Through former FEMA head Michael Brown's testimony last week in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearings we've learned of yet another case of Bushevik amnesia. Brown told committee chair Susan Collins (R-ME) that he sent urgent reports to White House officials on Monday August 29, the day the hurricane hit, that New Orleans' levees were failing and that there was potentially disastrous flooding already underway. The next day, Aug. 30, President Bush incredulously went before the press to declare that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet."

This prompted yet another chapter in the Ignorance is Bliss defense by the Bushies whenever they find themselves under attack. On the September 1 broadcast of ABC's Good Morning America, Bush said "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." But we now know he in fact knew beforehand. And as for his lack of knowledge until Tuesday that New Orleans was facing severe conditions, Brown called that "just baloney" and "a little disingenuous."

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.

The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.

In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, Bill Scheurer realized that the nation's soul was in jeopardy. He saw George Bush on TV, standing in the rubble of Ground Zero, whipping the national grief into carte blanche for revenge. Behind him, as the death toll wavered, people held up a banner that screamed: 6,000 MORE REASONS TO KILL THEM ALL.

"That's when I said, 'We're in trouble,'" he told me the other day, describing the journey that has made him a standard-bearer for what has become perhaps the largest bloc of disenfranchised voters in the country: the war-disillusioned. Four-plus years into the Bush version of homeland security, with the blood and the lies seeping into the national psyche, with public revulsion at high simmer, Scheurer is poised to help the peace majority remake American politics.

The anger and horror so many of us have felt about the national direction since we went to war with the rest of the world has shockingly little political traction. No matter how many people oppose Bush's bomb-and-torture show, it continues, the system incapable of shutting it down. The loyal opposition blesses it with endless mush.

Paranoid America -- by which I mean its governors -- has long dreamed of foolproof technology to guard the Homeland from subversion, or penetration, by alien hostiles.

In its latest variant, the vaunted technology comes in the form of the sweeps by the computers of the National Security Agency (NSA), programmed to intercept hundreds of millions of phone, e-mail and fax messages. These days, as much as a third of global communications are on fiber-optic cable routes that that pass through the United States.

The NSA's programmers claim that the artificial intelligence programs -- terabytes of speech, text and image data -- monitoring the filters are of such refinement that they can determine the sex, age and class of the communicators and, no doubt (though they take care not to boast of any such profiling), their genetic and linguistic ethnicity, too. After all, Middle Easterners are surely a prime target.