Casting aside justice: by claiming the power to imprison terrorist suspects without trial, or to send them abroad to be tortured by foreign secret police, President Bush is creating precedents that imperil the rights of U.S. citizens.(EXECUTIVE BRANCH)(Cover Story)

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

--O'Brien, torture specialist in George Orwell's 1984

Roughly a century and a half before Orwell published 1984, his cautionary tale of endless dictatorship through perpetual war, British statesman Edmund Burke warned that "criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred." That which we authorize our government to do to anyone, it can do to everyone. If we permit the government supposedly protecting us to ignore the constitutional limits on its powers, it will quickly become the single greatest threat to our own lives and liberties.

The Bush administration, and those who dutifully echo its rhetoric, insist that everything changed on 9/11. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counter-terrorist unit, insisted in congressional testimony in 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off."

As Burke observed, once a government removes those "gloves," it will only put them on again when it is forced to do so. And once a state--any state --gets the scent of blood in its nostrils, it tends to become less than discriminating in its targets.

Many conservatives consider it something akin to sedition or treason to criticize the Bush administration for claiming that the president has unlimited power to deal as he sees fit with anyone he designates as an enemy in the "war on terror." This perspective rests on two completely unjustified assumptions. The first is that George W. Bush, being a better man than Bill Clinton (hardly the highest hurdle to surmount), can be entrusted with extraordinary powers. The second is that the powers in question would always be used against "them"--that is, the "worst of the worst"--rather than against "us."

Mr. Bush's trustworthiness, or lack thereof, aside, he is constitutionally required to step down in January 2009. His successor could very well be a second president Clinton (or a first president Rodham), or someone of similar ideological inclinations who might look on "right-wing extremists" as the domestic equivalent of al-Qaeda. Once again, that which we authorize the government to do to anyone, it can do to everyone.