The fact that 24 presents the enemies of the US as dehumanised beings who are willing to kill even their own children in their terrorist fight against a democratic society suggests that the upholders of law and life are left with no alternatives, so that torture becomes acceptable in extreme situations.

The series also gives the impression that torture is not always as bad as its reputation. In one scene a CTU director used a stun gun repeatedly against a female staff member who was assumed to have knowledge that could prevent the meltdown. What was her reaction when the director realised she was not involved in the plot? She was disappointed with her superior for mistrusting her, but then demanded a pay rise and went back to her desk. Just another bad day at work.

This presentation of what we can call the torture dilemma, combined with the minimisation of the effects of torture, make it necessary to reiterate two facts that are increasingly questioned in anti-terrorism provisions:

- The prohibition against torture in international law is absolute: nothing can justify torture. This principle is reflected in the United Nations Convention Against Torture amongst other international law instruments. The logic is that allowing torture in exceptional circumstances would open a Pandora's box and would lead to a situation in which states would be at liberty to respond to perceived extraordinary crises by diluting existing definitions of torture.

In the words of the British law lord, Lord Hope of Craigshead: "A single instance, if approved to meet the threat of international terrorism, would establish a principle with the power to grow and expand so that everything that falls within it would be regarded as acceptable."

The US detention camp at Guantánamo aptly illustrates the problem. The UN has recently criticised the US for using interrogation methods amounting to torture against detainees at the camp. The US government denies the charges, relying instead on its own interpretation of what constitutes torture, an interpretation that is far narrower than that of the UN convention, to which the US is a signatory.

- In the real world torture is even worse than its reputation. Torture is not only about the immediate pain; it is also about the all-encompassing fear associated with being completely at the mercy of one's torturers.

In most cases the actual physical and/or psychological abuse coupled with complete helplessness makes the victim's subsequent life a hell of depression, rage, anxiety, nightmares and feelings of guilt, which are a few of the common consequences of torture. The victim's family is heavily affected too. And all of this happens whether the victim is in fact "guilty" or not.

These two crucial factors - the slippery slope associated with questioning the absoluteness of the prohibition against torture, and the effects of torture in the real world - must be at the forefront of the debate at a time when leading democratic countries have implicitly and explicitly expressed reservations as to that absoluteness.

Any attempt to open a Pandora's box, in entertainment or the real world, should raise deep concern. Torture is not something you walk away from with a disappointed shrug, whether at the hands of your boss at the office, hooded thugs in a soundproof room at the back of the local police station, or foreign soldiers in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib. And it is no less torture when secret agents working for democratic governments use stun guns and electric cables to interrogate another human being than when the henchmen of dictatorships extract their victims' fingernails or burn them with irons.

Those who claim otherwise are playing a dangerous game, and contributing to a treacherous discourse that has developed in the context of the war on terror, a discourse that has caused a slow but unmistakable shift of norms and values to the point that it has become plausible to suggest that torture can be used in a responsible and morally sound fashion. It cannot.

In empirical terms, history does not give us one single example to support the claim that there can be such a thing as responsible use of torture. No torturing governments in the history of humanity, whether dictatorships or democracies, have limited their use of torture to indisputable ticking-bomb scenarios. If anything, the present US government's unclear policies on torture and the resulting abuses at detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have confirmed the lesson that any opening, however small, that allows the use of torture will turn instantly into a festering gap, even when the perpetrator is a leading democracy.

The claim that there can be responsible use of torture ignores the fact that, even in theoretical terms, foolproof safeguards against mistakes (such as that of the stun gun incident in 24) are not possible. Nothing can establish beyond doubt that the guy in custody is the right guy. That the information leading to his arrest is 100% reliable. That he does not just look convincingly like the real guy. That he has not been set up.

The logical next step is to allow torture on the grounds of justified suspicion. And so it goes. Accept a shift of norms, however small and well argued, and you blow the lid off Pandora's box. Allow a little torture and no one will be entirely safe.

According to the influential Rome-based La Repubblica, Carlo Rossella -- at the time editor-in-chief of Berlusconi's Panorama, one of Italy's largest weeklies -- delivered the dossier in the autumn of 2002 to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Rossella's actions were puzzling because its top investigative reporter, Elisabetta Burba, was in the midst of discounting the file as a gross falsification.

Besides directing Panorama, Rossella -- once a foreign policy advisor to Berlusconi -- had been considered a candidate to direct RAI, Italy's state broadcasting system.

A more direct connection to Berlusconi is Giovanni Castellaneta, current Italian ambassador to the United States and Berlusconi's former national security adviser.

According to La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of SISMI, tried to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers and failed. Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy and currently national security advisor. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and has been confirmed by White House officials.

It was after this meeting that the story of the yellowcake uranium ore from Niger took off. In late September, CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in separate classified hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In advance of President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, Hadley asked for the CIA's approval to include the Niger claim in the president's speech. Even though the CIA had explicitly excised the claim from a prior address given by the president and now repeated its misgivings to Hadley, Bush ended up saying in his speech that, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush attributed this intelligence to the British government. No mention was made of any connections between the Italian and American governments.

What did the Berlusconi government get in return for providing the Bush administration with a convenient "smoking gun" to attack Iraq? At the end of the yellowcake trail may be the prestigious contract an Italian firm won to manufacture Marine One -- the fleet of presidential helicopters. In January 2005, the U.S. Navy awarded the contract for the construction of 23 new Marine One helicopters to AgustaWestland. Marketing itself as an Anglo-Italian firm, AgustaWestland is wholly owned by Finmeccanica, Italy's largest defense conglomerate.

The choice of AgustaWestland for Marine One surprised most industry observers because U.S.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. was the heavy favorite. Sikorsky patented the first helicopter design in 1939 and built virtually every president's helicopter since 1957. President Eisenhower regularly flew in a Sikorsky to his Gettysburg farm, and the Sikorsky that Nixon boarded when he resigned from the White House is now being restored for permanent display at the Nixon Library.

Not only did Sikorsky lose, but it lost to a foreign firm that has no problems selling its helicopters to the United States' adversaries. (See side bar, "Choppers for Sale, to Everyone")

As with the yellowcake dossier, the key figure in the Marine One contract is Gianni Castellaneta. When the Pentagon put the Marine One contract out for bid, Castellaneta was deputy chair of Finmeccanica and national security advisor to Prime Minister Berlusconi. By the time the contract was awarded, Castellaneta had been appointed Italy's ambassador to the United States.

Castellaneta proudly told U.S. Italia Weekly, "At noon President Bush received me for the official delivery of credentials. He didn't make me wait a single day. An exceptional courtesy."

Castellaneta's role in obtaining the Marine One contract has never been examined before, but according to Affari Italiani, Italy's first online daily, and disarmo.org, an Italian arms control advocacy group, Castellaneta has long managed the most sensitive dossiers in U.S.-Italian bilateral relations.

When Ambassador Castellaneta was asked about his role, the embassy press officer, Luca Ferrari said, "In his capacity as ambassador, representing all of Italy in the United States, the ambassador does not care to speak any more about Finmeccanica."

"Castellaneta's double role as ambassador and corporate businessman has come under scrutiny at various junctures," says Carlo Bonini, an Italian journalist who has extensively investigated the yellowcake affair. "His duality has inspired animated debate in the Italian Parliament, but due to the absolute majority of seats held by Berlusconi, the matter could never be fully discussed."

With center-left opposition leader Romano Prodi taking the helm of Italy's new government, the newly reconfigured Parliament is expected to open a probe into the "Yellowcake One" affair. For Italians, the main question is whether Berlusconi personally profited from the helicopter deal. For Americans, the question is whether the Bush administration paid the Italians back for providing the false intelligence that helped justify launching the war in Iraq.

Bush and Blair are trying to offset the unpopularity of their chosen war by appealing to a verdict of history we will never hear

If democracy is supposed to represent the will of the people, then there is either something wrong with the democracies or something wrong with the people on both sides of the Atlantic. Less than two years ago George Bush was re-elected president of the United States. His pitch: "Stick with me, I have not done a thing wrong." His promise: "I will do more of the same." Six months later Tony Blair went to the polls with a similar message.

Both were elected. Both have since been as good their word. With the exception of Dick Cheney's poor marksmanship and John Prescott's priapism there have been no real surprises since then.

Yet both now find themselves wallowing at dismal levels of public support. Blair has the lowest approval rating of any Labour premier on record - dipping below Harold Wilson in 1968 during the post-devaluation crisis. Bush similarly keeps plumbing new depths - currently standing at just over half the level Clinton enjoyed in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal. If there were an election tomorrow, both would struggle.

On the domestic front, the route by which they got to this point and the time they have to recover differ. Blair has strayed too far from the core interests of the party he represents. Bush has stuck too closely to his. Bush must stay and face the music until January 2009, and no one knows who will replace him; Blair could go at any moment, and his heir apparent lives next door and is champing at the bit.

But both move into the twilight of their political careers with colleagues and commentators looking over their shoulders at potential successors, like social climbers at a cocktail party. From now on they are not fighting for their political lives - their days on that score are literally numbered, even if in Blair's case we are not sure quite what the number is - but for their political obituaries. In the time that remains, they are focused not on legislation but legacy.

The trouble is that the issue on which those legacies will be judged is the one where they have given themselves the least room for political manoeuvre and over which they now have the least day-to-day control: Iraq.

According to a morgue report, last month sectarian fighting claimed 1,100 Iraqi lives in Baghdad alone. Meanwhile, the death toll of US soldiers has risen to roughly three a day - back to the higher levels of last year. According to a Pew poll in March, half of Americans favour immediate troop withdrawal and less than a third approve of the way Bush is handling the war. In the UK, a Newsnight poll showed 60% believed that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.

Both Bush and Blair staked their reputations on this war. They made their pledges to tough it out the hallmark of their leadership style. Yet the premises on which they entered it were false and the conduct of it remains flawed. Militarily, they are unable to move forward; politically, they are incapable of turning back. They are desperate for everyone to change the subject and yet are stuck with the subject they themselves chose.

"The diplomatic historian traces foreign affairs as if domestic affairs were offstage disturbances," writes Walter Karp in The Politics of War. "The historian of domestic politics treats the explosions of war as if they were offstage disturbances. Were that true, we would have to believe that presidents who faced a mounting sea of troubles at home have none the less conducted their foreign policy without the slightest regard for those troubles - that individual presidents were divided into watertight compartments, one labelled 'domestic' and the other 'foreign'."

The relationship between this foreign misadventure and these domestic mishaps is contextual rather than causal. Iraq has become a signifier for leaders who do not listen, politicians who mislead, and political priorities that are out of kilter with the public need. These are sentiments that transfer easily to gas prices and Hurricane Katrina in the US as much as to school reform and ID cards in Britain. The war "is like a fog that just envelops the entire political atmosphere", Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report told the Los Angeles Times. According to a CBS poll in April, almost two-thirds of Americans think Bush describes things in Iraq as better than they are. In the Newsnight poll, 52% of Britons said their opinion of Blair has gone down as a result of the war. More Americans rank the war as the most important issue facing the country than those who prioritise the economy, immigration and terrorism put together. But that is still only 27%.

These statistics are not coming from the same place. These two leaders sold different wars to different electorates. The Bush administration used the terrorist attacks in New York as the pretext for this war; terrorists used this war as the pretext for attacking London. The Bush administration responded to the attacks with a policy of pre-emptive strikes and regime change in which WMD were central but not crucial. In his post-9/11 speech, Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" but evoked Congo and Kyoto, not Iraq or Iran. Finally, most Americans supported the war until last year; bar a brief period at the outset, most Britons never did.

But, for all these differences, what the war exposed both in the UK and the US were democratic deficits that failed to check or balance the bellicose machismo of either man. In Britain the dislocation between public will and foreign policy was blatant. Somehow an issue of war and peace that raged through the country was marginalised in parliament and erased from the cabinet. In the US the public barely got a look in. A supine press and spineless Democrats ensured that no alternative arguments or strategies would emerge until it was too late. The people are not fickle but their democracies are dysfunctional.

As a result, both leaders got precisely what they wanted. Unchecked by political opposition at home, unfettered by international law abroad, unpersuaded by argument at home and abroad, like Sinatra they did it their way. And so, since they have no one else to blame and find themselves out of credit at the goodwill bank of public opinion, they reach for the arbiter of last resort: history.

Not the history that has passed. Not the history of Kenya or Vietnam which taught us that the suppression of a colonised people can only be sustained through barbarism. Certainly not the history in which Winston Churchill advocated gassing the Kurds and the US continued to support Saddam Hussein as an ally after the Halabja massacres.

In their desire for legacy, they seek not the history that records the past but a history of the future: an abstract verdict that we cannot argue with for the simple reason that it hasn't been made yet.

"History will prove the decision we made to be the right decision," said Bush in 2003.

"If we are wrong," argued Blair, "we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive."

Rebutted by the past and rejected in the present, their only hope is the future imperfect. Only when we are all dead will the genius of this war finally become clear.

Last week the committee, whose members are appointed by Tony Blair and report to him, cleared MI5 of blame after it failed to thwart the attacks, which killed 52 innocent people and injured more than 700. It concluded that MI5 had no reason to suspect Khan of plotting attacks in Britain. He was regarded as "peripheral" to higher priorities.

The new evidence shows MI5 monitored Khan when he met suspects allegedly planning another, separate attack; that he had knowledge of the "late-stage discussions" of this plot; and that he was recorded having discussions with them about making a bomb and leaving the country. He was also recorded talking about his plans to wage jihad - holy war - and go to Al-Qaeda terrorist camps abroad.

Yesterday David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "If this is true, it completely undermines the basis on which the ISC did its report."

Patrick Mercer, the Tory spokesman on homeland security, said: "Unless there is a proper independent inquiry, there is a danger of the committee's report being interpreted as a whitewash."

A committee member, who asked not to be named, admitted that it had not seen transcripts of MI5's recordings of Khan. Instead, it had taken evidence from senior security officials and accepted their judgment that there was no reason to regard Khan as a serious threat.

The MP said that if the transcripts showed Khan had been involved in discussions about bomb-making and another possible attack, the committee had been seriously misled. "If that is the case, it amounts to a scandal," said the source. "I would be outraged."

Rachel North, a survivor of the bomb at King's Cross, was shocked by the disclosure: "I am shaking with anger.

In the absence of an independent inquiry answering the public's questions, I had hoped that those who heard the evidence behind closed doors on our behalf would find out the answers for us.

"They did not find out nor tell us the whole truth, and I feel badly, desperately let down."

The disclosures will increase pressure for a public inquiry into the atrocity, with greater powers to demand evidence and interrogate witnesses.

The government also failed to address concerns about what MI5 knew when they were raised in unreported exchanges in the Commons last week. Davis referred to the existence of the tape recordings when he addressed John Reid, the home secretary.

"It seems that MI5 taped Mohammad Sidique Khan talking about his wish to fight in the jihad and saying his goodbyes to his family - a clear indication that he was intending a suicide mission . . . he was known to have attended late-stage discussions on planning another major terror attack. Again, I ask the home secretary whether that is true."

Reid said the questions were "legitimate" but failed to answer them.

While Bush doesn't always join personally in the attack-dog operations, he has a remarkable record of never calling off the dogs, letting his surrogates inflict the damage while he winks his approval. In some cases, however, such as the punishment of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, Bush has actually gotten his hands dirty. [See below.]

The Bush-on-the-sidelines cases are illustrated by what happened to the Dixie Chicks, a three-woman country-western band that has faced three years of boycotts because lead singer, Natalie Maines, criticized Bush as he was stampeding the nation toward war with Iraq.

During a March 10, 2003, concert in London, Maines, a Texan, remarked, "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Two days later - just a week before Bush launched the Iraq invasion - she added, "I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world."

With war hysteria then sweeping America, the right-wing attack machine switched into high gear, organizing rallies to drive trucks over Dixie Chicks CDs and threatening country-western stations that played Dixie Chicks music. Maines later apologized, but it was too late to stop the group's songs from falling down the country music charts.

On April 24, 2003, with the Iraq War barely a month old, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Bush about the boycott of the Dixie Chicks. The President responded that the singers "can say what they want to say," but he added that his supporters then had an equal right to punish the singers for their comments.

"They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out," Bush said. "Freedom is a two-way street."

So, instead of encouraging a full-and-free debate, Bush made clear that he saw nothing wrong with his followers hurting Americans who disagree with him.

Pattern of Attack

Other celebrities who opposed the Iraq War, such as Sean Penn, got a similar treatment. Bush's supporters even gloated when Penn lost acting work because he had criticized the rush to war.

"Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring about consequences. Whoa, dude!" chortled pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, cited as justification for Penn's punishment the actor's comment during a pre-war trip to Iraq that "I cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." [MSNBC transcript, May 18, 2003]

In other words, no matter how reasonable or accurate the concerns expressed by Bush's Iraq War critics, they could expect retaliation.

With Bush's quiet encouragement, his supporters also denigrated skeptical U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters and renaming "French fries" as "freedom fries."

Bush's backers even mocked U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for not finding WMD in Iraq in the weeks before the U.S. invasion. CNBC's right-wing comic Dennis Miller likened Blix's U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.

As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. The problem wasn't the incompetence of Blix but the fact that Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD were false, as Bush's arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded after the invasion.

But the critics never got any apologies or repair to the careers. As CBS's "60 Minutes" reported in a segment on May 14, 2006, the Dixie Chicks were still haunted by the pro-Bush boycott three years later.

"They have already paid a huge price for their outspokenness, and not just monetarily," said correspondent Steve Kroft. Sometimes, Iraq War supporters even turned to threats of violence.

During one tour, lead singer Maines was warned, "You will be shot dead at your show in Dallas," forcing her to perform there under tight police protection, said the group's banjo player, Emily Robison. In another incident, a shotgun was pointed at a radio station's van because it had the group's picture on the side, Robison said.

Though the Dixie Chicks are still shunned by many country-western stations, they have refused to back down. Indeed, one of their new songs - entitled "Not Ready to Make Nice" - takes on the hatred and intolerance they faced for voicing an opinion about Bush and the Iraq War.

As Kroft noted, "Not Ready to Make Nice" received favorable reviews and became one of the most downloaded country songs on the Internet, but it still "fizzled on the charts" as Bush supporters called up stations and demanded that it never be played.

Asked to explain why these tactics work, Maines said, "when you're in the corporate world, and when that's your livelihood, and when 100 people e-mail you that they'll never listen to your station again, you get scared of losing your job. And why did they need to stand up for us? They're not our friends. They're not our family. And they cave." [CBS's "60 Minutes," May 14, 2006]

The Plame Case

But what's most troubling is that this intolerance toward dissent is not simply overzealous Bush supporters acting out, but rather loyal followers who are getting their signals from the top levels of the Bush administration.

For instance, a new federal court filing by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney apparently instigated the campaign to punish former Ambassador Wilson for his criticism of the administration's claims that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from Africa.

After reading Wilson's July 6, 2003, opinion article in the New York Times, Cheney scrawled questions in the space above the article, according to the court filing. Cheney's questions would soon shape the hostile talking points that White House officials and their right-wing supporters would spread against Wilson and his CIA officer wife, Valerie Plame.

"Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the Vice President and the defendant - his chief of staff [I. Lewis Libby] - on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to these assertions," according to a May 12, 2006, filing by Fitzgerald.

Cheney's questions addressed the reasons why the CIA sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out - and ultimately discredit - suspicions about Iraq allegedly seeking "yellowcake" uranium from Africa.

"Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?" Cheney wrote. "Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

Though Cheney did not write down Plame's name, his questions indicate that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her husband's assignment to check out the Niger reports.

Over the next several days, White House officials, including Libby and Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, allegedly disseminated information about Plame's CIA identity to journalists in the context of knocking down Wilson's critical article. In effect, the White House tried to cast Wilson's trip as a case of nepotism arranged by his wife.

On July 14, 2003, Plame was publicly identified as a CIA operative in a column by right-wing commentator Robert Novak, destroying her career at the CIA and forcing the spy agency to terminate the undercover operation that she had headed. A CIA complaint to the Justice Department prompted an investigation into the illegal exposure of a CIA officer.

Initially, when the investigation was still under the direct control of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush and other White House officials denied any knowledge about the leak. Bush pretended that he wanted to get to the bottom of the matter.

"If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. "I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true."

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started - since he was involved in starting it - he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.

Failed Cover-up

The cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Fitzgerald - the U.S. Attorney in Chicago - was named as the special prosecutor. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively, even demanding that journalists testify about the White House leaks.

In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald added that his investigation had uncovered government documents that "could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson" because of his criticism of the administration's handling of the Niger evidence.

Beyond the actual Plame leak, the White House oversaw a public-relations strategy to denigrate Wilson. The Republican National Committee put out talking points ridiculing Wilson, and the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading claims about his honesty in a WMD report.

Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay - and for reporting accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims - the Bush administration sought to smear the former ambassador and, in so doing, destroyed his wife's career and the effectiveness of her undercover work on WMDs. Plame has since quit the CIA.

The common thread linking the Plame case to the attacks on the Dixie Chicks and other anti-war celebrities is Bush's all-consuming intolerance of dissent.

Rather than welcome contrary opinions and use them to refine his own thinking, Bush operates from the premise that his "gut" judgments are right and all they require is that the American people get in line behind him.

Bush then views any continued criticism as evidence of disloyalty. While Bush will tolerate people voicing disagreement, he feels they should pay a steep price, exacted by Bush's loyalists inside and outside the government.

So, when Bush's supporters malign his critics as "traitors" and spit out other hate-filled expressions bordering on exhortations to violence, Bush sees no obligation to rein in the intimidating rhetoric.

Instead, Bush almost seems to relish the punishments meted out to Americans who dissent.