EDMONTON -- The treatment of school marching bands during last week's presidential inauguration is evidence the United States has lost its war on terrorism, the editor of Harper's magazine said. Lewis Lapham, the outspoken liberal at the helm of the monthly American magazine for more than 25 years, asserted that band members were told not to look U.S. President George W. Bush as they passed his stand or they would be taken away by security officers and questioned.

"I think to myself, the United States has lost the war on terror if this is what has happened to the American idea," Lapham said during a critique of post-Sept. 11 U.S. political culture which he described as intent on gagging dissenters.

His speech to a crowd of hundreds at an Edmonton hotel was filled with barbs aimed at everyone from Bush, whom he compared to the Wizard of Oz, to a mainstream media he says tries to protect the image of power.

He called Alberto Gonzales, Bush's nominee for attorney general, "a clever eunuch in a corporate harem" and "a man of very little principle and probably less integrity."