Continued violence in Iraq, a struggling economy, an unpopular plan to privatize Social Security, homeland security left underfunded while the rich get giant tax cuts … what's a White House to do when the news about its policies isn't favorable? Fake it. An explosive, front-page New York Times story this weekend exposes President Bush's vast manipulation of the media and White House attempts to manipulate public opinion. Over the past four years, it turns out at least 20 different federal agencies have been involved in producing hundreds – yes, hundreds – of fake TV news segments, many of which were "subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production." In fact, since President Bush took office, the White House has spent at least $254 million on these fake segments and other public relations ploys to spread positive propaganda about his policies. President Bush has paid lip service to the concept of a free press, saying in January 2005, "there needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press." He also claimed "our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet." Here's what happens when it can't:

LOSE YOUR IDENTITY: One of the largest concerns about these fake news segments is that they obscure the fact that they are paid for using taxpayer money and contain a one-sided, purely positive take on administration policy. In a now-infamous segment by the Department of Health and Human Services, a PR official named Karen Ryan posed as a reporter interviewing then-Secretary Tommy Thompson. (Her role in the well-rehearsed spot was to give Thompson "better, snappier answers" to her pre-approved questions.) The Government Accountability Office found the agency "designed and executed" her segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations."

OFFICE OF B.S.: The Office of Broadcasting Services is a branch of the State Department which traditionally has acted as a clearinghouse for video from news conferences. That all changed three years ago. In 2002, "with close editorial direction from the White House," the unit started producing fake news segments to back up President Bush's rationale for going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. As one senior official told Congress, the phony segments were "powerful strategic tools" used to influence public opinion. In all, the office produced nearly 60 segments, which were then distributed around the world for local stations to use as actual news footage. Although the White House has claimed ignorance about the use of fake news, it was well aware this was happening. A White House memo in January 2003 actually said segments the State Department disseminated about the liberation of Afghan women were "a prime example" of how "White-House led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."

IGNORE THE GAO: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a nonpartisan branch of Congress that investigates government fraud. The GAO criticized the administration's role in creating phony news three separate times in the past year, saying unless viewers are aware that what they're watching is government produced, it constitutes "covert propaganda." The GAO also forbade federal agencies from creating prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials." The administration's response? The New York Times reports that on Friday, "the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the GAO findings."

IGNORE FEDERAL LAW: These fake news spots are produced with taxpayer money by outside public relations firms. Federal law warns federal agencies away from doing exactly that; the U.S. Code states "appropriated funds may not be used to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose." However, the GAO, which monitors the law, has no enforcement power. That responsibility lies with Congress and the White House. U.S. federal law also contains the Smith Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibits the spread of government propaganda in the United States (although it allows groups like Voice of America to broadcast it to foreign audiences.) According to the NY Times, State Department officials claim that provision doesn't apply to them.

*EDUCATION – When religion meets science:

It seems scientific reasoning is not what it used to be. After years of crafty strategizing orchestrated by conservatives, policymakers in nearly twenty states are now considering measures "that question the science of evolution." Though most do not seek to completely disavow the teaching of evolution, an overwhelming number of the proposals attempt to address the "gaps" in Darwinian theory by means of the intelligent design theory, which claims that the vast complexity of nature is evidence of the existence of a great cosmic "designer." Though many scientists are aghast at what is being called neocreationism, religious activists and anti-evolutionary scientists have long felt "persecuted" by the teaching of evolution and are now simply taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the Bush presidency, as President Bush himself believes the "jury is still out on evolution."

*The fight to save our courts is about to really heat up. Bush just resubmitted 20 nominees to the U.S. Courts of Appeals that the Democrats fought four years to block. These 20 judges were rejected, while 204 were approved, because they have consistently sacrificed the rights of ordinary Americans to appease powerful special interests and extreme right-wing ideology. They must not be given lifetime appointments on the federal bench. The Democrats can block them again, but only if they stand united. As a senior Democrat on the all-important Senate Judiciary Committee, Edward Kennedy can either embolden the Democratic resistance, or splinter it. That's why we need to call on him today for the leadership this issue demands. Please call Senator Kennedy's office and ask him to strongly oppose ALL 20 of Bush's repeat judicial nominees to the United States Courts of Appeals, at 202) 224-4543 Then, let us know you called: http://www.moveonpac.org/judicial/call/ Dick Cheney and Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist are now threatening to eliminate the filibuster. The filibuster is a Senate rule that allows 40 or more senators to force further debate before controversial votes -- and minority parties have used it to keep extremists from all sides off the courts for centuries. It would require a two-thirds vote of the Senate to actually change the filibuster rule, and they know they don't have that much support. So instead, Cheney is planning to use his power as president of the Senate to simply declare the filibuster rule null and void. If Frist can get just 50 senators to support Cheney's ruling, the right to filibuster judges will be gone. It's a power grab so outrageous and unprecedented that even the Republicans call it the "nuclear option." This all leads up to the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. Without the right to filibuster, there is no reason for Bush to nominate justices acceptable to both parties, and Democrats will be powerless to stop even the most dangerous nominees. With as many as 3 Supreme Court vacancies likely to come up in the next 4 years, the "nuclear option" is Bush's big push to lock in his hard-right, corporate friendly ideology for decades to come. As this all unfolds, it's critical to get the calls in early -- even before the headlines hit. We can block Bush's 20 repeat nominees, and we can stop Cheney's "nuclear option" if at least 50 Senators oppose it. The first step is ensuring Democratic unity and vocal leadership from key senators like yours. Please call Senator Kennedy today and ask him to oppose ALL of Bush's repeat nominees to the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and defeat the Republican "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster at 202) 224-4543 The 20 nominees Bush has resubmitted were rejected because of their extreme positions in favor of corporate interests and against civil rights, the environment, civil liberties, and the concerns of ordinary Americans. Here's a brief summary of just the first four to be considered.

If Democratic resolve falters, dozens of nominees like these will be granted lifetime appointments to the federal courts. And if Cheney and Frist "go nuclear" and take away the filibuster -- paving the way for an even more radical Supreme Court nominee -- there's no telling how bad things could get. We must not let that happen. Please call Senator Kennedy's office at (202) 224-4543. Ask him to strongly oppose ALL 20 of Bush's repeat judicial nominees, and do everything she can to defeat the "nuclear option" at 202) 224-4543 Then, let us know you called: http://www.moveonpac.org/judicial/call/

*Say Hello to the New PC
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet. Posted March 15, 2005.

The new PC is about doling out Scarlet Letters through public moralistic scrutiny of individual private behavior with little or no concern for matters of public interest or institutional morality

The term "political correctness" was invented by sensitive "liberal" academics who wanted to raise awareness about the power of language to dehumanize, but has now become a cynical wise-crack in the mouths of "conservatives" who have made it politically correct to be politically incorrect- - "I know this isn't politically correct but ... (hee, hee)."

Mostly made up of "angry white males" who cry victim over the "victim mentality" of historically oppressed groups in America, the old PC back-lashers do make a good point. "Progressives" and other assorted leftists need to lighten up.

On the other hand, being politically incorrect is not the same thing as having the courage to "speak truth to power." There's nothing courageous or truthful in publicly proclaiming that Indians, for example, shouldn't be "so sensitive" about the racist imagery of sports team mascots. It's downright callous.

Say hello to the new PC, which turns Jesus' famous words on their head by condemning the splinter in other people's eyes while ignoring the lumber in their own. The new PC is about doling out scarlet letters through public moralistic scrutiny of individual private behavior with little or no concern for matters of public interest or institutional morality.

So the new PC, for example, considers President Clinton's sex sins and his lying about something that all unfaithful men lie about to be worthy of impeachment hearings.

But devotees of the new PC are apparently willing to accept, at face value, the word of war planners that the Iraq WMD hype was the result of "mistaken" intelligence, and the "war on terror" torture scandal is essentially a "liberal media" conspiracy to "aid and abet the terrorists" by sensationalizing the behavior of "a few bad apples," despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The inadequate funding of "No Child Left Behind Act" (doublespeak at its best)? So what, says the new PC. Cut my taxes! Teachers, who are arguably the most socially-valuable asset this country has, make too much money anyway, right?

Enticing desperate, poor teenagers to join the "all volunteer" military with promises of employment and education benefits while exposing them to the horrors of war? No big deal for the new PCs, just don't burn my flag.

And now, here comes the "baseball steroid controversy" with Congress holding high-profile hearings this week. The central question: how widespread is/was steroids in pro baseball? – a question that ranks right up there with the other great inquiries of modern times like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Got Milk?

Where's all the "free-market" scholars and cheerleaders complaining about big government sticking its nose into the private business of baseball?

On a baseball talk show on XM Radio the other day, one co-host suggested there were more important things Congress ought to be concerned about, like the rising price of gasoline. His colleague agreed but took issue with the analogy. There's a big difference between "kids dying of steroids" and the price at the pump.

Point taken. But is the analogy that far off-base? To the extent that the war in Iraq is about extending American hegemony in the Middle East, one could argue that kids are dying over the price of gas.

The war in Iraq isn't just about oil, as leftist critics rightly point out. But, as many hawks refuse to acknowledge, if Iraq's major industry was the exportation of pomegranates, there never would have been any talk about a nonexistent "grave and gathering threat."

Nor would we have intelligent people pretending that Bush's "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq is fundamentally an expression of compassion for the Iraqi people whose "liberation" is so important to us that we're willing to sacrifice thousands of young lives to, once again, pay "the price of freedom."

So to be down with the new PC, I suggest Congress hold hearings about the rampant use of the performance-enhancing drug caffeine in journalism. Subpoena me. I'll testify about how reporters, "juiced" on caffeine, are "cheating" and how we need to put an asterisk in Pulitzer Prize record books because coffee has tainted some accomplishments.

Where's the outrage?

Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff reporter and a syndicated columnist.

Plowing Iraq for Profits

By Christopher D. Cook, In These Times. Posted March 14, 2005.

American agribusiness isn't wasting any time exploiting Iraq's fragile food sector, battered by decades of war and sanctions.

Iraq's Fertile Crescent, the fabled birthplace of ancient grains and agricultural civilization, is emerging as a new market opportunity for American agribusiness. Even as U.S. officials tout gracious shipments of food aid and technical assistance to thankful Iraqi farmers, the agenda articulated by government agencies and industry groups is clear – Iraq's fragile food sector, battered by decades of war and sanctions, is open for business.

U.S. exports of wheat, rice, soybean products and poultry to Iraq all ballooned in 2003 after sanctions were lifted. Freshly minted contracts show American wheat exporters are expanding sales (albeit still small) to Iraq, and congressional testimony by industry groups shows their keen interest in recapturing what was once, through the late '80s, a profitable destination for U.S. crops.

And the American project extends beyond prying this revived market away from Australia and other nations that did agricultural business with Saddam Hussein during the sanction decade. The broader agricultural plan includes privatizing state-run food companies, phasing out farm subsidies, boosting food prices and, possibly, introducing genetically altered seeds that are patented and not reusable – all moves that dovetail with an overall neoliberal strategy to open up and deregulate Iraq's markets.

This broader push for privatization is reflected in the language of Order 81, one of among 100 legal orders left behind by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's departed regime. This order, which covers patents and copyrights, including "protected plant varieties," calls for a "transition from a non-transparent centrally planned economy to a free-market economy."

Patenting the future

Order 81 paves the way for genetically modified crops (GMOs), stating: "Farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties." The order, exposed by Focus on the Global South and GRAIN in an October 2004 report, does not require Iraqi farmers to use GMOs. But it etches into Iraqi law WTO-style patent protections for genetically engineered crops – assuring U.S. GMO-producing firms a legally protected niche in the country's future.

Agricultural giant Monsanto, for one, claims to have no interest. "For the record, Monsanto has no plans to introduce biotechnology in Iraq," insists company spokesman Chris Horner. "It doesn't fit with our business plans." If security and other factors improve, Horner says, "there could be opportunities for conventional seeds and chemicals. ... I would not characterize it as an emerging market." The outcry about Order 81 has "no basis in fact," says Horner. "How many new patented seed varieties are there in Iraq? Zero."

But the law was enacted only last April, and activists say its implications are far-reaching. "If seeds had to be patented, there would have to be significantly more money in the farmer sector," says Antonia Juhasz, former program director for the International Forum on Globalization, who is writing a book about Iraq. "Only those who can afford to patent or buy patented seeds would remain farmers." At the same time, she suggests, the order establishes an economic beachhead into the rest of the region for the GMO industry.

Deborah James, global economy director at Global Exchange, calls seed-saving prohibitions like Order 81 "one of the biggest assaults on food security." Farmers, she explains, would be forced "to buy from multinational corporations like Monsanto, instead of doing what farmers have done throughout the millennia: guaranteeing food security by saving seed varieties."

Despite Monsanto's assurances, James cautions, "corporations never announce their plans to flood markets with genetically-modified food." Under NAFTA, "there wasn't supposed to be genetically modified corn coming to Mexico," yet GMO corn from the United States was discovered there in 2001. This February, a coalition of 70 groups from six Central American and Caribbean countries announced that GMOs – specifically, the infamous StarLink maize not authorized for human consumption – had been detected in U.N. food aid and commercial imports from the United States.

Liberation – for U.S. commodities

Meanwhile, the $100 million agricultural reconstruction project undertaken by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) aims to get the government out of food production. "The idea is to make this completely a free market," says Doug Pool, agriculture irrigation and environment specialist with the USAID's office of Iraq Reconstruction.

The USAID goal – mirroring U.S. and WTO policies – is to help the new government phase out farm subsidies. "The Minister of Agriculture has been quite good in doing that," says Pool. State enterprises, such as the Mesopotamia Seed Co., "need to be spun off and privatized," he said.

Other USAID efforts include an "agricultural mechanization program," deploying U.S. companies such as Case New Holland to rehabilitate Iraq's dilapidated farm machinery. While this may seem like a goodwill gesture, it has its payoffs. "Of course, the companies themselves will eventually sell replacement machinery and parts," adds Pool, "so it will be a good deal for them."

Indeed, while Pool emphasizes USAID's project to expand and revitalize Iraq's farm sector, U.S. commodity exporters are hungrily eyeing renewed market opportunities – which could undercut Iraq's farmers. "Iraq was once a significant commercial market for U.S. farm products, with sales approaching $1 billion in the 1980s," former agriculture secretary Ann Veneman told a conference of farm broadcasters in 2003. "It has the potential, once again, to be a significant commercial market."

According to John King, vice chairman of the USA Rice Council, Iraq was the top market for U.S. rice in the late '80s, prior to the 1991 Gulf war. "The U.S. rice industry wants to play a major role once again in supplying rice to Iraq," King told the U.S. House Agriculture Committee this past June. "With the current challenges facing the U.S. rice industry ... renewed Iraqi market access could have a tremendous impact in value-added sales."

King added: "The liberation of Iraq in 2003 by coalition forces has brought freedom to the Iraqi people. The resumption of trade has also provided hope for the U.S. rice industry."

The American wheat industry is also poised for a new export banquet. That industry – which at one point in the '70s had a 100 percent market share in Iraq – recently secured its first exports there in years. "Iraq is under a lot of pressure to buy wheat from the United States," said a disheartened executive from the Grains Council of Australia, a top wheat exporter to Iraq.

History's lessons

Critics of American agribusiness warn that this confluence of privatization policies, GMO-friendly patent protections and U.S. exports is a volatile mix that could further destabilize war-ravaged Iraqi farmers while producing few benefits for their American counterparts.

"Any profit that's made will go to the companies that export it to Iraq, not to farmers," says George Naylor, Iowa farmer and president of the National Family Farm Coalition. Foisting Iraqi growers into a privatized free market will "destroy" small family farms there, just as similar policies have done in the United States, Naylor insists.

Mark Ritchie, president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, argues that the U.S.-led overhaul of Iraq's agriculture is a "completely ideological" endeavor that ignores historic lessons. Well-recorded failings of large-scale industrial agriculture in the former Soviet Union and in the United States, he says, "haven't deterred people who ideologically think that's the way to go, so we're going to repeat the mistakes again if we have a chance."

Ultimately, Ritchie says, American taxpayers may also pay a stiff price for any wartime export bubble. He points to the Vietnam War, during which the American rice industry was temporarily enriched by huge exports. Then the postwar market evaporated, and the industry was propped up with big subsidy payments. "The U.S. can create a giant export flow for underpriced commodities, and taxpayers can just pay through the nose," Ritchie warns. "The dangers to producers there are real, and the dangers to American taxpayers are equally real, and Vietnam has shown us how devastating this is."

Christopher D. Cook is the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us (New Press).

The Courts and the War on Terror By Karen J. Greenberg, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 16, 2005.

The Bush administration's legal battle with terrorism is over-hyped, ineffective, and suggests a deep contempt of human rights and the law. On the eve of his departure from office, Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted, "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." In this, he echoed a drumbeat of announcements by top officials who have repeatedly proclaimed that, when it came to the war on terror, the administration was succeeding in the courts as well as on the battlefield. As President Bush declared in a speech to the FBI Academy in September 2003, "We've thwarted terrorists in Buffalo and Seattle, in Portland, Detroit, North Carolina and Tampa, Florida."

In fact, looked at with a cold eye, the administration's record of convictions in terrorism cases is remarkably inconsequential. Although it is extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on such cases, the facts, as best we know them, are these: Of the 120 terrorism cases recorded on Findlaw, the major information source for legal cases of note, the initial major charges leveled have resulted in only two actual terrorism convictions – both in a single case, that of Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber. Of 18 actual charges of "terrorism" brought between September 2001 and October 2004, 15 are still pending and one was dismissed. In lieu of convictions for terrorist acts, the Justice Department uses another related, lesser charge – that of "material support," which means providing aid or services to a terrorist or a terrorist organization. Its extreme breadth and over-inclusiveness has rendered it the fallback charge of choice and a catch-all for anything from having trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan back in the 1990s (when al Qaeda's focus was the war in Bosnia and other places outside of the United States) to weapons training, or even the exceedingly modest category of producing fraudulent documents, so long as they are knowingly provided to a designated "foreign terrorist organization."

But what of the six cases of "terrorism convictions," material support or otherwise, that the President himself hailed as the benchmarks of the administration's courtroom success story? As it happens, five resulted from questionable plea bargains, often on lesser charges, not necessarily closely related to terrorism, and one has yet to be tried. Only in the Detroit case has there been an actual conviction for "terrorism," (albeit material support for terrorism), and that case has since been overturned in a manner embarrassing to the Bush administration.

When the plea bargains are considered in their own right, their apparent circumstances should cause the odd eyebrow to be raised. After all, over half of all terrorism cases tried so far have resulted in plea bargains. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that such pleas are offered in exchange for important information in the war on terrorism and spokespersons at the DOJ invariably maintain that, as in criminal cases generally, these have yielded invaluable information. Yet despite the implementation of the Patriot Act and the re-organization of our law enforcement efforts to fight terrorism, the yield seems neither better, nor worse than that which existed prior to 9/11.

Let's just consider the five already tried cases that the President cited. In most of them, the evidence seems to show that the use of plea bargains had a good deal less to do with getting crucial "terror" information than with getting convictions on the books in situations where a conviction at trial might have proved difficult indeed. In the Buffalo case, the defendants – known as the Lackawanna Six – were initially accused of belonging to an "al Qaeda sleeper cell," but instead ended up pleading to material support charges.

What's especially interesting here, however, is the way in which some of those plea bargains seem to have been achieved. According to defense attorneys, the defendants were threatened with the prospect of being classified as "unlawful combatants," the new Bush-administration-defined status which entails imprisonment without end as well as the loss of the right to a lawyer and to communicate with anyone in the outside world. Nor did these appear to be idle threats. There were frightful precedents. The administration had seen no reason for restraint, for example, when, in 2002, it labeled Jose Padilla and Yasser Esam Hamdi, both American citizens, as "enemy combatants" and placed them in military detention and (so far) beyond the reach of the law. (Just last week, U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd ruled that the Department of Justice has 45 days to charge Padilla, jailed in the spring of 2002, or release him.)

Although we have no way of knowing how many domestic suspects have been threatened with enemy-combatant status and so with the possibility of being placed indefinitely in a black hole of detention, several defense attorneys have gone on record with similar stories in which the DOJ used warnings about potential enemy-combatant status as leverage for obtaining cooperation in a plea. Allegedly responding to such threats, Lyman Faris, who was accused in 2003 of threatening to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, pled guilty to immigration fraud. Days later, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who had been arrested in 2001 on charges of document fraud, refused to plea bargain, virtually daring authorities to reclassify him as an enemy combatant. He was, in fact, then placed in military custody without access to a lawyer, where he remains today, a potent symbol for any defendant or defense lawyer who cares to look.

The use of such "leverage" – itself completely outside the normal justice system – would at any other moment have qualified as an obvious kind of extra-legal coercion. While plea bargains are certainly useful tools with which prosecutors can obtain information, the question needs to be asked: If there is coercion, can whatever information is obtained be trusted? Or are we here facing a very pale version of the more directly coercive and illegal methods used against alleged terrorists at our detention centers in Guantanamo and other places not on American soil?

Of note also is the failure of DOJ prosecutors to tie many of these cases directly to terrorism. In the Portland case, for instance, seven men were arrested on material support charges. Two of the men, Patrice Lumumba Ford and Jeffrey Leon Battle, were the main focus of the government's indictments. "Evidence" came largely from secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants. FISA and its secret courts were originally designed to regulate the FBI's spying by distinguishing between counterintelligence operations and persecution of the government's political opponents.

The Patriot Act and post-9/11 court decisions have, in effect, eliminated the requirement that FISA surveillance – wiretapping, searches, and otherwise – be primarily for intelligence-gathering as opposed to criminal investigatory purposes. By jettisoning that standard, Congress and the courts now permit the government to avoid the strictures of the Fourth Amendment and ordinary wiretap statutes by simply declaring anything, no matter how flimsy or marginal, is for intelligence purposes. Indeed, under the new standards, FISA warrants have mushroomed at an alarming rate; and the public sees only the tip of the iceberg, since FISA warrants and their fruits never see the light of day unless they are used in a criminal prosecution – which represent only an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of FISA wiretaps and searches.

Nonetheless, government prosecutors, evidently worried that new post-9/11 Bush administration rules extending FISA requests to terrorism cases might sooner or later be challenged as unconstitutional, again offered plea bargains. The defendants agreed. Terrorism-related charges against Battle and Ford were dropped and each was sentenced not to life for "terrorism," but to 18 years for "treason"; the other five defendants pled on lesser charges. Despite the convictions, the administration failed, as it had failed in the Lackawanna case, to link the accused directly to a terrorist conspiracy.

The Detroit case, hailed at one point as the ultimate showpiece in the legal war on terror, now stands as the greatest rebuke to the Bush administration's prosecution of alleged domestic terrorists. In June 2003, four Arab men were convicted of providing material support for terrorism and of conspiring to engage in fraud or the misuse of visas, permits, and other documents. Their conviction was, however, overturned in July 2004, on the grounds that the prosecution had blatantly withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense – in this case, a videotape and photos. Though the government is currently once again trying to prosecute two of the defendants, it is doing so on the lesser charge of "insurance fraud."

The kinds of mistakes prosecutors have made in cases billed as important to national security may or may not have been intentionally fraudulent, but they certainly suggest signs of administration frustration with the very idea of using the courts to combat terror. How regularly, we should ask, are prosecutors rushing into court without solid cases, pressured to get results in a manner similar to the way the Pentagon pressured the military to obtain information from detainees in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Has a fear of being accused of incompetence in the war on terror merely led to more incompetence?

In only one of the President's cases, as far as we know, did significant information come from the plea bargaining process. In the Seattle case, James Earnest Thompson, who goes by the name Earnest James Ujaama, was alleged to have attended al Qaeda training camps and indicted on charges of conspiring to set up an al Qaeda terrorist training camp in Oregon. In the end, he pleaded guilty on the lesser charges of bringing money, computer equipment, and a recruit to the Taliban. His plea was entered in exchange for his cooperation in terrorism investigations. In particular, he is alleged to have given evidence on al-Masri, a terrorism suspect being held in British custody.

Overall, despite all the hype, the Department of Justice's record in terrorism cases is unimpressive indeed and even that record now faces a new hurdle – if information, however paltry, has been gained from suspects by illegal coercion or, in the case of suspects held abroad, through torture, it may prove inadmissible in future court cases against other suspects. This will be yet another setback in the legal confrontation with terrorism.

Perhaps this paltry and flawed record can be explained by the administration's well known lack of belief in the importance of law enforcement in the war on terror. As Bush suggested in his last State of the Union Address, and other top officials have emphasized elsewhere, the war on terror is not supposed to be about law enforcement at all but about the use of force, about taking the fight to the terrorists by whatever means are necessary outside the United States. Another reasonable conclusion might be that, for all the color-coded alerts we've lived through, there just aren't that many terrorists among us – at least not al Qaeda related ones.

Terrorists do indeed exist who would like to do great damage to the United States, but convictions like those in the President's cases are generally less than helpful in the defense against them. If anything, they lull Americans into a false sense of security, into a sense that important terrorists are indeed being convicted and jailed for crimes or plans of significance. In the meantime, most of these cases represent, at best, sloppy prosecutions; at worst, fraudulent ones. In all of them, there is a powerful sense of apparent desperation and hype, of prosecutors flailing about as if there were nothing more important than simply declaring, "Yes, we have found sleeper cells; yes, there is danger in our midst; yes, we are winning this war in the homeland."

The fact is that the political expediency of the war on terror has undermined the strategy of an effective pursuit of terrorists. The rush to prosecution, the pressure to get convictions, even the holding of detainees without charging them, speaks more to politics than to justice, more to appearances than substance. It is time for the courts to assert their professionalism, to prosecute alleged terrorists carefully, without a rush to judgment, and in so doing to help the legal war on terror take its rightful place in the annals of American jurisprudence.

Karen J. Greenberg is co-author of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. The Center has just produced a "Terrorist Trial Report Card."