NEW YORK--Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ken Lay--all thieves. Compared to the world's two richest men, however, Lay was small potatoes. So why are we praising them, and kicking Lay while he's down--six feet down?

Yeah, yeah, I watched the documentary ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"). Lay and his sidekick CEO Jeffrey Skilling, used bluster, lies, a bunch of fictional Excel spreadsheets and an updated Ponzi scheme to create what appeared to be the nation's seventh largest energy company. Even when the truth--that Enron had negative net assets--was about to come out, Lay continued to talk up his BS company and its fraudulently inflated stock. Shareholders, many of them employees whose retirement savings were invested entirely in Enron, believed his reports that the company's finances were solid. Meanwhile, while he lied through his teeth to thousands of men and women who would be ruined because they believed him, he secretly cashed out millions of dollars of his own.

Federal prosecutors say that Lay and Skilling illegally bilked Enron out of $183 million, including company bonuses paid during their conspiracy to pump up the company's stock and Lay's use of its line of credit to pay off millions in personal debt for such items as a $200,000 yacht for his wife Linda's 2001 birthday party. When Lay died last week of a heart attack, having been found guilty of a fraud that led to the 2001 collapse of Enron, he had been awaiting sentencing. The New York Post, noting that Texas law may protect Lay's estate from forking over the $43.5 million the Securities and Exchange Commission had sought as restitution, published one of its instant classic front pages: pictures of the deceased executive and a coffin, under the headline "Before They Put Cheato Lay's Coffin in the Grave, CHECK HE'S IN IT."

True, Lay was scum. But the "I Spit On Your Grave" act is a new phenomenon. Cruel and avaricious titans of industry typically receive the kid gloves treatment when they pass on to the Great Equities Desk. In 1989 Steven J. Ross, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, paid himself a record $78.2 million--more than 9,000 times the average salary of his employees, thousands of whom he had cheerfully laid off the year before. When some cynics mentioned that Ross' victims might be jumping for joy at the news of his 1992 death from prostate cancer, they were universally and loudly denounced as rude and unfeeling.

Lay stole $43.5 million. Ross overpaid himself at least $78.2 million (worth $121.9 million today). Now consider investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, worth $44 billion and $50 billion, respectively, according to Forbes. Each one has accumulated one thousand times more cash than Ken "#1 Bush Campaign Donor" Lay. But we're supposed to like, and even admire, these rogues.

Buffett and Gates may not have broken any laws--although, in Gates' case, the Clinton-era Justice Department thought he'd cheated millions of American consumers by violating anti-trust laws--but it's hard to see how their billions are more ethically legit than Lay's misbegotten millions. Sorry, but "working hard" doesn't cut it. I don't care if you stay late at the office every night, work weekends and holidays, or you never go on vacation. It doesn't matter how smart, imaginative or lucky you are. It just isn't possible to earn $44 billion in a single lifetime.

Not honestly, anyway.

Gates and Buffett have created a lot of pain and misery on their way to "earning" their combined $94 billion. (Bear in mind, that's what they're worth. That doesn't include what they've spent.) Gates scammed his dough the old-fashioned way: overcharging his customers and underpaying his employees. Somewhere along the way to accumulating $50 billion, doesn't it occur to a guy that he could charge a little less than $200 for buggy, instantly obsolete, software? Or that it's time for a company-wide raise? He could even hire (gasp) unionized American workers instead of building plants in the Third World and relying on the slave labor of prison inmates!

It's harder to draw a direct line between Buffett's convoluted arbitrage machinations and the reduced incomes of thousands of other people, but anyone who has been downsized by a shareholder-terrorized managing board has experienced the impoverishing of the workers whose employers he targets.

Now we're supposed to be shocked and awed by Buffett's decision to give $37 billion--about 85 percent of his assets--to Bill Gates' foundation. "Stunning in its generosity," raved the Christian Science Monitor. "The scale of Mr. Buffett's philanthropy is matched by its good sense," chimed the Washington Post. Recent grants paid out by the Gates Foundation include $100,000 for the museum at Pearl Harbor, $241,500 "to provide sustainable public access computer hardware and software upgrades" to libraries in Los Angeles, and $21 million "to provide curriculum and support for teachers as a part of a transformation that aims to prepare...Chicago public school students for success in post-secondary education."

Good causes all, but maintaining Pearl Harbor is one of the reasons we pay federal taxes. Why does a national war memorial need help from Gates? One can't help wonder whether L.A. libraries and Chicago schools might be less cash-strapped in the first place if so much of our society's wealth hadn't been monopolized by America's tiny, increasingly powerful oligarchy, rather than going to city taxpayers in the form of fair wages and affordable computers.

Factoid: the average member of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans has seen his income rise 3.5 times--from $800 million (adjusted to 2006 dollars) to $2.8 billion--in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, real income for more than half the population increased...zero. Nada. Zip.

To his credit, Buffett acknowledges the rising income disparity. "What has gone on in this country in recent years is a huge benefit to the very rich and not much that relief to those below," he told Fortune in 2005. But philanthropy won't slow the United States' slide into Third Worlddom. And it doesn't help the philanthropists' victims. All things considered, a $45 million lout like Ken Lay hurts America less than a $44 billion one like Bill Gates.

Consider a burglar who boosts your TV and then, thinking better of it, donates it to an orphanage. His act of generosity beats the alternative--keeping it for himself. But you'd probably prefer that he'd returned it to you, or better yet, never stolen it at all.

Predicting the future is never an exact science, but one technique is to establish an arc of past events that points toward what is likely to happen next. If one were to apply that approach to Iraq now, alarmed U.S. policymakers might be speeding to pull American troops out as fast as possible.

Another way to judge whether a policy is heading in the right direction is to go back to earlier milestones and ask whether a change of course then would have been a smart idea. If the answer is yes, it's fair to assume that the wrong direction before won't suddenly transform itself into the right one.

Except for die-hard neoconservatives and George W. Bush's staunchest followers, most Americans - if allowed to turn back the clock to March 2003 - would happily agree to give the United Nations weapons inspectors more time to complete their search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Though it's a bitter pill for the Bush team to swallow, even with a swig of fine Bordeaux, the French were right. If their advice had been taken, more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis might be alive today - and the United States might have averted a strategic disaster.

Even looking back at post-invasion high points, like Saddam Hussein's capture, many Americans might wish the Bush administration had opted for a "declare victory and leave" approach. But Bush saw each positive development as encouragement to press on toward a more total victory.

In retrospect, Bush's policy might be summed up by the slogan, "Who knows? We might get lucky."

Grim and Grimmer

But, as the Iraq news grows grim and grimmer, the U.S. occupation of Iraq shows no sign of getting lucky.

Sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites continues to inflict widespread bloodshed, while some U.S. troops have been fingered as trigger-happy participants in the slaughter of Iraqis.

It also doesn't help that the Bush administration - by lowering standards to meet U.S. military recruitment goals - has been sending unfit soldiers and even sociopaths into the baking-hot tinderbox that is today's Iraq.

In 2004, many military strategists shook their heads at the notion of putting the likes of Lynndie England and Charles Graner in positions of authority over detainees inside Abu Ghraib prison. But now the U.S. military is grappling with even worse scandals, the alleged murders of Iraqi civilians by out-of-control soldiers and Marines.

On July 9, the U.S command accused five soldiers of complicity in the rape/murder of an Iraqi girl and the slaying of three members of her family in Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad. The atrocity allegedly was carried out on March 12 after the girl had complained about advances from U.S. soldiers at local checkpoints.

A sixth American, Steven D. Green, was arrested in North Carolina on June 30 and accused in civilian court as the leader of the rape-murder. The former private first-class had been discharged from the Army over an unspecified "personality disorder."

U.S. officials initially said the rape victim was 20 years old, but relatives identified the victim as Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, whose passport put her age at 14. The rape-murder case, which has further stoked anti-Americanism in Iraq, comes on the heels of an alleged massacre of 24 Iraqi men, women and children at Haditha and a spate of other accusations against U.S. forces.

Neo-Nazis

The Mahmudiya case also coincides with reports that pressure to relax enlistment standards has opened the door to the U.S. military for white supremacists, "skinheads," neo-Nazis and a variety of other misfits.

In a report entitled " A Few Bad Men," the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long kept an eye on violent right-wing extremists, said "military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way" as white supremacists enter the military.

The report, written by David Holthouse, quoted Defense Department gang detective Scott Barfield as saying that neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core. ... We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem."

Indeed. Violence-prone white racists might not be the best envoys of American values to send into the 100-plus temperatures of Iraq where U.S. forces must deal daily with a myriad of complex and lethal threats. Even the best of the U.S. troops must cope with language difficulties and a foreign culture divided by centuries of hostilities between Shiites and Sunnis.

The fighting in Iraq also has become multi-sided. In recent days, the U.S. military has hit both Sunni and Shiite factions, a development that recalls the bloody fighting in 2004 when American casualties spiked amid street battles that sometimes pitted Sunnis and Shiites against Americans.

Like then, the U.S. military is mounting operations against the powerful Mahdi Army, allied with militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. On July 7, Iraqi government and U.S. forces captured two Mahdi Army leaders and launched a raid on a militia bastions on July 8. [NYT, July 10, 2006]

The arc of recent events is clearly pointing in a troubling direction.

Washington View

Yet, while the Iraq military situation seems to be swirling into a downward spiral, U.S. policymakers in Washington appear relatively safe from the consequences. Republicans even believe they can use the war, again, as a partisan club for beating back any Democratic challenge to Bush's authority in Election 2006.

Any talk of a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is confronted with charges of "cut and run," cowardice or treason.

Republican political strategists also believe they have succeeded in stabilizing Bush's political decline by sharpening the rhetoric against Democrats, the New York Times and other critics of the President.

Both Democratic and Republican strategists have told me in recent days that they see GOP prospects for Election 2006 brightening, largely because the Democrats have failed to offer a coherent alternative on Iraq and the Republicans have swung onto the offensive.

Reinforcing that point, Democratic strategists offered me two diametrically opposed views of why the Democrats were floundering and what they should do on Iraq.

One school held that Democrats needed to tilt more to the right and select more conservative candidates; the other faction blamed Democratic leaders for demoralizing their base with mealy-mouthed positions on Bush's abuse of constitutional power at home and the Iraq War abroad.

In official Washington, the notion of an Iraq withdrawal is still not supported by many policymakers or opinion-leaders. The exceptions are mostly Democrats, such as Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

But Republicans and their right-wing allies remain eager to pound anyone who advocates an Iraq pullout. Meanwhile, most centrist Democrats and many mainstream pundits argue that while the invasion may have been a mistake, the U.S. now has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq until the violence settles down.

There's also the question of the United States losing face if a withdrawal is seen around the world as a defeat. Bush and other war defenders argue, too, that a U.S. pullout would turn Iraq into a base for international terrorism.

Some war critics counter that the war's supporters should have thought of those possibilities before plunging into the quicksand of Iraq.

At Consortiumnews.com, in 2002, we questioned Bush's "preemptive war" strategy "Bush's Grim Vision" and his specific case for invading Iraq "Misleading the Nation to War". In the days after the March 19, 2003, invasion, we cited ominous signs from tougher-than-expected Iraqi resistance "Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down".

Withdrawal Logic

Almost a year ago, in August 2005, we laid out the arguments for a prompt U.S. military withdrawal "Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal" . That article noted that Washington has yet to conduct a clear-headed examination of the worsening military situation, with Bush supporters simply saying "stay the course" and former war critics intoning "we must get it right."

"But," the article stated, "there is a case to be made for U.S. withdrawal as the best option for both resolving the conflict and neutralizing the foreign Islamic extremists in Iraq. A corollary of this thinking holds that the continued U.S. military presence does more harm than good."

Basically, the logic behind withdrawal was that the removal of U.S. troops would undercut the al-Qaeda-connected foreign jihadists who represent a small but violent part of the Iraqi insurgency. An American pullout would remove the incentive for many young Muslims to go to Iraq and for those already there to stay.

Meanwhile, the Sunni resistance might lose any tolerance for the outside extremists. With the U.S. occupation ended, the usefulness of the jihadists would be diminished. Plus, many Iraqi Sunnis, like Iraqi Shiites, are deeply offended by the horrific brutality of the al-Qaeda faction.

So, rather than Iraq becoming an al-Qaeda base if U.S. forces withdrew, there is an argument for the exact opposite - and for the belief that the longer U.S. troops stay in Iraq, the more likely al-Qaeda operatives will put down roots and will be harder to weed out.

There is also recent evidence that al-Qaeda shares that analysis. The terrorist group sees its goals advanced by Bush's interventionist strategies and threatened by a prompt U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Overreaction

As far back as summer 2001, U.S. intelligence knew that al-Qaeda was disappointed by the restrained U.S. reaction to its bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and was determined that the next attack - the one on Sept. 11, 2001 - would compel a much more aggressive U.S. response. If it were clumsy enough, that would help al-Qaeda.

This al-Qaeda strategy was revealed by New York Times reporter Judith Miller in a 2006 interview with Alternet. Miller said a well-placed CIA official briefed her on an al-Qaeda intercept over the July Fourth holiday in 2001.

"The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up," Miller said. "The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of al-Qaeda. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the [destroyer USS] Cole [which was bombed on Oct. 12, 2000].

"And one al-Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"

In the Alternet interview, published in May 2006 after Miller resigned from the Times, the reporter expressed regret that she had not been able to nail down enough details about the intercept to get the story into the newspaper.

But the significance of her recollection is that more than two months before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA knew that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack with the intent of provoking a U.S. military reaction - or overreaction.

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat on Aug. 6, 2001, with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. The CIA sent analysts to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, "All right, you've covered your ass," according to Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine. Bush then returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

The 9/11 Attacks

When the 9/11 attacks occurred, the United States did hit back against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But after Osama bin-Laden and other leaders escaped, Bush quickly turned the U.S. military's attention to the Iraq invasion, which followed in March 2003.

After the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein in April 2003, al-Qaeda operatives, including Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, flooded into central Iraq bringing along a generation of new recruits. Soon, the group's signature suicide-bombings were killing Iraqis and Americans alike.

Though al-Qaeda's brand of terrorism appeared to be making a comeback in Iraq, bin-Laden apparently saw a danger in fall 2004 - the potential defeat of George W. Bush and the possible start of U.S. withdrawal under John Kerry.

So, according to CIA analysts, bin-Laden timed his release of a videotape denouncing Bush to the Friday before the Nov. 2, 2004, election. CIA analysts concluded that bin-Laden's tirade had the desired effect, giving the Bush campaign a last-minute boost and ensuring the continuation of Bush's policies. [As reported in Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, or see Consortiumnews.com's "CIA: Osama Helped Bush in '04."

By summer 2005, despite Bush's victory over Kerry, al-Qaeda leaders were still fretting about the dangers of a prompt U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. A 6,000-word letter purportedly written by bin-Laden's deputy Ayman Zawahiri on July 9, 2005, to Zarqawi suggested tactics for keeping the jihadists from quitting if the U.S. forces did pull out.

"The mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal," the "Zawahiri letter" said. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Al-Qaeda Letter Belies Bush's Iraq Claims."

Compromise

Another argument for American withdrawal is that it could push the Shiites and their Kurdish allies into compromising with the Sunni minority on an overall settlement and rewriting the constitution to grant the Sunnis a larger share of the oil revenues.

Throughout the U.S. occupation, the Shiites and Kurds have had little reason to make significant concessions to the Sunnis because the American military tilted the power balance in favor of the Shiite-Kurdish side.

As for the issue of whether a U.S. withdrawal would strengthen American enemies, Bush has argued that a U.S. pullout from Iraq would open the way to Islamic extremists controlling a vast empire from Spain to Indonesia.

The claims are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when U.S. policymakers warned of a "domino effect" of country after country falling to communism and when Richard Nixon said the United States would be viewed as a "pitiful, helpless giant" if it caved on Vietnam. In reality, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did not have the dire consequences that were predicted.

With an Iraq withdrawal, Washington also might be able to capitalize on a resurgence of Muslim good will, especially if a pullout is followed by a renewed commitment to seek a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and to support political reform in repressive Arab states.

On a more tactical level, a U.S. withdrawal also would free up Special Forces to concentrate on tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda's leadership, an operation that was disrupted by Bush's hasty decision to focus on Iraq in 2002.

Without doubt, there are serious risks from whatever course of action the United States follows in Iraq. A bloody civil war could occur whether the U.S. military is present or not; U.S. enemies might be emboldened whether the United States is bogged down in Iraq or has repositioned its troops outside the country.

One reading of the intransigence from Iran and North Korea is that those other "axis of evil" countries learned a lesson from Iraq, which stopped developing WMD and trusted that the U.N. could fend off a U.S. invasion. Hussein's defeat demonstrated that only fearsome weapons could give pause to Bush's "preemptive war" strategies.

Neither Iran nor North Korea senses any great benefit from compromising on matters of their own national security. Plus, with U.S. forces tied down in Iraq, Washington's ability to enforce any ultimatums is much weaker than it normally would be.

Iran knows, too, that it can retaliate against any U.S. attack simply by unleashing its Iraqi Shiite allies against vulnerable U.S. troops in Iraq.

Losing the national debate over the war in Iraq while falling to unprecedented lows in public approval, the Republican right is returning to a favorite smear tactic: charging the loyal opposition with "treason." For now the New York Times is the most prominent target of these charges, having published an article on the Bush administration's investigation of terrorist money laundering using SWIFT, an international banking correspondence system. But the current campaign against the paper of record is merely rehearsal for a barrage of accusations against Democrats as the November midterm approaches.

In recent days, the buzzing swarm of right-wing drones has spread the treason meme , from the House Republican caucus to Fox News Channel, MSNBC, talk radio and the Internet. The ubiquitous Ann Coulter compared Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to Tokyo Rose, while a California radio host named Melanie Morgan, who also operates a Republican-funded Web site, convicted Times executive editor Bill Keller of capital treason and urged his execution by gas chamber. A Wall Street Journal editorial suggested that (unlike the Journal news editors who also had published the SWIFT story) the Times is guilty of intentionally "obstructing" the war on terror. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol demanded on Fox News that the Justice Department prosecute the Times under the Espionage Act. (If Kristol and his ilk really believe that the Times is a nest of traitors, shouldn't they call for their patriotic friend David Brooks to resign from the paper's Op-Ed page?)

And professional propagandist David Horowitz, who has been shrieking for years about the liberal "fifth column," declared "war" on the Times as well as all liberals, Democrats and leftists. Just to prove that he is still crazy after all these years, Horowitz endorsed the publication of the home addresses and telephone numbers of the newspaper's personnel.

As with so many ugly accusations promoted by the likes of Coulter, Kristol and the Journal editorialists over the past decade, this furor is just another political hoax. Their professed outrage is a fraud, meant to intimidate mainstream journalists who have begun, at long last, to examine the misconduct of the Bush administration and the Republican congressional majority.

Ever since the appearance of the Times report on the SWIFT consortium's cooperation with US counter-terror agencies, right-wing commentators have been screaming about the alleged damage done to our national security interests. The president has joined this angry chorus, but neither he nor anyone else has mentioned anything specific -- almost certainly because there was no damage.

The SWIFT system is an international banking cooperative, based in Belgium and overseen by the central bankers of the 10 largest industrial countries. Ever since 9/11, the governors of those banks and the SWIFT directors, along with nearly every financial institution in the developed world, have publicly committed their resources to prevent, trace and report money laundering by suspected terror organizations.

On June 23, the SWIFT chairman, deputy chairman and CEO reiterated that policy in a public statement posted on the cooperative's Web site. "As you may know from the User Handbook and swift.com," said the statement, which was addressed to the cooperative members, "SWIFT has a longstanding history, beginning in the 1990s, of cooperating with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and international organisations such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in their efforts to prevent misuse of the financial system. Our members support this policy." Indeed the SWIFT Web site has long featured a page explaining its policy of cooperation with international efforts to frustrate money laundering and terrorism.

American intelligence and law enforcement access to SWIFT's database was not secret in any meaningful sense, having been disclosed more than three years ago. In a report dated December 2002, a special U.N. Monitoring Group, created by the Security Council to combat terrorism after 9/11, mentioned the importance of SWIFT and other international financial organizations. Among the experts who signed that report was Victor Comras, a former State Department official. Still available in PDF form at the U.N. Web site here, the report noted in Paragraph 31:

"The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries."

Anyone who bothered to read the U.N. report on international counter-terror efforts knew that American officials were using SWIFT data. Anyone who consulted the SWIFT Web site knew that the organization's official position, overseen by the Group of Ten central bankers, was to provide complete cooperation against terror and money laundering.

Although self-styled experts such as Coulter, Horowitz and Kristol may not have been aware of the SWIFT system or its role in the war against al-Qaida, the same cannot be said of the actual terrorists. According to U.S. officials responsible for tracking terrorist financing, the enemy has become increasingly wary of normal banking channels over the past few years because they know those institutions are likely to report suspicious customers or transactions.

In September 2004, a pair of House subcommittees held a joint hearing on "combating international terrorist financing," co-chaired by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the loudmouthed politician who has lately accused the Times of "treason." At that hearing Juan Zarate, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary on terrorist financing, and E. Anthony Wayne, the State Department's assistant secretary for economic affairs, both testified that the terror financiers had largely been driven out of the international banking system, and were using suitcases of cash and the traditional Muslim money exchange known as "hawala" instead.

Wayne testified that "we have made it more difficult for terrorists to use the financial system. But as we have made it more difficult for them to use that banking system, they have been shifting to other, less reliable and more cumbersome methods, such as cash couriers. Now, this means that we need to adapt, too, and we have been adapting and shifting our priorities, both nationally and internationally, as they start using more cash couriers, as they look at these alternative remittance systems known in the Middle East as hawalas; as they look to use NGOs and charities more effectively."

While cautioning that "all means are still being used to raise funds" by the al-Qaida network, Zarate agreed that "it is certainly much harder and much riskier, and I think we are a victim of our own success in the sense that terrorists are now using couriers instead of banks to move money around the world."

In short, the participation of SWIFT in American counter-terror systems was revealed more than three years ago, and the terrorists began to shift their transactions from banks to couriers at least two years ago. To the extent that SWIFT continues to provide useful information, incidentally, it is obliged to do so by law. As the Times reported, its data has been subpoenaed by U.S. officials, who can continue to rely on that method as well as SWIFT's stated commitment to cooperate.

So how did the Times report damage American security interests? It didn't.

But Horowitz and his comrades in the right-wing vanguard never allow their zeal to be confounded by simple facts. Angry and alerted to the threat, they quickly added an additional count to their indictment of the supposedly disloyal newspaper. There are traitors in the travel section, too. In his blog, Horowitz cited a June 30 Escapes feature that included "huge color photos of the vacation residences of Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, identifying the small Maryland town where they live, showing the front driveway and in Rumsfeld's case actually pointing out the hidden security camera in case any hostile intruders should get careless" as further evidence of the paper's perfidy. He identified the article's purpose as "apparent retaliation for criticism of [the Times'] disclosure of classified intelligence to America's enemies."

The seemingly innocent travel feature provoked volcanic rage in the right-wing blogosphere. After linking to the story, Horowitz raved on: "Make no mistake about it, there is a war going on in this country. The aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists who began a scorched earth campaign against President Bush before the initiation of hostilities in Iraq." He continued in this vein, citing various examples of dissent against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq as proof of liberal Democratic disloyalty.

Never mind, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, that Rumsfeld had granted an official request from the Times to photograph his summer house. Never mind that Newsmax, the right-wing Web site that is financed, like Horowitz's operation, by the Scaife foundations, had published an article on the Rumsfeld and Cheney residences in that Maryland resort community. (And never mind that Horowitz knows nothing about how daily newspapers work, let alone terrorists or banks; such feature spreads are assigned and illustrated weeks in advance.) Never mind that Horowitz's link to a Frontpage contributor who published the address of Sulzberger's home could result in actual violence.

In a calmer political environment, an obviously deranged individual like Horowitz could be dismissed as comic relief. But with substantial resources and friends in the White House, including Karl Rove and the president, he is more than a mere crank. He is long overdue for exposure and repudiation by the mainstream media, whose attention he so plainly craves.

The upshot here appears to be that Novak lied to everyone in order to betray his country on behalf of Rove and company. First he revealed the name of an active CIA officer, blowing any and all operations with which she has ever been involved, costing the country millions, and possibly endangering lives despite the specific request from the agency that he not do so. That's all here.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

Next, he played Joan of Arc by insisting he would never reveal the names of his sources to Mr.Fitzgerald while simultaneously doing just that. Why in the world is The Washington Post continuing to stand by this scoundrel? Is it all because he's a member of the club and insiders protect their own? It worked for Kim Philby and I'm beginning to think it's working here too.

BBC News reported it this way: "All US military detainees, including those at Guantanamo Bay, are to be treated in line with the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions. The White House announced the shift in policy on Tuesday, almost two weeks after the US Supreme Court ruled that the conventions applied to detainees."

A small thing, one would think. We have been told time and again, after all, that we are engaged in a "War on Terror," and the rules of war should therefore apply. The fact that we are also fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan further simplifies the issue.

With the Bush administration, however, nothing is so straightforward. The administration argument, on the surface, has been that because "terrorists" are affiliated with no official government, they do not fall under the umbrella of Geneva protections.

The real reason for the denial of protections, though, was the Cheney-born insistence that the powers of the executive are plenary and not to be restricted in any way. Holding people indefinitely without trial while subjecting them to torture, therefore, was a marvelous way to establish the precedent of limitless power.

We caught a glimpse of the mind-set behind this whole process on Tuesday afternoon. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Hamden v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court ruling, the one that has ostensibly turned the Bush administration's war doctrine on its ear and has motivated them to grant minimum Geneva protections to prisoners.

Senator Patrick Leahy was grilling Steven Bradbury, acting head of Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, on the legal and ethical basis for Guantanamo in general and the treatment of prisoners specifically. Pressed into a corner by Leahy's questioning as to whether Bush was right or wrong in his decisions on the matter, Bradbury finally stated, "The president is always right."

Mr. Bradbury, it appears, did not get the memo.

Tuesday's Washington Post laid out the myriad ways in which, all of a sudden, the president is being forced to admit that he has been, almost comprehensively, always wrong. "Accustomed to having its way on matters related to the nation's security," reported the Post, "the administration is being forced to respond to criticism that it once brushed aside. The high court ruling rejected the White House's assertion that the president has nearly unlimited executive powers during a time of war, and now executive branch lawyers are reviewing whether other rules adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will have to be revised, especially those concerning the Geneva Conventions."

Much of this is, in the end, short-term analysis and observation. After picking through the detritus left behind in arguments over executive power, the inside baseball of political positioning, and the strange absolutism of Justice Department attorneys, we come around again to looking at long-term ramifications.

Granting minimum protection standards under Geneva to prisoners cannot and must not have anything to do with the exact circumstances of the detention of a prisoner, or the modern elastic definitions of war, or the desires of an administration to establish unlimited power. While the need to gather necessary intelligence and information on the disposition of terrorist elements is undeniable, the need for adherence to the rule of law on this issue goes far beyond constitutional platitudes.

The book Ghost Soldiers, by Hampton Sides, gives us all the reasons we need for stating, without equivocation, that adherence to Geneva protections is essential beyond any niceties of legal argument. Keeping to Geneva, simply, is a matter of national security and an absolute necessity whenever we have our own soldiers deployed in combat situations far from home.

"Ghost Soldiers" describes the horrifying ordeal endured by the American soldiers captured after the Japanese takeover of the Philippines in 1942. Tens of thousands of soldiers were trapped on the Bataan peninsula after the surrender of American forces, and the survivors were corralled into wretched prison camps after enduring the infamous "Bataan Death March."

During that march, and for years afterwards, these American prisoners were subjected to unspeakable acts of torture. They were starved, denied medicines for basic illnesses, beaten, shot, and eviscerated with bayonets. Many were killed because they were deemed to be less than human by their captors; the Bushido warrior code of Japan considered the surrender of any soldier to be beneath contempt, and any soldier who did so was unworthy of anything resembling humane treatment.

The Japanese Imperial Army, in the end, was playing a very dangerous game. By allowing its soldiers to consider captives less than human, by allowing the torture and murder of prisoners to take place on a large scale, Japan opened itself up to potentially terrifying reprisals. Any captured Japanese soldier faced the immediate threat of being the receptacle for outraged revenge at the hands of an American who knew what happened at Bataan.

So it is today. America has soldiers in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those soldiers run the risk of capture, and further run the risk of capture by individuals who know all about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Thus, we enter into a tit-for-tat game where the stakes are paid out in blood and screams. You torture us, so we torture you.

The Bush administration, under duress, has finally decided that the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions are worth paying attention to. They did not do this because it is right, because it is moral, or because they know that doing so affords a small margin of security to troops in the field. They did so because their hand was forced, and there is no guarantee that their words on the matter will be followed up by actual deeds.

Heil Bush,

Dear Sheriff Coats,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the 'Vidkun Quisling Award' for 2006! Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Johnny (the Enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your setting up "Free Speech Zones" on the 4th of July, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Police Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross first class presented by our glorious Fuhrer herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair" formally "Rancho de Bimbo" on 08-26-2006. We salute you herr Coats, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney