In the last month a number of major developments have begun to indicate the next stage in the evolution of the post-9-11 world is at hand. Forget the polls. The Bush Administration's position, whether viewed from a political or a military standpoint, is weakening across the board. Dissent is rising all over the country and around the world. At the same time there are signs everywhere, both on a global and at my personal level, that the hand of tyranny has been stirred into action as a response to this rising dissent. What is coming -- what has already begun -- is neither pretty nor pleasant. But the fear of what is coming is the only real thing that needs to be faced. A brave and experienced soldier once told me that the real surrender always occurs a long time before the defeated ones raise their hands. "It happens," he said, "at the instant their minds succumb to fear."

In the spring 2002 issue of "Correspondence: An International Review of Culture and Society," published on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), writer Kenneth Maxwell -- the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for inter-American studies and director of Latin America studies at the CFR -- published an angry critique of an opinion expressed by a Brazilian economist, Celso Furtado, that the attacks of Sept. 11 had been an American Reichstag fire perpetrated by the American right. Furtado is a close friend of Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, and his views are shared by a large majority of the Brazilian population. The problem is apparently serious enough for the CFR to take notice of it.

In the meantime a French book, "The Frightening Fraud" by Thierry Meyssan, has afterburnered to the top of the best-seller lists in Europe. Its premise: there was no flight 77 that smashed into the Pentagon. The author is the president of the Voltaire Network, which Britain's The Guardian described as, "a respected independent thinktank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity." I have looked at just about all the pictures and film footage of the Pentagon crash on the Internet, and I have seen no airliner in them, and I am still left with one big question that needs to be explained. Where's the airplane?

But that is not the point. The point is that so many people, so overwhelmingly believe what Meyssan writes. Within the first two hours the book was on sale, 20,000 copies were sold. Fox News was alarmed enough to do a story on it.

On March 25, Britain's The Guardian also noted that the FBI had raided an alleged U.S. terrorist support group, the Safa Trust, which had reportedly been sending money to both terrorist interests and to the Republican Party through a Republican political action committee called The Islamic Institute.

In this issue, FTW exposes the fact that Attorney General John Ashcroft has potentially criminal conflicts of interest with two grand juries investigating, among others, ExxonMobil and BP-Amoco on charges of bribery and an illegal oil swap with Iran in 1997. Both grand jury targets were heavy Ashcroft 2000 campaign donors, and both got behind closed doors into Vice President Dick Cheney's energy policy task force. In a half-measured cover-up, the White House complied this month with a court order to release task force records, but they were so heavily redacted as to be virtually useless. That noose, connected to Enron and deeper criminality, is slowly tightening around the Bush Administration's imperial neck.

On March 30, the Associated Press reported that 3,500 angry protesters took to London streets to protest likely U.S. military intervention in Iraq.

Around the nation, the fear-driven rush to enact the draconian Model Emergency Health Preparedness Act has slowed. The act has only been passed in one state and has been introduced in what appears to be a peak number of 24 states. Mississippi has actually defeated it. People have disconnected from the war.

Last weekend I watched a Fox News program. It was a call-in poll asking, "Who do you think is responsible for the anthrax?" The first caller on the air said, "I think it was the CIA. They did it to get more power." The strange thing is that not one of the news commentators openly disagreed with the caller. A couple of them nodded in agreement.

A new newspaper, the War Times, (http://www.war-times.org/index.html) will soon make its debut. They have already expanded a planned original printing from 7,500 to 100,000. What remains to be seen about this paper is whether it will fulfill its promise of telling us what the mainstream media won't, or whether it will be a well-funded wolf in sheep's clothing designed to corral and misdirect criticism of the U.S. government and its real role in 9-11. This is one of the oldest and best-known tactics of the power elite -- the creation of a "respectable" opposition voice to effectively control both sides of a debate. But the War Times' slick list of contributors gives proof to the fact that there is serious opposition. We will pray for a miracle with this new paper.

And the ubiquitous Michael Moore, author of the runaway best-seller "Stupid White Men," is bouncing around the country on a tour that continues to stop traffic and threaten civilization. The searing and hilarious critique of American industrialists and politicians, with some heavy swipes at the Bushes, is proof that the presidential approval rating poll numbers are lies. The book has been out for only two months, and already has more than 20 printings.

It seems the bad guys have noticed. After many revelations that last fall's military-grade anthrax had originated from within the U.S. military and CIA-related programs, hyperbolic news stories began to appear insinuating that the nasty old Islamic terrorists had been making the stuff after all -- with simple chemistry kits.

Earlier this month, it was leaked that the Pentagon was developing plans for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in battlefield situations against non-nuclear powers.

Israel and the Palestinians are driving the world mad as tensions, carnage and death mount. The insanity builds fear everywhere as people remember Israel has nukes. And Iraqi strongman Saddam Houssein may also have weapons of mass destruction, as the remainder of the Arab world -- especially Iraq, Syria and Lebanon -- get drawn closer to the point of committing to rescue Arafat or else seriously lose all respect. If Saddam moves to support Arafat, then the U.S. will no longer face a world opposed to the U.S. invading -- or nuking -- Iraq. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon knows this, and he'll play it until the string breaks. I believe powers larger than Israel and the Palestinians are pouring coals on that fire.

Tension is building everywhere. It has been the same here at FTW. In this last month we have had a locked, garage storage area burglarized. Our website has been hacked. Whoever did it took out 200 websites just to get to us. An Internet stalker has been following the repostings of my stories about Delmart "Mike" Vreeland in Canada around the Web, in order to post hate mail. Several articles have appeared with deliberately falsified information about FTW. Pro-government administrators inside the Pacifica Radio network have pulled me from scheduled broadcasts. I have been attacked by The Nation Editor David Corn in a silly attempt to disparage my reporting. So severe was the criticism of his unfounded missive, that he received what might be several thousand e-mails and had to lament in a Sunday, March 24 Los Angeles Times OpEd interview. Corn described his run in with me, that all of us conspiracy junkies were hopelessly demented, and there was nothing he could do to save us. Thank you, God! This was in the same week that a writer in the L.A. Weekly described me as a "nutball conspiracy theorist" and a "defrocked" ex-cop.

I have previously written for both of these papers and am in negotiations with the news editor of the Weekly over how they are going to correct the libelous term "defrocked."

All along in my lectures and radio appearances I have been saying this fight is winnable, but it will not be won without some discomfort. So therefore I must, in order to serve you and remain true to my beliefs, take this as a measure of the success of FTW, which you have made possible. I must walk the walk and say, "These are good signs."My opinion is that things will get worse for all of us who love the truth -- and soon. My caution to you is to be prepared for the next big lie and to jump on it with both feet when it comes.

A sign of its imminence was a comment made by avid hawk, Bush speechwriter, and political crony William Kristol on a C-SPAN Brookings Institute political forum. It was memorialized on an internet discussion list by an astute watcher who wrote, "Kristol is a motor-mouth and, therefore, stuff leaks out. When confronted with this poll of people disengaging in this war, he said that in 6-12 months they will have war as the top most in their mind as we get into a much bigger war than we have now. At one point he slipped into another tense…he talked about Bush in front of the Congress asking for a declaration of war against Iraq as though he was a reporter talking about something that happened yesterday -- that got their attention. And then it slipped. He talked about the terrorist attack that is going to happen in the next four (I believe -- or around there) months; caught himself, turned red and added, 'God forbid.'"

As we enter our fifth year of publication, FTW is now in 29 countries with almost 3,000 subscribers. Our website averages 4,000 visitors a day and our acceptance as a respected and responsible news source continues to grow. I thank all of you for believing in me, and I pray we will continue to be worthy of your faith and trust. Things are just starting to get interesting.