Four from the Boston Globe on Bush's abuse of power

a truly astounding FOUR editorials in today's boston globe are devoted to excoriating the bush administration on its jaw-dropping abuses of power and equally jaw-dropping claims of righteous indignation...

first, an editorial from the editorial staff...

President Bush is wrong to sacrifice Americans' civil liberties needlessly by resorting to a secret presidential order to authorize warrantless surveillance of phone calls and e-mails within the United States. The American way of life Bush is sworn to defend rests upon the rule of law and a constitutional separation of powers. No president should be allowed to create a law-free zone in which government agencies spy on people in this country without legal authorization from Congress and warrants from a court.

h.d.s. greenway weighs in...

I never would have thought I would live to see the day when the president of the United States would threaten to veto a bill in Congress to ban torture, or when the vice president would spend his days lobbying Congress in favor of torture. That little shop of horrors, the vice president's office, seems to be the place where fear regularly gains ascendancy over good judgment.

scot lehigh...

The Bush team's polarizing partisan instincts were also on display in the controversy over the secret monitoring the president authorized of US telephone conversations, an order that sidestepped a legal process that already allowed for relatively easy approval of such eavesdropping.

Not only did the president criticize the media for publishing the story, the administration also clearly hopes to box the opposition by forcing Democrats to support the president's action or ''defend positions that could weaken our national security," as a senior administration official put it in both the New York Times and Washington Post.

Both instances show that what we've seen is a change in tone but not in tactics.

and, finally, thomas oliphant...

[I]t's happened again.

The latest abuse of civil rights and the Constitution began with the first round of captures of Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks.

Some of these terrorists were caught in possession of their cellular telephones and laptop computers. Naturally, it occurred to the US agents involved to see where these cellphones and hard drives led -- a perfectly understandable notion.

And then, as night follows day, it all got out of hand, morphing into a system of snooping that can only be justified by authoritarian theories of executive supremacy, complete with legal justifications for a super-secret program that are themselves super-secret.

The clue that even the government recognizes it is doing wrong lies in the almost laughable inability of top officials to discuss all this without resort to the tortured euphemism that authoritarians always rely on.

it's time for regime change at home... no doubt about it...

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