US TORTURE: Is No One Accountable?

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused. These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals. Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

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Bill Cosby's Not Funny: Questions for Michael Eric Dyson

Your new book is a rhetorical screed against Bill Cosby, and the title alone is not exactly subtle: ''Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?'' When a comedian throws a pie in the face of a powerful person, it's funny. When he throws a pie in the face of a homeless mother with three kids, that's not very funny. You're referring to Cosby's recent harangue about lower-income black people, whom he faults for neglecting their children, wasting money on expensive sneakers and glamorizing ghetto culture. It's his Blame-the-Poor Tour. He should pick on someone in his own class. If he had come out swinging at Condi Rice or Colin Powell, they could defend themselves. But he's beating up on poor black people, the most vulnerable people in this nation. And why jump on them?

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Broke: Why is a nation that considers spending a civic duty approving harsher ways to punish the bankrupt?

As the financial pages and cable business channels ceaselessly try to persuade their audiences, our current national prosperity depends on mass displays of Trumpish optimism. Buy a digital camera for the home team. Stock up on iPods for Uncle Sam. Impulsively buying luxury goods is touted by our political and business leaders as a crucial civic duty. Whether these patriotic injunctions to break out our MasterCards, hit the malls and propel the financial market to new highs actually influence people's spending habits remains an open question, but they certainly help the little Trumps feel nobler about the spending they do anyway -- particularly the spending they can't afford for items they're not quite sure they need. And then someone falls ill or is divorced or suffers a loss of emotional self-control and buys a $9,000 plasma TV by taking out a tax-advantaged loan secured by the home where the set was meant to go. A struggle to redeem himself ensues. The credit-card company that first beguiled the debtor with a low-interest ''introductory'' rate announces that because of a tardy payment the previous month, that rate has sextupled to a level once forbidden by usury laws but now perfectly permissible. To shake the plastic monkey off his back, the debtor obtains another low-interest card, shifts his balance to it, misses another payment and is attacked by a second monkey, with fangs. The next day a letter from the National Guard arrives informing the fellow to pack a duffel bag because he's headed to Iraq. While he's reading these dire words, the telephone rings, but the fellow doesn't answer it because he now knows that the people on the line -- who typically identify themselves with blandly sinister pseudonyms like ''Mrs. Smith'' or, merely, ''Edward'' -- can be counted on to call again just before dawn the next day.

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