"If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, is there no law that can stop him"?

"No treaty," replied John Yoo, the former justice department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush's policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance without warrants.

Yoo publicly debated last month the radical notion of the "unitary executive" - that the president, as commander-in-chief, is sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva conventions, and has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat. This is the cornerstone of the Bush legal doctrine.

Yoo's interlocutor, Douglass Cassel, a professor at the Notre Dame law school, pointed out that the theory of the unitary executive posits the president above other branches of government: "Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo."

"I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that," said Yoo.

The "unitary executive" is nothing less than "gospel", declared the federal judge Samuel Alito in 2000 - it is a theory that "best captures the meaning of the constitution's text and structure".

Alito's belief was perhaps the paramount credential for his nomination by Bush to the supreme court.   more »

Psychiatrist calls for end to 30-year taboo over use of LSD as a medical treatment.

British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.

The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once "acid" hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.

Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened.

Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March - the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.   more »

Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail.

These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq.

But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.

As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office.   more »

The thing that will really make Iran and Israel the most dangerous animals in the post-Iraqi Middle East jungle is Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons.

On the one hand, this commands grassroots popularity among the Arabs. They see it as a self-assertion that no Arab leader would dare offer against colonial-style western bullying and the hypocrisy of the west's acceptance of Israel's nuclear monopoly.

On the other hand, no one invested greater expectations in the Iraqi adventure than Israel. US success, it thought, would transform its strategic position.

But with US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians, and more ready for military action against Iran.

Should the US itself deal with Iran in the same violent and partisan fashion as it did Iraq, the adverse consequences of that new adventure will outstrip those of the earlier one.

For there is no reason to doubt that Iran's response, from both itself and its strengthened Shia and Islamist allies in the region, will be the devastating one it constantly promises.   more »

Is Israel not our fair-haired boy? Though Sharon & Co. have stomped on as many UN resolutions as Saddam Hussein ever did, they have pocketed $100 billion in U.S. aid and are now asking for a $2 billion bonus this year, Katrina notwithstanding. Anyone doubt they will get it?

Though per capita income in Israel is probably 20 times that of the Palestinians, Israel gets the lion’s share of economic aid. And though they have flipped off half a dozen presidents to plant half a million settlers in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, have we ever imposed a single sanction on Israel?

Has Bush ever raised his voice to Ariel Sharon? And when you listen to the talking heads and read the columns of the neocon press, is it unfair to conclude that, yes, they would like to dump over every regime that defies Bush or Sharon?

Empathy, a capacity for participating in another’s feelings or ideas, is indispensable to diplomacy.

An absence of empathy can leave statesmen oblivious as to why their nation is hated, and with equally fateful consequences.   more »

Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician has just dealt a huge blow to American-backed efforts to avoid civil war through the creation of a new, nationally inclusive constitutional order.

That leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has turned his back on the crucial pledge, made before last October's constitutional referendum, that the new charter would be open to substantial amendment by the newly elected Parliament.

Instead, Mr. Hakim, who runs the dominant, Iranian-supported fundamentalist party, now says no broad changes should be made. In particular, he defends the current provisions allowing substantial autonomy for the oil-rich Shiite southeast.

The vote count from last month's parliamentary election is not yet complete. But it is already certain that the Shiite religious alliance, in which Mr. Hakim is the most important leader, will hold enough seats to block any constitutional changes it doesn't like. The only recourse is to persuade Mr. Hakim to respect that earlier pledge.

Mr. Hakim's latest position is a prescription for a national breakup and an endless civil war. It is also a provocative challenge to Washington, which helped broker the original promise of significant constitutional changes.   more »

In my case, it was an L.A. Times Op-Ed article I wrote. In "Animals Suffer a Perpetual Holocaust" (April 21, 2003), I defended People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for using a quote of my grandfather's.

Unlike me, my grandfather was a famous man, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had escaped anti-Semitism in Europe in 1935 and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.

My grandfather, a principled vegetarian, famously wrote: "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis. For [them], it is an eternal Treblinka."

Three years ago, PETA built a campaign around that quote, but critics charged that the words were not really Isaac's, only those of one of his characters.

My Op-Ed article affirmed that from my personal knowledge Isaac felt that way — that the cattle-car reality of factory farming compared to the Holocaust. And I agreed with him.

In the era of the search engine, no good (or bad) deed goes unpunished. Then again, perhaps I should take pride in being ridiculed by a U.S. senator, John Cornyn (R-Texas).   more »

Perhaps the Europeans, watching us blunder into Iraq, have stood by to just watch us sink into this quagmire because they are tired of being pushed around. We were the big bull mastodon who mistakenly wallowed into the tar pit that is Iraq.

Everyone must read Chalmers Johnson's "The Sorrows of Empire." In his justly famous book he explains how and why our American empire will end.

Unfortunately, those that might have most benefited from reading him were the neocons whose misguided notions of empire have actually greatly sped up the deterioration of American might.

Back in 1997 when Wolfowitz, Cheney, Libby, Kristol and the other leading neocons authored a statement of principles for the New American Century they aimed to "rally support for American global leadership."

Less than a decade later we see what utter jackasses they were and how their hubristic naivete has done perhaps irreparable damage to our nation's standing in the world.

They lied us into Iraq to create a beachhead to reshape the entire region. Meanwhile in our own backyard Latin America is slipping forever away from us.   more »

12 JANUARY

TV Series "24": XXX Propaganda Value

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Is America Losing Its Hard-On?

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Bob Herbert Hounds George Bush

US Military in Iraq: Ingrained Racism

Judge Alito: On the Quiet Side of Extremism

Western Imperialism Commits Genocide in Iraq