Living under a cloud of fear has become a way of life for the people of the United States since the events of September 11, 2001. But the fear factor has been cleverly manufactured by political factors and the talking heads of a sold-out media.

We have been constantly bombarded by warnings of plots by secret Islamic cults to attack us again. Consequently we have been goaded into launching five wars against Moslem nations, accepting new laws severely restricting our freedoms and privacy, and submitting to increased suppression by police and other authority figures.

As all of this has happened, we have seen our economy tank, our factories and jobs move overseas and our "elected" national leadership go into a state of such incredible impotence it seems as if this nation is a rudderless ship adrift in a storm.

At least this is the way it appears. We suspect that in reality, there is a plan being hatched by a secret power structure designed to tear down this once great nation brick-by-brick. It is a plan that is already in its advanced state but most Americans are so unaware of what is happening they are still trusting Uncle Sam to keep them protected from the big bad wolf at the door. They do not realize that the wolf is already in the house and about to devour them alive.

The 9-11 attack itself was carried out with such amazing skill by a supposedly pack of young and unprofessional assailants using box cutters and home-schooled training to fly commercial airliners. The fact that three large aircraft successfully flew into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon was quite incredible. Home and surveillance video footage of these events have raised so many questions that professional analysts suspect that the attack originated from within our own military. That Osama Bin Laden, the so-called leader of the secret El-Qaeda network blamed for the attack, was a former CIA agent during Russia's war in Afghanistan seems to have been totally overlooked, as was the Bin Laden family ties to former presidents Bush.

With all of these questions falling out of the fog of the 9-11 attack, the corporate-owned national media went out of its way during the 10th Anniversary to help remind the public of the original story and laud the "heroes" of the day, the fire fighters and other first responders that died trying to save lives.

No one seems to want to question how three buildings in the heart of downtown Manhattan could implode so perfectly after two of them were hit, even though demolition experts say accomplishing such a feat would take specific skills in planting explosives throughout such massive buildings. Film maker Michael Moore and others have asked these questions in various documentaries but to date all we have heard are reports from hired engineers who have gone to great lengths to explain away the unexplainable.

No one appeared to question the fact that within less than two months Congress passed a comprehensive 342-page Patriot Act that dramatically reduced restrictions on government access to electronic and telephone communications, medical, financial and other personal records, and gave the Secretary of the Treasury authority to regulate financial transactions. The act passed both the House and Senate with an almost unanimous vote although most legislators later admitted they never read it.

While caught up in the constant fear of further attacks, most Americans seem to be ignoring the quick erosion of their freedoms to move about, provide for their families, choose valid candidates for public office and live without fear of suppression.

Airport security is so strict that people are X-rayed, excessively patted down and their luggage thoroughly searched before they can board an aircraft. Police dogs guided by ATF agents sniff people in public places for drugs or explosives. Our telephone conversations, computer activities, FAX messages and all other electronic communications are under constant surveillance. Police make random traffic stops, sometimes blockading highways, to test for alcohol consumption, drugs or other suspicious cargo in our vehicles.

Since the choosing of George W. Bush by the Supreme Court to be America's president after the controversial 2000 election, it has become obvious that both the high court and the majority of elected Republican (and some Democratic) legislators have sold out to the interests of big corporations, including the military industrial complex.

The Supremes stacked the deck for the 2012 presidential election when the judges voted 5-4 to give corporations the freedom to pour large amounts of money in support of the candidates of their choice. That means voters will be directed by a clever and well financed advertising campaign to select the candidate of corporate choice. Another troublesome development has been a so-called "taxpayer protection pledge," a vow reportedly taken by 41 senators and 236 Congressional representatives . . . nearly all Republicans . . . that they will stand against any increase in taxes. The pledge, promoted by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, appears to have prevented any chance for raising extra revenues to offset the nation's multi-trillion dollar deficit.

We are living in a nation with a crumbling infrastructure, with roads, bridges, dams, levees, sewer and water systems, electric power grids and gas lines falling into poor repair. Our railroad, bus and airplane services are failing to meet a growing need for public transportation at a time when rising fuel prices and the high cost of owning and operating a personal automobile are making it harder for people to get around.

States and local municipalities also are feeling the financial pinch. The problem has become so acute that local services, including education programs are being slashed.

In spite of all the rhetoric expressed on the anniversary of the 9-11 attack, or on holidays like the Fourth of July, this is no longer the America we once knew and enjoyed.

Terrorism like poverty and disease has always existed and it will always exist. The random acts of terrorism that have gained so much attention since 9-11 have been no more of a threat to us now than they ever were. If Americans have anything to fear it is their own failure to maintain good educational programs and remain keenly aware of what is going on among those who govern. And if they take a good look . . . they will have reason to be very afraid.
(c) 2011 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. He currently produces daily articles for this web site.

And we heard all of them from two dozen brilliant speakers during a three-day conference this past weekend. If you missed it, the video is all online. So is the text of many of the papers presented. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite:

"Let's say we want to create 29 million jobs in 10 years. That's 2.9 million each year. Here's one way to do it. Take $100 billion from the Department of Defense and move it into education. That creates 1.75 million jobs per year. Take another $50 billion and move it into healthcare spending. There's an additional 400,000 jobs. Take another $100 billion and move it into clean energy. There's another 550,000 jobs. And take another $62 billion and turn it into tax cuts, generating an additional 200,000 jobs. Now the military spending in the Department of Energy, the State Department, Homeland Security, and so forth have not been touched. And the Department of Defense has been cut back to about $388 billion, which is to say: more than it was getting 10 years ago when our country went collectively insane." -- David Swanson

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, and even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, and every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society." -- President Eisenhower in a play by Wally Myers

"In addition to the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on World Peace Day, in violation of its commitment to disarmament under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the United States will fire an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California over Hawaii and the Pacific Missile Range tracking facility (PMRF) to crash into the Pacific Ocean near Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands." -- Ann Wright

"And when I met with Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, an ostensibly very progressive Democrat early in her freshman term of office, I told her that her constituents wanted her to cut military spending and bring the war dollars home. But she said it wasn't that easy. Once she got to Washington 'they' asked her, 'What do you want to do, put 3,000 people out of work your first term in office?' This made reference to the largest employer in the state, Bath Iron Works, which has contracts to build the Aegis destroyers that the Navy hopes will be docked on little Jeju Island off the coast of China that Ann Wright spoke of last night." -- Lisa Savage

"It occurred to me over the past couple of days that there is a common thread across these issues of drones, torture, and illegal wars. The unifying thought was that the use of drones, interrogation, and armed conflict each have various legal regimes that shape them and form the universe of what we see as what is legally permissible. The legality of the manner in which state actors operate in these areas are derived from both domestic and international law rules. The powers of any individual official to act are derived from the internal state structure such as the Constitution. Just like there is the known universe of these rules that apply for these areas, I started to wonder about what is not seen in the universe: when state actors act with malice aforethought or sufficient mens rea and actus reus to be a crime. It occurred to me that this part of the universe of law might also be viewed as the dark matter in a similar fashion to how the term is used in astrophysics. Dark matter has not been seen but is used as a way to explain certain phenomenon that are inexplicable by what is seen in the known universe." -- Ben Davis

"In 1942, the 3,000 residents of five rural Tennessee mountain communities were given just a few weeks' notice to vacate their homes and ancestral farms. Thus was the 'secret city' of Oak Ridge established, and the 60,000 acres of Tennessee valleys and ridges expropriated for the war effort. The Manhattan Project was developed to enrich the uranium used for the Hiroshima bomb. In subsequent decades, and in the name of national security, officials knowingly subjected atomic industry workers, soldiers and nearby residents to deadly doses of radiation at nuclear sites throughout the country. 'Some 300,000 people, or half of those who ever worked in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, are believed to have been affected by exposure to radiation,' asserts Michael Renner, of the World Watch Institute writing in the 1997 book War and Public Health. Every step of the nuclear bomb-making process involves severe environmental contamination that lingers for generations." -- Clare Hanrahan

"In 2004, a North Carolina child protection group analyzed sixteen years of records involving the murder of children by parents or step-parents. The rates of such homicides were steady across the state's one hundred counties, with two exceptions: in Onslow and Cumberland counties, the childhomicide rates were consistently twice as high. Onslow County is home to Camp Lejeune; Cumberland County hosts Fort Bragg." -- Mia Austin-Scoggins

"Put your ear to the railroad tracks and you can hear the train coming. Now that the new 12-member Congressional 'Super Committee' has essentially been given the power of God (and the Devil) the military industrial complex, and their appendage called the corporate media, are swinging into action. Their message? We can't cut Pentagon spending because it will hurt an already tight job market.....and we need these troops to keep knocking countries off the "Non-Integrating Gap" list (those countries that refuse to play ball with corporate globalization)." -- Bruce Gagnon

"The more famous stories we do know. Daniel Ellsberg was harassed and attacked, caricatured by the state as a criminal, not a hero. The many witnesses against the U.S. military regarding Agent Orange, and years later, the vaccinations and experimental drugs that are part and parcel of what would become known as Gulf War Syndrome, which today has killed more U.S. citizens than the Vietnam War, all of these men and women were treated as enemies of the state. Those who would tell the truth about the propaganda, and original intent, on the way to the wars in and continuing occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq, are all made to be enemies of the state. Think about Bunny Greenhouse observing in pre-Iraq invasion contracting, and Sibel Edmonds in the months before 9-11. Fired, stifled, harassed, treated badly by our own government for simply telling the truth. And those who would bear witness to mistreatment and unlawful acts of war and interrogation by the United States here and around the world, are, you guessed it, enemies of the American state." -- Karen Kwiatkowski

"From a strategic, economic, and security perspective, our response to the attacks on September 11th has created many more problems than it has solved. For example, invading the Greater Middle East violated the most basic principles of military strategy. According to Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War, one of the worst things a leader can do in war is become angry. Sun Tzu knew that when people are enraged, they cannot think clearly and will make self-destructive decisions. This is why one of the best things a leader can do in war is make his opponent angry, because when leaders – whether military or civilian – become angry they lose concern for consequences, and they become reckless and careless. An angry and reckless opponent is much easier to lure into a trap than a calm and rational opponent." -- Paul Chappell

"I was there. All the stories that were in the Western media about Gaza are completely untrue. I’ve been to Gaza many times before. On this occasion we were told there’s no need for flotillas and such because the borders of Gaza are open. Not true. Absolutely not true. We’re told that the people who are ruling Gaza, who were they elected authorities (they were elected in 2005) are irrational, Islamist madmen who want to oppress women. Not true." -- Helena Cobban

"Many Americans have developed what Bob Marley -- the poet laureate of oppressed people around the world -- called 'mental slavery.' Social scientists have also recognized this phenomenon of subjugation resulting in demoralization and defeatism. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, the El Salvadoran social psychologist and popularizer of 'liberation psychology,' understood this psychological phenomenon of fatalism, and they helped their people overcome it. We must first acknowledge the reality that for millions of Americans, subjugation has in fact resulted in demoralization and fatalism. Then, we can begin to heal from a “battered people’s syndrome” of sorts and together begin to fight for democracy." -- Bruce Levine

Click the authors' names above to read more, or for a better taste of the conference that brought these and many more opponents of militarism together, check out the videos and photos.

The conference closed with a song:

For Bradley Manning

One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.

After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.

Target confirmed.

This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial "Terminators," minus beefcake and time travel.

The Fort Benning tarp "is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate," said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. "You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don't have time for a human to say, 'I need you to do these tasks.' It needs to happen faster than that."

The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.

Military systems with some degree of autonomy -such as robotic, weaponized sentries -have been deployed in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and other potential battle areas. Researchers are uncertain how soon machines capable of collaborating and adapting intelligently in battlefield conditions will come online. It could take one or two decades, or longer. The U.S. military is funding numerous research projects on autonomy to develop machines that will perform some dull or dangerous tasks and to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries who are also working on such systems.

The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.

The prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to use discrimination and proportionality, standards that would demand that machines distinguish among enemy combatants, surrendering troops and civilians.

"The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a conference in Italy this month. "It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues, which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed."

Drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen can already move automatically from point to point, and it is unclear what surveillance or other tasks, if any, they perform while in autonomous mode. Even when directly linked to human operators, these machines are producing so much data that processors are sifting the material to suggest targets, or at least objects of interest. That trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the U.S. military shifts from one pilot remotely flying a drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once.

But humans still make the decision to fire, and in the case of CIA strikes in Pakistan, that call rests with the director of the agency. In future operations, if drones are deployed against a sophisticated enemy, there may be much less time for deliberation and a greater need for machines that can function on their own.

The U.S. military has begun to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.

"Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions," according to an Air Force treatise called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047. "These include the appropriateness of machines having this ability, under what circumstances it should be employed, where responsibility for mistakes lies and what limitations should be placed upon the autonomy of such systems." In the future, micro-drones will reconnoiter tunnels and buildings, robotic mules will haul equipment and mobile systems will retrieve the wounded while under fire. Technology will save lives. But the trajectory of military research has led to calls for an arms-control regime to forestall any possibility that autonomous systems could target humans.

In Berlin last year, a group of robotic engineers, philosophers and human rights activists formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and said such technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody.

Some experts also worry that hostile states or terrorist organizations could hack robotic systems and redirect them. Malfunctions also are a problem: In South Africa in 2007, a semiautonomous cannon fatally shot nine friendly soldiers.

The ICRAC would like to see an international treaty, such as the one banning antipersonnel mines, that would outlaw some autonomous lethal machines. Such an agreement could still allow automated antimissile systems.

"The question is whether systems are capable of discrimination," said Peter Asaro, a founder of the ICRAC and a professor at the New School in New York who teaches a course on digital war. "The good technology is far off, but technology that doesn't work well is already out there. The worry is that these systems are going to be pushed out too soon, and they make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be atrocities."

Research into autonomy, some of it classified, is racing ahead at universities and research centers in the United States, and that effort is beginning to be replicated in other countries, particularly China.

"Lethal autonomy is inevitable," said Ronald C. Arkin, the author of "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," a study that was funded by the Army Research Office.

Arkin believes it is possible to build ethical military drones and robots, capable of using deadly force while programmed to adhere to international humanitarian law and the rules of engagement. He said software can be created that would lead machines to return fire with proportionality, minimize collateral damage, recognize surrender, and, in the case of uncertainty, maneuver to reassess or wait for a human assessment.

In other words, rules as understood by humans can be converted into algorithms followed by machines for all kinds of actions on the battlefield.

"How a war-fighting unit may think - we are trying to make our systems behave like that," said Lora G. Weiss, chief scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Others, however, remain skeptical that humans can be taken out of the loop.

"Autonomy is really the Achilles' heel of robotics," said Johann Borenstein, head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan. "There is a lot of work being done, and still we haven't gotten to a point where the smallest amount of autonomy is being used in the military field. All robots in the military are remote-controlled. How does that sit with the fact that autonomy has been worked on at universities and companies for well over 20 years?"

Borenstein said human skills will remain critical in battle far into the future.

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient's blood they could purge the evil "humors" that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn't just inflicting vast pain; it's starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated by calls for fiscal austerity. By slashing spending and reducing deficits, we were told, nations could restore confidence and drive economic revival.

And the austerity has been real. In Europe, troubled nations like Greece and Ireland have imposed savage cuts, even as stronger nations have imposed milder austerity programs of their own. In the United States, the modest federal stimulus of 2009 has faded out, while state and local governments have slashed their budgets, so that over all we've had a de facto move toward austerity not so different from Europe's.

Strange to say, however, confidence hasn't surged. Somehow, businesses and consumers seem much more concerned about the lack of customers and jobs, respectively, than they are reassured by the fiscal righteousness of their governments. And growth seems to be stalling, while unemployment remains disastrously high on both sides of the Atlantic.

But, say apologists for the bad results so far, shouldn't we be focused on the long run rather than short-run pain? Actually, no: the economy needs real help now, not hypothetical payoffs a decade from now. In any case, evidence is starting to emerge that the economy's "short run" troubles - now in their fourth year, and being made worse by the focus on austerity - are taking a toll on its long-run prospects as well.

Consider, in particular, what is happening to America's manufacturing base. In normal times manufacturing capacity rises 2 or 3 percent every year. But faced with a persistently weak economy, industry has been reducing, not increasing, its productive capacity. At this point, according to Federal Reserve estimates, manufacturing capacity is almost 5 percent lower than it was in December 2007.

What this means is that if and when a real recovery finally gets going, the economy will run into capacity constraints and production bottlenecks much sooner than it should. That is, the weak economy, which is partly the result of budget-cutting, is hurting the future as well as the present.

Furthermore, the decline in manufacturing capacity is probably only the beginning of the bad news. Similar cuts in capacity will probably take place in the service sector - indeed, they may already be taking place. And with long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression, there is a real risk that many of the unemployed will come to be seen as unemployable.

Oh, and the brunt of those cuts in public spending is falling on education. Somehow, laying off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers doesn't seem like a good way to win the future.

In fact, when you combine the growing evidence that fiscal austerity is reducing our future prospects with the very low interest rates on U.S. government debt, it's hard to avoid a startling conclusion: budget austerity may well be counterproductive even from a purely fiscal point of view, because lower future growth means lower tax receipts.

What should be happening? The answer is that we need a major push to get the economy moving, not at some future date, but right now. For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad. And it's not just pointy-headed economists saying this; business leaders like Google's Eric Schmidt are saying the same thing, and the bond market, by buying U.S. debt at such low interest rates, is in effect pleading for a more expansionary policy.

And to be fair, some policy players seem to get it. President Obama's new jobs plan is a step in the right direction, while some board members of the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England - though not, sad to say, the European Central Bank - have been calling for much more growth-oriented policies.

What we really need, however, is to convince a substantial number of people with political power or influence that they've spent the last year and a half going in exactly the wrong direction, and that they need to make a U-turn.

There were numerous reasons that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer were accused in prominent venues of all sorts of crimes -- including anti-Semitism -- when they published The Israel Lobby, but the most common cause was the book's central theme: that there is a very powerful lobby in the U.S. which is principally devoted to Israel and causes U.S. political leaders to act to advance the interests of this foreign nation over their own. In The New York Times today, Tom Friedman -- long one of Israel's most stalwart American supporters -- wrote the following as the second paragraph of his column, warning that the U.S. was about to incur massive damage in order to block Palestinian statehood:

This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel's leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America's.

Isn't that exactly Walt and Mearseimer's main theme, what caused them to be tarred and feathered with the most noxious accusations possible? Indeed it is; here's how the academic duo, in The Israel Lobby, described the crux of their argument as first set forth in an article on which the book was based:

After describing the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel, we argued that his support could not be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds Instead, it was due largely to the political power of the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel . . . We suggested that these policies were not in the U.S. national interest and were in fact harmful to Israel's long-term interests as well.

Is that not exactly the point which The New York Times' most "pro-Israel" columnist himself just voiced today? This thesis has long been self-evidently true. Indeed, many of the same Israel-loyal neoconservatives who accused Walt and Mearsheimer of promoting an anti-Semitic trope of "dual loyalty" -- by daring to suggest that some American Jews cast votes based on what's best for Israel rather than the U.S. -- themselves will explicitly urge American Jews to vote Republican instead of Democrat because of the former's supposedly greater support for Israel (you're allowed to argue that American Jews should make political choices based on Israel but you're not allowed to point out that some do so). Ed Koch just ran around the 9th Congressional District in New York successfully urging American Jews to vote for the GOP candidate based on exactly that appeal ("Koch, a Democrat, endorsed [the GOP candidate] in July as a way to 'send a message' to Obama on his policies toward Israel"). And in The Wall Street Journal this week, Rick Perry excoriated President Obama because of the small handful of instances where Obama deviated ever-so-slightly from the dictates and wishes of the Israeli government.

Walt and Mearshiemer merely voiced a truth which has long been known and obvious but was not allowed to be spoken. That's precisely why the demonization campaign against them was so vicious and concerted: those who voice prohibited truths are always more hated than those who spout obvious lies. That the foreign affairs columnist most admired in Washington circles just expressed the same point demonstrates that recognition of this previously prohibited fact has now become mainstream.

Unfortunately, though, it is still a fact. While there is little doubt that blocking Palestinian statehood will damage the U.S. in substantial ways, there is a reasonable debate to be had about whether Palestinian statehood is actually beneficial to the Palestinians. But American politicians won't be entertaining that debate as they exercise their veto because, as The Israel Lobby documented and Tom Friedman today put it, "the powerful pro-Israel lobby . . . can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America's." Obama officials recognize how vital it is to improve how the U.S. is perceived in the Muslim world and go to great lengths to achieve that goal -- including, supposedly, just fighting a war in Libya in part to accomplish that -- yet (predictably egged on by Democratic Congressional leaders) are prepared/required to throw all of that away because of the imperative of honoring the Netanyahu government's obsession with denying Palestinian statehood.

I don't know if Troy Davis was innocent, but I do know that the evidence for demanding a re-examination of his conviction, including the recanted testimony of most of the witnesses against him, was overwhelming. But of course that is now beside the point, which is exactly what is so wrong about the use of the death penalty. No matter what evidence of innocence might be produced in the future, it is of consequence no longer.

That is a compelling argument against the death penalty-no room for correction-but there are others. The most egregious argument for capital punishment is the claim that the finality of officially condoned killing is a necessary guarantor of civilized order. Egregious because it is not possible to make that case without explaining why most of the democratic societies that we admire shun the death penalty as contrary to their most deeply held values.

Or is it China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen, which, along with the United States, led the world in government executions, that we most admire? There is something stunningly disgraceful about the company we keep on this issue.

As Amnesty International-the world's premier human rights organization, which deserves high marks for its anti-death penalty campaign-points out, more than two-thirds of the world's nations have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. I defy anyone to compare the list of countries that have retained the death penalty with those that have abolished it and then conclude that it serves a needed purpose.

It is obvious from the experience of those nations without the death penalty and our own 17 states that have banned capital punishment that this barbaric custom is not a necessary, let alone efficient, means for ensuring public safety. Due process in the United States, which claims to have an enlightened legal system, requires death penalty procedures that are costlier than appropriate incarceration.

Governments that cling to this primitive ritual of state-sanctioned murder do so not to induce respect for law but rather to indulge a lust for vengeance. Toward that end it would be far more honest to have the bound prisoner stoned to death by the governors, state legislators, prosecutors and judges who support the death penalty rather than employing lethal injections by disengaged technicians. Forcing them to be the executioners in actual practice rather than as a matter of legal theory would compel a far greater sense of personal responsibility than politicians and some others tend to exhibit on the matter.

From my own experience as a journalist covering this issue, the vast majority of politicians who defend capital punishment do so out of rank opportunism, which they demonstrate, particularly when the conversation is off the record, by citing polling numbers rather than evidence of the death penalty as a capital crime deterrent.

As I waited for the news of Troy Davis' fate, my thoughts kept returning to that day in 1960 when we Berkeley students picketed the California governor's office in pleading for a stay in the execution of convicted rapist Caryl Chessman, who was never accused of murder. It didn't come because Gov. Pat Brown, despite his deep reservations about the case, had succumbed to public opinion. I never imagined then that more than half a century later the death penalty would still be enforced. That it is mocks our claim to be a moral leader in this world.

It is appropriate that we grieve for the slain police officer, Mark MacPhail, but if Davis was not the one with the gun, as he claimed to the end, the true murderer will have gone unpunished, as suggested by Davis' haunting plea to the MacPhail family minutes before he died: "I did not personally kill your son, father, brother. All I can ask is that you look deeper into this case so you really can finally see the truth."

Execution is a means of summarily ending the pursuit of justice rather than advancing it.