Mistaken War

But launching an unprovoked war by mistake?

This is essentially the finding of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose July 9 report "left in shreds two of the Bush administration's main rationales for the war in Iraq: that Iraq had illicit weapons and that it cooperated with al Qaeda." ("As Rationales for War Erode, Issue of Blame Looms Large," The Washington Post, July 10, 2004.)

For all the discussion this sensational mistake has generated, there has been little or no discussion of its basic causes -- which means more enormous mistakes lie ahead. When mistakes bring about war, few misguided national policies can be ruled out.

There is a reason why examination of basic causes has been avoided: It's because the faults are cherished fallacies embedded within our culture; because they are faults that we the people harbor within ourselves; and because we don't like to think about our own faults, because we are addicted to comfort.

The first issue we are shunning is what is meant by "mistakes." The New York Times reports:

Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the CIA's prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said he did not know of any such program.

["CIA Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, Officials Say," New York Times, July 6, 2004]

There has been much talk of bias and political pressure. But if:

1. the people have been deliberately deceived, and

2. that deception was what led the nation into war,

then it should be clear that the deception is an act of treason.

This produces the first collision with our cultural precepts. The crime here amounts to the expression of certain ideas. The thought that speech could be a crime is an alien and unwelcome concept -- even when the speech amounts to distortion, manipulation, or blatant falsehoods.

Our commitment to freedom of speech involves much more than an unwillingness to trust government to properly discriminate between innocent and harmful speech. We do not accept the idea that speech can be noxious in an objective sense (apart from established First Amendment exceptions like obscenity). The free speech we consider our birthright is a freedom to have any opinion, and to loudly express it. It's freedom from all higher authority -- not only government, but intelligence and reason as well.

It is revealing that although our public discourse is awash in clashing opinions, we virtually never see the categorical resolution of any issue; not, at any rate, as the result of debate. If a new social consensus develops, it happens through attrition -- the gradual evaporation of conviction or interest on one side. No individual is proven wrong. The idea of categorical resolution of differences of opinion, of some ideas defeating others, is foreign to us.

Of course, a modern society cannot function without legal adjudication. So we conveniently make an exception for the special domain of the courtroom, and blithely accept that courts can do what we assume to be impossible elsewhere in the domain of ideas: to sift through evidence, determine objective truth, and act decisively on conclusions (for example, by depriving a man of liberty).

A glaring failure of intellectual resolution was recently on display in the New York Times, when it stated in a news report that the 9/11 commission "sharply contradicted one of President Bush's central justifications for the Iraq war" ("Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11," June 17, 2004). Vice President Cheney responded on TV by describing the Times's coverage of the issue as "outrageous," "ignorant" and "malicious." Since the issue involved no unknown facts whatever (the question was whether Bush's public statements were contradicted by a public report), one might have thought the issue could be unambiguously resolved. But the Times retreated, softening subsequent reporting, and few readers on either side of the issue are likely to have had their views altered.

This represents a remarkable defect of our culture. We have endless talk. We have an abundance of communications channels. But once one of us has formed an opinion on something -- anything -- that opinion is generally impregnable. Moreover, we do not find the sound of dissenting opinions particularly pleasing (unless someone is calling attention to them in order to denigrate them). And we certainly do not expect to be asked to justify our views.

This is a self-reinforcing defect. Though we yearn for strong leadership, it is our leaders who follow us, since they know well the futility of encouraging us to modify our views. Our support is gained by finding out what we think and telling us we are right.

But it is the advertisers, and the media, that are ubiquitous in our lives -- and they are only too glad to embrace any delusion we care to harbor. Why not? It costs them nothing, and appealing to us is their business. However, the perpetual pandering we are accustomed to reinforces our sense that our views and inclinations are sacrosanct.

Paradoxically, while we resemble a population of little dictators when it comes to our specific convictions, we are at the same time socialists in principle. We do not believe that any of our judgments are universally correct or inevitable, or that they are based on objective standards of any kind. We are dedicated (again, in principle) to the equal validity and legitimacy of others' judgments, even though they may be different. Regarding one's views as superior, we are persuaded, is the height of arrogance.

In short, our public discourse has no accepted framework for resolving who is right and who is wrong when opinions differ. To put it bluntly, we have no intellectual standards. And we aren't looking for any, because we don't even accept the concept of intellectual standards.

This strangely primitive cultural appendage that has attached itself to us strikes at the heart of the ideal of democracy -- a system in which the contest of ideas is supposed to be central. It also clashes with our very natures, since the human mind offers the potential for logical reasoning -- a mode of inquiry that is indeed objective and universal.

The Times produced another illustration of our lack of intellectual standards when its ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, devoted a column to the question: "Should opinion columnists be subject to the same corrections policy that governs the work of every other writer at The Times?" ("The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact," New York Times, March 28, 2004.)

Okrent's conclusion? Well, he offered no conclusion, apart from the observation that "anything that is indisputably inaccurate must be corrected." Statements that are only disputably inaccurate, on the other hand -- Okrent offered by way of example William Safire's assertion that there is a "smoking gun" linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein -- are unassailable. Okrent quoted an email he received from Safire:

An opinion may be wrongheaded, but it is never wrong. A belief or a conviction, no matter how illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, is an idea subject to vigorous dispute but is not an assertion subject to editorial or legal correction.

The Times ombudsman offered no demurral. He apparently agreed.

Our unwillingness to conclusively resolve issues disenfranchises the people by throwing an impenetrable shroud over major public issues. The citizen's expected role, in a regime where every side has voluble proponents, is to discover which leader best represents his interests not through a process of rationality, but through divination and faith.

How might we respond to our discovery that our war was a mistake, if our culture's unnatural appendage were amputated and we could restore our ability to deem illogical and "crackbrained" ideas wrong?

Might I have uttered an intemperate statement?

Two days after that last instalment of this essay, the New York Times publishes the first of two long articles arising from a six-month investigation into the breathtaking evils perpetrated against American soldiers -- by financial services companies operating, by permission of a government corrupted by corporate money, at military installations:

Nicholas Stachler was 19 years old when he reported for basic training with the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., before shipping out for 11 months to Iraq.

A gentle, trusting man, he had only weeks earlier graduated from high school with a handful of trophies in hockey and soccer, middling grades and hardly a clue about how to handle his money. He had held only casual jobs baby-sitting and mowing lawns and had never opened a checking account. The bus trip to boot camp, from the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio to the kudzu-covered fields of western Georgia, took him farther from home than he had ever been.

About six weeks into his training he tasted one of the less-honorable traditions of military life: a compulsory classroom briefing on personal finance that was a life insurance sales pitch in disguise.

As he remembers the class and as base investigative records show, two insurance agents quick-stepped him and his classmates through a stack of paperwork, pointing out where they should sign their names, where they should scribble their initials. They were given no time to read the documents and no copies to keep....

"I asked him what this money was coming out of his paycheck for, and he didn't even know," said his mother, Pamela M. Stachler of Athens, Ohio.

Specialist Stachler's experience is not uncommon. Insurance agents have made misleading pitches to "captive" audiences like the ones at Fort Benning. They have posed as counselors on veterans benefits and independent financial advisers. And they have solicited soldiers in their barracks or while they were on duty, violations of Defense Department regulations.

The Pentagon has been aware of practices like these since the Vietnam War. But because of industry lobbying, Congressional pressure, weak enforcement and the Pentagon's ineffective oversight, almost no action has been taken to sanction those responsible or to better protect those who are vulnerable.

And the problem has only intensified since the beginning of the Iraq war. With the death toll rising, interest in insurance among the troops has surged, making the war a selling opportunity for many agents.

To reach the buyers, many companies have used their military connections to lend credibility to their sales efforts, recruiting heavily from among retired or former military people for their corporate boards and sales forces. The advisory board at one company includes Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the retired commander in chief of the United States Central Command.

[One] product heavily promoted to military people is a type of mutual fund in which 50 percent of the first-year contributions are consumed as fees, a deal considered so expensive that such funds all but disappeared from the civilian market almost 20 years ago.

Industry executives defend their products as appropriate and say they employ veterans as agents and advisers because they better understand the financial and personal pressures of military life.

"Someone who is mature enough to fight and quite possibly die for their country should be freely able to decide how much and what kind of life insurance they should have," [said Frank Keating, president of the American Council of Life Insurers, a lobbying group.]

That argument does not satisfy people like Capt. James A. Shaw, commander of the Second Battalion's 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C. In his experience, he said, the training that produces competent soldiers may make them vulnerable to a disguised pitch from a friendly agent in the classroom who is a veteran.

"It's an environment where you do what you're told," Captain Shaw said. "They are learning stuff that will save their lives in combat. Those classes are the law."

[Following a complaint from a retired master gunnery sergeant about a policy that his 23-year-old son, a trainee for the marines, had purchased, an investigation was begun at Camp Pendleton, Calif.] and passed to Capt. Jonathan Strasburg.

In affidavits, many of the marines that Captain Strasburg interviewed said the agents had instructed them to sign and initial stacks of unread documents, including both the allotment forms that set up payroll deductions and the company's "Statement of Understanding" forms. These certify that each marine had requested the sales appointment, was off duty at the time and had understood the details of the insurance being purchased.

Like the Pentagon's code, the camp's rules forbid soliciting business from new recruits or trainees. The reason is simple, Captain Strasburg said: these young marines "are taught to question nothing."

Captain Strasburg ultimately identified 345 marines who had bought insurance through the improper briefings. Of the dozens he interviewed, he said in his report, all "felt they were obligated to sign up."

"They all believed the plan was endorsed by the Marine Corps," he concluded.

Lt. Wayne V. Hildreth, retired, of Jacksonville, Fla., conducted one of the Navy's most extensive investigations of the improper sale of financial products on military bases. The experience, he says, taught him ... that the Pentagon was capable of ignoring the problems, even for decades.

His discouraging education came in 1997.... The Pentagon, he discovered, already knew about many of the problems he was investigating. It had known at least since the Vietnam War, in fact, thanks to the reporting of Richard C. Barnard in The Army Times in 1974. When Lieutenant Hildreth first encountered the newspaper's work months into his 1997 investigation, he said, it nearly broke his heart.

"The sales methods and practices described in this article mirror those sales methods and practices I have uncovered," he wrote in his report. It was evident, he went on, that Defense Department officials knew of the practices involving Academy Life "yet appear to have done nothing."

His report, submitted in 1997, appealed for Pentagon-level action to address the structural problems he had identified. The Pentagon's response was to order more studies and, a year later, to bar Academy Life temporarily from the military market....

That response was not nearly strong enough, Lieutenant Hildreth said. "The fact that you are still finding these incidents on base today proves that," he said in a recent interview.

The first Pentagon study looked at life insurance sales on 11 military bases around the country selected at random. The report found improper practices at all 11 bases: "misleading sales presentations, presentations by unauthorized personnel, presentations to captive audiences, soliciting during duty hours and soliciting in the barracks."

The Pentagon then ordered another study, this one by Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Cuthbert, retired.... His report was an indictment of the status quo at the Defense Department. Its policies, he wrote, "have been routinely violated" for 30 years.

Long before General Cuthbert issued his report, Lieutenant Hildreth had retired from the Navy, disillusioned about the Pentagon's willingness to address the problems he had uncovered in 1997.

"I sensed that nobody was going to do anything," he said in an interview this spring. "I lost confidence in a system that I had once had a lot of confidence in."

Lobbied heavily by the [insurance] industry, Congress voted last year to require the Pentagon to give its members 90 days' notice before changing its rules on insurance sales. This year Congress may do much more to restrict the Pentagon's options.

Early this spring, the industry began to argue that the military is in fact doing too much, not too little, to monitor the insurance that servicemen and women buy. Some companies ... have complained that senior officers on bases are interfering with their business.

On March 29 [some influential members of Congress] asked the Government Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office, to look into the industry's complaints.

And in April, California Democrat Ellen O. Tauscher's office helped draft legislative language that would further restrict the Pentagon's options. The language, approved as Section 586 of the voluminous military authorization bill for 2005, would prevent the Pentagon from changing its insurance rules for at least a year after Congress receives the pending study by the Government Accountability Office. In the late afternoon of May 20, the House voted 391 to 34 to approve the bill with Section 586 tucked inside.

"The idea that there are a bunch of people out there preying on our military community is distasteful to me; I just don't believe it," Ms. Tauscher said. "This is a regulated industry."

[Excerpted from "Basic Training Doesn't Guard Against Insurance Pitch to G.I.'s," New York Times, July 20, 2004, and "Insurers Rely on Congress to Keep Access to G.I.'s," July 21, 2004.]

How do organizations dare conspire to commit such blatant outrages? How do politicians dare support them?

These are obvious evils. But they are not obvious enough. No bruises. No broken windows. Some abstract thinking required. Credible-seeming people with suits and ties defending the practices. That's enough to transmute the issue into "a matter of opinion" -- which means, as we have seen, that our culture will reject any decisive conclusions. And that is enough to assure evil the cover of darkness that it needs (and that it has exploited in this case for the last 30 years).

Must we be defenseless from evil whenever abstract thinking is called for?

There is a single conceptual leap which -- could our society only achieve it -- would greatly strengthen our ability to promote our common goals of justice and security: in a modern society, the citizenry must understand, as it does not today, that large-scale deception is a social offense on par with obvious crimes that directly cause physical harm.

This is not a difficult insight. Deception, in modern society, diverts votes or money to evildoers. Votes and money bring political and financial power -- which ultimately amount to physical power. Deception can produce transfers of money whose effects are identical to theft. And it can mislead the nation into war -- especially when a doctrine of preemption has been adopted.

Could legislation be enacted to criminalize large-scale deception?

Many would immediately dismiss such a notion as fantastic. It is different; it is unfamiliar; but these things are not the same as "fantastic." In our new age, when "evil men" can "bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth," we need new ideas. The aftermath of a mistaken war might be the moment to consider some.

Those seeking facile objections will invoke the specter of kangaroo courts and the suppression of dissent. But large-scale deception is often a matter of objective, verifiable fact. Consider the typical case:

• An exact record of the false statements at issue is readily available, as are many witnesses (of necessity, since mass deception is involved);

• A motive to deceive can be established.

Could Specialist Stachler's "financial advisers" be exonerated if they'd taken care to avoid any explicitly false statements? No. The unmistakable implicit advice was that the product was beneficial. And this was false.

Criminalizing mass deception is radical, but these times urgently demand a rethink of our basic assumptions. We are facing the abyss. Larger terrorist strikes are probably headed towards us. The torture and imprisonment without trial we have seen since 9/11 may be only the beginning. Our civil liberties could be swept away entirely. Then there may be no opportunity to discuss new ideas.

This could be a propitious moment for such a proposal, as America realizes that deception may be what led it into the Iraq war -- a war which the nation's democratic processes might otherwise have prevented.

Mass deception prosecutions would involve open trials and the same beyond-reasonable-doubt standard of proof currently demanded for criminal convictions.

By definition, there can be no deception without intent to deceive, so legitimate speech would be unthreatened.

Criminalizing mass deception may be unprecedented in history. Does that mean it's impractical or misguided?

There is another explanation: that our circumstances are equally unprecedented, and that such a measure has never before been so badly needed.

It's only in the 1950's that TV first blanketed America. The arrival of electronic mass media was a turning point for humanity -- a tool of mass deception more potent than anything that had existed before. At the same time, mass opinion had never been so important, both in politics and in business. People had the vote, and they had money to spend.

It's true that today's mass deceptions are mitigated by our abundance of information sources. No one exerts rigid control over information; lies can be and are corrected. But that is not very satisfactory, as we all know. Deception techniques have advanced over the last half century, just like the hardware by which deception is propagated. Deception is often subtle -- not simple contradictions of fact that can be directly refuted. And even overt misrepresentations succeed in deceiving the people, though many refuse to believe it and the phenomenon is rarely examined directly.

A recent New York Times article gives a glimpse of how deception is standard fare in our politics -- and how deception works. The article describes results of the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which interviewed 1,026 adults in the 18 battleground states where the Republican and Democratic campaigns have been showing commercials since March. The survey found that 56 percent believed that John Kerry "voted for higher taxes 350 times" -- a claim repeated countless times by commercials for President Bush, and one that Bush himself has made. But as the Times reports, the list of 350 votes includes occasions when Mr. Kerry voted to keep taxes at existing levels, or supported lower tax cuts than Republicans sought.

Similarly, 61 percent of respondents believed Mr. Bush "favors sending American jobs overseas," demonstrating the effectiveness of a Kerry commercial claiming that "George Bush says sending jobs overseas `makes sense' for America." But as the Times reports: "Mr. Bush himself never said that, nor did he sign a document saying so. What he signed was a message accompanying the annual report of his Council of Economic Advisers, a report that asserted it made sense for the United States to buy goods and services from countries that produced them more cheaply than the United States could. Standard economic thought -- although dumb politics -- but Mr. Bush never said it." ("Lie, and the Voters Will Believe," May 12, 2004.)

But the main triumph of the deceivers is deeper than any particular misconceptions they have foisted upon us. Their victory is our very atmosphere -- one permeated by confusion, where truth is but one among many indistinguishable voices, and where trust has withered as an inevitable result of routine betrayals.

Today our dominant international challenge is to restore the greatness of America -- (cheers, applause) -- based on telling the truth, a commitment to peace, and respect for civil liberties at home and basic human rights around the world. (Cheers, applause.)

Truth is the foundation of our global leadership, but our credibility has been shattered, and we are left increasingly isolated and vulnerable in a hostile world. Without truth, without trust, America cannot flourish. Trust is at the very heart of our democracy, the sacred covenant between a president and the people. When that trust is violated, the bonds that hold our republic together begin to weaken.

We need to recommit ourselves to a few common-sense principles that should transcend partisan differences.... [I]n the world at large we cannot lead if our leaders mislead. (Cheers, applause.)

[T]he basic issue is whether America will provide global leadership that springs from the unity and the integrity of the American people or whether extremist doctrines, the manipulation of the truth will define America's role in the world. At stake is nothing less than our nation's soul. (Applause.)

I believe tonight, as I always have, that the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the American people will prevail. (Applause.)

And so I say to you and to others around the world, whether you wish us well or ill, do not underestimate us Americans. (Cheers, applause.)

We lack neither strength nor wisdom.

[Excerpted from former president Jimmy Carter's address to the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 26.]

I too believe in "the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the American people." But the common sense of the people has not seen great transformations -- while the resources invested in manipulation, the techniques used, and the technology supporting it, have all advanced.

America's obliviousness to the threat of mass deception, its failure to imagine the fatal undermining of democracy that lies ahead despite many signals, is analogous to its failure of vigilance before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission found:

The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers.

No one working on [recently received] leads in the summer of 2001 connected them to the high level of threat reporting.... [N]o analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground.

[T]here were specific points of vulnerability in the plot and opportunities to disrupt it. Operational failures, opportunities that were not or could not be exploited by the organizations and systems of that time, included: not watchlisting future hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar, not trailing them after they traveled to Bangkok, and not informing the FBI about one future hijacker's U.S. visa or his companion's travel to the United States; not sharing information linking individuals in the Cole attack to Mihdhar; not taking adequate steps in time to find Mihdhar or Hazmi in the United States; not linking the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, described as interested in flight training for the purpose of using an airplane in a terrorist act, to the heightened indications of attack; not discovering false statements on visa applications; not recognizing passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner; not expanding no-fly lists to include names from terrorist watchlists; not searching airline passengers identified by the computer-based CAPPS screening system; and not hardening aircraft cockpit doors or taking other measures to prepare for the possibility of suicide hijackings.

[W]e cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government ... disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot. Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.

The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat. The terrorist danger from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress. Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign.

[Excerpted from the executive summary of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.]

Jimmy Carter is right that "without truth, without trust, America cannot flourish." But he does not acknowledge the all-encompassing breadth of the deception problem, which he must know goes far beyond Bush's statements on Iraq.

Mr. Carter believes the people will prevail in an unregulated, free-for-all environment, using old-fashioned strength and wisdom to overcome the confusion sown by America's ubiquitous deceivers.

Mr. Carter's faith, I submit, represents a failure of imagination.

For four years we've heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans.

You don't value families by kicking kids out of after-school programs and taking cops off the streets so that Enron can get another tax break.

We believe in the family value of caring for our children and protecting the neighborhoods where they walk and they play.

You don't value families by denying real prescription-drug coverage to seniors so big drug companies can get another windfall profit.

You don't value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service, if you deny veterans health care or if you tell middle-class families to wait for a tax cut so the wealthiest among us can get even more.

We believe that what matters most is not narrow appeals masquerading as values, but the shared values that show the true face of America.

What does it mean when Mary Ann Knowles, a woman with breast cancer that I met in New Hampshire, had to keep working day after day through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family's health insurance?

What does it mean when Deborah Kromins from Philadelphia, Pa., works and saves all her life and finds out that her pension has disappeared into thin air and the executive who looted it has bailed out on a golden parachute?

What does it mean when 25 percent of our children in Harlem have asthma because of air pollution?

What does it mean when people are huddled in blankets in the cold, sleeping in Lafayette Park on the doorstep of the White House itself, and the number of families living in poverty has risen by three million in the last four years?

Where is the conscience of our country? I'll tell you where it is. It's alive in the people that I've met in every single part of this land. It's bursting in the hearts of Americans who are determined to give our values and our truth back to our country.

When I was a prosecutor, I met young kids who were in trouble, abandoned, all of them, by adults. And as president, I am determined that we stop being a nation content to spend $50,000 a year to send a young person to prison for the rest of their life when we could invest $10,000 a year in Head Start, Early Start, Smart Start, a real start to the lives of our children.

Our health care plan for a stronger America cracks down on the waste and the greed and the abuse in our health care system. And patients and doctors, not insurance company bureaucrats, will make medical decisions.

And when I am president, we will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy and the connected and the elected.

I don't wear my religion on my sleeve. But faith has given me values and hope to live by. I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.

And whatever our faith, one belief should bind us all: The measure of our character is our willingness to give of ourselves for others and for our country.

Two young bicycle mechanics from Dayton asked, what if this airplane could take off at Kitty Hawk? It did that and changed the world forever.

And now it's our time to ask: What if? What if we do what adults should do and make sure that all of our children are safe in the afternoons after school?

[Excerpted from Senator John Kerry's speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in Boston, July 29, 2004.]

There is real, concrete evil being openly conducted in America today. The perpetrators are powerful. The victims include children and seniors.

It is the government's job to address such problems. It's foolish to think they can be solved any other way.

But will these ideas reach the voters? Or will America's deceivers win the "democracy" game?

Under the headline "Voters Want Specifics From Kerry," The Washington Post recently quoted a voter demanding that John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "what they plan on doing about health care for middle-income or lower-income people. I have to face the fact that I will never be able to have health insurance, the way things are now. And these millionaires don't seem to address that."

Mr. Kerry proposes spending $650 billion extending health insurance to lower- and middle-income families. Whether you approve or not, you can't say he hasn't addressed the issue. Why hasn't this voter heard about it?

Well, I've been reading 60 days' worth of transcripts from the places four out of five Americans cite as where they usually get their news: the major cable and broadcast TV networks. Never mind the details - I couldn't even find a clear statement that Mr. Kerry wants to roll back recent high-income tax cuts and use the money to cover most of the uninsured. When reports mentioned the Kerry plan at all, it was usually horse race analysis - how it's playing, not what's in it.

On the other hand, everyone knows that Teresa Heinz Kerry told someone to "shove it," though even there, the context was missing. Except for a brief reference on MSNBC, none of the transcripts I've read mention that the target of her ire works for Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who financed smear campaigns against the Clintons - including accusations of murder. (CNN did mention Mr. Scaife on its Web site, but described him only as a donor to "conservative causes.") And viewers learned nothing about Mr. Scaife's long vendetta against Mrs. Heinz Kerry herself.

There are two issues here, trivialization and bias, but they're related.

Somewhere along the line, TV news stopped reporting on candidates' policies, and turned instead to trivia that supposedly reveal their personalities. We hear about Mr. Kerry's haircuts, not his health care proposals. We hear about George Bush's brush-cutting, not his environmental policies.

[S]ince campaign coverage as celebrity profiling has no rules, it offers ample scope for biased reporting.

Notice the voter's reference to "these millionaires." A Columbia Journalism Review Web site called campaigndesk.org says its analysis "reveals a press prone to needlessly introduce Senators Kerry and Edwards and Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, as millionaires or billionaires, without similar labels for President Bush or Vice President Cheney."

As the site points out, the Bush campaign has been "hammering away with talking points casting Kerry as out of the mainstream because of his wealth, hoping to influence press coverage." The campaign isn't claiming that Mr. Kerry's policies favor the rich - they manifestly don't, while Mr. Bush's manifestly do. Instead, we're supposed to dislike Mr. Kerry simply because he's wealthy (and not notice that his opponent is, too).

In short, the triumph of the trivial is not a trivial matter. The failure of TV news to inform the public about the policy proposals of this year's presidential candidates is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.

[Excerpted from "Triumph of the Trivial," by Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 30, 2004.]

Saddam Hussein is evil. Osama bin Laden is evil. Hitler was evil. I mean, just look at them.

But smooth-faced executives? Politicians and professionals who have violated no criminal laws? Smartly attired folks, empathetic and media-savvy, fluent and confident, exuding everything we associate with success?

If these people would only break a window or rape someone, we'd have no trouble judging them. If they'd commit even a white-collar crime, so we could see them doing the perp walk in cuffs, then an authority we more or less trust would have judged them for us.

But our cries of condemnation are muted before Frank Keating, president of the American Council of Life Insurers, as he argues that "[s]omeone who is mature enough to fight and quite possibly die for their country should be freely able to decide how much and what kind of life insurance they should have."

Suddenly we're in touchy territory.

Keating's evil, however, is the kind of evil we must learn to condemn in order for our democracy to work. If mass deception continues to be viewed as legitimate, then our democratic debates will become increasingly dysfunctional, and the leaders we need will be hobbled -- just like an athlete running clean when all his rivals use doping.

Seeing Keating's evil is not difficult conceptually. It's simply a matter of opening our eyes. It's the classic pattern of evil we all instinctively know: manipulating a person; gaining their trust; abusing that trust and causing injury -- all for selfish ends.

Keating's argument, clearly, is grotesque nonsense. Obviously 19-year-old Specialist Stachler, or others in his situation, are indeed entirely vulnerable to being duped by financial companies' deceptive practices. Yes, Stachler is about to fight and maybe die for his country. It should go without saying that that hardly functions as a justification for fleecing him just before his dispatch to Iraq.

It's not difficult conceptually. But confronting Keating's evil is not easy. It is so utterly commonplace in our society. The implications are very awkward. We are comfortable with Saddam's evil. But recognizing evil amongst ourselves makes us nervous. It raises the possibility that we ourselves may harbor evil within us, and we are not accustomed to hearing that, or thinking about it.

Yet, as I myself observe above, reasoned argument virtually never changes anyone's mind. As the economist J.K. Galbraith has written, it takes a cataclysm to upset the conventional wisdom.

So with a perpetual cloud of futility hanging above, it's time to summarize and conclude.

What's called for here is a cultural change: an appreciation that mass deception is a social offense.

Mass deception abets unequivocal evils and could fatally undermine democracy. But in our current culture, mass deception is taken for granted and routinely practiced.

Cultural change is not impossible. One way to promote it would be to criminalize and prosecute the most flagrant instances of mass deception.

Now would be a good time. Mass deception may have brought us the extreme consequence of mistaken war. It should not be hard for anyone to understand that that's treason. Those instances of mass deception, if confirmed, could and should be prosecuted, if necessary under new, retroactively applied legislation.

The July 9 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that CIA analysts misrepresented and distorted evidence about Iraq's WMD. These analysts are ripe targets for prosecution.

Perhaps they were pressured and were genuinely fearful of losing their jobs. Too bad. They were professionals, paid by taxpayers to advise on security threats to the nation. If they deliberately distorted evidence, they should be publicly prosecuted and do time behind bars.

If, as is widely thought, the Bush people pressured the CIA, then one may suppose they bear a greater burden of moral guilt. But their culpability may not be provable. The administration's greater guilt should not inhibit the prosecution of the analysts, against whom it seems likely that an airtight case could be mounted.