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Saved by the bomb?
In August, 1945, near Manila, and for years later, I thought my life had been spared by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. Now, I'm not so sure

On Aug. 6, 1945, at a staging area a few miles north of Manila, I was a non-commisioned officer in a company of Army Special Forces preparing for yet another amphibious assault.

For two years we had leapfrogged from southern New Guinea to the heart of the Philippines under Gen. MacArthur's command. Everyone knew that the D-Day of all D-Days was near at hand and was preparing for the mother of all landings with stoic resignation.

On that day the stunning news came that a super bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima with devastating effect. After confusing and contradictory reports we learned what the word "radioactive" meant and that the war was over.

Soon, orders came through for us to land at Wakayama on Honshu Island. Ours was the first contingent to hit the beach and, while we were prepared for combat, it was immediately obvious that there was no opposition and little to defend. After establishing a perimeter we cautiously reconnoitered. For several weeks I was able to move around freely and made a point of observing the damage that our B-29s had inflicted on every aspect of civilian and defense installations. There were no uniformed enemy soldiers except at the Osaka train station and those demoralized individuals were trying to slip home, one by one. Japan's main defense forces had been obliterated by the B-29s.

For years after, I was among those who felt that dropping the A-bomb was not only justified, but a military necessity. "I was one of those saved by dropping the bomb!" was my stock answer to the anti-nuke peaceniks. That usually shut them up, since I was most often the only one who had been anywhere near Japan during WW II.

End of story? Not quite. ...

...The truth is, I now believe, that in August of 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army could not have defended its homeland against a well-trained troop of Eagle Scouts....

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Baghdad Mayor Is Ousted by a Shiite Group and Replaced
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."...

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‘Full-Quiver’ Baptists Say No to Contraception
Southern Seminary President Al Mohler recently charged married couples who decide to remain childless are guilty of “moral rebellion” against God’s design.

“Marriage, sex, and children are part of one package,” Mohler said July 27 in Baptist Press. “To deny any part of this wholeness is to reject God’s intention in creation--and His mandate revealed in the Bible.”

Mohler quoted a declaration in Psalm 127: “Behold, children are a gift of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.”

Mohler did not explain why he and his wife, Mary, stopped after two children,...

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Forthcoming Book, Movie Show Man ‘Living Biblically’
Writer A.J. Jacobs has a mission: to obey the Bible literally for a full year.

The senior editor at Esquire magazine will share the results of that endeavor in The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible As Literally As Possible, which Simon & Schuster plans to publish in fall 2006....

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'War for Righteousness' Book Garners National Attention
Read a statement about America's moral duty "to show the paths of freedom to all the world" and you might think it was a quote taken from the day's newspapers. But that statement was made 90 years ago by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, three years before America became involved in World War I.

The similarities that modern-day war terminology has with that of World War I has drawn national attention to Dr. Richard M. Gamble's book, "The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation." ...

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Onward, Christian Soldiers
...What Richard Gamble has done in this important study is to show that this violent tradition of liberal righteousness extends much further into the past. The War for Righteousness chronicles the story of “progressive” Christian clergy, whom we might expect to be faithful to the Prince of Peace, but who instead overwhelmingly favored U.S. involvement in World War I. German militarism, which they viewed as responsible for the war, was in their eyes a scourge upon civilization that had to be eradicated; otherwise the international order would not be redeemed and ultimately set on the path of righteousness.

That is an important piece of history in itself. But Gamble also shows how these clergymen, caught up in their conviction that the U.S. was at least in some sense the savior of the world, applied to America the same language that Christians had traditionally applied to Christ. The Christian categories and concepts that Social Gospel theologians had found malleable enough to make railroad regulation sound like a direct command of Christ were thus drafted into service in the conflict that had engulfed Europe. It thus became impossible for them to conceive of the war in measured, rational terms: to America they had assigned the righteousness of Christ, and there could be no compromise between Christ and Satan....

... These thinkers likewise criticized a transcendent view of the kingdom of God, suggesting instead that the kingdom of God would be achieved once “justice” had come to characterize human relations and social ills were at last eradicated. According to Rev. C. Arthur Lincoln, pastor of Buffalo’s First Congregational Church, the church’s goal was “not that men should become Christians and thus save their souls from hell but that men should become Christian and work hard to save the world from hell.” It was with such thoughts in mind that progressive Christians threw themselves into the holy cause of World War I.

It was once the conventional wisdom that World War I marked the end of progressivism in America. But as economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard showed, the war in fact represented the culmination of progressivism. The progressive mentality that was so anxious for Americans to shed Jeffersonian cautions about big government was gratified by the domestic consequences of the war. Progressives, who overwhelmingly supported U.S. entry, were delighted at the opportunity both to extend state power through the massive economic planning that Woodrow Wilson adopted during the war and to exploit wartime patriotism to promote collectivism and the idea of service to the state as American values.

And that is just how progressive Christianity saw things as well. Christian Century happily predicted that “the right of the State to commandeer its able-bodied citizens for service will survive the war and will be greatly strengthened by it.” Military training camps, they hoped, would become “permanent features of our national life,” though they would train men for social service rather than for war.

Christian Century likewise spoke of the increasing acknowledgment of “the social sin of the German nation as a whole.” Now that America understood the important progressive Christian concepts of social sin and guilt, it would “be incomparably easier to apply the principle of social sinning to groups and institutions within a single nation and to bring to bear upon them through the social gospel the super-personal forces of condemnation and destruction.” The war had thus facilitated the application of the social gospel both domestically and internationally.

According to Gamble, progressive Christians viewed the war in Manichaean terms rather than as the morally ambiguous clash of imperial rivals that it was. “For some of the clergy,” he explains, “the European War by 1916 had already assumed the character of a holy war.” He quotes a seminary professor as saying that “pacifism does not mean passivity” and “does not renounce physical force.” To remain neutral while Europe fought its own wars “may have been justifiable for our nation in its infancy; it is not now. The pacifists do not advocate any such peace policy as that. Their motive is not safety but service. They would have ours not a hermit nation but a humanitarian nation.”

Gamble cites a number of figures who actually feared that the conflict might end prematurely, before righteousness had had the opportunity to triumph. One progressive Christian told a meeting of the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, “We do not want the war stopped until peace can be established on the basis of justice. For myself I believe it must be fought out.”

When in December 1916 Woodrow Wilson invited the major powers to state their war aims (as a prelude to possible talks aimed at an end to hostilities), 60 prominent clergymen signed a letter of rebuke to the president. “We are apt to forget,” they wrote, “that there are conditions under which the mere stopping of warfare may bring a curse instead of a blessing. We need to be reminded that peace is the triumph of righteousness and not the mere sheathing of the sword.”

The idiom of the progressive Christian even made its way into the halls of Congress on the eve of war. More than one congressman compared Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of the world to the divine mission that the U.S. was about to undertake. A New York congressman declared that “Christ gave his life upon the cross that mankind might gain the Kingdom of Heaven, while to-night we shall solemnly decree the sublimest sacrifice ever made by a nation for the salvation of humanity, the institution of world-wide liberty and freedom.”

Gamble contends that in the name of bringing about perpetual peace, progressive clergy, through their crude application of Christian language and concepts to the war and its contending parties, helped to legitimize the 20th century’s first total war....

...In the progressive mindset, the war became the proving ground for Christians who possessed a social consciousness. Instead of focusing on the hereafter, the truly saved Christian was the one who offered himself here and now in service to his fellow man. “The best mark of a ‘saved’ man,” wrote Rev. William P. Merrill in his book Christian Internationalism, “is not that he wants to go to heaven, but that he is willing to go to China, or to the battle-field in France, or to the slums of the city, or to the last dollar of his resources, or to the limit of his energy, to set forward the Kingdom of God.” This is a particularly revealing remark, according to Gamble: “In Merrill’s expansive ideal, there was apparently no distinction between personal redemption, social service, and enlistment in the United States Army.”

Ecumenism is an inevitable byproduct when a pluralistic society goes to war, since it becomes urgent to emphasize that what unites the citizenry is more important than what divides them. Serving in the trenches alongside men of a variety of creeds and performing reciprocal acts of heroism can only have a similar effect.

Recognizing this, a New York Morning Telegraph editorial in 1918 observed that “loyalty to the flag swiftly is coming to be recognized as of equal or even greater virtue than fidelity to a church, a religious sect, or an ordained priesthood. … Soldiers of Moses, soldiers of Christ, and soldiers of Democracy have become unified in the one Grand Army of Liberty, which is giving the only meaning worth while to …‘The Church Militant.’” Thus was the United States made something sacred, higher than all other fidelities and obligations....

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The Most Famous Christian of the 20th Century?
Here’s a little trivia question for you. Who was the most famous Christian of the 20th century?

Mother Teresa? Nope. Billy Graham? Nope. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Guess again. Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, any and all popes, any and all U.S. presidents…Nah, throw ‘em out.

The most famous Christian of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler.

Sure, we call Hitler infamous today. But before he started gobbling up European countries like they were little bratwurst sausages, Hitler was famous as a world leader with high moral values and a distinctly Christian vision.

In fact, no present politician has more blatantly declared his Christianity than Hitler, or has had his faith so widely accepted. Millions of Christians around the world admired the savvy tyrant; a couple of his more recognizable fans included Britain’s Lloyd George and that all-American idol of idols, Charles Lindbergh. The most appealing of Hitler’s “Christian” attributes included:

•His morality. He did not smoke or drink and he abhorred pornography and homosexuality.

•His call for his nation to repent. “Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell… And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that He may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God.” (March 1936)...

...*His war on atheism: “We were convinced that the people need and require [the Christian] faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” (October 1933)

*His blending of church and state: “National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity… For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life…These are Christian principles!” (August 1934)

•His faith-based charity: “With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty.” ...

...On the other hand, Hitler privately loathed Christianity, calling it “a drug” and “senseless,” the “invention of sick brains.” He also perceived it as a potential threat to his leadership, and intended to abolish the church. And let’s not forget: He did make Nazism the official state religion and he replaced school and church Bibles with copies of “Mein Kampf.”...

...f Hitler were an American politician today, based solely on his faith and God-talk, he’d make an attractive candidate to the Christian right.

That Hitler exploited religion for political gain, however, is a given. He knew that he lived in a nation that was overwhelmingly Christian, and he used Christianity to pander to mass idiocy in order to draw the biggest crowd in history....

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Lawsuit says officer dumped baby's ashes
A man calls a Mount Dora police search illegal, saying the officer mistook his daughter's remains for cocaine.

TAVARES -- A father who accused a Mount Dora policeman last year of dumping out his infant daughter's cremated remains sued the city and the officer Monday.

Filed in Lake Circuit Court, the lawsuit accuses the city and Officer Brad Cline of illegally stopping and searching Jason Burnham, 34, as he was walking home after Hurricane Charley.

During the stop, Burnham's suit says, Cline emptied the ashes from a cross-shaped pendant worn by Burnham, suspecting it contained cocaine.

"This is probably the most mean-spirited violation of a person's civil rights that I have seen in many years," said Winter Park lawyer Howard Marks, one of Burnham's attorneys. "That conduct is not acceptable -- it's not warranted."

Mount Dora Mayor James Yatsuk would not comment on the case, saying the city's insurance company likely would select the attorney to represent the city.

The seven-count lawsuit accuses the city of false arrest/false imprisonment and detention of Burnham, and violation of his right to privacy. It accuses the city and Cline of invasion of privacy and violation of Burnham's civil rights. Finally, it accuses Cline of intentional infliction of emotional distress on Burnham.

It asks for damages in excess of $15,000 each from the city and the officer.

"Burnham was illegally patted down, illegally searched and illegally detained, all without probable cause or reasonable suspicion that Burnham had committed a crime," the suit states....

...Cline was on patrol Aug. 14 in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley when he said he saw Burnham walking on Highland Street about 2:30 a.m. According to the police report, Cline said Burnham "appeared to be intoxicated."

The officer questioned Burnham about "a variety of issues, including illegal drug use," according to the lawsuit.

Burnham said he had a prescription for Xanax that he was taking because he was depressed over his daughter's death.

After examining the pills, Cline questioned Burnham about the pendant, the lawsuit says. It contained the ashes of Carli Miracle Burnham, who died at the age of 9 months in 2002. She was napping with her father when he mistakenly rolled on top of her, suffocating her. The death was ruled accidental, and no charges were filed.

Taking the pendant from Burnham, the officer broke its seal and dumped the ashes on the hood of his patrol car, the suit says.

"Defendant Cline, after seeing that the ashes were not cocaine, wiped Plaintiff Burnham's daughter's ashes to the ground," the suit says....

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Guardsmen Took 'Rent' From Iraqi Businesses
California Army National Guard troops sought unauthorized, off-the-books "rent" from Iraqi-owned businesses inside Baghdad's Green Zone to raise money for a "soldiers fund," military officials and sources within the troops' battalion said Friday.

The disclosure is the latest to emerge from a wide-ranging investigation into the conduct of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment of the Guard, which is headquartered in Modesto.

Military officials had confirmed previously that the battalion's commander, Lt. Col. Patrick Frey, had been suspended and that one of the battalion's companies, based in Fullerton, had been removed from patrol duties and restricted to an Army base south of Baghdad....

...Army officials say the total amount involved was $4,000, but troops in the battalion have said the scheme raised more than $30,000. The investigation resulted in disciplinary action against one officer from the battalion's Bravo Company. Army officials declined to reveal the officer's name, and his identity could not be confirmed independently....

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Jim Wallis tells a tired tale: the faith-based politics of a liberal activist are as suspect as Bush's
... As much as I admire the other-centered work of Jim Wallis--as a husband, father, community organizer and writer--I think he's wasting his time and energy arguing in his latest book that he has an inside line to the thinking of his God. "Here's the big news," he writes: "The politics of God calls all the rest of our politics into question.... Clearly, the politics of God is different from ours."

I'd be more accepting of Wallis' views if it weren't for the old saying, "Pay heed to those who seek God but watch out for those who say they've found him"--whether the finder is Bush, Wallis or whomever.

It's futile to mix politics and religion. Ask a dozen people, or a dozen dozen, to define either and no answer is the same. Politics is about perception: yours, mine and everyone else's, and all of it flavored with the subjective. Isn't religion, too, about perceptions--hunches that a God, or gods, exists. With more than 10,000 organized religions now in operation on a planet that Alfred North Whitehead called a third-rate rock spinning around a second-rate sun, we have little more than a jumble of hunches on what may or may not be divine. Does evidence exist that faith-based social justice is more productive than faithless-based?

I realize this is a secularist argument, and it should be. The first mistake of Wallis is to push the idea that public policy and personal theology can not only be compatible but can be mutually supportive--so long-as it's the policies and theological preferences backed by Wallis and not those of the Bush administration. Wallis labels Bush's foreign policy as "bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous." True enough, except that's been true of every president, all of whom believed in military killing and violence to solve international conflicts.

Wallis's second mistake is to place his faith in government. What will it take for him and other conventional liberals to wake up and see that Tolstoy was right: "Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us"? Instead of fruitlessly hoping to shape up both the political right and the left--as in his book's subtitle, Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It--it might be better for Wallis to join those who oppose, resist and defy the militaristic U.S. government. How? Dozens of ways, from the public witness of the traditional peace churches--Quakers, Mennonites, the Brethren--to those engaged in war tax resistance, boycotts of products of antisocial corporations, civil disobedience, peace education, simple living, refusing jury duty and supporting those who have broken free from the stale notion that government can be reformed with just a little prayerful tinkering....

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The bomb didn't win it
The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union's entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor....

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90-day penalty in fatal shooting
Denver - The police officer who shot and killed Frank Lobato, Jr. after mistaking a soda can for a gun faces a 90-day suspension without pay....

...As police approached, Martinez fled out an upstairs window. Officers, unaware he had left, used a ladder to enter a different second-story bedroom window, where Ford encountered Lobato, who was in ill health, in bed. Ford shot Lobato once in the chest after apparently mistaking the glint of the soda can he was holding for a gun, and Lobato died at the scene....

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Evangelical Chaplains Test Bounds of Faith in Military
Walk into just about any Christian bookstore and you are likely to find a copy of The Soldier's Bible. The leather cover comes in a choice of green for the Army, black for the Navy, burgundy for the Marines, blue for the Air Force and -- just released -- blue for the Coast Guard.

These are handsome Bibles with gilt edges, just the right size for a service member to stuff into his or her pack. Printed on the front is the emblem for the appropriate branch of the armed services. And that's a problem.

One could be excused for thinking that this Bible was put out by the military. But it's not. Holman Bible Publishers of Nashville developed, printed and distributes The Soldier's Bible at its own expense.

Still, critics think the emblem on the front brings up legal questions -- and may even violate the Constitution's ban on government-established religion.

What's especially troubling to some is that this particular Bible is clearly evangelical. Holman Bible Publishers is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention. On the first few pages, there's a "Plan for Salvation" that says you must be baptized as an adult believer to have eternal life.

Printed in the back are inspirational words from military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin. He raised a few eyebrows back in 2003, when he said of his battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Evangelicals are playing an increasing role in the military. Department of Defense statistics show that 40 percent of active duty personnel are evangelical Christians. Sixty percent of taxpayer-funded military chaplains are evangelical.

"It does raise the question of whether we are, effectively, as a country -- with tax dollars -- promoting a particular evangelical religious viewpoint," said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Add to that a privately funded evangelical Bible that looks official, and critics say the military has a problem that needs to be addressed.

The Army says the use of its emblem "is authorized in publications and other printed matter of an official or quasi-official nature." The Army's Institute of Heraldry is the keeper of the emblem. If you want to put it on a T-shirt or bumper sticker, you first have to get permission from Stanley Haas at the Institute.

Haas says to his knowledge, Holman was never granted permission to put the Army's emblem on The Soldier's Bible. But he also doesn't keep a list or database of people who've been given permission.

Haas says people simply write in to request permission and he writes back, telling them yes or no. He says that normally, permission would not be granted for anything religious. ...

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Men overcompensate when their masculinity is threatened, Cornell study shows
THACA, N.Y. -- Threaten a man's masculinity, and he will assume more macho attitudes, according to a study by a Cornell University researcher.

"I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle," said Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell. Willer is presenting his findings Aug. 15 at the American Sociological Association's 100th annual meeting in Philadelphia. ...

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Don't get into a lather over sweatshops
...We use "sweatshop" to mean those foreign factories with low pay and poor health and safety standards where employees choose to work, not those where employees are coerced into working by the threat of violence. And we admit that by Western standards, sweatshops have abhorrently low wages and poor working conditions. However, economists point out that alternatives to working in a sweatshop are often much worse: scavenging through trash, prostitution, crime, or even starvation.

Economists across the political spectrum, from Paul Krugman on the left, to Walter Williams on the right, have defended sweatshops. Their reasoning is straightforward: People choose what they perceive to be in their best interest. If workers voluntarily choose to work in sweatshops, without physical coercion, it must be because sweatshops are their best option. Our recent research - the first economic study to compare systematically sweatshop wages with average local wages - demonstrated this to be true.

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers.

The apparel industry, which is often accused of unsafe working conditions and poor wages, actually pays its foreign workers well enough for them to rise above the poverty in their countries. While more than half of the population in most of the countries we studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90 percent of the countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry would lift a worker above - often far above - that standard. For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less than $2 per day.

In 9 of the 11 countries we surveyed, the average reported sweatshop wages equaled or exceeded average incomes and in some cases by a large margin. In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country's economy.

Our findings should not be interpreted to mean that sweatshop jobs in the third world are ideal by US standards. The point is, they are located in developing countries where these jobs are providing a higher wage than other work.

Antisweatshop activists - who argue that consumers should abstain from buying products made in sweatshops - harm workers by trying to stop the trade that funds some of the better jobs in their economies....

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Once upon a time, a dangerous radical gained control of the US Republican Party.
Reagan increased the budget for support of the radical Muslim Mujahidin conducting terrorism against the Afghanistan government to half a billion dollars a year.

One fifth of the money, which the CIA mostly turned over to Pakistani military intelligence to distribute, went to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a violent extremist who as a youth used to throw acid on the faces of unveiled girls in Afghanistan.

Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass the Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to match US contributions....

...In the US, the Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their favorite project. They even sent around a "biblical checklist" for grading US congressman as to how close they were to the "Christian" political line. If a congressman didn't support the radical Muslim Muj, he or she was downgraded by the evangelicals and fundamentalists....

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'One of them made cuts in my penis. I was in agony'
Benyam Mohammed travelled from London to Afghanistan in July 2001, but after September 11 he fled to Pakistan. He was arrested at Karachi airport on April 10 2002, and describes being flown by a US government plane to a prison in Morocco. These are extracts from his diary....

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Third prosecutor critical of Guantanamo trials
A third US military prosecutor has walked out of the commissions process set up to try Guantanamo Bay detainees because of concerns it was unfair, the ABC has learned....

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"War is the Health of the State"
by Randolph Bourne (1918)

To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government....

...War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty - or mystic devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them....

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Exclusive: Secret Memo—Send to Be Tortured
Aug. 8, 2005 issue - An FBI agent warned superiors in a memo three years ago that U.S. officials who discussed plans to ship terror suspects to foreign nations that practice torture could be prosecuted for conspiring to violate U.S. law, according to a copy of the memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. The strongly worded memo, written by an FBI supervisor then assigned to Guantanamo, is the latest in a series of documents that have recently surfaced reflecting unease among some government lawyers and FBI agents over tactics being used in the war on terror. This memo appears to be the first that directly questions the legal premises of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition"—a secret program under which terror suspects are transferred to foreign countries that have been widely criticized for practicing torture.

In a memo forwarded to a senior FBI lawyer on Nov. 27, 2002, a supervisory special agent from the bureau's behavioral analysis unit offered a legal analysis of interrogation techniques that had been approved by Pentagon officials for use against a high-value Qaeda detainee. After objecting to techniques such as exploiting "phobias" like "the fear of dogs" or dripping water "to induce the misperception of drowning," the agent discussed a plan to send the detainee to Jordan, Egypt or an unspecified third country for interrogation. "In as much as the intent of this category is to utilize, outside the U.S., interrogation techniques which would violate [U.S. law] if committed in the U.S., it is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute," the agent wrote. "Discussing any plan which includes this category could be seen as a con-spiracy to violate [the Torture Statute]" and "would inculpate" everyone involved....

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Leaked emails claim Guantanamo trials rigged
Leaked emails from two former prosecutors claim the military commissions set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay are rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused.

Two emails, which have been obtained by the ABC, were sent to supervisors in the Office of Military Commissions in March of last year - three months before Australian detainee David Hicks was charged and five months before his trial began.

The first email is from prosecutor Major Robert Preston to his supervisor.

Maj Preston writes that the process is perpetrating a fraud on the American people, and that the cases being pursued are marginal.

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people," Maj Preston wrote....