Much has been made, in this and in other threads elsewhere, of the passivity of the American public in the face of so many outrages committed by the Bush administration and its collaborators (such as various supposedly independent courts).  To take one famous example of an aroused public, the March of the Women on Versailles in October 1789, the ostensible cause was the high price of bread.  Or, in other words, a pocket-book issue that would be experienced by many.  In the USA today, without a draft taking away some young people and making the others sweat, with no special tax raised for the meaningless "War on Terror", with no "average" Americans being "disappeared" so far, with gasoline and food and entertainment available although becoming more expensive, there is little to trigger a reaction from most Americans towards what the Bush people have been doing in faraway, virtually invisible places such as Bagram or Guantanamo.  And it is clear that this is just what the current administration has aimed for.  Americans do not want to think they are criminals and as long as there is little or no "hard" (ie, visual, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs) evidence that Americans have been committing crimes against humanity, the majority of the population will simply ignore the occasional written reports as fanciful exaggerations of the infamous "liberal" media.  Until something occurs that disrupts the surface calm of American society - a serious spike in gas prices, for instance, or the revelation of an American concentration camp somewhere with lots of gruesome photos, or someone in the administration leaking some devastating information, I cannot see that there will be much of a public response to what Bush has done.  Most people want it simply to go away, and they're hoping they can brush all the mess under the carpet and forget it about it.  Most Americans, it is my opinion, do not honestly want a close and uncomfortable examination of the crimes of this administration, because they instinctively know that it would reveal many dubious arrangements on which America's affluence has been based.  Much less distressing to wave the flag and say "God bless America!" than to look too closely at how Wall Street (to take just one sector) has been subsidized by uncontrolled Defense Department contracts.  The American public is nervous, guilty, greedy and afraid the "free" ride may be about to stop.  That's what they care about much more than some anti-American "ragheads" being tortured in places they can't pronounce anyway.