Today is a good moment to give some thought to one of the worst remaining legacies of the Bush era, the prison where that administration's grotesque offshore detention policies -- the beatings, the torture, the works -- were first put into play, the prison that has yet to go away. And as Karen Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and the author of a striking new book, The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First 100 Days, points out, it's not, as you might expect, Guantanamo, but our grim prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

In a hopeful sign of change, the Obama Justice Department has just released nine previously undisclosed Bush era Justice Department documents, the sorts of things you shouldn't read by flashlight in the dark. Bush's lawyers, we now know, wrote bushels of such legal documents indicating that their commander-in-chief could do just about anything in the arsenal of any two-bit tyrant. That included loosing the U.S. military on the United States. ("In one of the newly disclosed opinions, Justice Department appointee John Yoo argued that constitutional provisions ensuring free speech and barring warrantless searches could be disregarded by the president in wartime, allowing troops to storm a building if they suspected terrorists might be inside.")

It also included an assertion "that detainees could be transferred to countries known to commit human rights abuses so long as U.S. officials did not intentionally seek their torture." That's a prescription that has much in common with the Justice Department's infamous 2002 memo that offered this pretzled definition of torture: "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" -- and actually made the definition dependent on the supposed intent of the torturer. When it came to torture, what had to be proven, the authors of that memo wrote, was "specific intent to cause pain� As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent... if causing such harm is not his objective, [the putative torturer] lacks the requisite specific intent... A defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his custody or physical control... Where a defendant acts in good faith, he acts with an honest belief that he has not engaged in the proscribed conduct." Uh, sure�

Dan Froomkin, who writes the Washington Post's White House Watch reviews the latest news on all of this with his usual acumen, including a claim by a former Bush administration lawyer in the Los Angeles Times that these newly released memos are but "the tip of the iceberg." (Oh, and let's not forget this week's news that the CIA purposely, and surely illegally, destroyed 92 videotapes of the interrogation of top al-Qaeda prisoners and who knows what else as part of a cover-up in late 2005 as Congress started to get interested in investigating.)

In her new book, Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, who has spent these last years doggedly -- and brilliantly -- following the torture trail wherever it led, offers a revealing excavation of the early days of Bush detention policies as that administration was beginning to create its offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice. It's full of surprises. Now, she issues a challenge to the Obama administration, in this moment of possible change, to face the "missing prison" at Bagram Air Base and deal with it. Tom

Obama's Guantanamo?

Bush's Living Legacy at Bagram Prison
By Karen J. Greenberg

Just when you think you've woken up from a bad dream�

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[Note for TomDispatch readers: Not to be missed -- the Nation Institute, which so nobly supports this website, Nation Books, and Alternet are co-hosting a panel discussion, "Meltdown: The Economic Collapse and a People's Plan for Recovery," with an all-star cast that includes Katrina vanden Heuvel, Joseph Stiglitz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jeff Madrick, Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Christopher Hayes. Some of them should be consulting for the Obama administration in place of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers et al. instead of offering us their thoughts for free at 8 pm this Friday at 2 West 64th Street in New York City. Doors open at 7:15, first come, first served.]

Back in December, I wrote about the layoffs -- what a polite word for a terrible act -- then coursing through book publishing, my own business of more than 30 years. "When you get the word," I commented, "the call, the notice that you're a goner, or when your little world shudders, that's something else again. Even if the call's not for you, but for a friend, an acquaintance, someone close enough so you can feel the ripples, that can do the trick."

I had, by then, felt those ripples when Colin Robinson, an editor I admire, a Brit working for a large New York house, was axed. At the time, I wrote about his firing without using his name, but he's since written his own account of how he was tossed out (and what's happening to publishing) in the London Review of Books. "I'd hardly settled behind my desk," he begins, "when one of my bosses asked if I would join her in the corner office. 'Please close the door,' she said as I entered the room. Seldom a good sign. 'Why don't you take the comfortable chair?' Oh dear.")

Oh dear, indeed. He was gone the next day -- and what was his boss's last comment to him about book publishing? "She said that two words sprung to mind: General Motors." Indeed again. In fact, too much of American life has a GM look to it these days. Take journalism. Newspapers? Get your money out while you can. Last week, the Rocky Mountain News, almost a century and a half old, died ignominiously, as in the near future may the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle and other endangered species of papers. Last week as well, the Philadelphia Inquirer went into bankruptcy, just one of 33 U.S. daily newspapers whose parent companies have recently filed for it; and that's without even mentioning the rest of our papers radically cutting costs and staffs, hocking assets, or sinking into debt. If you needed one more hint about the way the wind was blowing, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported that, "on Friday, the American Society of Newspaper Editors canceled its convention, saying too many members planned to stay home."

I still read two papers a day in print, but no matter. I'm 64 years old, almost as superannuated as the papers I read. This year it seems all but certain that at least one, if not more, major cities in this country will lack a newspaper.

Recently, a close friend of mine in publishing was whacked. Ten years at his job, 24 hours out the door. It does take your breath away. Or mine at least. And Jill Fraser's as well. It's as if you're watching the tightening gyres of some bird of prey circling in for the kill. But, as Fraser indicates below, not every American is quite so out of breath, not if we're to believe the latest opinion polls. Author of White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America, Fraser is a new TomDispatch author; she also runs a website, EconoWhiner.com, that couldn't be more of this moment or better poised to cover our bad times, macro to micro. A longtime financial journalist, she has taken up the post of "whiner-in-chief" at her site, which is addictive. I'm hooked. You will be, too. Check it out. And while you're at it, to catch a TomDispatch audio interview in which Fraser discusses why a sizeable minority of Americans seem immunized to the idea that anything bad could happen to them, click here. Tom

What, Me Worry?

Making Sense of Polling on Job Insecurity
By Jill Andresky Fraser

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[Note to TomDispatch Readers: This week, the website Foreign Policy In Focus, whose work I greatly admire and whose co-director John Feffer is a TomDispatch regular, will be using this piece to kick off its new strategic focus on empire. FPIF will be exploring the question of whether the Obama administration is likely to wind down our empire or will simply try to implement a somewhat kinder and gentler version of the same. Its weekly e-newsletter, World Beat, is particularly useful and can be subscribed to by clicking here. Tom]

The Imperial Unconscious

Sometimes, it's the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

"U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said. 'The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'"

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: "there must be an Afghan face on this war." U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace -- and no less unremarked upon -- for them to urgently suggest that an "Iraqi face" be put on events there.

Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory -- and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War -- ours -- a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It's hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington's everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Again, thanks to all of you who, in response to recent TD pleas, urged others to sign up for the email notice that goes out every time this site posts a piece -- or simply turned people on to the site itself. (If you meant to do so, but haven't yet, don't forget to spread the word!) And thanks as well to all of you who offered your hard-earned dollars to help this site and its writers via the "Resist Empire, Support TomDispatch" contribution button. What a difference that makes. Note, by the way, that the RSS feed at TD is finally fixed. You just have to sign up again and, as you've probably already noticed, there's a snazzy new "share this" button at the top of every piece that allows you to share the latest TomDispatch post with more social networks than I even knew existed!

Now to the day's post: All forms are made to be broken. It's been an unbroken form at TomDispatch for me to introduce each post. Sometimes, when no introductory comments spring to mind (particularly on subjects I know less about), I'll ask an author if he or she has come across a relevant news clipping or has any passing thoughts about what to write. When I asked Chip Ward the other day, he responded with an introduction so striking that I decided to turn the space over to him. And so here he is, in a site first, introducing himself. Tom]

Common to sudden catastrophes is the shock of finding the world upside down. The water is suddenly on top instead of under; the rumbling earth swallows houses and spits out lava; the mud wall slides down from above; the flames roar up; the wind spins; the tower topples. In an instant, everything is broken and nothing works. What you relied upon is gone.

The destruction of the World Trade Center towers was that kind of deep disturbance, even if it was man-made. The shock of 9/11 was so profound that we thought it would define the twenty-first century, and even now it's hard for any event to match the immediacy, the drama, the sheer horror of that single autumn day. When the smoke cleared we learned that we had never really been quarantined from the epidemic of planetary violence that, until 9/11, was always "over there." Suddenly, the shocking violence most of us only witnessed on our television screens had blown back to our very doorstep. Our world shifted over night. Fear reigned. It became our ideology. It became their means of controlling us. It was called "homeland security."

In the second big shock of the young century, seven years later, Wall Street collapsed. Although a few wise voices had warned us it could happen, we didn't see that one coming either. If 9/11 put an American sense of physical safety to flight, the meltdown of casino capitalism took away our economic security.

The debris from economic earthquakes may appear less obvious -- being failed institutions rather than twisted beams -- but the damage couldn't be more real. All that wealth incinerated almost overnight translates into lost jobs, lost homes, lost businesses, lost retirements, lost health care, lost education, lost options, lost dreams. Shredded investments and failed businesses mean that struggle, diminishment, indignity, anxiety, anger, defeat, depression, stress, and hardship will stalk us for years to come. What we once counted on is just as gone as any house or community washed away or burned to the ground. Like 9/11, the economic disaster shook the ground we walked on. This time, stress joined fear.

On 9/11, towers crashed to the ground. In this recent crisis, an entire empire of belief went down.

Islands, it's well known, are more vulnerable to species extinctions than continents. Could the same be true with economic extinctions? After all, as Rebecca Solnit wrote at this site, the small North Atlantic island of Iceland (pop. 320,000) went bust first in this ongoing, roiling economic crisis. Its economy had been riding high on speculative funny money for years when, in little more than a week in October, all three of its major banks cratered and the country's currency essentially ceased to have value. Not long after, Icelanders hit the streets of their capital, Reykjavik, launching protests, which have yet to end. Soon after, the government fell.

Just this Saturday, Ireland, another suddenly shaky island, whose economy had been riding high on funny money, saw mass protest in the streets of its capital. As the British Times described the scene: "For two hours yesterday Dublin's O'Connell Street was a swollen river of anger as 100,000 people marched in protest at the government's handling of the financial crisis." At least one protestor carried a sign warning of "a lesson learnt from Iceland." And in this climate of unrest that threatens to flood islands with "swollen rivers of anger," the British police are now bracing for the worst -- a possible "'summer of rage' with mass protests over the economic crisis that could mar Prime Minister Gordon Brown's G20 summit in London in April." We're talking here about a formerly prosperous isle that is now inspiring headlines like "Is The U.K. Another Iceland?" and whose capital has been dubbed by some "Reykjavik on the Thames."

But mainlands, as Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, tells us in his latest TomDispatch post, haven't exactly been immune from rage either. As the planet seems to melt down, day by day, week by week, no place may be. Everywhere, it seems, authorities are bracing themselves for the worst. Just yesterday, for instance, the New York Times reported that, in China, which has lost 20 million jobs in the last few months, "more than 3,000 public security directors from across the country are gathering in the capital to learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called mass incidents."

Good luck, as they say. Let Klare -- who, back in the 1990s, may have been the first person to seriously consider the kinds of violence, conflict, and even "resource wars" that might arise out of scarcity and tough times -- survey the global landscape and offer you a sense of what may lie ahead. Tom

A Planet at the Brink

Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?
By Michael T. Klare

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

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