Christian Parenti is a correspondent for the Nation and is author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (the New Press 2004). He received a PhD in sociology from the London Schoolof Economics in 2000. His two previous books are The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror, (Basic Books, 2003) and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, (Verso, 2000). He has been a Soros Senior Justice fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School\'s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.