This week, when our feckless leader George W. Bush was asked by reporters if he had seen the memos written by White House and Pentagon lawyers justifying the use of torture in the War on Terror, he replied that he didn't recall having seen them. This is a page right out of the Ronald Reagan playbook: deny that you remember anything and hope your underlings get caught in the fallout, not you. When asked repeatedly if he approved the use of torture techniques in Guantanamo and Iraq, George W. didn't give an outright "no," as we might expect from a man who's innocent. Instead, he covered his ass by saying that his instructions were "to conform to US law"--whatever that means. With right-wing lawyers telling him that US law can be stretched so far that he, as President, can do anything he wants, then George W.'s answer doesn't mean a damn thing. Is it "yes" or "no," George? It's not an essay question.--Maria Tomchick

And when you have White House and Pentagon lawyers working in shifts to come up with legal rationales that justify the President of the United States as being above any law--due to wartime, technicalities, whatever--what we have is a dictatorship. This is the real thing: an unelected leader, above the law, torturing prisoners just like some Saddam Hussein or Josef Stalin. The only difference is quantity, and they're working on it. Be very afraid. --Geov Parrish

The new US-appointed Iraqi prime minister is so out of touch with the Iraqi people that he recently bragged about his ties to the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies. Iyad Allawi didn't mention which intelligence agencies he was talking about, but you can bet the Iraqi people are thinking, "He must have worked with Mossad, too!" That'll inspire confidence in his rule. As if that weren't bad enough, the New York Times interviewed several former CIA officials who had worked in the Middle East in the 1990s. They said that Dr. Allawi and his exile group, the Iraqi National Accord, were responsible for a CIA-funded string of car bombings in Baghdad during the early 1990s. One former CIA officer, Robert Baer, recalled that one of the bombings involved the explosion of a school bus that killed Iraqi schoolchildren. Several of those interviewed thought it "ironic" that Iyad Allawi is now in charge of the security situation in Iraq, including stopping car bombings and other insurgent attacks. Nobody pointed out that this car-bombing campaign means that Dr. Allawi has committed crimes on a par with Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and other former US employees. Truly, the US has replaced one evil dictator with another. When asked exactly when the car bombings occurred, the CIA employees all pulled a Reagan: they couldn't remember. How convenient for George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, one of whom would've had to sign off on the project.--M.T. Sources: "New Iraqi PM Not Ashamed of CIA Links," Lin Noueihed, Reuters, 6/10/04, and "Ex-CIA Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks, Joel Brinkley, NY Times, 6/8/04, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html.

In a rare attempt at journalism by a Western news agency in Iraq, the Washington Post sent a staff reporter to Fallujah to see how the new Fallujah brigade was doing in keeping the peace in this restive city. Daniel Williams found, to his great surprise, that security in the city of Fallujah is like an onion. In the outermost ring, the US Marines control the area outside of Fallujah. Just inside their perimeter, the Fallujah Brigade, set up by the US marines and run by a former general under Saddam, is clustered in a ring of tents on the outskirts of the city, where they man a few checkpoints. Nearby, the Iraqi police cower inside their parked police cars, refusing to go on patrol. Just a few feet inside that ring, the insurgents have their own checkpoints. Once Williams passed through this gauntlet safely, the intrepid reporter found that the insurgents completely controlled the entire town, with no sign of either the Iraqi police or the Fallujah Brigade in sight.

Furthermore, in spite of the checkpoints, the insurgents--oh, let's just call them guerrillas, fer Christ's sake--are able to come and go from the town as they please, which is why there have been an increasing number of guerrilla attacks on US troops and convoys in the region since the ceasefire. When asked what the US marines were going to do about this problem, Col. Larry Brown replied: "We measure progress in small steps. We prefer to bring them back into the fold slowly. It is a good sign that Iraqis are handling their problems." That may sound stupid, but, truly, what can they do? Wiping out the guerrillas would mean bombing the town of Fallujah right off the map. And even that wouldn't accomplish the goal, because other Iraqis would rise up in protest. Meanwhile, the US general in charge of training the Iraqi police, Paul D. Eaton, told the Associated Press last week that the training program was a complete flop. "It hasn't gone well," he said. "We've had almost one year of no progress." Que sera, sera.--M.T. Sources: "Despite Agreement, Insurgents Rule Fallujah," Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 6/7/04, p. A15, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20761-2004Jun6?language=printer, and "US General: Iraq Police Training a Flop," Jim Krane, Associated Press, 6/9/04.

As I noted in the Reagan article, David Dellinger died a couple weeks ago. His passing, unlike Reagan's, didn't get nearly enough attention. He was a pacifist activist to the end, embodying an egoless spirit all too rare among well-known activist types. His actions flowed from his integral beliefs in the goodness of all people. Opposing war and supporting justice, as a young potential conscript and as an old man, flowed inexorably from his essence: the belief in love.

The amount of living history Dellinger embodied nearly defies the imagination. Best known as the oldest and most authoritative of the Chicago Seven, the anti-war movement leaders singled out for prosecution in the aftermath of Chicago's 1968 convention protests, Dellinger had over 30 years of activism on either side of that seminal moment, activism that probably earned him his own file cabinet somewhere in an FBI basement. Influenced as a youth by Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day's Depression-era Catholic Worker movement, Dellinger worked behind the lines in the Spanish Civil War, and then in 1940 refused to register for the draft before the country's entry into WWII. As a result, he became one of a handful of radical pacifist prisoners whose Gandhian fasts helped integrate the federal prison in Danbury in 1942. Dellinger was, with a handful of other pacifists, a key strategic bridge between the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Dr. King and early protests of the Vietnam War. Singled out for heaviest punishment during the Chicago Seven trial for his refusal to be gagged or intimidated, Dellinger stood out among the younger, primarily student activists who surrounded him. His persona was less bravado, more statement of fact: this is who he was, and it wasn't about to change or be cowed into submission after so many years and so much struggle.

Most famous during Vietnam, Dellinger kept on writing, talking, and getting arrested for decades to come--through the anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity movements and on to both Iraq wars, as well as the quieter moments between--with the perseverance and courage that comes from knowing no other way. It's who he was. --G.P.

Speaking of the Reagan article, a version of it that ran last week in Workingforchange.com got me on Michael Savage's nationally syndicated radio hatefest. He actually read the article--at least until he got to the part about AIDS, at which point he veered off into gratuitous gay-bashing. I got an astonishing amount of mail--not just the predictable moron mail from Savage's listeners, but a lot from people sick of the Gipper love fest. Notably, the favorable e-mails had tons of other examples of Reagan's contributions to the greater bad, while the critics couldn't name anything good he actually did He just made "us" feel "good," and then I'd get the personal attacks. Facts always help. --G.P.