It’s become something like a predictable horror movie these days. In the horror movies, you know the zombies are about to appear from around a corner when the violins play their high, shrill notes. In today’s political climate, you know the zombies are about to appear when you hear the the word “reform”.

The thing about zombies that makes them so creepy is that they take what’s good in the world and turn it rotten. It’s a good thing to see people on the street, walking for a bite to eat, but when they’ve got cemetery soil on their suits, their skin is green, and their eyeballs are popping out, suddenly that snack doesn’t seem so appetizing.

It’s the same way with the reform zombies. Reform used to mean making something better. Now, Republican zombies have made “reform” their favorite word, and they’ve turned it into a sickening shell of what it once was.

They stumble down the street, smoking their GOP victory cigars, moaning “Social Security reform!” Then, when they get their hands on Social Security, they rip it apart, chewing its flesh, sucking its blood until it too joins the living dead.

In every state in the union, reform zombies stagger through the night, screeching “Medicaid reform!” They search, relentlessly, for any corner where Medicaid recipients might be hiding, in need of “reform”. They take those Medicaid checks and devour them, and leave Medicaid recipients’ quivering bodies behind to fester without adequate access to medical care.

Oh, but the reform zombies are never satisfied. Always hungry, they stagger through America looking for any program that smells vulnerable. What’s their next victim? Class action citizen protection from corporations. “Reform! Reform class action!” they scream, hobbling down the street into America’s courthouses. It used to be that when corporations violated people’s rights, cheating them, poisoning them, or exposing them to danger, people had some redress. They could team up their efforts to seek compensation.

Now, that the Republican reform zombies have their hunger piqued, the days of such citizen cooperation are numbered. Remember when Erin Brokovich found that corporation poisoning the drinking water of an entire town? Well, if the reform zombies have their way, Erin Brokovich wouldn’t be able to file any more class action lawsuits like she did. The reform zombies want to have her for lunch.

Know what’s truly scary? The reform zombies have hired public relations experts to help them devour what’s left of citizens’ protection from corporate power. The public relations firm representing the reform zombies calls what they’re doing the “Class Action Fairness Act”.

Even more frightening, the large corporations of American are teaming up with the reform zombies to take the politics of living dead cannibalism public. Pharmaceuticals manufacturers, big oil companies, heck, practically all the big corporations that operate in the United States are helping truck the reform zombies all around the country to do their dirty work, eating the living flesh off of America’s traditions of civil law.

The corporations say that they have no choice. They have to make profits, see, and when citizens can seek compensation for being injured or killed by a corporation’s actions, they call that “unfair”. In their minds, giving people dangerous drugs is fair. Poisoning drinking water is fair. Creating cheap automotive parts that end up killing the people riding in American cars is fair. But, these corporations have to draw the line somewhere. Corporations absolutely will not tolerate it when people ask to be compensated for the death and ruin corporate corruption causes in their lives. It’s the principle of the thing, see.

So, the reform zombies are being sent out to your neighborhood to find any last shred of class action citizen protection, and suck the life right out of it. But, they’re not going to have to do the job alone. This time, they’re being joined by a new breed of Republican zombie: The fairness zombie.

Lock your doors, and defend yourself. No, don’t grab a rifle. Sign a petition defending the right of Americans to file class action lawsuits in local and state courts.

Mother Davis puts Republican reassurances in her box of broken promises as she reports,

There are some awfully peculiar consequences of the recent gay marriage ban that was passed by voters in Ohio last fall - and when I say “awfully peculiar” I put emphasis on the awful.

In Ohio, a public defender has used the anti-gay constitutional amendment there to request the dismissal of domestic violence charges against unmarried defendents. You see, unmarried couples just can’t have the rights of married couples in Ohio - even if those unmarried couples are heterosexual.

In Utah, a man is using the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment passed there last year as the basis for an appeal stating that his girlfriend has no legal right to file a restraining order against him.

Will these legal challenges win in court? We’ll have to wait and see, but this much is clear: Amendments to state constitutions that ban same sex marriages also may be making unmarried Americans sitting ducks. If you live in a state with one of these new constitutional amendments, you’d better get married if you want to be safe.

So much for equal protection under the law.

Now, some might say that these problems are unintended consequences. As for myself, I think it’s stretching the definition of coincidence that many of the groups that supported the state constitutional bans on same sex marriage also opposed domestic violence laws 20 years ago.

Wondering what constitutional protections will be the next to go,
Mother Davis

I’m so happy today.

Why, you might ask?

I’ve received my Republican National Committee membership card!

Why in the name of lesbian baby-burning satanism would the Republican National Committee send me a membership card? And why does this make me happy?

The RNC is sending me a card, along with a glossy brochure and various inserts, because I’m on their list of donors to the campaign of George W. Bush. I got on that list by sending $10 to George W. Bush in the early summer of 2004. Since then, George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee, various North Carolina Republican organizations and a couple of Republican Senatorial candidates have sent me loads of literature. Each piece may cost less than a dollar to package and send, but believe me, I’ve gotten a lot of Republican mail.

You might think that receiving Republican solicitations would drive one nuts. But I smile every time I get a “signed” 8×10 glossy of Dubya or a “membership card” to a Republican organization because it means that the Republicans have wasted another bit of their budget on little old me. That’s what the $10 donation was for, you see — a bet that I’d get much more than $10 of crap sent my way. In net terms, mine was an anti-donation of, I figure, around $50 so far. And every little “mail-gram,” every new “personal appeal” from some Republican Party bureaucrat, every cheap trinket designed to win my heart signifies more Republican money down the drain.

So that’s why I’m just tickled to find out that I’m a “member” of the Republican National Committee. If you want to feel the joy, too, send your check off to the Republican National Committee today!

But don’t be a fool like me. Make it a measly $5. That way you can tip the scales, and enjoy a good cackle at mail-time, much sooner.

You thought Bush spent a lot on Tsunami Relief at $350 million?

Get a load of this:

As of the end of 2004, the administration of George W. Bush has spent $250 million dollars on public relations agencies to promote its policies. That’s a quarter of a billion — BILLION — dollars on public relations for itself.

By 2004, a full 40% of those public relations contracts were awarded non-competitively — just handed out like candy. No bid!

At this rate, by the time George W. Bush is done, his administration will have spent 43% more on public relations for itself than it spent on Tsunami relief for a disaster that killed at least 150,000 people.

For 250 million dollars, the Bush administration could have started a full scholarship program for room, board, and a whopping stipend to boot, at $40,000 a year for four years, for 1,500 of America’s best college students.

For 250 million dollars, the Bush administration could have hired more than 7,000 of the workers tossed out of their jobs by the same corporations who, while moving their headquarters and factories overseas, managed somehow to shower Bush with big fat political contributions. It could have paid those workers America’s median income — not fancy, but no small shakes.

Heck, for 250 million dollars, the Bush administration could have CUT THE DEFICIT by a quarter of a billion dollars. Instead, that quarter of a billion dollars that it spent on public relations for itself is a quarter of a billion dollars more that the American people owe. And the interest on that quarter of a billion dollars is accumulating, compounding — right now.

How can you possibly characterize this sort of behavior as conservative?

Conservative, my ass.

Goodness gracious, a THIRD Conservative Columnist paid to promote a policy by the Bush Administration.

And yes, he “forgot” to tell everyone about it, too. Whoopsie!

This one’s name is Michael McManus. He got paid to promote Bush’s policy to push young people into getting married, and did so in his news columns without telling his readers that he was on the Bush Administration dole.

Want to guess what the title of his syndicated column is? Click through to the comments to find out.

Mother Davis twirls her skeleton keys around as she muses,

Developments in the release of four prisoners from the American gulag at Guantanamo Bay are nagging at my mind, and so I want to provide an update to the article I wrote on the prisoner release a few days ago.

The four men, Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar, and Moazzam Begg, who were finally released by the Bush Administration after years of imprisonment, torture, and other punishments without ever being charged with a crime, were extradited to the United Kingdom. There, the British government held the four men and questioned the, then released them from its own custody. The British government declared that there was no evidence that the men were of any criminal threat to anybody.

The United States Department of Defense, on the other hand, still insists that the four men it released still pose a “significant threat”. As I noted in my last article on the subject, this continued insistence by the Bush Administration of the guilt of these four men is truly bizarre, given the fact that the men were never charged with any crime, much less put on trial. If the four prisoners were truly a “significant threat”, then why on Earth didn’t the United States keep them in custody and put them on trial so that they could be legally imprisoned for a long period of time?

The likely answer is simple: The United States really has no evidence that the four men it released from custody have committed any crime at all. After all, the Bush Administration’s arrangement for trials allowed for extremely loose standards of justice that favored easy prosecution through military tribunals many legal experts have characterized as kangaroo courts. If there were any reasonable evidence against these four men, the Bush Administration would have used it by now.

The sham of the Guantanamo imprisonment is clearly shown by what the Bush Administration has attempted to claim as evidence against one of the four men: Moazzam Begg. During his time in American custody, first at a prison in Bagram, Afghanistan and then at Guantanamo Bay, Mr. Begg was exposed to cruel and inhuman conditions designed to erode his mental stamina to the point that he would no longer be able to resist American interrogations. Indeed, it now appears that agents of the American government interrogated Mr. Begg over 300 times. Mr. Begg could not have toilet paper, a toothbrush, a cup for drinking water, or even basic medical attention, unless he was “cooperative” with interrogators. The definition of being cooperative at Guantanamo Bay was, apparently, agreeing to do whatever his interrogators told him to do, including making false confessions.

So, after hundreds of interrogation sessions over years of captivity and abuse, what kind of confession was the American government able to wring out of Mr. Begg’s tortured mind? The American interrogators got Moazzam Begg to confess that he was indeed one of the men shown in a video attending a meeting with Osama Bin Laden himself. That sounds pretty juicy, doesn’t it? I mean, here was Mr. Begg, admitting to his interrogators that he was right there, on videotape, meeting with Osama Bin Laden, planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Pretty chilling stuff, huh?

Well, not really. It turns out that there is no possible way that Mr. Begg could have been one of the men on that videotape, standing with Osama Bin Laden. You see, after the proud American interrogators shared their supposed “evidence”, wrung out of Mr. Begg through years of torture and manipulation, with British intelligence agents, the British agents returned with evidence that proved without a doubt that Mr. Begg was in Britain at the time that the video of Osama Bin Laden was made.

The confession of Mr. Begg was completely bogus, but it is no surprise that American interrogators were able to get him to make it. After all, it has been documented that as part of the interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, prisoners are told that they will not be allowed to eat until they tell interrogators what they want to hear. Or, they’re made to lie on the floor, chained so that they cannot move, defecating and urinating on themselves, until they tell interrogators what they want to hear. Or they’re beaten, or stripped naked, or left for long times in solitary confinement, or groped by female guards… After years of such treatment, a prisoner will say anything to get just a little relief. The prisoner might even believe it.

Research into interrogation methods has clearly shown that confessions obtained through the use of torture, inhumane treatment, and long-term mental manipulation are worthless. That’s why the most respected experts in the military and intelligence agencies say that torture should never be used - it completely ruins the ability of American agents to obtain credible information, and makes it impossible to prosecute even the worst criminals.

On a happy note, Moazzam Begg has now seen one of his daughters for the first time. His wife, Sally, was pregnant with their fourth child when American and Pakistani soldiers came in the middle of the night and threw him in the trunk of a car without explanation.

That’s right - Mr. Begg, who our government imprisoned and tortured for years without ever bringing a criminal charge, has a wife named Sally.

It shouldn’t matter, but for some Americans, foreign-sounding names make the prisoners we drag through hell sound less than completely human. It’s easy for us to tolerate the torture of a man named Moazzam Begg, but it’s much harder to make excuses for the illegal imprisonment of the husband of a woman named Sally.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the American people could stretch their minds enough to consider that while there’s no evidence of any crime by a man named Moazzam, there is a huge load of evidence that a man named George has committed serious crimes against international and domestic American law?

Not holding her breath,
Mother Davis

Sit back and think for a minute. Close your eyes. Picture what a presidential ticket is supposed to look like.

Okay, now throw that image away, and get ready to replace it with one that looks an awful lot more like the real America that we all live in.

Imagine Boxer/Obama ‘08. With Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama running together, what Republican would stand a chance? Would the Republicans flounder and pull Alan Keyes out of the basement again? Would they run Pat Buchanan? Jeb Bush?

Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama possess the intelligence, the integrity, the strength, and the progressive idealism that has been sorely lacking in Democratic presidential candidates for an entire generation. It’s time to pack up the militaristic fuzziness of John Kerry, the collaborationist weakness of Joseph Lieberman, and the unscrupulous ambition of Hillary Clinton. It’s time for progressives to stand up for what they believe in, with no soft-pedalling, and no apologies.

The Democratic Party is never going to win over the racists, sexists and other breeds of bigots who make up a huge chunk of the Republican base of support. These Republican fanatics will never approve of people like Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama, but let the Republicans keep them.

Unlike so many of their colleagues, Senators Boxer and Obama are anything but Republican Lite. In 2008, the American people deserve an honest debate with a strong progressive voice to counter the nationalist extremism of George W. Bush and his followers. When it comes to 2008, Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama are the two leaders of national standing most able to accept this challenge.

January has been the month of Barbara Boxer.

While other Democrats of national prominence have surrendered to the agenda of the ruling Republican elites, Barbara Boxer has stood toe to toe with the Bush Administration and given a strong voice to the concerns of progressive Americans. Senator Boxer faced down Condoleeza Rice, who expected to treat the United States Senate as a rubber stamp. Furthermore, Barbara Boxer was the only Senator to demand accountability for irregularities in Ohio’s voting in the 2004 presidential election.

Barbara Boxer has a proud history of doing what’s right for America, even when it isn’t the easy thing to do. When it came to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Senator Barbara Boxer was one of the few people in Congress who perceived the dishonesty in the Bush Administration’s push for war. She was one of the proud few to vote against giving George W. Bush authorization to invade Iraq and wage war across the Middle East. History has vindicated her stand.

There is no one in America who has the combination of intelligence, experience, integrity, and devotion to the progressive bedrock values of freedom, fairness and truth that Barbara Boxer possesses. A presidential campaign with Barbara Boxer as the nominee of the Democratic Party will give America the strong voice for honest progressive ideals that we never got in 2004.

For that reason, we are proud to announce the arrival of Boxer 2008, the first web site dedicated to promoting a campaign of Barbara Boxer for President.

Senator Boxer has yet to announce whether she is interested in running for President, so it’s important for those of us who appreciate her courageous stands against the lawless nationalism of the Republican Party to show our support. The Boxer 2008 web site is just in its infancy, but it promises to grow into a fantastic resource for citizens who want to restore America to the position of honor it once occupied in the world.

Let’s call it like it is: Maggie Gallagher is a conservative welfare queen. Not content to write fawning essays about the Bush Administration at the ordinary rate of pay for a syndicated columnist for the United Press Syndicate, Gallagher apparently signed a couple of juicy contracts to get tens of thousands of dollars straight from the Bush Administration - to do what she was already doing.

Conservative newspaper columnists like Maggie Gallagher have complained for ages about ordinary Americans getting any kind of assistance from the government. They say that when people get help from the government, they turn lazy. Yet, Americans are quickly learning that many conservatives have been paid taxpayers’ money to write articles praising Bush Administration policies.

In the case of Maggie Gallagher, the Bush Administration paid over 41 thousand dollars. What did the Bush Administration get? In return for a government check, Gallagher signed a contract that obligated her to promote a Bush Administration pro-marriage plan.

There’s irony all over on this story, but here’s the peach that really catches my eye. The policy that Maggie Gallagher was paid by the Bush Administration to promote was centered around a program through which agents of the federal government would nag poor people to get married. This policy comes after a generation of Republican ideology that held that poor people are ruined by checks from big government entitlement programs. So, under the program that Maggie Gallagher was paid to write about, the government stopped helping out poor people, but now comes to their doorsteps to tell them how to lead their private lives. It’s an odd thing that Republicans like Maggie Gallagher always complain about big government, but think it’s a really good idea to have federal bureaucrats telling Americans when they ought to get married.

I don’t know if Maggie Gallagher is married herself, but she sure is on the government dole - taking part in what appears to be a big government program of welfare just for Republican pseudo-journalists. The appropriate question to ask now is not which other conservative columnists were paid by the federal government to promote Republican policies, but whether there are any conservative writers in the national media who are not on the government dole.

We will find out, eventually. Non-profit watchdog organizations have filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act to be given information about all government contracts with conservative columnists during the last four years.

Of course, the Bush White House has advised all government agencies that they will be supported in their efforts to resist Freedom of Information requests. But, purposeful stonewalling by the Bush Administration can only last so long. There is a little thing called the law, after all, and last we heard, the Bush Administration was still obligated to follow it.

Which reminds me: It is against the law for federal funds to be used for programs of partisan political propaganda. Maybe Maggie Gallagher’s next column ought to be about why the Republicans in Congress are refusing to allow an investigation into what appears to be a pattern of widespread violation of the law by the Bush White House…

I say that we don’t let this one lie. As long as conservative pseudojournalists like Maggie Gallagher are taking money to secretly write articles for the government, why don’t we hire them ourselves? This afternoon, we got ahold of her email, so we’re encouraging our readers to ask Maggie Gallagher, at MaggieBox2004@yahoo.com whether she’ll accept our offer of ten dollars and 14 cents to promote the idea of impeaching George W. Bush for using taxpayers’ money to create partisan Republican propaganda during a congressional campaign season.

Tell you what, Maggie - we’ll pay you an extra five dollars if you can work in an extra complaint about how checks from the big government corrupt the moral integrity of low-wage workers.

I get so many along these lines, but this one really takes the cake:

Dear , Your website, www.irregulartimes.com - 2004 Reasons To Boot Bush, was just added to our directory. You can find your listing here… http://www.atsthmazone.com/teddyrooseveltatsthma

How apropos!

The Conservative Christian Right has no time to use its influence with the White House to demand an investigation of systematic torture, or to press for an end to poverty, or to free the wrongfully accused, because…

…they’re too busy finding hidden phalluses on video covers. The Conservative, Christian, Right-Wing ChildCare Action Project, determined to ferret out and quash evil words and deeds wherever they exist, notes the following on its website:

“FACT: In “The Little Mermaid,” a scene depicts a priest becoming noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding. Also, a castle spire on the jacket art for the video resembles a phallus. [A phallus is a representation of the male member]”

They didn’t mention that the Little Mermaid is wearing nothing but a bra made out of scallops, but why should we quibble? This is clearly a Big Moral Issue, important enough to Take Action on (unlike, say, the torture of Iraqis).

The ChildCare Action Project goes on to note:

“FACT: JEFFERSON IN PARIS (Disney backed) spreads the smear (initiated by his political rivals, but discounted by historians) that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by a 13-year-old slave girl.”

Actually, Jefferson in Paris says that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by a 15-year-old slave girl, Sally Hemmings. And — WHOOPSIE! — DNA analysis has supported this claim.

Clearly, to this Conservative Religious Christian group the possibility that a White Founding Father slept around with a Black Slave Girl is a possibility to be discounted at all costs. It’s a Moral Values Thing, apparently — unlike poverty, which the ChildCare Action Project doesn’t write a word on, except to ridicule Rocky and Bullwinkle for fictionally living in poverty in their cartoon land.

The ChildCare Action Project continues:

“FACT: Actors Ernie Sabella and Nathan Lane said in a New York Times interview that the characters they played (Timon, the meerkat, and Pumbaa, the wart hog) in THE LION KING are ‘the first homosexual Disney characters ever to come to the screen….’”

Homosexuality between a meerkat and a warthog! Unscripted! Offscreen! At Some Hypothetical Time Or Another! The HORROR! Clearly, the off-screen, off-script, hypothetical homosexual relationship between two fictional animated beasts of different species is a Big Moral Issue — unlike, say, the wrongful imprisonment of innocent people, on which the ChildCare Action Project writes not a word.

Now that the Republicans have won, everybody tells me I need to readjust my moral values to reflect theirs. Let me practice: Sex? Bad. Questioning White ForeFathers? Bad. Cartoon animals that make us think of homosexuality? Horrid!

OK, I’m with the program. But do you know what? The thing that chaps me now about the ChildCare Action Project is that they don’t focus on the perverse imagery of one of the most prevalent programs on American television.

Two weeks before the Super Bowl, they haven’t said a word about…

…no, not Janet Jackson…

…football players. Get a load of this:

Scantily Clad Homo-touching!

Inappropriate Public Displays of Affection!

Eeewwwww!

Tight ends, receivers, end zones, oh my.

When will the Conservative Christian Right-Wing begin to address this clearly compelling moral issue?

Maybe after they’ve cleared up that little torture thingy.

36 Americans were killed in Iraq today. That makes today the most deadly day for American troops since the beginning of the Iraq War - even though it’s getting close to two years since President Bush declared that major combat operations were over. Of course, many more than 36 people were killed in Iraq today. Scores, if not hundreds, of Iraqis were killed in Iraq today as well.

The saddest thing is that all these deaths were unnecessary. All the reasons that the ruling Republican elites give for justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq have turned out to be shams. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The Middle East has not been made more stable. Democracy has been promised, but most Iraqis cannot even leave their homes in safety, much less vote. At the same time, almost 300,000 sons and daughters of Iraqis, including a huge number of people who have never set foot in Iraq and have citizenship in other countries, are voting in safe places like London, Detroit, and Los Angeles, skewing the vote in a most undemocratic manner. The promise of ending the reign of terror turned out to be an empty fraud as well, with recent revelations that the American puppet “interim” government is torturing Iraqis much in the same way that Saddam Hussein’s government did.

More and more, Republican pundits are falling back to an indefensible position that “it doesn’t matter anymore whether going to war was wrong or right”. On the Iraqi side, insurgents are declaring that elections are somehow un-Islamic. Both positions are pathetic excuses that barely cover a bloody lust for violence.

The leaders of all sides in this conflict have the power to step away from it and end the bloodshed. Yet, motivated by selfish anger, greed, stubbornness, and a pornographic pleasure in slaughter, they continue the fight. All pledge not to stop fighting until they win, but of course, they cannot all win. Instead, the closest thing to an exit strategy is to prolong the fighting until every last thing that once was worth winning is torn to bloody shreds.

Mother Davis opens her front door and appreciates the fresh air as she notes,

There’s an interesting piece of news from the Center for Constitutional Rights today. It seems that four of their clients who were held as prisoners at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay were released today.

Now, there are two possibilities to explain this release.

1. The men are innocent of any involvement in terrorist activities. Certainly, this is the possibility that traditional standards of law would recognize. You see, before George W. Bush came to occupy the White House, there was something called presumption of innocence. That meant that if a person were accused of a crime, the system must regard that person as innocent until proven guilty.

Of course, these four men were not ever even formally accused of any crime. They were just snatched, as part of a huge body grab that also brought to the Guantanamo Bay prisons people who turned out to be completely uninvolved in any armed struggle against the United States - people like taxi cab drivers, farmers, and teachers. Why, some of those people that Donald Rumsfeld insisted were “the worst of the worst” sent to be imprisoned, degraded, and tortured at Guantanamo Bay were little boys less than 13 years old. The American military still holds many of these boys as prisoners, without charge, without access to lawyers, at Guantanamo Bay.

The fact that the men are being released shows that the Bush Administration has no evidence against them, and never did. It shows that the Bush Administration has been imprisoning and torturing people without regard for who they are. It gives the appearance that the Bush Administration only cared about rounding up a sufficient number of Muslim men and boys to give the appearance to the American public that vengeance was being carried out.

2. The second possibility is that these four men are, in fact, among “the worst of the worst” - some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world.

Of course, if the Bush Administration has evidence that this is the case, if it was so sure that these men were despicable and wretched “evildoers” with certain ties to Al Quaida’s plots to kill thousands of Americans, then the Bush Administration could easily have just put these men on trial to show to the whole world what twisted nasty people the enemies of America are.

So, if these men are not innocent, then what possible reason would the United States have for releasing them?

Well, some Republican apologists are suggesting that these men might have been deadly dangerous Al Quaida evildoer operatives, but they have been “turned” through “special techniques” to become double agents for the United States. The idea is that the prisoners were subjected to such a mind-bending routine of torture, interrogation, sensory deprivation and confinement that they have become putty in the hands of prison guards, and now are being sent back to their countries of origin to settle back with Al Quaida, and report back intelligence to their former American captors.

Now, for silly little old me, neither option seems particularly reassuring. If the first possibility is true, then America is being ruled by lawless, despotic thugs. If the second possibility is true, then America is being ruled by fools.

Consider this for a moment: If the four men were released from the hellhole of Guantanamo Bay to serve as double agents for the United States of America, then the USA has certainly set them up to fail. For one thing, the American government released their names: Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar, and Moazzam Begg. How could these men possibly work as double agents when their identies are now known to the whole world, including Al Quaida?

Furthermore, if these men truly were among “the worst of the worst”, what kind of idiots are they in the Bush Administration to believe that they can be trusted to work as American intelligence agents? If they could really be transformed into pro-American zealots through torture by American guards, then what would stop them from just converting back to anti-American zealotry?

Considering these two possibilities, it becomes clear that the first possibility - that the men are innocent - is much more plausible. Consider the case of one of these men: Moazzam Begg. Mr. Begg is the son of a banker in Birmingham, England. He went to Afghanistan, with his three young children, to become a teacher. While there, he also worked constructing wells for drinking water in poor communities. When the Americans started bombing his area of Kabul, he went to live in Pakistan. It was in Pakistan that he was thrown into the trunk of a car by American soldiers and Pakistani intelligence agents.

Begg was held prisoner in terribly harsh conditions at Bagram in Afghanistan for one year. Torture was common at the prison where he was held. Then, Begg was sent to Guantanamo Bay. The Bush Administration declared that Begg was one of six prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who would likely be tried by a military tribunal set up explicitly to evade the standards of American law.

Now, we do not know if Begg actually committed any crime. Neither does Begg’s father, who last year begged the American government to put his son on trial so that his status could be determined.

It’s very strange that the Bush Administration would go through all the trouble of capturing Begg, calling him one of the “worst of the worst”, imprisoning him for years in inhumane conditions, and preparing him for a military tribunal only to release him without any criminal charge whatsoever.

Behavior of this kind can only be described as irrational. This is the thought that sticks with me - that America’s foreign policy and systematic degradation of the rule of law at home has been motivated, planned and executed not in a carefully considered effort to make America safer, but out of a raw fear and rage that blinds our leaders to reason.

Whether or not Moazzam Begg and the other three men released today were innocent, or were guilty of heinous terrorist acts, the way that the Bush Administration has dealt with them makes no sense at all - and there is nothing more terrifying than a government that regards itself as above the law and beyond all need of reason.

Anticipating the next irrational strike,
Mother Davis

And oh yeah, another record deficit.