To these fundamentalists, the Pentagon bestrides the narrow world like a colossus, except when it's looking up the long legs of the media. What Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Isikoff do or don't do can cause rampage and death from Kabul to Jakarta.

It is the place of maturity to know that the world is full of actors beyond ourselves. Some very bad actors seized on the Newsweek story to manipulate an alleged blasphemy for political ends.

Most of the inflammations of anti-American and anti-Western passion in the Muslim world during the last 30 years, running right through the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, back to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, were political as much as religious eruptions: more political than religious. No doubt simple Muslims found the idea of The Satanic Verses offensive, just as millions of Iranians found the Shah distant, overbearing and (to the extent he exalted Iran's Aryan past and his own cosmopolitanism) impious. But there was hay to be made, just as there is now when mobs turn out to burn Old Glory.

In countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, malcontents long to come to power. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, mullahs and rogue members of the vast royal family seek distractions abroad in order to maintain power at home. In Afghanistan and Iraq, those who ruled under the Taliban and who gorged under the Baathists seek to regain power. A despot like Gen. Pervez Musharraf is an obvious obstacle to the career plans of such men (there are no women among them). But so is any degree of democracy. If people rule themselves, then tyrannical elites cannot rule them. If people have a say in making their own laws, then Islamofascists cannot say, in the name of holiness, what the law should be. If presidents can be elected and unelected, then there will be no palaces for Uday and Qusay.

If you need proof of the political storyline behind the headlines, consider the hypocrisy of the religious complainers. We were told it would be offensive to fight in Afghanistan during Ramadan, though many wars in Muslim history have been launched then. Beware, beware of attacking mosques, and so we have been, though our concern has not been matched by terrorists who stuff mosques with ordnance and guerrillas. The horror of imagining a Koran flushed down a toilet apparently didn't stop some of the Guantánamo detainees themselves from ripping pages from their Korans (all provided by the U.S. Army) and flushing them down their toilets, so as to cause blockages and confusion. What, finally, are we to make of suicide bombers, or the 9/11 hijackers, since the Almighty in the Koran, as much as in Hamlet, has fixed his canons 'gainst self-slaughter?

Grant that the uproar is manipulated. Is Islam susceptible to manipulation? Let us draw a comparison from our own experience. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is an evangelical Christian. Former Presidential candidate Howard Dean is a die-hard secularist (he left his Episcopal Church in a fight over a bike path, which is taking good government and public aesthetics pretty seriously). Mr. Ashcroft is driven and dour; Mr. Dean is pugnacious and flamboyant. Each man, moreover, stands for legions of the likeminded. Now let their sternest enemies honestly ask themselves: However distasteful you think your bête noire and his followers are, could you imagine Ashcroftians or Deaniacs murdering people in the streets? You couldn't. So why does it happen in the Muslim world?

The obvious secular explanation for Islamic violence is the poverty of the Muslim world. Subtract oil, and you have a mass of peasants (give or take Turkey)-and where destruction is only a drought away, it is easier to rouse people to destroy in the name of Him Who controls the rain clouds. This is the analysis of humanist meliorists of all stripes, from libertarians to the Second International. There is something to be said for it, though it doesn't explain why so many jihadists, like the 9/11 hijackers, should have been so well-off.

Is violence justified by Islam itself? Islam is a this-worldly religion. The goal is Paradise, but definite instructions are given for how society should be ordered here and now. Augustine wrote about the city of God and the city of man. Islam acknowledges the realm of believers and the realm of struggle. Can't rioting be seen as a shortcut to victory in the latter?

There is another perspective. All religions believe that they embody eternal and unchanging truths. But in daily life, religions are defined by what believers do. A religion might or might not encourage a struggle to rule the world. But if believers are not in fact struggling, then the definitional question has answered itself.

The third-largest Muslim country in the world is India. It has a long-running dispute with its Muslim neighbor, Pakistan; its Parliament was shot up by jihadists soon after 9/11, and Hindu incendiaries have murdered Muslims and destroyed mosques. With all these materials for explosion, most Indian Muslims haven't followed Newsweek into the streets. They show, by their actions and inactions, what their faith means to them. Similarly with Muslims in America-a tiny minority, but one ideally positioned to embarrass the American war effort, if it chose to heed jihadist appeals. Yet it has not done so. By their fruits you shall know them.

This is not bland hopefulness, a belief in easy escalator rides to the penthouses of consciousness. If religions change, and change for the better, it takes work from the faithful: to understand revelation better (as they would say) or to fit revelation to truth (as Christopher Hitchens would say). It also takes work from outsiders: to call out believers when they are being inhumane, and to not let politeness stand in the way of respect. Maybe outsiders are divinely directed to do so. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

"The delight that you see!" she gushed on a recent Friday afternoon. "Those are often my favorite shots because there’s this golden glow, and they have these beautiful looks on their faces. See, what these couples are really doing is expressing love. They just happen to be wired a little differently."

So is Ms. Nitke. The 54-year-old photographer was sitting at a Murray Hill Thai restaurant nibbling spare ribs, her neatly styled brown hair and blazer-and-jeans get-up more Tipper Gore than Karen Finley—hardly the old Mapplethorpe-era shock-artist type.

And yet, it appears that Ms. Nitke’s own little chapter of the culture wars is taking shape. On Wednesday, Oct. 27, at 9 a.m., she’s taking Attorney General John Ashcroft to court, resurrecting the old debate over art and obscenity. Only this time the battleground isn’t federal grants and public museums; it’s the Internet.

Nitke v. Ashcroft is a case about the right to be raunchy in cyberspace—or, in legal parlance, about the right to freedom of speech on the Internet. Its target is a statute of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that makes it a crime punishable by up to four years in prison to transmit "obscene" material by means of "interactive computer service." (In its original form, the law also banned "indecent" material from the Internet, but the Supreme Court struck this clause down in 1997.) Because of an unusual provision in the C.D.A., the case could be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court after this round of arguments.

Ms. Nitke first learned about the C.D.A. in 2001, when she began contemplating the idea of a Web site for her photographs. The old culture war had burned through most of the other outlets for alternative art—"The right-wing got its way," Ms. Nitke said flatly—and cyberspace seemed like one of the last outposts of photographic free love. Before posting any pictures, however, Ms. Nitke decided to play it safe and get some advice from lawyers to find out if she could be held liable for her work. They came back to her with the C.D.A.’s obscenity clause.

Obscenity is a slippery legal concept, defined, in part, under the 1973 Miller v. California Supreme Court decision as "work" that is "patently offensive" and "appeals to the prurient interest" under "contemporary community standards." At the time, this seemed like a sensible enough definition, since it recognized that different geographic regions had different mores, and that a place like New York City shouldn’t have to conform to the standards of a place like Biloxi, Miss., and vice versa. But in the Internet era, when information flows willy-nilly across thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, the whole notion of community standards gets tricky.

Or so Ms. Nitke argued.

"You know, I’m sitting in Manhattan, which is very liberal, and I have my Web site, which I think is full of just brilliant artwork, but I don’t know what somebody else in some other part of the country is going to think about it," said Ms. Nitke, whose photos feature the whole kinky caboodle of S&M tricks: from leather-men dangling from metal harnesses to corseted women thrashing naked lovers, to a man with a bit in his mouth prancing like a pony as his partner whips him silly. "So if you’re going to follow the law, anything you put on the Internet would have to be completely G-rated or better, because someone somewhere could find it obscene. And that’s not free speech."

Ms. Nitke punctuated this thought by pounding the table lightly with her right hand. Her voice was sing-song, and while she wasn’t exactly agitated, she was stirred. When I suggested that perhaps the C.D.A. wasn’t quite as frightening as she claimed—after all, the Internet still has plenty of X-rated Web sites—she offered up an anxious story about cyber-sexuality in the age of Ashcroft.

"I think it’s a bad law, period," she said. "But I’m particularly disturbed because I think someone like Ashcroft is more likely to use the law. It’s a known fact that he’s announced they’re going after pornography and sexual expression. And that makes me feel vulnerable.

"In fact," she added, "a lot of images from my new body of work aren’t on my Web site because they show people doing extreme S&M scenes, and I know they’re going to incite people." (Instead, some of these images—including your standard husband- choking-wife-during-sex and couples-at-"blood-play"—will be on display at the Art @ Large gallery in mid-November.)

The Department of Justice refused to comment on Ms. Nitke’s claims while her case is pending. But research suggests that Mr. Ashcroft is, in fact, ramping things up against online licentiousness. While the Clinton administration didn’t meddle much with Internet smut, the Bush administration, under the prim hand of Mr. Ashcroft, has reportedly prosecuted some 25 cases in the last two years (26 cases if you count Mr. Ashcroft’s successful crusade against the exposed breast of the Spirit of Justice). This past February, Mr. Ashcroft hired Bruce Taylor—the notorious anti-porn czar who prosecuted Larry Flynt—as senior counsel on obscenity issues for the Justice Department. And Mr. Bush’s proposed 2005 budget adds an extra $4 million to hire new prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to track down triple-X naughtiness.

These are the kind of developments that press Ms. Nitke’s panic button. It’s a Pavlovian thing, she said, that she traces back to 1972, when her then husband, Herb Nitke, was charged with obscenity for helping produce the cult sex-romp The Devil in Miss Jones. "All of a sudden, we had six F.B.I. come into our apartment very early one Sunday morning and arrest him, and I can’t tell you what that’s like," Ms. Nitke said. "He went through three obscenity trials, and in the end he didn’t serve jail time, but in every other way he was tortured. So I really got to see what that is, and it became like my worst nightmare."

looking for ‘transcendence’

Long before she was an arty sex photographer, before she’d ever heard of S&M or become a free-speech gadfly, Barbara Nitke was a nice Southern girl from Jerry Falwell’s hometown of Lynchburg, Va. Her mother was from a "typical conservative family," but her father, who was an air-traffic controller, "was kind of a rebel type," she said. It’s from him that Ms. Nitke suspects she got her unconventional streak—an idea that was reinforced when she learned that the controversial sexologist, Shere Hite, was her half-sister. Growing up, Ms. Nitke had heard that her father had a child from a previous marriage, but she never met the girl because her proper Southern family considered the subject taboo. Then, one day in the late 1980’s, she stumbled across her father’s name in a magazine profile about Ms. Hite. It seemed the model-turned-feminist—whose first book, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976), caused a frenzy with its ideas about women’s desire—was in fact her mystery half-sister.

"I guess I really do take after my dad’s side of the family," joked Ms. Nitke, who has had several phone conversations with Ms. Hite but is not close to her. "It must be something genetic."

Those genes seem to have kicked in around 1982, when Ms. Nitke got a job through one of her ex-husband’s friends shooting stills on the set of The Devil in Miss Jones II. (Cue the Boogie Nights soundtrack, please.) All day long it was sex —exploitive? Sometimes. Seedy? Sure—but the subculture junkie in Ms. Nitke was fascinated by it.

"What I found most interesting was the behind-the-scenes moments where you’d be in the middle of an orgy scene and they’d call ‘Cut!’, and everybody would just yawn and pull out a cigarette," she said with a throaty chuckle. "Everyone’s expression would drop, and they’d be like, ‘Oh God, when is this going to be over?’ Or, ‘What are they making for lunch?’ And I just loved it, because you had this supposedly exotic thing going on, and then it was just another day at the office. So a lot of times, that’s what my pictures were about."

Ms. Nitke spent nearly 12 years snapping stills on porn sets, racking up some 300 hard-core credits. But by the early 1990’s, AIDS had blasted its way through New York, and the porn industry was changing: getting cheaper, going corporate, moving West. That’s when Ms. Nitke learned about S&M from her good friend Rick Savage. (Cue the appropriate Devo song.) Mr. Savage, a porn star turned fetish-film director whose credits include A Day in the Dungeon and Big, Natural and Bound ( I and II), had started going to meetings at the Eulenspiegel Society, an organization for S&M enthusiasts, and he began urging her to join him. He promised she’d love the people, and sure enough, the moment she arrived she discovered the truth of that old downtown cliché—the one about the burliest leather-guy being the first to save your place in the movie line—and her heart went pitter-patter.

"I literally walked in the door and fell in love with everybody. I feel like I kind of came into the light, because I was coming from the porn world, which is kind of cynical," said Ms. Nitke. "In the porn world, everyone’s been around the block 400 times—you know, ‘How much extra do you want to pay me for that anal, thank you’—but in the S&M world, people are just delighted."

Still, it took nearly six months for Ms. Nitke to persuade the first sets of couples to let her into their bedrooms (or dungeons or play-spaces or whatever) to photograph them in action. That’s also about how long it took her to feel warm and fuzzy about S&M. "Initially, I was sure that people wouldn’t do S&M unless they were playing out some childhood trauma or whatever," she said. "But I learned that people weren’t saying they had this horrible trauma; this is just their way of making love. They’re looking for a transcendent state."

Soon enough, Ms. Nitke was following these couples all over the city, snapping photos as they whipped, pierced, scratched and burned their way to transcendence. She became fast friends with the couples, eventually joining the Eulenspiegel Society as a kind of resident voyeur. In 2003, a German publishing house published her first book of photographs, Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism, after skittish U.S. publishers bucked at the explicit photos.

But even an old hand like Ms. Nitke has had her awkward moments. "I was photographing this one couple, and all of a sudden they started having sex!" she said, describing an early encounter. "I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re having sex!’ And I kind of jumped up, and one of my lenses fell off and banged the floor, and I stepped on the dog, and the dog started barking—but I got the shot! I am trained, you know."

‘i don’t actually "play"’

It’s been nearly three years since Ms. Nitke lodged her lawsuit to strike down the obscenity clause of the C.D.A. Working with her lawyer, John Wirenius—who is representing her pro bono, on his personal time—she has plunged hundreds of hours into the case, squeezing time for fund-raisers and depositions between her work as president of the Camera Club of New York and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts.

Ms. Nitke’s first trip to court was back in 2002, when the Justice Department moved to have the case dismissed, and that round, by and large, was a Nitke victory: The three-judge panel refused to dismiss the case and found that, yes, the C.D.A. might be a violation of the First Amendment. But they also found that Ms. Nitke had some work to do to prove that her own speech had been chilled, among other things. The judges asked her to come back with more evidence and set a new court date for this Wednesday.

These days, the old culture war seems long over—a forgotten relic of the 80’s and 90’s. But with Nitke v. Ashcroft, Ms. Nitke seems to be telling people there’s still one last front, one disputed territory.

"I don’t actually ‘play,’" she said, using the insider’s argot for S&M, "because I guess, in a way, it’s just not where I want to go.

" But, I have tried things," she added, "and I’m here to tell you that you haven’t lived until you’ve held a big bullwhip in your hands and cracked it."

from: Karl Rove

To: POTUS, The White House Brain Trust, the R.N.C.

cc: Sean Hannity

Re: Convention update

Well, folks, let's be honest. I won't try to spin you here:

The Democrats pulled it off in Boston. Their convention worked like a charm:

They moved to the center; they quieted the lunatic left; they barely mentioned

guns or gays-at least not in prime time.

Even the "accidental" release

of the bunny-suit pictures from Cape Canaveral didn't ding their guy, and

failed to paint him as some kind of high-tech Dukakis.

(I suspect the explanation here is that between Kerry's biking,

skiing and windsurfing getups, the public is no longer surprised when they see

him in full mufti. Either way, let's give a shout-out to NASA here: Thanks for

the effort, guys. Nice try, anyway. The check for the next Mars mission is

still in the mail.)

Now sure, we all know that Kerry's speech had more holes in it

than a disputed Palm Beach Presidential election ballot. Like what he

accomplished during two decades in the Senate. (Umm … nothing?) Or his fantasy

that, with a little regime change in America, the French are going to march right

in and bail us out in Baghdad. (Yeah, right. Grosse chance, Monsieur K. )

Still, I have to give him credit: It's precisely the speech I

would have told him to deliver. Because in politics, perception is reality. And

coming out of the convention-in sound bites and photo ops-the message is that

these guys are smart, and tough, and determined to win.

So where does this leave us?

On the bright side, we have Kerry's "friends" in the so-called

"liberal media" to thank for his less-than-stratospheric bounce in the

post-convention polls. Predictably, they nailed him on the speech-suddenly

rediscovering their "objectivity" at precisely the moment they should have been

at their most partisan. (But then, that's the difference between our side and The New York Times : When we issue a

script, Sean Hannity sticks to it. Objectivity is swell, but passion wins

elections.)

On the other hand, the economy is sputtering, the war isn't over,

and nobody in this administration-from Ashcroft to Wolfowitz-is out there

winning prizes in the charm category.

So with fewer than 100 days left till the election, it's time to

look at our positives and negatives, and focus on a new message. Clinton had

"It's the economy, stupid." But I suggest we borrow-and update-the words of

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

We have nothing to sell, but

fear itself.

Scare the bejesus out of America with terrorist threats? Mission

accomplished! And although it's too late to move our convention from New York

to someplace less hostile to our ideals (Fallujah, anyone?), here are my

thoughts on how to script this event:

-The President's Arrival.

How do we top John Kerry arriving in Boston by boat? Simple: We restage the entire Robert Duvall helicopter-attack

sequence from Apocalypse Now . Ten

choppers, coming in low, out of the sun, over the Hudson River, blasting "Ride

of the Valkyries," as G.W.B. hops out of a Black Hawk onto the roof of Madison

Square Garden and snaps off a salute to the SWAT teams: "Outstanding,

gentlemen!" The delegates will go wild. The protesters will be terrorized. And

it'll drive the Democrats and the news media absolutely insane for at least one

entire news cycle.

-The V.P.'s Speech. We

want to present Dick Cheney as sober, calming and adult. I'm thinking cardigan

sweater, fireplace and cat, via video from an undisclosed location.

-The Band of C.E.O.'s.

Originally, I thought this was a swell idea. ("We supported him when he was out

of work; we still support him now!") But I'm afraid it's been overshadowed by

Kerry's Band of Brothers. Solution: Fill that stage with firepower. Cops,

troops, even "independent contractors" if we have to. Hell, it's New York City.

Even Laura Bush should be packin' heat.

-The Film. Alas,

there's no film from G.W.B.'s distinguished service in the National Guard. (At

least not involving the kind of "shooters" that Kerry was involved with.) So

let's go the usual warm and fuzzy Republican route: kids, dogs, minorities and

Reagan. Flags are nice, too. Lots of them.

-The Demonstrators. How

do we turn this into a win? I'm thinking Nixon, paying a surprise visit to the

anti-war demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial in May 1970. G.W.B. faces his

accusers? Brilliant! Great television! Shades of High Noon! Let's pull together a list of "friendly" unfriendlies,

pronto!

-Television Coverage.

Let's face it: The networks made jackasses of themselves during the

D.N.C.-running only three hours of coverage; complaining their presence was

irrelevant; blurring the line between entertainment and news by treating Jon

Stewart as the new Edward R. Murrow. (And hey: I like Stewart. But only Ted

Koppel seemed to understand the long-term damage here: If you don't take

yourself seriously, why should viewers? Airing that rerun of CSI: Miami

was far more important for the future of the Republic.) In any case, this

is good news for us. We don't need the extra scrutiny. (Note to C. Powell: Can

you ask your son Michael if there are any media mergers coming up? Let's reward

these guys for shooting themselves in the foot.)

-Our New Slogan. Forget

"Help is on the way." We've already started to focus-test the far more

simple and eloquent "Duck!"

In the end, let's all remember that this election is going to

come down to 17 undecided voters in Ohio and Florida. Luckily for us, John

Ashcroft intends to visit each and every one of them-up close and

personal-during the next few weeks.

Let me know if you have any

other suggestions.

Karl.

P.S.: Memo to Rummy: I know

the original plans had the capture of bin Laden scheduled for early October.

But if we need him sooner, can we move this up? If the "softening up" process

works, I bet he'd make a fantastic keynote speaker.

Unfortunately, almost everyone had "other priorities"-to borrow a phrase immortalized by Dick Cheney-during the first 233 days of the Bush administration.

During much of his first year as President, George W. Bush was, literally and figuratively, on vacation. (The years that followed have not been much different.) Prior to September 2001, he spent 54 days at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., 38 days at Camp David, and a four-day weekend at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Me., which works out to slightly more than 40 percent of his time. He was on a month-long retreat in Crawford on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received his daily briefing from C.I.A. director George Tenet. In obvious deference to Mr. Bush's attention deficit, the C.I.A. chief delivered a very brief document-less than 20 sentences in total-whose message was its now-famous headline: "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S."

Clearly, the C.I.A. was trying to convey to the President the fearful urgency felt by Mr. Tenet, his agents and analysts, and their National Security Council colleague Richard Clarke during the spring and summer of 2001.

Before Condoleezza Rice realized that the contents of the daily briefing would be declassified and published, she testified last week that it was a document containing only "historical" information. By that she apparently meant a review of threats during the previous two or three years. She could not have meant the memo's warning that the F.B.I. had more recently "detected patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." (Incidentally, the White House is still resisting the commission's request to interview the C.I.A. analyst who prepared the Aug. 6 briefing.)

Meanwhile, in May 2001, the Vice President had been "tasked" to study homeland security. The President announced that Mr. Cheney would chair an interagency committee on this important issue. But the Vice President was preoccupied with other matters, including Iraq and the energy bill, and his committee on homeland security simply never met before September.

Toward the end of June 2001, F.B.I. director Louis Freeh, after failing for eight years to install modern communications and management facilities in that vital agency, had quit his post in the midst of an extraordinarily high terror alert. His interim successor, Thomas Pickard, took command of an agency whose infrastructure had been severely neglected, collapsing in one scandal after another.

In late June and July 2001, says Mr. Pickard, he personally briefed Attorney General John Ashcroft about the terrorist threats. After two briefings, the Attorney General told the acting F.B.I. director that he "did not want to hear this information anymore," according to Mr. Pickard's recollection (a stunning allegation that Mr. Ashcroft denies). Mr. Pickard also recalls that on Sept. 10, 2001, he asked the Attorney General to add more counterterrorism money to the Justice Department budget, and that Mr. Ashcroft rejected his appeal.

Whether Mr. Pickard's memory is accurate or not, there is considerable evidence that the nation's chief law-enforcement officer was less concerned in those days with terrorists than with pornographers and pot-smokers. Dale Watson, who then headed the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism division, told the commission's investigators that he "almost fell out of his chair" when he read a Justice Department document that omitted any mention of counterterrorism among the department's priorities in 2001. Other Ashcroft memos and documents similarly discounted terrorism as an urgent matter.

In accordance with the blustering attitude always favored by the Bush White House, Mr. Ashcroft kept calling himself "tough" during his appearance before the 9/11 commission. Then he tried to shift blame to his predecessors and to former President Bill Clinton.

Like Mr. Ashcroft, the administration has taken an unapologetic stance: to change the subject, to filibuster the hard questions, to feign toughness and to portray all critics as unreasonable partisans. The administration's principal argument seems to be that the attacks of Sept. 11 could not have been prevented because there was no specific warning about when, where and by what means Al Qaeda's assassins planned to strike.

Yet the President will still have to explain why he and his cabinet performed so feebly back then. That old "blame Clinton" theme accompanied Mr. Bush's entry into the Oval Office-and if he doesn't come up with anything more convincing, it may serve as his exit music, too.

P ALIGN="JUSTIFY"

Finally, she let it rip.

"I revere John Ashcroft," she said.

There was a lengthy silence. Things went downhill after that.

"This comment caused such dementia," said Ms. Rabinowitz a few days later at her newspaper's Liberty Street offices, 200 yards from Ground Zero. " What ? Somebody they knew and respected could say this? Of course I don't revere John Ashcroft-but as far as I was concerned that night, I revered John Ashcroft."

The sixtysomething Ms. Rabinowitz, who was wearing a black leather bomber jacket and red snakeskin pants, continued on about the "radical crazies" and "fascist left" who are at the core of her fury these days.

In particular, she objected to Hollywoodites and other cultural elites who like to compare George W. Bush's United States to Germany in the 1930's.

"This is it, in a nutshell," she said. "This is the thing, the ballistic missile-this is what will earn my eternal loathing, and there is no going back. You know, it's always two minutes to midnight for American democracy in the minds of these people. It is a fact that what John Ashcroft has done is pull together what was already on the books. He has made it more difficult for the accused terrorists to defend themselves-but this is not nothing; we are living in a war against terror. And to watch the revered Walter Cronkite burbling on, comparing Ashcroft to Torquemada and without a blink-and he's not joking. So these are the fever swamps in which we now are in."

Above Ms. Rabinowitz's desk were photographs of her with Henry Kissinger, Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham and the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley. Although she's a registered Democrat, the last one she voted for was Lyndon Johnson.

She said Howard Dean had been the Democrats' best candidate.

"The more integrated personality of them all," she said. "It's his speech: He connects one thought to another, he is absolutely jargon-free, he doesn't talk like the others-he was a male person in a really serious way. There's a kind of a sexy core to him, even in his little, short-armed way.

"I thought everything he said was absurd," she added, "but not the kind of absurdity that's deep and corrosive."

How about the nominee-presumptive, John Kerry? The phrases "grinding condescension and babble," "sheer mindless demagoguery" and "bombastic lordly presence" escaped her lips.

She moved on to President Bush, whom she voted for "very reluctantly" in 2000.

"It wasn't very long until after Bush was sworn in that I saw what he was," she said. "He was solid and earnest. He knows what is important. He has an inner confidence that is rare. He's no Franklin Roosevelt, but he is who he is. He is a tough guy, and I greatly admire him."

She also adores Donald Rumsfeld and hates It's a Wonderful Life .

Dorothy Rabinowitz is not purely a darling of the right, however. "Dorothy is my favorite kind of right-winger," said 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt. "She's right without being righteous."

"She's a lively, funny, incisive person, which is obviously a quality of her writing as well," said New York Times columnist Frank Rich. "Our lunches are not debating sessions; we probably agree more often than we don't."

In 2001, Ms. Rabinowitz won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for articles about the 2000 Presidential election and bogus child sex-abuse cases, which last year became a book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times .

"What she did with the abuse cases was the sort of thing that all of us originally got into this business to do," said The Journal 's editorial-page editor, Paul Gigot. "She got people out of jail . That's worth a lot more than a Pulitzer Prize."

Ms. Rabinowitz has never been married and said she's never been lonely. In 1971, she moved into the one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment she shares with a Tibetan terrier named Simon. "I would say he's the best-looking male that has ever entered my life," she said.

The building's residents hardly embrace her. "People don't even say hello," she said, adding that she's overheard herself being referred to as "the person who doesn't like Maureen Dowd." Others have tried to hook her into elevator conversation by referring to "that bastard Bush."

There are exceptions. Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York and Observer columnist, lives next-door.

"We talk about everything from hairdos and maquillage right through to politics-where, of course, Dorothy really shines," Mr. Doonan said. "I'm fairly apolitical, but after 10 minutes with Dorothy on the street, you just wonder why everyone isn't a raging archconservative, because she's wildly charismatic-and that's something that left-wing people haven't figured out yet."

Recently, Mr. Doonan said, there was an antiwar march down their street; he watched from his balcony as students chanted things like "Bush is a scumbag!"

"And then, all of a sudden, I saw Dorothy cleaving her way through them, and she had an American flag tied around her dog's neck," he said. "She was spewing well-deserved invective at these idiotic students.

"And the fact that she's such a good-looking broad doesn't hurt," he continued. "She's extremely good-looking. I would say she's an Ava Gardner–Liz Taylor 50's brunette. She's always hot-looking. If she went to Washington, I'm sure they would think she's a hooker."

Dorothy Rabinowitz grew up "very poor" in a two-family house in Queens. Her father, a grocer whose family had been killed by the Nazis, was often agitated. "He would go to refugee agencies every day after the war," she said. "I would catch him crying."

Her mother, she said, had a "rapier, assaultive" wit; she would mutter "bastards" and "thugs" under her breath, to which her husband would reply, "Shhhhh!"

Ms. Rabinowitz said she remembered when Harry Truman won the 1948 election. "But the greatest joy that I can remember was when the Giants won the pennant," she said.

She liked to be alone and read comic books. In fourth grade, she hit a boy in the head with an apple and once impressed classmates by picking up a snake. "You're daring and everyone else is shrinking," she said.

At Forest Hills High School, she was voted class cynic. At Queens College, she skipped class, and her grades were so bad that she was forced to see a counselor. During grad school at New York University, she taught freshman composition, but it never occurred to her to be a writer.

"I can't understand to this day why, since I love literature," she said. "I think the horizons are much shrunken when you're young."

She liked boys: "I used to pace the front porch when I was in love, late at night-sweet memories, Tony Bennett singing Because of You ."

Much later, there would be a few of what she termed "illicit romances."

"I don't think I could ever run for President myself," she said, by way of explanation. "I expect to write memoirs one day. But if the AIDS epidemic were around then, we would all be dead."

Candidate John F. Kennedy caught her eye one afternoon in Washington Square Park. "I have never seen anybody look quite …. He glowed red, a golden-red presence," she said. "It was quite amazing to see him. The assassination remains a sort of encapsulated horror."

Ms. Rabinowitz made a rightward turn after what she termed "fascist bands of antiwar protesters" and "mindless, politicized thugs" radicalized the debate in the wake of the 60's: student uprisings, the 11th Street townhouse bombing, hippies walking around barefoot.

"Every day it was something else," she said. "It was the annihilation of all standards of reason and discourse."

But there was fun to be had. "God, there were so many parties," she said.

"She was an elegant bohemian," said longtime friend Ruth King. "A very fine list of accomplished gentlemen were very interested in her. Always. They wanted to create an ongoing situation, and I think with Dorothy there was a cutoff at some point. She had chosen a life alone."

In 1970, after working at an old folks' home, Ms. Rabinowitz sent an unsolicited article about the experience to the neoconservative journal Commentary . It was published. Soon editor Norman Podhoretz was telling people, "She writes one sentence and the whole world comes!"

In the same spirit as "Radical Chic," Tom Wolfe's take-down in New York magazine of Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue party for the Black Panthers, she targeted the New Left.

"That article was a turning point," Ms. Rabinowitz said. "Tom Wolfe got to them in the best possible way. He got to them and he made people laugh at them. The laughter kills-as Midge [Decter] said to me, 'He's destroyed them.' And, of course, that's what he did."

In 1976, Ms. Rabinowitz received a grant to write about Holocaust survivors, which became a book, New Lives , which Saul Bellow listed as one of three books that meant the most to him that year. Over the next decade, she wrote book reviews for The New York Times , a column for the New York Post and investigative pieces for New York magazine. "I used to pride myself as the person who could get the interview that no one else could get," she said. "I never took no for an answer. Never."

But freelance life was rough: "You're getting somewhere, you have no money, and being attractive doesn't do you any good."

In the mid-80's, she took an interest in the growing list of child sex-abuse cases, many of which centered around day-care workers. Anonymous phone calls were leading to quick investigations. Civil-rights groups took little interest in the accused; the dominant point of view was expressed by Times Op-Ed columnist Anna Quindlen: "Listen to the children."

Ms. Rabinowitz took up the cause of Margaret Kelly Michaels, who was convicted of 115 counts of sexually abusing 20 nursery-school children in 1988 and sentenced to 47 years. Ms. Rabinowitz spent two years trying to get an article published. The New Yorker passed, as did New York magazine and Vanity Fair , where editor Tina Brown gave her $10,000 for research, then backed away. "It was very honest," said Ms. Rabinowitz. "She said, 'I can't do it-I've got a 4-year-old son.' That was a very common response."

She rewrote her piece five times. "It was very exhausting. I don't know what kept me at it, but once you're in it, you're in it," she said. "Anger is one of the greatest boons to a writer."

She tried to persuade her friend Ismail Merchant, the producer, to make a movie about the case. "Oh, Dorothy, we're doing Howards End now," he told her.

Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham came to the rescue.

"She called me up, and it sounded interesting to me," Mr. Lapham said. "It came out and reopened the case and got Kelly Michaels out of jail. That's one of the best things that Harper's Magazine has ever done."

Soon after, Mr. Bartley hired her at The Wall Street Journal and gave her space to continue the crusade. One case involved the Amirault family, who ran a day-care center in Massachusetts. In court, children told of being given magic juice drinks, being tied to trees, and being terrorized by clowns and robots. Three family members had been sent to jail in 1987. In 1995, six months after Ms. Rabinowitz began writing about them, Violet Amirault and her daughter Cheryl were released.

What's it like getting people out of jail?

"It's very nice," she said. "But it's the thing that other journalists value very much, because it appears to be something that's important-get somebody out, change the world. All right, it is a change in the world; it stopped the agony of knowing that someone you know beyond a shadow of a doubt is innocent … you know your life will never be the same again unless you move heaven and earth to get them out. And you're in a position to do it.

"I don't see myself at heart as a rescuer," she continued. "I am not a social worker …. I do not like the idea of being viewed as saintly."

In 1996, she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for commentary "for her columns effectively challenging key cases of alleged child abuse." She won it in 2001, for her "articles on American society and culture," including five articles about sexual abuse cases.

She wasn't expecting to win. Mr. Bartley tricked her into coming into work that day. There was a big party. Mr. Bartley told his star writer that the best was yet to come. Two years later, he died at 66. The funeral began with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

"We just dissolved, all of us," she said. "The coffin goes by, and that was just an agony. Things pass, but those were bad days. The thought of this brilliant presence lying in the ground was too much. He was the sanest, most eccentrically wonderful creature, and everyone knew that about him. But everything went on."

During The Journal 's editorial-board meetings, said board member Susan Lee, Ms. Rabinowitz has two modes.

"One is Delphic in utterance, which is sometimes confusing," Ms. Lee said. "Something will come out, and everybody will go, ' Ahhh … have to think about that later.' And the other mode is, she's very funny. I find Dorothy extremely seductive. She's got that manner of somebody who's used to being thought of as seductive. She is definitely an oddball, but she is beloved."

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Rabinowitz was sitting in front of a giant mirror at a salon on Madison Avenue, discussing lefty Hollywood as the salon's owner, Richard Stein, fussed over her black hair.

"They live in an alternate universe, an alternate revolting universe," she said, citing actress Janeane Garofalo and others that she termed "elitist scum," including director Robert Altman, Alec Baldwin, Johnny Depp and Michael Moore.

Mel Gibson?

"He is the most loathsome public specimen of Hollywood I have seen," she said. "He sees himself as a martyr. This moist martyrdom: 'They're after me!'"

Mr. Stein, the salon owner and an ardent liberal, spoke up.

"I think Kerry's supposed to bring a new Camelot," he said. "Don't you think he's going to resurrect J.F.K.-the real J.F.K. that we all want ?"

"No. Richard, are you cutting my hair too short?"

Mr. Stein compared America in 2004 to the 1930's: "The fact that we're in dumbed-down America, and Germany was dumbing down and burning books …. " he said.

"Shut up!" Ms. Rabinowitz said. "I'm getting annoyed now."

"All of you media," Mr. Stein continued, "NPR included-you're owned by Murdoch, all of you."

"This is ludicrous. He has no idea what he's talking about. Shut up, Richard!"

"She's such a troublemaker," Mr. Stein said, cutting away. "She's the best troublemaker I know. I once cut Abbie Hoffman's hair, before he came out."

"Richard, don't fool around with it-leave it alone!"

"We all believe that you Republicans are finished now, slowly unraveled, and it's almost over," he said. "The consensus is that the whole media is tied into Bush money."

"Don't use your fingers-use the comb and the roller!" she barked. "See, you're not in control of your instincts. I'm serious-I'll call you in the middle of the night if I find this hair falling down."

Soon Mr. Stein was holding forth on Margaret Thatcher.

"That's very good, Richard," Ms. Rabinowitz said. "My dog Simon has a greater grasp of reality than you …. Richard, I want you to tease that hair . I am never coming here again, and I'm never bringing anyone here again."

"My God, I like it when you look sexy and hot like this," he said.

Ms. Rabinowitz paid the $385.27 bill, then asked the woman behind the counter if she should become a blonde. But before the woman could speak, Dorothy Rabinowitz answered her own question: "Every man in my life has always said, ' Nooo , brunettes are the thing.'"

Ms. Stewart is a 64-year-old criminal-defense lawyer in the lefty, liberal tradition familiar to all New Yorkers: the type of lawyer who wears baggy sweaters, never combs her hair, reads The Nation , takes on unpopular clients and hangs out with the ACLU. One may not agree with her politics-in the 1980's she defended the Weather Underground, and recently has said she believes Muslim fundamentalists are "forces of national liberation" -but New York has always been a city which thrives on the diversity of its characters, where so-called troublemakers like Ms. Stewart or the late William Kunstler argue their way into the tabloids and are part of the city's raucous charm. But in the bizarre brain of our nation's chief law-enforcement officer, Ms. Stewart, the grandmother of seven, is a danger to democracy.

The new charges involve her conduct with her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 1994 of plotting to blow up New York landmarks. Mr. Ashcroft and James Comey, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, accuse her of helping Sheik Rahman pass messages from prison. When Mr. Ashcroft first brought the charges last year, Ms. Stewart was led in handcuffs from her Brooklyn home, and the Attorney General flew to New York to announce the indictment. Her office was searched, and client records and computer files were seized. This July, however, a federal judge in New York, John Koeltl, found the charges to be on shaky constitutional ground and dismissed them. Mr. Ashcroft's prosecutorial overreach was temporarily thwarted. Now he's come back with new charges, which Ms. Stewart accurately describes as "a pretty vindictive act on the part of the government."

Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may be roaming freely, American troops may be murdered daily in Iraq, but George W. Bush and John Ashcroft are determined that Lynne Stewart not get away. Apparently, busting a Brooklyn grandmother on spurious charges is far easier than finding the real villains.

John Ashcroft is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

A Smart Move Against Indian Point

The Indian Point nuclear-power plant in Westchester County uses 2.5 billion gallons of water a day, and kills millions of fish every year. The state, to its credit, believes this is completely unnecessary and is demanding that the plant's operators install a new cooling system.

Not surprisingly, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the plant, says the new system would be too expensive-more than $1 billion. If the state persists, the plant's operators say, they'll have to close down the facility.

You don't suppose they mean this as a threat, do you?

The Indian Point plant ought to be shut down. In this terrible new era of global terrorism, even Entergy's executives know that New York City is a main target of militant Islam's unholy warriors. They would stop at nothing to use Indian Point as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. A catastrophe there would kill millions, and delight jihadists all over the world. Even absent the threat of terrorism, Indian Point is a disaster waiting to happen: It has the worst safety record of any nuclear plant in the country, and it's just 35 miles from midtown Manhattan.

Anything that makes Indian Point less attractive as a business is a step in the right direction. Even on its own merits, the state's demands are reasonable. The power plant is an environmental nightmare, a throwback to the days when the Hudson River was treated like New York's public sewer. That era, luckily, is over. But the mess at Indian Point remains.

The state wants Entergy to install a cooling system that would rely on recycled water. Such a plan would reduce by 97 percent the number of fish killed because of the plant's operations. Entergy says the state's plan could cost as much as $1.6 billion. Environmentalists put the price tag at a more reasonable $200 million to $360 million.

But it's not just the money. Why do we continue to operate a nuclear-power plant in one of the nation's most crowded metropolitan areas? This is a matter of national security, not of energy policy.

So if Entergy makes good on its threat to close the plant rather than build a new cooling system, millions of people will be safer.

And they call that a threat? It would be a wonderful outcome for all New Yorkers.

The New Yorker and John Updike Have A 'Rich Jew' Problem

Is The New Yorker implicitly endorsing anti-Semitism in its pages? It certainly appeared so in the magazine's Nov. 24 issue: In a review of Peter Carey's novel, My Life as a Fake , John Updike refers to one of the characters, David Weiss, as "a rich Jew." Note that Mr. Updike was not quoting a passage from the book, or referring to how another character viewed David Weiss. The "rich Jew" phrase is his own. For the editors of The New Yorker to have signed off on this is insensitive at best.

To say that the expression "rich Jew" is loaded with historical anti-Semitism is an understatement. Would Mr. Updike describe someone as "a rich Catholic" or "a rich Protestant"? It is disappointing that an author of Mr. Updike's talent and position would put his name on a piece of writing that furthers the stereotype. Anti-Semitism is no less harmful when it appears in a highbrow publication than when it is scrawled by thugs on a storefront or a synagogue. Perhaps even more so, since the offense is more subtle and calls less attention to itself.

At a time when anti-Semitism has been documented to be on the rise on the country's college campuses-so much so that Harvard University president Lawrence Summers gave a speech addressing this toxic trend-it is frankly outrageous that David Remnick and the editors of The New Yorker allowed Mr. Updike's "rich Jew" to appear.

"You lawyers are my angels," proclaims one of the key figures midway through Steven Brill's After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era . Sal Iacono, the man who makes the statement, is thanking his pro bono attorney for securing him an insurance check worth nearly $16,000 to help him rebuild his ailing shoe-repair shop, which was nearly destroyed by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. But the speaker might as well be the author. Mr. Brill (who, among other things, founded The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV) intends his book, at least in part, to be a mash note to the members of the legal profession for their important and patriotic work on behalf of the many victims of 9/11. To be fair, lawyers aren't the only maligned professionals that come in for hagiographic treatment in After . Profit-seeking businessmen, press-hungry politicians and special-interest lobbyists get their due as well, all in support of what is basically a junior-high civics lesson: The American system is based on the idea that the larger public interest is served when self-interested parties pursue their own narrow, selfish interests.

Luckily, the parts of After make up for a less-than-satisfying whole. When Mr. Brill isn't lecturing about his less-than-novel thesis, his book is a meticulously reported and impeccably sourced chronicle of the actions of a few individuals (20 "main characters" and 28 "other key figures") in the year that followed Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Brill structures the book chronologically, relaying bite-sized vignettes from the lives of a handful of characters each day. There's a decent cross-section of figures, from a Border Patrol agent to the C.E.O. of a company that makes luggage-screening equipment to a United States Senator, but by far the most compelling portions of the book concern Eileen Simon, the widow of a Cantor Fitzgerald energy trader. Mr. Brill turns up detail after heartrending detail about her efforts to piece her life together after her husband's death. Her 5-year-old son, Tyler, meets with a therapist and draws pictures of airplanes colliding with buildings. Later, they take a plane trip to Florida, and Tyler asks if he is "higher than Daddy was when he fell." It's not until April 7, 2002, that Eileen can bring herself to replace Michael's voice on the family answering machine. But there are lump-in-the-throat moments in the rest of the book, too. An insurance examiner calls a widow who accepts an insurance payment on her husband's life but promises to return it soon, when "John comes walking through this door."

Unfortunately, when After isn't moving, it's often tedious. Mr. Brill juggles too many characters: He has to check in on some of them now and again even when they're not really doing anything, just to remind you that they still exist. For example, Mr. Brill drops in on Tom Ridge while the newly minted Homeland Security Advisor spends two days reading "two thick black looseleaf volumes." We also get a minute-by-minute account of a day at the White House: "At 8:45, the President briefed his Homeland Security Council, using talking points and PowerPoint slides …. " When Mr. Brill relates that President Bush himself decided that the color-coded terrorism-alert system should use green for its lowest threat level, you're impressed by the reportorial detail, but you're also struggling to stay awake.

Despite the impossibly comprehensive promise of the subtitle, the book's scope is surprisingly narrow, consisting mostly of lawyering (whether it's from John Walker Lindh's defense attorney or plaintiffs' lawyers who specialize in airline disasters), squabbling over insurance payments, and the federal government's work to establish a comprehensive program for homeland security. Rudy Giuliani is virtually absent, as is the anthrax scare. And now that we've just completed the second war of the "September 12 era," Mr. Brill's unexplained decision to completely overlook the response by the defense and foreign-policy establishments in the federal government is puzzling. Readers looking for details on how America confronted Al Qaeda, Osama, the Taliban and Saddam will have to look elsewhere.

Instead, the villains of After (to the extent that there are any) are the Red Cross, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and John Ashcroft. Mr. Brill portrays the Red Cross as an incompetent bureaucracy that's more interested in good press clippings than in aiding the victims of 9/11. It can't get money to families quickly, and when it does, it overcompensates by giving too much money to people who neither need nor deserve it. The I.N.S. is similarly inept ("hapless" is Mr. Brill's adjective of choice). One devastating anecdote illustrates how the agency was more concerned with protecting itself than protecting the country: On Sept. 11, the I.N.S.'s Border Patrol agents in Washington "didn't go out to safeguard Washington's various landmarks and trophy targets. Instead, they fanned out in front of headquarters to prevent an attack on themselves." As for Mr. Ashcroft, the Attorney General comes across as a self-promoting, turf-conscious Beltway insider, sincere in his desire to protect Americans from terrorism but unfamiliar with the fine points of constitutional law, either because of "lack of interest or lack of intellectual firepower." Even F.B.I. agents are "quietly appalled" at Mr. Ashcroft's overreaching and his willingness to trample on civil rights.

But even the villains play a constructive role in Mr. Brill's Panglossian universe. The interplay between law-and-order types like Mr. Ashcroft and civil-liberties ideologues like Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, turns the Sept. 12 era into a Goldilocks story, where nothing is ever too hot or too cold but always just right. Mr. Brill selects Senator Charles Schumer as the personification of the moderate ideal-the 9/12 realization that the balance between freedom and security must be "recalibrated." In the end, Mr. Brill concludes that the Sept. 12 era has a happy ending: Because of this recalibration, the country is safer and more secure than it has ever been.

Mr. Brill concedes that another terrorist attack is nonetheless inevitable. But he asserts that the challenge isn't to stop the next attack. Rather, "the real challenge is to create a set of systems for protection," systems that strike the new Goldilocks balance. In Mr. Brill's view, new government agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security are doing just that. And the self-interested lobbying of everyone from the ACLU to the airlines to homeland-security profiteers will ensure that the nation lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, we really won't know if Mr. Brill is right until the next attack comes. And by then it may be too late.

Chris Suellentrop is the deputy Washington bureau chief for Slate .

Yet in Washington's ritualistic bloodletting style, Mr. Mueller is plainly being set up for sacrifice. The Wall Street Journal editorial page calls upon him to resign; right-wing pundit Robert Novak reports that "he is becoming a candidate for the first head to roll." This is premature and patently unfair-and ill-advised at a time when national law enforcement is already in turmoil.

Mr. Mueller may well deserve harsh scrutiny, but there are other Bush appointees who merit such scrutiny even more, and who should likewise be interrogated sharply by Congress and the press. At the top of the list is Mr. Mueller's immediate superior, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who may well be the single most culpable official still in government.

The very least that can be said for Mr. Freeh, after all, is that like other Clinton administration officials held over to serve the new President, he demonstrated deep concern about a probable terrorist attack on American soil. According to most accounts of the months and years preceding Sept. 11, those other worriers included C.I.A. director George Tenet and counterterrorist chief Richard Clarke, whose warnings created no sense of urgency as the White House pursued such irrelevant obsessions as missile defense.

From what we know of Mr. Ashcroft's conduct since he assumed office last year, he shrugged off the terrorist threat in favor of his own small-time agenda. He wanted to prosecute people in California who provide marijuana to cancer patients. He wanted to prosecute doctors in Oregon who assist the suicides of terminally ill patients. He wanted to prosecute pornographers.

No doubt he wanted to stop terrorists, too, but that particular item got priority only when he appeared before Congress or made speeches-not when he allocated funds or issued directives within the Justice Department. He can't say he wasn't warned. As Newsweek reported two weeks ago, Mr. Freeh tried to convince him that additional resources and action were needed to fight terrorism during a conference at the F.B.I. facility in Quantico, Va., but Mr. Ashcroft brushed him off.

Those who are now demanding the head of Mr. Mueller should go back and reread The New York Times ' stunning Feb. 28 story about Mr. Ashcroft's first budget, which was submitted to the White House the day before the Twin Towers fell. (At that point, the F.B.I. director had been in office for less than a week.)

As of Sept. 10, 2001, the Attorney General's final budget request for the coming fiscal year asked to increase spending on 68 programs, "none of which directly involved counterterrorism." He had rejected the F.B.I.'s request for funding to hire hundreds of new field agents, translators and intelligence analysts to improve the bureau's capacity to detect foreign terror threats. Moreover, among his proposed cuts was a reduction of $65 million in a Clinton program that made grants to state and local authorities for radios, decontamination garb and other counterterror preparedness measures.

A former F.B.I. official told The Times back in February that it was Mr. Ashcroft's attitude that "really undermined a lot of effort to change the culture and change the mindset" of the bureau. It should be recalled, too, that during the crucial months leading up to the Al Qaeda attack, Mr. Freeh had quit and Mr. Mueller had not yet arrived. In a real sense, Mr. Ashcroft was in charge of domestic security while warnings were ignored or misplaced and opportunities to prevent tragedy were lost.

Now the Attorney General has rewarded his own errors, and those of the agencies under his command, with greatly expanded power to conduct surveillance on the rest of us. Although there's no reason to believe that the 1976 restrictions on domestic political spying hindered the apprehension of the Al Qaeda killers, such curtailments of civil liberty are what Mr. Ashcroft prescribes for the problem he formerly ignored. In a bureaucracy that was already inundated with information that couldn't be sorted into the categories of useful and useless, he proposes to collect still more.

Last year, Mr. Ashcroft challenged the patriotism of anyone who dared question his incursions on traditional freedoms, and his critics quickly backed down. Now it is he who should be challenged, to explain his past approach to terrorism and to justify his present assaults on liberty. And he should not be allowed to hide his answers behind closed doors.

In pre-Miranda America, the cops could and did hold prisoners without telling the friends, relatives and lawyers looking for them where they were. In some cities, prisoners would be taken from one police station to another to thwart the enforcement of a writ of habeas corpus. Confessions extracted from prisoners by force, outside the presence of a lawyer, were admitted in criminal trials. In that era, discrimination and harassment consisted of more than bruised feelings and hate speech. Hateful and injurious acts were performed on persons of color and others generally referred to in that less-than-enlightened period as the poor and downtrodden.

Under the guise of national security, the Bush administration has taken a series of strides back toward the not-so-good old days with its announcement that foreign nationals are now subject to being picked up by the federal police, imprisoned for indefinite periods of time, kept incommunicado and interrogated without benefit of legal representation–and, for all we on the outside know, with benefit of sap and blackjack. If the last seems a bit overblown, please remember that, in addition to the introduction of the lettre de cachet by the U.S. government, various conservatives have been publicly musing on the advantages of torture in questioning non-Americans. Apparently, because we've been attacked and 3,000 of our citizens murdered, we are entitled to exempt ourselves from the standards of common decency. We might hope that a nation which had sustained such a sickening attack would be more, not less, scrupulous in its behavior.

Instead, the Bush administration tells us that some people will be put in chains and tried by military tribunals. It is assumed that the people subject to this rough handling will also be non-Americans, although that's not so sure. In general, the administration seems to be telling us that we who are lucky enough to be citizens are safe and needn't worry about midnight raids by the federal constabulary–but for citizens of any more or less defenseless country, the word is take care and take cover . Non-Americans better hope like hell that Mr. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft don't get a message from their personal Savior (or Saviors) to go after them.

A big thing is being made of the distinction between American citizenship and the lesser, more exposed status of non-citizens, be they legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or people in other countries whom, for whatever reason, the United States government swoops down on. Our position seems to be that when it comes to treatment by the federal government, American citizens get the full protection of the Bill of Rights to the extent compatible with national security; non-Americans get sloppy seconds. We live in a two-law world–one for us and another for them. The Western world has seen this kind of thing before. In the ancient world, the formula of Civis romanus sum ("I am a Roman citizen") got the speaker virtual immunity from all law save that of Rome.

Although the United States is not an empire as empires have been known in the past, its government and its people have cultivated an imperial outlook, an imperial sense of prerogative and an imperially solipsistic view of the planet. Not only is there one law for us and another for the rest of the world, but our losses are dearer, our sadnesses sadder. Our wounds and our deaths are more painful and tragic than the wounds and deaths of others. In Panama, people still mourn those who died at the hands of the U.S. armed forces during the 1989 invasion. Somewhere between 300 and 500 citizens of that impotent little nation perished. The Panamanians, having less money and equipment, do not know exactly how many died when the Americans attacked. They can't afford the costly excavations that we have done at ground zero–and yet, if the two countries are compared in size and population, Panama's loss is comparable to ours. At this point, however, the similarities end. We have been avenged; the American officials responsible for killing the Panamanians have not been called to account, and as for millions in compensation, how does "not one thin dime" sound?

For all the new wrinkles in the meting out of justice–be it military tribunals or clapping non-Americans in jail on administrative whim–the lawyers cite precedent. Since you can get a lawyer to tell you that anything you do is O.K., they're hardly the people to take as authorities, except perhaps for justifying rascality. Finding a precedent for doing something which isn't right counts for little outside a court of law. It is unbecoming a nation that prates about liberty, freedom and justice for all. The Bill of Rights is like foreign aid–something we like to talk about, but are too stingy or too indifferent to give to ausländers .

In the discussions of lettres de cachet , secret trials, trials without juries, trials without knowing the accusations or seeing the evidence, the names of three Presidents are spoken: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. They–three of our greatest–did it, therefore it is O.K. A lousier argument ad hominem I can't conceive of–and as for viewing their acts as applicable precedents, their situations bore no similarity to ours.

In explanation of his suspension of the Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, Lincoln is famously quoted asking, "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Compare his circumstances with ours. Eleven states had left the Union and were making war on the United States. It was a desperate situation calling for desperate measures. The destruction of the W.T.C. and flying an airliner into one side of the Pentagon may have been despicable, hateful, homicidal and horrendous acts, but they didn't put the government at peril; they didn't endanger the nation. As many died in one Civil War battle as perished at the World Trade Center. We are not fighting for our collective lives; we are fighting a very, very, very, very small group of terrorists. Some sense of proportion is called for in these lava flows of patriotic gore.

We are not fighting another nation or national government unless it is (or was) the Taliban–a military power so puissant and intimidating that more journalists than American soldiers died in combat. In actuality, you may recall, no American soldiers died in combat: What few fatalities we have suffered were self-inflicted, except for the C.I.A. agent who was killed in a P.O.W. internment-camp insurrection. That's comparable to the Civil War? That gives George Bush the same foundation for the lawlessness of the military tribunal as it gave Abraham Lincoln? (The military tribunal, despite its high-sounding name, is nothing more than take-'em-outside-and-shoot-'em justice. There are no established rules of procedure; they make the rules to fit whatever the foregone conclusion is.)

Woodrow Wilson's gagging the press, chucking people in jail and ending free speech during World War I is also used as a precedent for arguing that John Ashcroft should do the same. If anything, the Wilson repressions should warn us against allowing patriotic transports to sweep away our always-frail individual liberties. No war since the Civil War–not even the Vietnam War–was as unpopular as World War I. The arbitrary acts of Wilson and his attorneys general were what drove Constitutionalists to establish the American Civil Liberties Union; to this day, many historians here and abroad consider them to have been a tragedy whose consequences we're still living with. Who knows what might have happened had dissent against the war been tolerated? The Wilson precedent argues against what Mr. Bush and his fellow authoritarians are doing.

The last President invoked is Franklin Roosevelt and his putting tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese extraction in concentration camps. We have been treated to much speechifying linking Sept. 11 with Dec. 7, 1941–as if a bunch of scraggly-ass fanatics running around a mountain range 10,000 miles from New York in Fieldcrest towels with rusty rifles are the equivalent of the Japanese Imperial Navy, Adolf Hitler and the German army. The terrorists can kill and maim a few of us here and there, but they are not a serious threat. They jump out of the dark and murder us because they are too weak to challenge us. They do what they do because they have no warplanes, no aircraft carriers, no missiles, no tanks or cannons. They can drive us crazy with rage and grief, and that's all they can do.

Imprisoning Americans of Japanese origin was as stupid as it was unjust, and there were many people at the time who knew it, but none of them was sitting on the Supreme Court. The courts will always fail you when the mob is after you. Here and there, you may find a judge who will rule in favor of liberty. Judge Learned Hand found in favor of free speech against Woodrow Wilson, but the robed cowards sitting in the appellate courts above Judge Hand made short work of him.

When push comes to shove, don't count on the courts. Liberty is our personal responsibility. No one will protect us against Mr. Bush and Mr. Ashcroft but ourselves.

Probably not many people see the resemblance between John Ashcroft and Abraham Lincoln, but they were both challenged for extraordinary judicial measures. During the Civil War, when a Democratic politician, Clement Vallandigham, was arrested and tried by a military court for treasonous statements, a group of Albany Democrats criticized Lincoln for acting unconstitutionally.

Lincoln answered that he was following the Constitution, specifically Article I, Section 9. "The privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." The Civil War was clearly a rebellion. Did the terror war begin with an invasion? Look at the death tolls. As of this writing, our casualties on overseas battlefields are one. Our casualties at home-at the Trade Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93-are over 3,000. It has been safer to be a Ranger than a dishwasher at Windows on the World; safer to be a Marine than an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald; safer to be a spy than a firefighter. If the Iraqis fight as stoutly as the Taliban, those ratios may not change drastically. Americans in uniform are brave and competent, and this war must be won abroad by them, but its main front is here, and the enemy will do his best to kill more of us. If this is not an invasion, it will do until one comes along.

Do the actions of the Lincoln administration and the Bush administration undermine civil liberties over the long haul? Lincoln addressed that fear with one of his grim little jokes. "[I can't] be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man because it can be shown to not be good food for a well one. [Nor can I] believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life." War is the health of the state, but this condition of perverse health will end when peace returns.

John Ashcroft's greatest failing so far is not that he wants to question too many Muslims, but that he hasn't questioned enough F.B.I. men. (The same goes for the C.I.A., but they aren't in his bailiwick.) Sept. 11 was an extraordinary intelligence failure, and heads should roll. "Now?" a friend asked me. "In the midst of a war?" No, not now; the heads should have started rolling on Sept. 12. Who is going to be sifting the evidence on possible Al Qaeda sleepers in our midst-the same people who missed Mohammed Atta? This was not some routine screw-up, a budget overrun or an expense-account scandal: Thousands of people who pay the F.B.I.'s salaries died, in part because of F.B.I. bungling. The administration must worry less about internal morale than external results.

The other administration figure on the firing line is Colin Powell. The Secretary of State has a better spin machine than the Attorney General, but he also has industrious critics in the administration and outside it.

The critics often overstate their case. Mr. Powell is a powerful leader and a keen executive; he is also cautious and unimaginative. Every smart civilian knows that military men are the latter; they are also often the former: What good is having all that equipment, if you have to use it? There are as many Powells in uniforms as Pattons-and this isn't a bad thing. A President needs to have both in his tool box.

Mr. Powell's caution and conventionality will be tested by the full-scale terror war that has begun in Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is one of the touchstones of the State Department. When all else fails-when the Kyoto accords unravel, or the A.B.M. treaty molders from irrelevance-there will still be occasion to coax words out of Yasir Arafat, and restraint out of (fill in the blank, from Shimon Peres to Ariel Sharon). Nothing ever changes between Israelis and Palestinians, which means that efforts to make peace must always be redoubled, since the status quo is awful, and we couldn't just leave it alone, could we?

The new status quo, defined by the bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa, should put the peace process off indefinitely. How can Israel chat about West Bank maps with the perpetrators of mini–Trade Tower attacks? (Of course the casualties were smaller, but then Israel is a smaller country.) The Palestinians should have a state, but Israel can't possibly accept one run by the current gang. Either Mr. Arafat is a total incompetent who cannot control the people who bomb busses and malls, or he signed off on the bombings himself. Either way, would you give half of Gracie Mansion, or Albany, or Washington, D.C., to such a man?

The stakes for us in abandoning the peace process are much higher than usual. In normal times, a broken peace process signifies wasted efforts, diplomatic headaches, grim sessions at the General Assembly. Now we risk yet more captious Saudis, yet more sullen Egyptians, still more wrath from mobs temporarily stilled by the success of our arms. But who cares? We have so many even more pressing things to worry about-Osama bin Laden's whereabouts; Pakistan's atomic bombs; Iraq's chemicals and germs; the next visa applicant. Everyone in the world who says he is riled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is riled anyway. Israel has to protect itself as best it can. So do we.