Making a virtue of necessity, the Bush administration has used the exposure of its illegal wiretap scheme to ratchet up the level of terrorist scaremongering, accelerate its drive toward a military attack on Iran and publicly proclaim its long-held covert doctrine of executive dictatorship. Of course, "commander rule" is already the de facto state of the union, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made clear to the Senate last week, when he refused to deny the notion that the president can contravene any law he chooses under his authority as commander-in-chief. And we have often detailed here the tyrannical powers that President George W. Bush has already bestowed upon himself without objection from the U.S. political establishment, including the power to jail anyone without charges, hold them indefinitely and have them tortured -- or simply murder them in an "extrajudicial killing." The scope of Bush's claimed powers -- arbitrary sway over the life and liberty of every person on earth -- far surpasses that of the most megalomaniacal Roman emperor or totalitarian dictator.

But a militarist state must have war: to justify its draconian rule (and those $550 billion "defense" budgets), to find new fields for dominion and swag, and to seal with blood its illegitimate compact with the people, seeking to make them complicit in its crimes, which are committed in their name, for their "security." Fortunately for the militarists, Bush has promised war in abundance. Just this month, the Pentagon released its new strategy, heralding the newly dubbed "Long War" against terrorism, where U.S. forces will be deployed, openly and covertly, "in dozens of countries simultaneously" for decades to come. The plan is designed to "ensure that no foreign power can dictate the terms of regional or global security" -- except, of course, for the dictatorial foreign power emanating from the Potomac.

This is the constitution of the new commander state: the eternal "emergency," fomenting endless bloodshed, strife, atrocity -- and reprisals, the terrorist blowback that is the essential lubricant for the war machine. And a new terror strike on the "homeland" is inevitable. The ground for this attack has been carefully prepared -- whether wittingly or unwittingly is irrelevant now. For whatever the Bush faction's intentions, their actual policies have demonstrably and indisputably stoked the fires of Islamic extremism to new heights of virulence. Meanwhile, their manifest incompetence and callous disregard for the well-being of ordinary Americans -- vividly displayed in the deadly bungling of the Katrina disaster and its corruption-riddled aftermath -- have left American soil virtually undefended against any genuinely serious terrorist attack, i.e. one not carried out by half-wits telegraphing their punches over tapped phones.

For years, a vast infrastructure of authoritarian rule has been constructed behind the facade of ordinary political life -- such as the series of "special authorities" signed by Bush and Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld giving the military absolute power over the nation "in the event of a declared or perceived emergency," The Washington Post reports. This dovetails with such open measures as the Patriot Act and the creation of Northcom, the first military command aimed at the "homeland," which last fall conducted the massive "Granite Shadow" exercise, practicing "domestic military operations" with "unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force," the Post reports.

This infrastructure is part of the context, the granite shadow looming behind many recent events, such as last month's $385 million open-ended contract awarded to Halliburton to build large-scale "detention and deportation" centers around the country, as Reuters reports. It looms behind the "excitement" expressed by weapons-makers over Bush's plans to build new atomic bombs on a production-line basis, the Oakland Tribune reports, including "low yield" nukes for use in attacks on non-nuclear nations. It looms over Rumsfeld's frenzied push to build a new arsenal of "first-strike" intercontinental and space-based weapons to attack enemies -- or perceived enemies -- with "no warning," as the Pentagon declared this month, UPI reports. You can even see it in the Air Force's decision last week to allow top brass to press their politicized pseudo-Christianity on young cadets without restraint, as Reuters reports -- more of the sinister melding of militarism and religious extremism that characterizes the Bushist philosophy.

And of course, the granite shadow overhangs the entire campaign to foment war fever against Iran, a grim replay of the "Attack Iraq" propaganda, complete with exaggerated threats, manipulated intelligence supplied by dubious exiles, lies about "pursuing diplomacy" while finalizing battle plans, as The Sunday Telegraph reports -- and a complete disregard of the murderous quagmire that will ensue, including the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide as countries scramble to protect themselves from the "first-strike" triggermen of the Bush faction.

More war, more terror, more authoritarian rule: The fire next time is almost here.

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of power is on display with the Bush administration.

The most vivid example is the long delay in informing the country that Vice President Cheney had accidentally shot a man last Saturday while hunting in Texas. For a White House that informs us about the smallest bumps and scrapes suffered by the president and vice president, the lag is inexplicable. But let us assume the obvious: It was an attempt to delay and perhaps suppress embarrassing news. We will never know whether the vice president's office would have announced the incident at all if the host of the hunting party, Katharine Armstrong, hadn't made her own decision Sunday morning to inform her local paper.

Nobody died at Armstrong Ranch, but this incident reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969. That story, and dozens of others about the Kennedy family, illustrates how wealthy, powerful people can behave as if they are above the law. For my generation, the fall of Richard Nixon is the ultimate allegory about how power can corrupt and destroy. It begins not with venality but with a sense of God-given mission.

I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren't for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration's misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.

The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush's statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had "derailed" a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush's account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush's comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of misusing intelligence has been the administration's attempt to undercut Paul Pillar and other former CIA officials who tried to warn about the dangers ahead in Iraq. I'm not talking about the agency's botched job on weapons of mass destruction but about its warnings that postwar Iraq would be chaotic and dangerous. Pillar said so privately before the war, and he helped draft an August 2004 national intelligence estimate warning, correctly, that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating and heading for "tenuous stability" at best.

Bush was unhappy at this naysaying, just as he has grumbled about pessimistic reports from the CIA station in Baghdad. When Pillar made similar warnings about Iraq at a private dinner in September 2004, the White House went ballistic -- seeing Pillar as part of a CIA conspiracy to undermine the president's policies. Soon after, Bush installed a former Republican congressman, Porter Goss, who began a purge at the agency that has driven out a generation of senior managers. Pillar and many, many others have retired, leaving the nation without some of its best intelligence officers when we need them most.

Bush and Cheney are in the bunker. That's the only way I can make sense of their actions. They are steaming in a broth of daily intelligence reports that highlight the grim terrorist threats facing America. They have sworn blood oaths that they will defend the United States from its adversaries -- no matter what . They have blown past the usual rules and restraints into territory where few presidents have ventured -- a region where the president conducts warrantless wiretaps against Americans in violation of a federal statute, where he authorizes harsh interrogation methods that amount to torture.

When critics question the legality of the administration's actions, Bush and Cheney assert the commander in chief's power under Article II of the Constitution. When Congress passes a law forbidding torture, the White House appends a signing statement insisting that Article II -- the power of the commander in chief -- trumps everything else. When the administration's Republican friends suggest amending the wiretapping law to make its program legal, the administration refuses. Let's say it plainly: This is the arrogance of power, and it has gone too far in the Bush White House.

davidignatius@washpost.com

There were clear signs that something abnormal was going on when Bush Jr. declared, on December 31, 2002, that it was up to him alone to declare a war of aggression against Iraq, even though the U.S. Constitution divides war powers between the Congress and the President and emphatically states that only Congress can declare war: "The Congress shall have Power: To declare War,..."(Art. 1, sec. 8). On Dec. 18, 2001, George W. Bush perhaps spoke his mind when he said: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Everybody thought he was joking. —He wasn't.

To place himself above the law, Pres. Bush has used what is called "signing statements" hundreds of times. These are provisos he has added to newly adopted statutes that Congress sends him to be signed. With these statements, Bush expresses his intentions not to follow the said laws, if he chooses not to. By decreeing that he is above the law, as long as there is a war against terror and he is the Commander-in-Chief, Bush is in effect vetoing in advance the new bills he signs into law. He also reserves the right to ignore any other law on the books, if he chooses to. This is a royal prerogative that most legal scholars consider to be contrary to what was envisioned by the Fathers of the U.S. Constitution.

For example, Bush recently asserted that he has the power to ignore the recently adopted McCain amendment forbidding torture, to ignore the law that makes it illegal to conduct electronic surveillance on people within the United States without a warrant, to ignore the prohibition against indefinite detention without charges or trial, to ignore the Geneva Conventions to which the U.S. is signatory, etc. Moreover, Bush has also signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets.

On the precise question of illegal domestic eavesdropping that President Bush has confessed to having authorized since 2001, and which is being contested before the courts, it also appears that he publicly lied about it. On April 20, 2004, for instance, Bush emphatically proclaimed that "There are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way…" This was blatantly untrue, and he knew it, since he had personally authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap within the USA without a court order.

All this is in sharp contrast to the words of President James Madison (1751-1836), a prominent Father of the Constitution and the 4th U.S. President: “The [U.S.] Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war [and] the power of raising armies. A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well-checked governments. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.”

In a remarkable speech, on January 16, 2006, former Vice President Al Gore, winner of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election and whose election was stolen from him when many votes cast in his favor were not counted in Florida, echoed President Madison when he said: "We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law. I endorse the words of [former Congressman]Bob Barr, when he said, 'The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.' "

Incredibly, the most important newspaper in the United States, The New York Times, did not report Al Gore's speech, even though an important public figure raised fundamental questions about American democracy. This is not a complete surprise, since the leadership at the NYTimes also suppressed, for one full year, the information about the Bush administration violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by secretly and illegally spying on Americans'telephone calls and e-mail without getting warrants. Without this dereliction of duty on their part, it is possible that George W. Bush would not have been reelected in November 2004. Therefore, the highly concentrated American corporate media carry a large share of responsability regarding the relative degradation of democratic rule in the U.S.

These are quite amazing developments for a country that has prided itself until recently on being a model of democracy and on having a free press. Senators and Representatives had better wake up to these abuses of power before the Constitution-breaking 'imperial cult' of the presidency (under the newly invented and self-serving "unitary executive theory" of presidential power) becomes a reality. If not, they will have only themselves to blame for having failed to do their constitutional duty.

On a more practical level, all this political instability is bound to have serious economic consequences. The coming years risk being more tumultuous than many can possibly envisage.

Timothy Sparapani, an expert on privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the ACLU's response was one of incredulity, and alarm that many people are likely to be on the list by mistake, with serious impact on their lives and few, if any, means of getting themselves off it.

"The numbers continue to grow by leaps and bounds," Mr Sparapani said. He had no idea what methods were being used to add names to the database, but added: "I have to say we're probably adding names faster than we can figure out how to deal with them ... We worry greatly about the potential stain to anyone's life who ends up on this list."

It is unclear how many of the names on the list were collected as a result of a domestic wiretapping programme by the National Security Agency, the existence of which only became known through a leak in December.

Administration officials yesterday refused to confirm or deny the reported size of the NCTC list.

Thousands of Americans have only discovered their name, or a similar one, is on the list when they have been prevented from taking a commercial flight. Senator Edward Kennedy found himself in that position in 2004.

Mr Sparapani said he had heard officials from the Transport Security Agency estimate that about 30,000 people a year had been denied the right to board a flight because of the list.

The database was set up in 2003, initially with 75,000 names. The NCTC is the principal agency for analysing terrorist data, under the control of John Negroponte, the director for national intelligence.

Marc Rotenberg, the head of a watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said: "It's problematic not simply in the big brother way with the loss of privacy, but it's also problematic because it doesn't seem to work."

He said it was virtually impossible for those wrongly listed as terrorist suspects to clear their name. "We passed a very good law in the 1970s ... at least when the US government makes a decision about a US citizen, that process had to be transparent and people had to be able to appeal those decisions, but now those agencies get exemptions to the law."

Parade ranked the Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir as the world’s worst dictator. During his reign OECD countries gave his regime more than $6 billion in non-military aid. The U.S. accounted for more than $1 billion of that aid. Kim Jong-Il was ranked as the second worst dictator and received a little over $1 billion in aid, with more than half of it coming from the U.S. Than Shwe of Myanmar, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan round out the top five dictators on the list. The U.S. contributed $32 million to Myanmar, $1.1 billion to Zimbabwe, and $385 million to Uzbekistan.

Overall, OECD countries contributed aid to every one of Parade’s 20 worst dictators. Combined, these leaders received nearly $55 billion in aid. The U.S. contributed to 19 of the 20 worst dictators; King Abdulla of Saudi Arabia was somehow left off of the U.S. gravy train. In total, the U.S. contributed more than $7 billion in aid to these leaders. In North Korea, Belarus, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan the U.S. contributed more than 20 percent of the total aid these countries received from OECD countries.

Government-sponsored aid has failed to promote economic growth in the third world. From 1970 to 2000, more than $400 billion poured into poor African countries with no development to show for it. Parade’s list of dictators makes our foreign aid record even more disturbing. Not only has it failed to promote development, in many cases our aid has supported oppressive dictatorships.

Following Hamas’s recent victory in Palestine’s elections, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened to cut off aid to Palestine, saying, “The United States is not prepared to fund an organization that advocates the destruction of Israel, that advocates violence and that refuses its obligations.” Perhaps the U.S. should apply that policy to the dictators on Parade’s list as well. By providing aid to these dictators the U.S. has given them a source of funds to use to secure political support and likely prolonged their oppressive reigns.

The first rule of development policy should be to do no harm. Unfortunately OECD and U.S. aid have failed to promote development and actively promoted harm by aiding oppressive dictatorships. This kind of aid also unfortunately tends to undermine economic freedom by politicizing economic life in the recipient country and by preserving inefficient regimes. Over the last 30 years development aid has lowered measures of economic freedom in both dictatorships and democracies. To better promote freedom, and consequently development, we should end economic development aid to dictators and democracies alike.

Benjamin Powell, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute, an Oakland-based policy think tank and a professor of economics at San Jose State University.

Matt Ryan is an adjunct fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. and holds a Masters degree in Economics from San Jose State University.

"So far, we've only gone through one box and have just started the second box," she said Wednesday. "We expect to find much more."

Meanwhile, Maryland Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich Jr. delivered a scathing letter to the State Board of Elections Wednesday, lashing out at the agency for intending to use Diebold's systems for the upcoming 2006 election while California and Pennsylvania have either decertified or refused to certify the voting systems, which recent studies show can easily be hacked to manipulate votes.

"I no longer have confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006," the Republican governor stated in the four-page letter.

At the center of both controversies is Linda Lamone, administrator of the State Board of Elections, who did not immediately return several calls seeking comment over the last two days.

Upsets and unusual outcomes

In November 2002, Lamone, a Democrat, allowed Diebold to operate its machines in four counties for the state gubernatorial election. That was when Ehrlich became the first Republican governor to be elected in 36 years in what had always been known as a solidly Democratic state.

That was also the year when a Republican political newcomer, a self-described "nobody," ousted a veteran Democratic state senator in what The Baltimore Sun described as "one of the most remarkable election upsets in recent Maryland political history."

After serving for several decades, Democratic House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. lost his Allegany County seat to LeRoy E. Myers. Allegany County was one of the four counties where Diebold machines were used that year.

In March 2004, during the presidential primary elections, Maryland became one of only two states in the country to use Diebold voting machines throughout the entire state. A month later, Schade filed her lawsuit in an attempt to prevent Diebold from running the upcoming November 2004 presidential elections, accusing Lamone in the suit of "recklessly certifying" the machines for the primary elections.

But at the time, Schade had no idea that Lamone had not even bothered certifying the machines. In fact, the machines did not get certified until the following month. The machines were finally certified May 20, 2004.

Though now certified, machines still may not meet FEC standards

And the fact that they were eventually certified does not even place them in compliance with the law, said Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, who has been studying flaws within computer voting machines since the 1990s.

"The question is, should it have even been certified in the first place?" he asked. "My reading of the 1990 and 2002 standards suggests that use of the software from the PCMCIA cards should not have been in use in the first place."

Jones is referring to the standards put forth by the Federal Election Commission in those years, which the states have to legally abide by in order to receive federal funding.

An easily altered paper trail

The Diebold voting machines used in Maryland since 2002 use a common PCMCIA card, which record the numbers of votes cast on that particular machine during an election. When the polls close, election workers are suppose to print out results from each machine before shipping the PCMCIA card to a the main elections office.

Just last month, computer expert Harri Hursti showed Florida election officials in Leon County how easily these cards can be manipulated in a study now known as the "Hursti Hack."

"What Harri discovered was that using a laptop and a PCMCIA card reader, which you can buy on the Internet, he could change the contents of the card," Jones said. "He could reprogram the card to print anything he wanted and it only took seconds."

The contents on the card, which are shipped off to the main elections office, remain unchanged, but the printout, the only paper trail produced by the machines, end up altered, he said.

"And the paper trail is what most people would look at to verify an election," he said.

Skyrocketing costs and financial incentives

Despite the obvious flaws and election law violations, Lamone still managed to run up a multimillion dollar budget to maintain the Diebold machines, according to the governor's letter.

"The cost of Maryland's Diebold voting machines has skyrocketed as our confidence in the system has plummeted," he said.

"At the time, the General Assembly's fiscal note for House Bill 1457 estimated that the total cost would be $36,890,000. The actual cost, which has been financed by the state by the State Treasurer was $65,564,674 – an almost 78 percent increase from the original cost estimate.

"However, this misjudgment pales in comparison to the 1000 percent increase for estimates of the annual maintenance costs for the system," the letter states.

Schade, who ran for state legislator in 2002 under the Green Party and has spent the last two years researching the situation, said that Lamone authorized more than $111 million in contracts to Diebold since 2002. She also believes there is a conflict of interest between Lamone and Diebold because for the past two years, Lamone has been president of the National Association of State Election Directors, which approves all voting machines before they are used.

"You can imagine the financial incentives that are used to cozy up to NASED," she said.

The document, which shows the date of Diebold's certification, can be found here. The report date is the date the machines and software were certified.