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Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of... well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia's interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia's de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?

But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We've been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven't we learned how to stop them?

Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.

Why hasn't the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The "international community" needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week's real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America's energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the "task force" meetings. All we've known for sure is who wasn't invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America's dependence on fossil fuels.

We've long suspected that Cheney's special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of "Big Oil" over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney's energy task force.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force." This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn't conspire together, they did have one thing in common: their power was funded by our dependence on their oil. But even as Saddam's show trial begins, televisions are watching America's new national security enemies: Katrina and Wilma. Al Qaida's 9/11 attacks and the Saddam Hussein's dictatorship were "powered by" oil industry fortunes and short-sighted global energy policies, the same policies now bringing us global warming and monster storms.

Before making landfall in Mexico's Yucatan and pounding Florida, Hurricane Wilma was declared the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in history. That we got to a W-name itself is cause for concern: the first tropical storm of the year gets a name starting with "A" and so forth through the alphabet. This summer has been the most active hurricane season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We've seen so many storms that weather officials have now run through the alphabet: meteorologists are now having to track Tropical Storm (now Depression) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, five devastating hurricanes ripped across Florida, each one coming so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pounding Western Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the country. And of course Katrina devasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.

Global climate change is here. After decades of political hemming and hawing, only the most slimy of oil industry apologists (and Presidents) could argue that global warming hasn't arrived. We've built a national culture built on inefficient burning of fossil fuels. Developers put more and more people on unprotected sandbars built, maintained and insured by tax dollars. Someday is here and our weather is only going to be getting worse. We could be preparing for the inevitable adjustments. We could be investing in conservation, in renewable energies. We could change our tax codes to encourage sustainable housing: not just getting new development off beaches but also building urban and semi-urban communities that reduce automobile dependence.

Instead we spend billions of dollars on our oil addictions. We're now waiting for the announcement of the 2,000th U.S. military casualty in iraq. Administration officials used Katrina to rollback environmental protection regulations in Louisiana. The arctic ice cap is rapidly melting away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil industry officials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there.

How many Katrina bin Laden's and Saddam Wilma's does it take before we get the news.

One of the reasons I like "nonviolence" as a catch-all organizing principle is that it let you range across to some of the root issues that need to be addressed. One of these is the climatic effects that humans are having upon the Earth. The New Yorker has been running some articles: check out part one of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Climate of Man (part two is here).

One of the more useful set of links and discussions I've read lately comes from a post titled Climate Change Activism on a blog called The Public Quaker. It's not enough to know that the climate is going to hell in a handbasket and shouting the warnings out from the rooftops is often ineffective. The PQ talks about how we can help get a movement together that motivates people to build the world we want. Cool stuff and she has links to the work of others as well.

The "Indymedia" movement of independent media centers has been one of the most hopeful initiatives for democracy over the past few years. The Indymedia sites post stories from amateur reporters, in print, video and audio formats. The regional Independent Media Centers have been particularly active during large scale protests, covering them with a range and detail seen nowhere else.

Now there's disturbing news that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized Indymedia's computers in Britain. Details are lacking, but it certainly looks like yet another chilling violation of free speech in the name of "homeland security." Here's another article, from a local Indymedia Center. More as this frightening story develops. As we get information we will participate in any and all protests of this seizure. You can also check out thread on the Nonviolence.org Board (though much of it lame name-calling, sigh...)

One way to publicize grassroots political action is to give a trendy new name to your work. This is the strategy of the fellow who calls himself the "Freeway Blogger":
http://www.freewayblogger.com/. Rather than post to the internet he posts signs on the side of the road with clever statements like "War President? My Pet Goat"; "Rumsfailed"; and "Nobody Died When Clinton Lied."

There's nothing really twenty-first century about the Freeway Blogger's media. Activists have put paint on old bedsheets since time immemorial and the messages have gone up along the nation's highways just as long. One can imagine the first patriots scrawling "Go Home Brits" onto an old cloth hung in a tree outside Concord. Yours truly has modified a few highway signs in his day and wheatepaste political messages in what we might call "sensitive" places (the less said the better).

But what is new is the Freeway Blogger's use of the internet to highlight his work and organize it into a campaign. A sign on your local interstate isn't as exciting as a campaign of signs or a movement of sign-makers. So the Freeway Blogger has called for a National Freeway Free Speech Day on October 13. It's a day for all of us to grap our paint, posterboard, photocopies (and yes: bedsheets) in an coordinated effort to reach America's drivers. The Freeway Blogger does have a website and has gotten 770 people in 190 cities across 45 states to join him in "freeway blogging" on October 13.

Here's a great site I've recently found: "NonviolenceHelp". There's a lot of great material in here, I highly recommend for those wanting to learn more about the history and practice of nonviolence.

This site draws together some of the available on-line resources on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence. It is both an introduction to nonviolent social change and a resource for trainers and activists."

Update: December 2004: This site has now been retired; much of it's content can now be found in the Resources section of the Nonviolence Training Project

I usually think cyber-pranks are just silly. But I have to laugh at this one. enough bloggers have linked to President Bush's official bio with the words "miserable failure" that if you now type that phrase into Google our President comes up as the very first return. More on this "Googlebomb" from "this Newsday article":http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzgoog1206,0,2339508.story?coll=ny-business-headlines. And just to help the results along, I'll concur that I think he's a "miserable failure":http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.

One of the joys of the web is that you can think you've seen everything and then suddenly stumble across something new. This happened to me this morning with "West by Northwest":westbynorthwest.org, a great web-only publication focused on progressive issues in the Pacific Northwest. Organized as a ecumenical project by area Quakers, it's a journal of "arts & letters, ecology, and peace & social justice." I especially recommend their "Voices of Peace":http://westbynorthwest.org/artman/publish/peace.shtml selection.

Conservative godfather of the internet "Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org":http://www.instapundit.com/archives/011100.php the other day. He didn't like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs' critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here: * Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender _before_ the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender. * Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a U.S. warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at _enola Gay_ and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.

An interesting article on George Orwell and the future we've become. What would Orwell have thought about the big brother of national security and the never-ending war on terror. And what would he have thought of the internet and blogs? Here's a snippet:

"In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out.