"'I said [Zubaydah] was important,' Bush reportedly told [CIA director George] Tenet at one of their daily meetings. ‘You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?' ‘No sir, Mr. President,' Tenet replied. Bush ‘was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, ‘Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, ‘the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.'"

Of course, this administration never admits to torturing, but if you're going by "medieval" standards, water-boarding was once upon a time simply known as "the water torture." Such American actions -- and they have been legion in recent years -- have taken place outside the walls of the Bush administration's Green Zone, out there in a world of barbarians where "the gloves must come off" and hands must be preemptively dirtied to make us all safer back here.

Running with the Barbarians: So let's return to those ridiculous Europeans who think that the Bush administration is a greater destabilizing force than Iran or North Korea in our world. Despite the President's outrage, here's the odd thing: If you stop to think about it for a moment, the Bush administration's Iraqi argument and the recent full-scale charge of the Republicans in Congress is now implicitly based on little but the destabilizing qualities of the President's war-on-terror policies; on the thought that, if those policies are not pursued to their unimaginable endpoint, the destabilizing happening elsewhere, the turning of Iraq into a lawless, devolving Red Zone, of Afghanistan into a lawless, rebellious narco-state, the potential unsettling of the whole "arc of instability," will arrive on our shores.

The globally disastrous results of Bush administration policy are now the explanation for continuing that policy. We must stay in Iraq because otherwise the Zarqawis will come to us. Who even remembers when, before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi was a nonentity, a small-time thug and crude jihadist, a would-be whatever -- with little hope of becoming that "whatever." Now, he's in the pantheon of whatevers and he and his successors are being transformed in the White House Rose Garden from the dismal results of what this administration has done into the justification for everything they still plan to do.

In the meantime, we have now passed the Nth tidal shift, the umpteenth turning point -- moments which invariably allow the Bush administration to retell the same inane Green-Zone stories that the media always takes up with a strange kind of hope as if some slate had just been wiped clean until, soon after, they are drowned in new waves of blood and chaos.

How many more Green Zone stories are Americans capable of taking? For how long will Americans mistake safety for hunkering down in the ruins of occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, with the embassy lights on and the water running and that fabulous little club in full swing, and everything else going to hell? As long as we do, matters will only worsen. And sooner or later, whether the jihadis arrive on our shores or not, our empire will come home. It already has. Don't for a second think that you can keep the torturers, their methods, and their mentalities -- those classic "dirty hands" -- off in the shadows, beyond the walls forever. Indeed, the barbarians are already inside the gates. Soon enough, they may be impossible to tell from us.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.

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