WHEN US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Australia from March 16 she could well be asked about the Absent American.

The Absent American is the man or woman you would expect to be living in the US ambassador's residence in Canberra, but hasn't for more than a year.

That charming house, occupied by US envoys since Christmas 1943, has been strangely empty since Tom Schieffer took his suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe in February last year.

Schieffer, a close friend and former business partner of US President George W. Bush, is now ambassador to Japan, but has had no successor here.

The Absent American and the vacant house looking over the back of Parliament House and out over the lake, have vexed the minds of some interested in the US-Australia relationship.

Former trade minister and deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has been one of them.

Fischer has cheekily suggested that rather than go to waste, the residence could be used to give still-homeless victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans some R&R here.

More seriously he has said, "We're now a year without an ambassador, and it's going on a bit long."

Tim Fischer works promoting tourism to Australia, and the absence of an ambassador is bothering him and other business types.

The office of Foreign Minister Alexander Downer isn't worried: It's a matter for the Americans to deal with, not us.

However, Downer a few months ago did raise the matter of the Absent American during a visit to Washington, and there is no evidence he was given any solid assurances.

Apparently it bothered him enough back then to make inquiries, and it's hard to imagine he is totally satisfied with present arrangements.

Even in strict terms of functional diplomatic connections, the observation of protocol, it is an embarrassing vacuum.

William P. McCormick is no doubt doing a sterling job as US envoy to New Zealand, and Robert W. Fitts likewise is serving his nation's interests in Papua New Guinea. We have the Absent American.

There have been a couple of attempts to get an ambassador in the big house in Canberra but each time something has come up and the candidates have not been able to make the trip across the Pacific.

The quest is for someone who is personally, as well as politically, close to George Bush.

Bush has under three years left in his second and final term as President, so a new ambassador would not have a long tour of duty in Australia.

It's not that links between Canberra and Washington have suffered greatly. Deputy head of mission William Stanton is a capable and experienced professional diplomat standing in for an ambassador.

However, there is a broader question about the condition of Australia-US ties.

There has been rumbled discontent over the fact Secretary of State Rice ditched two previously scheduled visits here and, apparently, had to be talked into the impending visit from March 16-18.

Rice was here with President Bush in October 2003, before she was made Secretary of State. Since her elevation, her focus has been on the Middle East and not our Asia-Pacific region. The coming visit appears to be a hasty repair job on that lack of attention, with Australia lumped into a tour of Indonesia, Peru and Chile.

Downer has used Parliament to depict the Rice visit and relations generally with the US as functioning like a well-oiled machine. Contrary to suggestions that the US at the top level has been truant from security concerns in our region, Downer says they are heavily engaged.

During her visit, Rice will attend the first meeting of an Australia-US-Japan ministerial summit on security matters.

Elsewhere she has been lined up to meet Prime Minister John Howard, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, Treasurer Peter Costello and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock.

"This visit underscores the importance of the American alliance," Downer told Parliament last week.

"We had the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, here in November of last year.

"We are entirely unapologetic about our close relationship with the US. It is a country which we engage with very heavily over Asia-Pacific matters."

If the United States is so deeply involved in our region, it might be able to find one person to live in the ambassador's residence in Canberra.

On December 31, 2003, I boarded a bus in Ulm, Germany, for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia. When the bus crossed the border, Macedonian officials confiscated my passport and detained me for several hours. Eventually, I was transferred to a hotel, where I was held for 23days.

I was guarded at all times, the curtains were always drawn, I was never permitted to leave the room, I was threatened with guns, and I was not allowed to contact anyone. At the hotel, I was repeatedly questioned about my activities in Ulm, my associates, my mosque, meetings with people that had never occurred, or associations with people I had never met. I answered all of their questions truthfully, emphatically denying their accusations. After 13 days I went on a hunger strike to protest my confinement.

On January 23, 2004, I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and placed in a car. The car eventually stopped and I heard aeroplanes. I was taken from the car and led to a building where I was severely beaten. Someone sliced the clothes off my body, and when I would not remove my underwear, I was beaten again until someone forcibly removed it from me. I was thrown on the floor, my hands were pulled behind me, and someone's boot was placed on my back. Then I felt something firm being forced inside my anus.

I was dragged across the floor and my blindfold was removed. I saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. One of the men placed me in a diaper and a tracksuit. I was put in a belt with chains that attached to my wrists and ankles, earmuffs were placed over my ears, eye pads over my eyes, and then I was blindfolded and hooded. In the plane, I was thrown to the floor face down, and my legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the plane. I felt two injections, and I was rendered nearly unconscious. At some point, I felt the plane land and take off again. When it landed again, I was unchained and taken off the plane. It felt very warm outside, and so I knew I had not been returned to Germany. I later learned that I was in Afghanistan.

Once off the plane, I was shoved into the back of a vehicle. After a short drive, I was dragged out of the car, pushed roughly into a building, and left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. That first night I was interrogated by six or eight men dressed in the same black clothing and ski masks, as well as a masked American doctor and a translator. They stripped me, photographed me and took blood and urine samples. I was returned to my cell, where I would remain in solitary confinement, with no reading or writing materials, and without once being permitted outside to breathe fresh air, for more than four months.

During this time, I was interrogated three or four times, always by the same man, with others who were dressed in black clothing and ski masks, and always at night. The man who interrogated me asked about whether I had taken a trip to Jalalabad using a false passport, whether I had attended Palestinian training camps and whether I knew the September 11 conspirators or other alleged extremists. As in Macedonia, I truthfully denied his accusations. Two men who participated in my interrogations identified themselves as Americans. My requests to meet with a representative of the German government or a lawyer, or to be brought before a court, were ignored.

In March, along with several other inmates, I commenced a hunger strike to protest our confinement without charges. After 27 days without food, I was allowed to meet with two unmasked Americans, the prison director and an even higher official whom other inmates referred to as "the boss". I pleaded with them either to release me or to bring me to court. The American prison director replied that he could not release me without permission from Washington, but said that I should not be detained in the prison. On day 37 of my hunger strike, I was dragged into an interrogation room, tied to a chair, and a feeding tube was forced through my nose to my stomach. After the force-feeding, I became extremely ill and suffered the worst pain of my life.

Near the beginning of May, I was brought into an interrogation room to meet an American who identified himself as a psychologist. He told me he had travelled from Washington to check on me, and promised I would soon be released. Soon thereafter I was interrogated again by a native German speaker named "Sam", the American prison director and an American translator. I was warned at one point that, as a condition of my release, I was never to mention what had happened to me, because the Americans were determined to keep the affair a secret.

On May 28, I was led out of my cell, blindfolded and handcuffed.

I was put on a plane and chained to the seat. I was accompanied by Sam and also heard the voices of two or three Americans. Sam informed me that the plane would land in a European country other than Germany, because the Americans did not want to leave clear traces of their involvement in my ordeal, but that I would eventually continue on to Germany. I believed I would be executed rather than returned home.

When the plane landed, I was placed in a car, still blindfolded, and driven up and down mountains for hours. Eventually, I was removed from the car and my blindfold removed. My captors gave me my passport and belongings, sliced off my handcuffs and told me to walk down a dark, deserted road and not to look back. I believed I would be shot in the back and left to die, but when I turned the bend, there were armed men who asked me why I was in Albania and took my passport. They took me to the airport, and only when the plane took off did I believe I was actually returning to Germany. When I returned I had long hair and a beard, and had lost 18 kilos. My wife and children had left our house in Ulm, believing I had left them and was not coming back. Now we are together again in Germany.

I'm filing this lawsuit because I believe in the American system of justice. What happened to me was outside the bounds of any legal framework and should never be allowed to happen to anyone else. Ultimately, what I would like from this lawsuit is an acknowledgment that the CIA is responsible for what happened to me, an explanation as to why this happened, and an apology.

From a statement made to the American Civil Liberties Union in December by Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted and detained in Macedonia and Afghanistan from December 31, 2003, to May 28, 2004. The ACLU is charging that former CIA director George Tenet acted illegally by authorising agents to abduct El-Masri, beat him, drug him and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.

It will remain forever a defining moment of the 21st century, a sentinel marker in an age when so much is quickly forgotten. This was the point at which the vulnerability of the United States of America - economically and militarily the most powerful nation in the world - was exposed. The opening sentence of the subsequent official commission of inquiry captures it precisely: "At 8.46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States became a nation transformed." It was not nuclear weapons or an invading army, but a handful of ideologically warped terrorists engaged in a cowardly war, using means that even the most powerful nation in the world could not defend itself against. At 8.46am, a jetliner carrying thousands of litres of fuel slammed into one of the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane flew into the second tower. Two more aircraft crashed that morning: one into thea Pentagon, another into a field after passengers overcame hijackers, armed with the knowledge that their nation was under attack. The huge twin towers burned then collapsed. Almost 3000 people died directly as a result of the attacks. Four years later, footage showing the first and second planes ploughing into the iconic glass-and-metal towers is no less chilling. These are events etched deep in the global consciousness of the information age.

There had been warnings of catastrophe, notably the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and intelligence suggesting al Qaeda was preparing an attack of some sort in the US. Despite the prodigious intelligence-gathering of the US government community, no one had joined the do6ts. After the attacks came introspection. The 585-page report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (better known as the 9/11 Commission) was released last year. It found that no one person or agency was to blame. It recommended refocusing national efforts on combating terrorism in a manner that centralised power and intelligence even further. The report drew praise from the Government but was widely criticised by others, one lcommentator concluding it "offers peace through exculpation, evasion, and entertainment and in doing so dangerously re-energises a national relish for fantasy".

The US engaged in a full-on war on terror that saw it engage and topple the government of Afghanistan, understood to have given succour to the leaders and foot soldiers of al-Qaeda, and then embarked upon a bloody and unfinished war in Iraq, named by US President George Bush as part of an "axis of evil". Australia and Britain have remained staunch allies in this war without borders or battlefields. Much of the rest of the international community, notably the European Union, is wary of the US approach. There have been some dividends. Libya appears to have relinquished its past as an enclave of terrorism, and there has been a push to reform and/ reinvigorate the United Nations.

Australians discovered they were not too remote from terrorism when bombers struck in the popular Indonesian resort island of Bali in October 2002. Of the 202 killed, 88 were Australians. The bombing attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta one year ago underlined the fact that Australians must be considered targets of terrorist attack. Other attacks in Jakarta, Madrid and most recently in London have shown the struggle against this modern scourge is far from ended. There have been other debits. The climate of suspicion fostered since the September 11 attacks has, almost inevitablyc, led to an erosion of some freedoms.

So four years on from September 11, in a world that is fraught with dangers, what has the superpower learned? The answer to that conundrum may well lie much closer to home. When hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf states a fortnight ago, America was exposed as vulnerable again. The death toll from this natural disaster will probably far exceed1 that of the September 11 attacks. But it is the Federal Government's response - or more precisely - its shambolic and hopelessly delayed response to Hurricane Katrina, that has caused Americans again to become introspective. Many Americans have been embarrassed and shocked by the depth of the economic and racial divide that has emerged from the chaos of New Orleans and the other affected communities. For a few crucial days in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, far short of saving the world from tyranny, America looked as if it could not care for its own. The National Guard was diminished by the demands of the war in Iraq. Ironically, the Federal Emergency Management Authority - the body charged with the task of managing such crises - had been integrated into the terrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. The loss of many disillusioned senior FEMA staff arguably left it ill-equipped to cope with the demands of the present crisis. Yesterday, the White House lost faith in the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, effectively sacking him.

Americans will determine whether the billions of dollars spent on the war against terrorism at the expense of other programs have been well spent. But on this day in particular, it is worth remembering how swiftly and irreversibly the world changed on that terrifying day in September 2001, and how America used its economic and political leadership to decisively respond to that event. Had it not, how much more vulnerable to terrorist attack would the world be today? That is almost impossible to answer.

November 09, 2004
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IN an urgent phone call to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, US Secretary of State Colin Powell proffered the following diagnosis of the mental state of senior members of the Bush administration: "They're f---ing crazies."

Now these intellectually challenged characters have been given four more years to run the world – thanks to a rush to the ballot box by millions of Christian fundamentalists convinced that the earth and all its creatures were created in a process of divine mechanics that began at 9am on Monday, October 23, 4004BC – and who support Israel because of evangelical prophecies involving a rapidly approaching apocalypse.

Well, now that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, what further madness might we expect? Here are a few non-biblical prophecies.

First of all, the f---ing crazies will show Powell, the sanest member of the administration, the door. Or he'll head for it himself on a voluntary basis. Whether the crazies' Donald Rumsfeld goes with him is all but irrelevant, given that it's safe to prophesise a huge promotion for Paul Wolfowitz.

This will lead to enthusiastic escalation in the Iraq war. No longer embarrassed by 100,000 dead civilians, the collateral damage will be unconstrained, as George W. Bush, no more Mr Nice Guy, celebrates his second honeymoon by making missiles rain from the heavens like confetti. The US will attempt to impose democracy on Iraq even if it has to kill many of the voters. And that's not the only tactic that will lead the Middle East and the wider world closer to the Armageddon eagerly awaited by the religious Right.

Here, for example, is my prophecy for Iran. Having poked a stick into that theocratic ants nest, and choosing to ignore the attempts of Old Europe to negotiate and mitigate, Washington will give a wink and a nod to Tel Aviv to bomb anything that might be a nuclear facility.

The Israelis have done this before, quite successfully. Don't be surprised if there's a degree of what's known in the trade as plausible deniability, even a bit of tsk-tsking from the White House when the Israelis do the deed.

Hoping to benefit from the death of Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon will make as much mischief as possible in the mourning period. Apart from the vexed question of where the Palestinians will be allowed to bury their leader, Sharon will hope that the transfer of power will be as messy as possible. As usual the Bush administration will cut Sharon an immense amount of slack.

Before we leave the axis of evil, let us not forget North Korea. Washington's continued provocations will keep the North's nasty regime at a fever pitch of paranoia, thus providing George W. and the boys with the excuse to wipe out the place. The UN? It might voice the odd protest as the Bush juggernaut gains speed, but it will be utterly ignored. The UN is regarded as an irritating impediment to US hegemony and Washington wants it to join the League of Nations in the dustbin of history.

Of course, the Chinese won't be too impressed with any attack on North Korea but the most ardent of the neo-cons want to take Beijing on as well. Hence the missile defence system. Beijing knows that its main purpose is to make life difficult for the Chinese. So, apart from triggering a new arms race in our region – indeed, a new cold war – there's the grim possibility that the same intellectual giants that gave us the war in Iraq will start encouraging the most irrational elements in Taiwan.

Domestic prophecies for the US? The widespread looting from libraries of liberal literature by the religious Right, further bans on the teaching of evolution and a war against Roe v Wade via a restacked Supreme Court. And that's just for openers.

People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.

But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College.

If Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, why didn't he resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest? But now he's showing the courage by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration.

Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations — satisfying "the base" — trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." But there are many other revelations.

One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers — it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out — it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.

Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only "top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?"

Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001. There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good.

The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist. The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.

Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.

More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.

Fearing an imminent dirty bomb attack, scores of nuclear scientists with sophisticated radiation detection equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags scoured five US cities over Christmas and New Year, officials involved in the emergency effort say.

The call-up of radiation experts to Washington, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Baltimore - the first since the weeks after the World Trade Centre attacks - was conducted in secrecy, in contrast to the very public cancellation of flights from Europe and Mexico.

The terrorism crisis began late on December 19, when analysts assembled what they described as extremely specific intelligence, including electronic intercepts of phone calls and emails from al-Qaeda operatives, of an attack on US soil. A "code orange", or high alert, was issued on December 21.

Even now, hundreds of nuclear and bio-weapons scientists remain on high alert at several military bases across the US, ready to fly to any trouble spot. Pharmaceutical stockpiles to treat victims of biological attacks were loaded on transportable trucks at key US military bases.

Officials said one of their main challenges was determining whether al-Qaeda is planting provocative but false clues as a diversion or as deliberate disinformation to test the US response.

The attention to a potential dirty bomb attack resulted not from specific information pointing to an attack, but from the belief among US officials that al-Qaeda was sparing no effort to try to detonate one.

A dirty bomb attack, in which a conventional bomb is detonated and spews radioactive material and radiation across a small area, is unlikely to cause mass casualties, but could cause panic and devastate a local economy.

US officials became concerned that a large, open-air New Year's Eve celebration might be a target. While the perimeters of football stadiums can generally be secured, outdoor celebrations are much more vulnerable.

There were fears al-Qaeda operatives would hijack and crash an overseas flight into a US city or the ocean. Another was that terrorists would shoot down an aircraft with a shoulder-fired missile.

On the same day the national threat level was raised to orange, the Homeland Security Department sent out radiation detectors and hundreds of pager-sized radiation monitors for use by police in the biggest US cities.

It also dispatched the Energy Department radiation experts to cities planning large public events. In Manhattan, up to a million people were expected in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

The Energy Department scientists arrived to take covert readings on their disguised radiological equipment in a variety of settings. "Our guys can fit in a sports stadium, a construction site or on Fifth Avenue," one Energy Department official said. "Their equipment is configured to look like anybody else's luggage or briefcase."

Starting on December 22, the teams criss-crossed US cities, taking measurements 24 hours a day.

On December 29 in Las Vegas, the searchers got their first and only radiation "spike" - at a self-storage warehouse. The White House was notified.

It turned out that the locker belonged to a homeless man and, tucked inside his duffel bag was a cigar-sized radium pellet, used to treat uterine cancer. He had found it three years before. The man was released. Five tense hours after their radiation detectors had spiked, the storage locker security crisis was over.