Daily · Dreamtime

The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: Athens, a direct democracy, and Sparta, a militaristic oligarchy. It was, naturally, advertised as a war of liberation (each side claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. It began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a town near Athens—but metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states, and resulted, finally, in the defeat of Athens and the abolition of its democratic institutions. Because Sparta and its allies dominated the southern peninsula known as the Peloponnese—and because the men who wrote the histories of the conflict were usually Athenians—the war came to be called the Peloponnesian. As the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in “The Peloponnesian War” (Viking; $29.95), his brisk, if tendentious, new account, the Spartans probably thought of the conflict as the Athenian War; but then there were no Spartan historians to call it that.
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There is simply no magic to "growth" under these conditions. Any idiot with a hand full of credit cards charged to the next generation's children can gin up the short term illusion of prosperity. Until, that is, the bills come due.

George W. Bush inherited a $127 billion fiscal surplus but ran through all of that and more in his first year. He has turned a $5.6 trillion 10 year forecast surplus into a $3+ trillion forecast loss-an almost unimaginable reversal of $9 trillion in only three years. And this, in an economy that has grown for ten of the last twelve quarters.

The result of this almost psychotic profligacy, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be a national debt of $14 trillion in 10 years. Interest payments alone will approach a trillion dollars a year and will exceed spending for all discretionary federal programs combined. Even more surreal, a study commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil indicated that the 50 year forecast U.S. deficit would reach $44 trillion. The study was suppressed. O'Neil was fired.
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   Dear Friends: 

      Herewith a slightly revised version of the brief, 
updating the version I sent you earlier today. 

     Bill. 

In the Supreme Court of the United States
____________________________
SHAFIQ RASUL, ET AL.
Petitioners,
v.
GEORGE W. BUSH, ET AL.,
Respondents.
FAWZI KHALID ABDULLAH FAHAD AL ODAH, ET AL.,
Petitioners,
v.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ET AL.
Respondents.
____________________________
On Appeal from the United States 
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
____________________________
BRIEF OF DIEGO C. ASENCIO, A. PETER BURLEIGH, 
LINCOLN GORDON, ALLEN HOLMES,  ROBERT V. KEELEY, 
SAMUEL W. LEWIS, ROBERT A. MARTIN, ARTHUR MUDGE, 
DAVID NEWSOM, R. H. NOLTE, HERBERT S. OKUN, 
ANTHONY QUAINTON, WILLIAM D. ROGERS,
 MONTEAGLE STEARNS, VIRON P. VAKY, RICHARD N. VIETS, 
ALEXANDER F. WATSON, WILLIAM WATTS AND ROBERT J. WOZNIAK  
AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF THE PETITIONERS( Read more... )

  This is where we've come to after two decades of anti-U.S. terrorism and 9/11:
The cops are now in charge -- not the diplomats. As one U.S. diplomat in Europe put it to me, ''The upside is that we are more secure, the downside is you lose the human contact and it makes it way harder to have interactions with people who are not part of the elite. It makes my job less fun. [Some days] you might as well be in Cleveland, looking at the world through a bulletproof plate glass window.''
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Carol Munder is a fine art photographer 
specializing in large format black and white 
prints taken with a Diana camera.

Hands of Sorrow

1995