Columnist Terence Blacker in the Independent on Bush, fat, civil liberties and American wackiness.

Independent Argument America has always been a strange and fascinating country but right now it is becoming not only stranger but also more alarming. In the Oval Office, and across the media, earnest discussion is made of the moral rights involved in the size issue. Meanwhile, the destruction of real civil liberties tends to be regarded as being of marginal interest, if not actively unpatriotic.
The case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, the second US citizen captured in Afghanistan, has for example caused little concern outside civil liberties groups, which are routinely described in the mainstream media as of "the far left". Unlike John Walker Lindh, the other American fighting for the Taliban, Hamdi has been deemed insufficiently American to deserve a trial or access to legal advice. Asked whether this decision did not represent something of a watershed in that it allowed government to suspend habeas corpus for one of its citizens without explanation or appeal, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, remarked breezily that it was up to lawyers to think about what he called "these niceties".