The message of the TV series, that torturers can retain their human dignity if the cause is right, is a profound lie.

It is here that we encounter the series' ideological lie: in spite of the CTU's ruthlessness, its agents, especially Bauer, are warm human beings - loving, caught in the emotional dilemmas of ordinary people.

24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of problematic methods the US resorts to in its "war on terror". Much more is at stake. Recall the lesson of Apocalypse Now.

The figure of Kurtz is not a remnant of some barbaric past. He was the perfect soldier but, through his over-identification with the military, he turned into the embodiment of the system's excess and threatened the system itself.

The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's dilemma.

When confronted with the task of killing the Jews of Europe, the SS chief adopted the attitude of "somebody has to do the dirty job".   more »

Bush doesn't appear to seriously consider that what he thinks may not accurately represent reality. Iraq will welcome his legions with flowers so there is no need for contingency planning just in case that assumption is wrong.

Iraqis are valiantly struggling for pro-American "democracy" [whatever that means to him], so there is no need to consider that, just possibly, rival Iran is the big winner from Bush's Iraqi intervention.

Harriet Miers is a convenient choice for Bush so there is no need to consider what others may think of her appointment.

And Bush, like other tragic leaders throughout history, may actually believe the incredibly dangerous notion that there is no alternative to victory in an Iraqi conflict which, in all likelihood, has already been lost.

Bush's narcissism, thus, has provided the backbone of certainty which makes him appear as a strong leader to those so predisposed. But it also contributes to those character flaws that may ultimately lead to his undoing.   more »

The limits of US military power have been clear to observe: rotating 150,000 troops to Iraq has placed great stress on the US military. Some US National Guard units are on their third rotation. American public support is wavering and there are growing demands for troop withdrawals.

Meanwhile, short of re-introducing the draft, the US is not in a position to mount a major ground force offensive against North Korea or Syria, let alone Iran. Iraq imposes serious limits on US freedom of action elsewhere.

While the US has been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, tectonic shifts are occurring elsewhere in the world geopolitical scene. Gray argues that the fall of the Soviet Union served to reduce American power, rather than enhance it.

The Soviet collapse quickened the pace of globalisation, "enabling China and India to become great powers whose interests may conflict with those of the US". Thus the true beneficiary of the Soviet collapse is not America but Asia.

In Gray's view, the era of Western primacy is coming to a close. He thinks that as a result of its intervention in Iraq, the dissolution of US global hegemony "has been accelerated, perhaps by a generation".   more »

As Ariel Sharon's career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as "a man of courage and peace" who had generated "hopes for a far-reaching accord" with an electoral campaign promising "to end conflict with the Palestinians."

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don't happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence.

The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.   more »

A senior British officer has criticised the US army for its conduct in Iraq, accusing it of institutional racism, moral righteousness, misplaced optimism, and of being ill-suited to engage in counter-insurgency operations.

The blistering critique, by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces, reflects criticism and frustration voiced by British commanders of American military tactics.

What is startling is the severity of his comments - and the decision by Military Review, a US army magazine, to publish them.

American soldiers, says Brig Aylwin-Foster, were "almost unfailingly courteous and considerate". But he says "at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism".

The US army, he says, is imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion and talent.

"Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on."   more »

Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention.

We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century.

We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.

Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law.

In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination. Among those reasons are the following:   more »

I think it is safe to say that few of the journalists who were so slap-happy to see the troops and so vicariously outraged about Saddam's crimes will ever evince a similar outrage about the mass murder currently being perpetrated in Iraq.

As of October 2004, 100,000 on a conservative estimate. Since then, another deadly assault on Fallujah, then Tal Afar, al-Qaim, Haditha and Ramadi. The deliberate targetting of hospitals, the shutting off of water supplies and electricity. The strangling of medical supplies.

And the escalation in air strikes which are taking a toll on civilians, the torture, the deployment of death squads with cordless drills. Perhaps, now, as many as 500,000 dead. General Michael Rose is right: Blair should be impeached.

But I want to return to a prior genocide, one that is usually forgotten or mislaid or misrepresented. It is sometimes, craftily enough, deployed as a justification for the present one.

The UN imposed sanctions on Iraq throught Resolution 687 after the first Gulf War ended in 1991. The resolution's primary sponsors, of course, were the US and UK.   more »

11 JANUARY

Richard Dawkins: "How I Hate Religion"

The West's Nuclear Pot Calls Iran's Kettle Black

"War on Terror": Demonizing Any Threat to the Established Order

Iraq: Freedom...Just Another Word for Capitalism

Maureen Dowd: Alito Already Stuck on Bush

Israel Pressures Bush to Condemn Iran Nuclear Research

Not Only Bush...Impeach Blair Over Iraq

The 'State' of Palestine: Zionist Propaganda Dominates International Media