bush, it's hard to conceive how George W. Bush ever could have become President.

Now, as Hillary Clinton seeks a strong showing in the Iowa caucuses to solidify her image as the inevitable Democratic nominee, she appears ready to pick up the mantle as the Democratic protector of the Bush Family's legacy. Though she may utter some tough words about George W. Bush on the campaign trail, she's not likely to follow up if she wins the White House.

If Bill Clinton is telling the truth about Hillary Clinton's "first thing" to do as President - recruiting George H.W. Bush for a worldwide goodwill tour on behalf of America's image - that will require closing the door on any serious investigation of George W. Bush.

Doubts about Barack Obama's presidential credentials have crystallized during the past two weeks over his stewardship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on European Affairs, which has convened no policy hearings since he took over as its chairman last January. That startling fact, first uncovered by Steve Clemons, who blogs on the Washington Note, prompted acid comment in Europe about the Illinois senator's failure to visit the continent since assuming the committee post, and even speculation that he had never traveled there except for a short stopover in London.

But why should those questions matter to Americans who consider Senate hearings so much useless verbiage? And why does anyone care whether and where a would-be president has traveled, on official or personal visits?

The simple answer to the first question is that Senate hearings do not merely provide occasions for grandstanding as many voters may suspect, but fulfill a critical purpose in providing information and perspective to lawmakers. In the Senate, the foreign relations subcommittees have few direct legislative responsibilities, but they have traditionally gathered substantive research for the committee itself and for the rest of the Senate.

That is why congressional hearings matter, and why a subcommittee chairmanship represents a significant responsibility. Knowledge is not just power but the fundamental requirement for either house of Congress to act as an equal of the executive branch in government.

Should Obama wonder whether he ought to have bothered with his subcommittee, he could ask his friendly rival Joe Biden, D-Del., who chaired the Europe subcommittee for many years during the Cold War. Biden effectively exploited the chairmanship to transform himself from a junior member into one of the Senate's most knowledgeable experts on arms control, nuclear weapons, European attitudes toward America and the Soviet Union, the European Union's policies, and the role of NATO, which also comes under the subcommittee's mandate. As a result, Biden starred in Senate hearings on the SALT II arms treaties and eventually established himself as a leading national voice on foreign policy.

"I wouldn't call it a neglect of duty but a missed opportunity to explore issues that will be of fundamental importance to the next administration," says ambassador John Ritch, who served for two decades as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's senior staffer on European affairs and East-West relations, before going on to represent the Clinton administration at the United Nations organizations in Vienna.

Ritch points out that as subcommittee chair, Obama could have examined a wide variety of urgent matters, from the role of NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq to European energy policy and European responses to climate change -- and of course, the undermining of the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by the Bush administration. There is, indeed, almost no issue of current global interest that would have fallen outside the subcommittee's purview.

Certainly Obama is capable of formulating the concepts and questions that his subcommittee could have explored. In an otherwise unimportant press release hailing the visit of Poland's president to Washington last July, he took the trouble to note several important issues affecting our relations with Europe, including the renewal of transatlantic relationships, repairing our ties with what the Bush White House contemptuously called "old Europe," integrating Russia into Western institutions, consulting our allies on proposed missile defense deployments, and securing additional European troops for the Afghan security mission.

Perhaps he could not have been expected to undertake an ambitious round of hearings when he was in the midst of deciding to run for president -- but that decision may merely point up the conflict between ambition and experience that has raised questions about his candidacy.

So much for what might have been. Both Obama and his campaign spokespersons have taken pains to deny the suggestion that he has spent no time in Europe. As he said at the first Democratic debate last April, Obama regards the European Union and NATO as the most important allies of the United States, which would make ignorance of Europe a huge void for an aspiring chief executive.

"I've traveled extensively in Europe ... I love Europe," Obama told the Iowa Independent Web site a couple of days ago. But as Clemons noted on the Washington Note, the Obama campaign has not provided much detail on his European experiences and itineraries so far.

Those details are readily available, as indicated in a Chicago Tribune profile of Obama, which covered his 2005 senatorial trip to examine nuclear sites in Russia with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That story, whose deeper theme was Obama's tutelage in foreign affairs, mentioned that he had traded his blue tourist passport -- "which he had taken across Asia, Australia and Africa as well as most of Europe" -- for a burgundy-colored passport that identifies him as an official of the U.S. government.

I was near the deadline for a column when I glanced at a TV screen. "The Suze Orman Show," airing on CNBC at prime time, exerted a powerful force in my hotel room. And the fate of this column was sealed.

Seeing her the other night, within a matter of seconds, I realized that the jig was up. How could a mere underachieving syndicated columnist hope to withstand the blandishments and certainties of Suze Orman, bestselling author and revered eminence from the erudite bastions of PBS to the hard-boiled financial realms of General Electric's CNBC?

To resist was pointless. What if I tried to write as a carping critic? After all, Suze Orman has already explained that such critics, particularly the males of the species, just resent a strong woman with the guts, smarts and determination to cast off the shackles of a retrograde past. "Ladies," I could hear her say from the stage, with one of her magnificent flourishes, "don't let that nonsense wreck your future." So, in hopes of putting myself in sync with her redemptive power, I turn the rest of this particular column over to a distillation of Suze Orman's messaging:

Your money, your life. It's as simple as that. Ladies -- and you men, too -- the time is past when we hold back. Not having control over our own money is something we can't afford, and I mean that literally. We just cannot afford it.

I'll be blunt here. Anyone who tells you there's something wrong with getting rich and then richer has some serious unresolved problems. Heh heh.

If you want a solution, you go out and grab it. You rule money or money will rule you. People who can't wrap their minds around that vital concept -- they get nowhere.

You want to solve social problems, start with yourself. If you can't let yourself accumulate wealth, you're part of a social problem -- like I used to be. Now I do very well, thank you, and I don't want to hear about how some financial company is making money from my self-help website. Sure, I'm getting richer all the time. You got a problem with that?

The more people get rich, the happier I am. Even a leader of the Chinese Communists (and you know what dummies they were) said it straight out maybe 30 years ago -- "it's glorious to be rich." The baggage we're still carrying around tells us not to mind if some guy says it but if I as a woman make the same point then the knives come out. Ladies, to hell with that. We're not going back.

It's not glorious to be low-income, that's for damn sure. I know what that's like. Now I go back to PBS at pledge time, and they welcome me with open arms. Public broadcasting. Makes me almost sentimental. But catch me on CNBC these days, and you'll see that I'm swimming with the big-money fish.

I was a waitress for a pathetically long time. I had to find the courage. The courage, ladies. And I did. Now look at me.

I don't just want you to plan for the future. I want you to make enough money to buy your future: lock, stock and barrel. Money money money. I've got it on the brain, and I make no apology. I love money. It's freedom, and ladies -- you can earn freedom if you apply yourselves.

Some people can't stop complaining that the economic system has winners and losers. Whether they realize it or not, that's probably because they're bound and determined to be losers. Well, I think it's a heck of a lot better to be a winner -- don't you?

What kind of media future do you think I would've had if I chose to keep complaining about the system because of losers? I'd probably be a loser too! Not if I can help it. And I can, obviously.

Benazir Bhutto and her supporters who died with her during the suicide attack Dec. 27 are the latest victims of decades of dangerous U.S. support for Pakistan's military regime. The country's dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has held his grip on power despite increasing popular unrest. The Bush administration got nervous, turning to Bhutto to preserve the status quo in Pakistan. There is no doubt the exiled former prime minister was personally brave to return to her country. But Pakistani professor Pervez Hoodbhoy was critical nevertheless: "After returning to Pakistan, she made clear that for a few table scraps, she would have happily teamed up with Musharraf under the hopelessly absurd U.S. plan to give the military government a civilian face."

While President Bush imposed "regime change" on Iraq, based on