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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends in the media and others,

       I am giving a talk at the Eisenhower Center on the Mansfield campus of Ohio State University at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday February 23 about "The Lucasville Uprising: New Discoveries."

       The new material supplements my book Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising, published in August 1994.

       In the talk I continue to argue that the judicial process for Lucasville defendants has been so flawed that, as in New York State after Attica, the State of Ohio should declare a general amnesty.