THOSE who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But, Friedrich Hegel, in Philosophy of History (1832), writes that peoples and governments have never learnt anything from history. As we move towards the elections under the fourth military regime, it is becoming clearer that we have certainly not learnt anything from our history.

Pakistan suffered the most terrible tragedy in its history during a military government headed by an able general, Yahya Khan. But, have we learnt anything from the debacle of 1971 or have just shut our eyes to the events that led us, as a nation, towards this terrible tragedy? Hamoodur Rehman Report is a document that should have become a part of our collective memory as a nation. Unfortunately, we conveniently chose to ignore and forget it. It was due to the courtesy of our neighbour that it was finally opened, but selectively, for public scrutiny after a lapse of over two decades.

One interesting chapter of the report is on the intentions of General Yahya Khan. This chapter provides useful insight into the psychology and style of a military ruler. As again, the present regime is attempting engineering of the Constitution and the political order in order to keep one person in power. There are lessons to be learnt by us if we have not decided to make a repeat of tragedy.

I have chosen a paragraph from Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report, which provides food for thought to every Pakistani. The findings are equally relevant to today’s situation and should make us more watchful as a nation.

“...There is a large body of evidence which proves that he (reference to a serving general) was in close contact with various political personages to whom he would either go as the president’s emissary or whom he would attempt to persuade to a particular course of action in order to promote General Yahya’s policies. None of these matters, of course, formed any part of his official duties.

“In our examination of the events during and after the election campaign we have seen that General Yahya didn’t support any particular party but rather that he was expecting an election result in which no single party would emerge as a force strong enough to dictate its own terms and that a number of comparatively small parties would be thrown up...After the election again the effort of General Yahya was to nullify the election results by playing off the parties against one another.” Isn’t the thinking of our present rulers same as it was in 1970? No political party should emerge strong and victorious in the polls. It was for this reason that the PML became subject of an operation to split its strength into two factions, the MQM and the ANP were pushed to leave the ARD and the smaller parties are being courted to help them win larger than size share. Mr. Aftab Sherpao had been winked to return in order to strengthen NWFP pro-government forces along with the ANP.

In Sindh, Mr. Liaqat Jatoi, who a few weeks ago was wanted on corruption charges has been allowed a safe entry and has joined official PML(Q) and Sindh Democratic Alliance has been formed under official patronage. The same is the story of Mr. Jan Jamali, former chief minister of Balochistan. In Punjab, Chaudharys of Gujrat have been extended the resources of the district governments to dismantle the hold of the PML-N.

These are the pieces of puzzle that seek to fix the gaps in the provincial politics for the government. The philosophy is to trim the big for cutting them to size and inflate the smaller for becoming tie-breakers. Finally, they will be played against each other in a hung parliament to ensure transfer of power at General Musharraf’s terms only. The same strategy in 1970 resulted in a mandate divided along provincial lines.

Today, again the picture that is emerging points in the same direction. The national parties have been weakened, the national leaders are being marginalized, and a dummy leadership with no roots is being promoted. This will result in four different governments in the provinces and a weak national government. What this augurs for the federation of Pakistan, needs no further explanation.

The question for General Musharraf is whether he will once again play track III of the old script or break the past tradition of dispensing a military dominated democracy, whether a system will be tailor-made for an individual or for the nation, whether he shall follow a policy of exclusion or practise principles of inclusion, and whether he trusts our people to elect their rulers or the ego of a few retired persons sitting in posh offices of Islamabad will stand taller and heavier than the collective wisdom of 140 million people.

The present crisis is bigger than the stature of any person, party, and institution. Its call is that we should unite the nation and find a synergistic solution. But, the history is cruel and very cruel, our experience shows that military rulers fail to look into the mirror of history and finally events overtake them.

Pakistan stands at the threshold of a new era. Its people, resources, culture, and geography are second to none. Only one thing is standing in its way of realizing the dream of its founding fathers, that is not being able to find a stable political environment that can translate into rule of law, good governance, and social justice. Making and breaking of institutions throws us deeper into the crisis of governance.

If we don’t have leaders who meet the expectations of our establishment and intelligentsia it is because we haven’t let the system run long enough where it can produce leaders from within the system. Each break-up of democratic process injects a new generation of lateral entrants who owe their position and success not to the system but to the likes and dislikes of the military rulers.

Today, the government is again empowering a new generation of so-called politicians, some by taking under its wings and the others by targeting. The favourites are the opportunists and corrupt of the condemned government who were easily persuaded to change loyalties and the targeted ones, the jihadi and religious parties, were in the democratic process on the fringe but now are being pushed to play centre-stage role as government’s main opposition. What will this political engineering yield? Is it not a billion dollar question as we have experienced it three times before? Will anyone look into the mirror of history?

The writer is a former MNA and deputy chairman of Planning Commission.

IT is for the first time, since the Algerian struggle for independence, that the masses have moved to the centre-stage of history in the Arab world. The Palestinian masses — its workers and peasants, its intelligentsia — have come forward to fill the space vacated by the kings and presidents, by the slick diplomats and political generals.

Arab nationalism, led by the army officer corps, which was drawn mainly from the lower middle class, was no doubt committed to the struggle against Israel. And it did push back and weaken the pre-capitalist Arab leadership which, after losing the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, was ready to make peace on the basis of the defeat suffered by its armies on the ground.

However, in setting out to create a political base for itself within the Arab world, the army leadership suffered from two weaknesses. It carried out land reforms but was unable to industrialize the Arab East as those countries remained a part of the world market. Therefore, its economic programme ultimately turned to the liquidation of small Greek, Jewish and Lebanese compradore capital, with accompanying Xenophobia. Secondly, it refused an autonomous role to the Arab masses. The social base of the military leadership of Arab rationalism, thus, remained economically precarious and politically weak.

The separate peace made by Egypt with Israel and the huge American subsidy to it, which underpins this peace, is the recognition on the part of the middle class military leadership that it can neither pursue a long-term struggle against Israel, nor develop the economies of the Arab East beyond the logic of dependent capitalism.

The withdrawal of the Arab armies from the contest with Israel, indeed from the Palestinian land entirely, has left the Palestinian masses its master. The resultant civil society has been further strengthened by the systematic destruction by the Israelis of whatever little security apparatus the Palestinian Authority had been able to create.

This has changed the nature of the struggle against the Israeli military occupation. It transited from the political to armed resistance without difficulty and without a pause. And, of course, the methods of a mass struggle are, and must be, different from those of the armies. The suicide bombers, the snipers, the ambush layers may be distasteful to the regular soldiers and to the wealthy, who believe that fighting should be “comme il faut”. But they arise from the dialectic of the masses’ political strength and military weakness. An occupation army is conversely, always weak politically in face of the masses that it occupies. Hence its tendency to employ a high level of violence against them.

Israeli violence and brutality have their origin in the lack of comprehension of the relationship between the man and the weapon, by the Israeli leadership. It is the man who resists. And his will to resist comes from political consciousness. Weapons only lend greater efficacy to his action. This was the case when armed Jewish bands were fighting the Arab armies in 1948. However, the vast preponderance in arms of the Israeli army has obscured the fact of human essence of resistance from the Israeli leaders’ view. As a result, exasperated by a defiance, which appears irrational to them in the face of their fire-power, they hit out blindly in an attempt to overwhelm the Palestinians’ will to fight back.

The Israeli project of building buffer zones between their settlements and the Palestinian population is actually a recognition on their part that (a) they cannot crush the Palestinian popular resistance and that (b) this mass resistance will not permit the Palestinian bourgeois leadership to make the kind of peace with Israel, which the latter demands.

Hence the ingredients of a stalemate. But the danger in this stalemate is that its prolongation will increase the impatience of the people of the neighbouring Arab countries with the passivity of their governments, which may lead to political tensions or worse.

The peace proposal of Prince Abdullah is the response both to this stalemate, arising from the inability of Israel to crush the Palestinian resistance, and to the danger of things getting out of control in the Arab countries around Palestine. It aims at transferring the initiative in the Palestinian problem from the Palestinian masses back to the Arab states, as was the case up to 1967.

The plan is simple. It only adds an all-Arab dimension to the Security Council resolution 242, which called for exchange of land for peace and, significantly, it does not mention the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, another concession at the cost of Palestinians. If Israel had been agreeable to trading land for peace it would not have continued to occupy the West Bank and Gaza for thirty-five years. The only new element in the situation which gives an opening to Arab-Israeli negotiations is the realization dawning upon the Israeli leadership that it can neither push two million Palestinians into Jordan nor can it continue its occupation of West Bank and Gaza at an acceptable cost. This victory gained by the Palestinian masses has to be appropriated now by the Arab states for their own ends, which are those of maintaining social tranquillity in the Arab East.

Israel has not commented on the elements of the plan itself. But it has offered to talk directly with the Saudis without preconditions, i.e. without a settlement being necessarily based upon the plan. This was the technique Menachem Begin used with Sadat. The difference is that the objective then was to get Egypt to leave the Palestinians at the mercy of the Israelis. Now it will be to get the Arab states to control the Palestinians and to induce them to accept whatever the Arab potentates get for them from Israel. The Arab states may succeed in bringing the Palestinians under their control, because, firstly, the Palestinians are bound to wear out with endless sacrifices and, secondly, a bankrupt Palestinian Authority will need Arab, specially Saudi money for a long time.

Therefore, as Moliere’s Jourdain said: “Voila, tout le monde raisonable”. (There, now, everyone is behaving sensibly).

PAKISTAN until recently was known as a country having a poor government but rich people. That was the impression of foreign visitors who noticed the high living of the rich and the large budget deficit.

But now the government is tending to be rich or less indebted in the wake of generosity shown by the donors in the post-September 11 scenario, but the people are coming under heavier taxation, particularly the sweeping 15 per cent sales tax, and are forced to pay higher utility rates with prospects of far worse to follow in the coming years.

The common people expected to benefit from the large external assistance and the debt relief that the government has received from the donors as they deserved some breathing space following the misgovernance of the preceding years. Instead they are being subjected to heavier taxes year after year.

They had no role in the perpetual devaluation of the rupee, or its floating down, making every imported item too expensive. Even at the present exchange rate of over Rs 60 to a dollar the rupee is weaker than the Indian rupee which is 48.7 to a dollar and even Bangladesh taka which is 58 to a dollar.

The government gained by that means as inflating the rupee cost of imports meant larger revenues as customs duties are levied on the basis of the rupee value of the imports. And now the rupee has become stable due to external factors and the customs revenues of the country have fallen.

Increasing the cost of living now is the rise in gas prices and POL rates. Prices of gas for domestic use have risen by 8 to 20 per cent according to the consumption stabs, and they are to rise by 300 per cent in the next five years. And that will come to pass despite the 60 per cent rise in gas prices over the last three years. The POL prices, particularly of petrol and diesel oil, have gone up again although world price of oil is stable around 20 dollars a barrel and the world demand for oil will go down in summer lowering prices further.

And despite the fact that consumers in Pakistan pay the highest electricity rates in the region the decision to levy a 15 per cent sales tax on energy bills hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the heads of domestic consumers despite the vehement opposition of the chairman of WAPDA Lt. Gen. Zulfikar Ali Khan.

Sugar prices have gone up in the market. Following the argument of the sugar millowners that we have more sugar than we need and would be producing far more now, import duty on sugar has been raised from 20 to 30 per cent.

Instead of all this happening to the hard pressed consumers they should be getting the double benefit of the lower world oil prices as well as the stable rupee. In fact, they are getting the little benefit of positive developments despite the economic recession in the country, rising unemployment and fall in wages in a country in which over 40 per cent of the people live below the poverty line.

But when the people talk of poverty the government comes up with a list of the poverty reduction measures it is adopting or proposes to adopt including food stamps and increased Zakat payments to Khushal Bank loans and small and medium industries to help the unemployed and low-income groups. But such steps are actually helping a small number and the vast mass of the people are hit hard by poverty or prolonged unemployment.

Even if such steps are helping the very poor it is not enough if this class alone is helped. The fact is that if 40 per cent of the people live below the poverty line, the life of 40 per cent of the people above that is not much better because of falling incomes and rising prices. Ours is a society without safety net for the low income groups despite a great deal of talk about the need for them. In such a country even desperate job hunters, of whom some eventually commit suicide, find the transportation costs too heavy.

Indisputably the rise in energy costs has a multiplier effect on prices as a whole. When transportation costs go up they hardly ever come down. And if there is official pressure, they come down for a brief while and spring back to the old rates soon. When fares and freight rates go up, including of the railways, goods and services come to cost far more. Factory owners who had paid far more for their raw materials or other inputs and use the high-cost electricity raise their prices and thereafter the shop-keepers push up the prices.

All that raises the basic question of the rationale for paying taxes beginning with income tax and ending with the heavy 15 per cent sales tax. When one does not get water even after paying water charges, is not assured of reasonable security, supply of power is faltering ruining expensive electric and electronic equipment in the process, public transportation is scarce and awfully sub-standard despite high fares, the public education system is too poor and the public health system woefully inadequate, the moral basis for paying high and varied taxes stands eroded.

Now above the overall taxation there are the new retail taxes such as for parking a car or entering a public park. The fee is creeping up constantly. And the question arises in many minds that if one has to pay separately for all the services or buy them from the private sector why pay the varied taxes beginning with income tax?

And the government response to that is that if the total revenues are low raise the tax rates. That is how the rate of the sales tax has risen from 10 per cent to 12 per cent and now to 15 per cent, and in some cases to 20 per cent. That is a self-defeating exercise, but the IMF and the World Bank support that approach or insist on them to increase the revenues.

It is not enough in the kind of market economy we are developing to reduce absolute poverty by half by 2015 which is the UN target. The middle class which has been the target of high taxation at one end and inflation at the other in a low wage country, too, ought to be helped. Adverse factors tend to stunt the growth of this class, but a large and healthy middle class is essential for the success of modern democracy in Pakistan. We need a larger class of people who will not sell their votes or feel compelled to do so, and can vote freely and fearlessly.

Karl Marx may have scoffed at the middle class but the feudal lords, tribal chiefs and the mercantile leaders cannot afford to be too dismissive of them for long. Hence it should be the state policy to develop and strengthen the middle class by reducing its fiscal fetters and financial pressures on it, and help democracy grow in a healthy manner.

Robert Reich, former Harvard professor and Bill Clinton’s famous labour secretary says in his book, “The work of Nations” that “Each nation’s primary asset will be its citizens’ skills and insights. Each nation’s primary political task will be to cope with the centrifugal forces of global economy which tear at the ties binding the citizens together — bestowing ever greater wealth on the most skilled and insightful, while consigning the less skilled to a declining standard of living.”

Are we helping to develop the skills of our people and their insights? They have to have enough money for private education or technical training to develop their skills, sometimes by going abroad for their studies. In the process we lose some of the best minds and highly skilled persons.

Currently the official tendency is to increase the salary and perquisites of top persons in the hierarchy. One report says ministers’ salary is being virtually doubled from December 1, 2001. An earlier report had said the president’s salary has been raised by 130 per cent but later it was said that it did not apply to him as he is the army chief of staff. Salaries of the judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts have also been increased.

Another report says the salaried class may lose their tax-free perquisites, which has been agitating the executive class in the corporate sector. They have been arguing that while their total income is being slashed in this manner the large perquisites of the civilian and military officers are free of tax. But now a report says that the civilian and military officers may also lose their tax exemptions as their salaries have been raised in recent times.

All that seems too good to believe. The right approach to the problem is to give all persons, both in the public and private sector, clean pay without free or tax-free perquisites, as in the West and in Asian countries like Singapore.

But we were told earlier the government did not have money to pay large increases in salaries in lieu of the prequisites. Is the government now doing the second best of taxing their perquisites.

JONAS Savimbi was like the war in Angola itself: he went on and on, seemingly forever. Whatever peace deal was negotiated he was sure to break it, sure to find another sponsor who’d trade diamonds for guns.

He outlasted most of his principal rivals and he certainly outlasted his godfather, the cold war, and the earnest need of the superpowers to woo friends who were prepared to engage in a proxy war against the friends of the rival superpower.

In the end, such was his tenacity and his masterly improvization, he showed that he could survive and live to fight another day without a superpower behind him. When America finally but belatedly turned against him he wooed the malevolent and rich dictator of neighbouring Zaire, and when that ended with Mobutu’s death he befriended the presidents of Togo, Rwanda and Burkina Faso. Anyone who’d sell him a gun or a howitzer or buy his diamonds.

Now he’s dead, shot in the neck. Twenty-seven years after the war began the army of his principal rival finally got him. They always said they would. But it took a long time, a very long time and in these endless years the country has been laid low. The hospitals in the war zones are all closed, the roads destroyed, the earth scorched, children wasted, often orphaned, living in sewers in Luanda, the capital, for want of a roof over their head. According to the Red Cross, Angola has suffered more from the agonies of war than any other country in Africa.

In 1975 Portugal, recently having succumbed to revolution itself against its long time fascist dictator Salazar, decided to wash its hands of its rebellious African colonies. It agreed to negotiate a hand over to three rival independence movements, which had consented to abide by elections. If democracy had been allowed to prevail then more than a million lives might have been saved.

But the then US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, believed he knew better. He was obsessed with the ideological bias of one of the factions, the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) toward Moscow and Havana and he talked president Gerald Ford into a clandestine adventure that was to lead Angola away from the ballot to the bullet.

Only days after the peace agreement with Portugal was signed, establishing a transitional power-sharing government, the CIA intervened and sent $300,000 in cash to a rival faction, the CIA’s long-term client the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), which used the money to launch an all-out military attack on the MPLA.

The CIA payment, although made without the knowledge of the US Congress or public, was soon known to Moscow which quickly resumed large-scale arms shipments to the MPLA and in March 1975, Cuba sent in 230 advisers. The ratchet of superpower competition began. The United States dispatched $28 million in covert aid to the FNLA and to a third faction, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, the National Union for Total Independence of Angola which soon eclipsed the FNLA.

White-ruled South Africa watched closely. Believing it had been given a wink and a nod from Kissinger it invaded Angola on August 5. The MPLA besieged called in the Cubans. President Ford was angry. He announced that Cuba had committed “a flagrant act of aggression”. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed in Congress, and Senator Dick Clark piloted through an amendment outlawing any more clandestine aid to Angola.

Jimmy Carter became president and his administration worked hard to resolve the Angolan imbroglio and the linked issue of independence from South Africa for its southern neighbour, Namibia. But once Ronald Reagan supplanted Carter in the White House the US quickly reverted to its old habits.

Reagan, persuading Congress to rescind the Clark Amendment, resumed military aid to Savimbi and South Africa reverted to total intransigence on Namibian independence. —Copyright Jonathan Power

THE US State Department’s annual human rights report, which is a voluminous compendium of separate country reports, was issued this week, the first after the September 11 attacks.

Asked in an interview if there were any changes in the way the human rights report was compiled this year because of the US commitment to fighting terrorism, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour Lorne Craner said: “People are going to be very disappointed if they are looking for the reports to be softened.”

As in the past, the administration has issued reports on all members of the United Nations, with the exception of the United States itself. “We rely on others to do that; we don’t think we would be the best judge of our own performance,” he remarked.

The assistant secretary couldn’t have spoken truer words. After Sept 11, either the United States should stop issuing its annual reports or someone should take the responsibility of compiling a human rights dossier on the US each year.

This year’s report has come at a time when the Bush administration is under fire at home and abroad for gross violations of human and civil rights. The treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay camp and the killing of Afghan civilians in bombing raids have been justified on the grounds that the US is at war. Civilian casualties happen at such times; prisoners do get taken, even if they cannot be classified as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions because al Qaeda was not an army in the accepted sense of the word and did not represent a state. Thus runs the administration’s argument. It is admitted that the Taliban prisoners, since they did represent the army of a government recognized by three other countries, comprise a greyer area, but they are still not being given PoW status.

What’s happening to civil rights and human liberties within the US because of the “war against terrorism” is harder to justify, but the administration nevertheless carries on, and it does not want anyone to question its actions: those Americans who do are somehow considered to be endangering the war effort. The Third World syndrome of confusing state with government has now come to the oldest democracy of the world.

Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, recalling Attorney-General John Ashcroft’s remark before a Senate committee in December that people resisting the proposal for military tribunals for terrorists “give our enemies ammunition”, said the other day: “Ashcroft has turned one of the bedrock principles of our justice system on its head. He has reversed the constitutional dictum that a defendant is innocent until proved guilty. Uncounted numbers of black-haired men who were rounded by after Sept 11 are held in jails without charges while FBI bunglers fish around for more reasons to keep them longer. We can’t know how many there are, or their names.”

The columnist also criticized the administration’s effort to keep out the Afghan war off the record. “The Pentagon regards the press as a nuisance, not as a conduit to tell the people how their tax dollars are being spent in the field. In the Gulf war, the Pentagon put a chokehold on it. Now, in Afghanistan, it’s seeking extermination. Reporters can’t cover events without credentials the military refuses to give them.”

Complaints of discrimination received against Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian workers by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and Muslim or Arab American organizations have soared since Sept 11. The commission, according to the Post, has received more than 300 complaints so far, and that does not include similar cases filed in state or local government offices. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has received more than 1,700 reports of workplace bias, airport profiling, discrimination in schools, physical assault and other incidents, compared to 322 in the year 2000.

Some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been, or at least were till Monday, refusing food: a hunger strike in prison by dissidents in Russia, Iraq, Iran or Libya would have figured heavily in any US review of human rights. It is only a few conscientious and caring reporters and columnists in the US media that have kept track of civil rights violations affecting foreigners and US citizens of foreign origin, who otherwise would have suffered unnoticed, many of their representative organizations, particularly of Pakistanis, being all too ready to keep silent.

It is now time that someone began compiling human rights transgressions, acts of police brutality, racial profiling, news management, and all steps taken by the Bush administration since Sept 11 to usurp increased executive powers under legislation such as the Patriot Act.

The State Department’s claim that it has not softened its comments on any particular country allied in the war effort is not incorrect in many instances. Saudi Arabia has come in for strong criticism of its system and practices despite the fact that the US has a strategic dependence on Riyadh. At the same time, however, it should be remembered that the slight show of independence registered by Saudi Arabia in the immediate aftermath of Sept 11 rankled with the Bush administration, and some may have thought that the country needed to be kept in place.

In the case of Pakistan, this year’s report again says that the country’s human rights record is poor, but on the whole the report is politically fairly bland, confining itself to narrating instances of illegal detentions, police torture, acts of discrimination against minorities and other such abuses. The section on India is also largely a repetition of last year’s report, with a detailed reference to extra-judicial killings by Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir. Human and civil rights advocates in countries like Pakistan and India have their own reservations about this annual US exercise, but welcome it to the extent that it strengthens their own hands to fight the establishment and carry on the struggle for rule of law and due process, freedom of assembly and speech, and freedom of the press and against intolerance and bigotry, whether religious or political.

Looking again at the transcript of the briefing on the report by Assistant Secretary Craner, an excerpt from it might be of interest in the context:

Q: When you talk to other governments about their human rights problems, since post-September 11, have they raised issues with the United States in terms of some of the measures that this government has taken that have been criticized by human rights groups —- detention of immigrants and these sorts of things, as if to sort of say diminishing your message?

CRANER: They haven’t tried that yet.

Q: They haven’t tried that yet?

CRANER: Well, we don’t try and rate ourselves. That wouldn’t be fair.

The assistant secretary was also asked how concerned the US was that it was aligning itself with countries that had thick folders of human rights violations. The official said: “If in aligning ourselves with them, we are able to address the human rights situations in their countries and improve the situation in their countries, where we might otherwise not be able to do that, I’m not concerned. I think it’s actually for the better that it happened, and I think we will look back some years from now and say it was an important by-product of our alliance with them.”

Meanwhile, apart from its other domestic repercussions, the Bush campaign against terrorism has led to distinct strains on the consensus that had so far characterized Congress. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle came out last week with a reasoned critique of the war effort and wanted the American people to be told where it was headed. Concerned about the decision to send “military advisers” to Georgia and Yemen and the talk of targeting Iraq, the senator asked President Bush to clarify the administration’s plans for the next stages of the war.

This immediately incensed Republicans whose leader in the Senate, Trent Lott, exploded: “How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism, especially when we have troops in the field?” It appeared as if Sen Daschle was being labelled a traitor merely for suggesting that the Congress should be kept fully informed of the administration’s projects abroad.

But that is the kind of America that is being created by President Bush and his right-wing comrades in the administration.