Nat Hentoff @ The Village Voice: Why Is the Bush Administration So "Afraid of Freedom?"

For a government that can't say 10 words without adding that, "Terrorists hate our freedoms and that is why they want to kill us", it's bloody amazing (and bloody, it is) that there has perhaps never been a president or his administration so afraid of American "freedom" and so willing to rescind it as the Bush-Cheney crew.

Wherever you look, whatever you read, time and again, we see them shredding the Constitution, drowning habeas corpus (again, not an American invention, but one dating back to the 1200s and considered one of the foundations of true civilization), trying to limit free speech, and increasing the surveillance on the most private and personal of our communications.

Thankfully, one of the U.S. media outlets that still remembers what the First Amendment means is the Village Voice, and one of their best voices on the subject has been and remains Nat Hentoff, who asks this week, "Is America Afraid of Freedom?" Here's a (albeit generous) snip:

The Bush administration's sudden decision to apparently end the president's illegal unleashing of the National Security Agency's secret, warrantless spying on us does not offer an armistice on the Bush team's pursuit of the press as a danger to national security.

If you look behind the curtain of this "retreat" on the commander-in-chief's "inherent power" to deal with terror as he sees fit, it is not clear whether placing the responsibility on the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—which hears only government lawyers before it makes a ruling—means the court will issue individual warrants or a blanket dragnet of warrants not attached to a specific person. A classic example are the "John Doe" nameless warrants attached to a particular telephone and everyone using it. Similarly, an Internet provider could be served with such a blanket warrant.

Also, the president in no way acknowledges that he broke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the NSA's warrantless filling of FBI and CIA databases in its secret spying. As New York Times legal analyst Adam Liptak noted on January 19: "The administration continues to maintain it is free to operate without court approval." The president has not embraced the Fourth Amendment and judicial review of his "inherent" powers, despite his backtracking on the warrantless spying."

Furthermore, in a little–noticed declaration on January 17, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, said in a speech at Washington's American Enterprise Institute that federal judges are not "equipped to make decisions" about actions taken by the commander-in-chief regarding national security. "A judge," said Gonzales, "will never be in the position to know what is in the national security interest of the country." So judges should back off.

The ever–loyal attorney general would not have issued this manifesto of unchecked presidential powers without knowing he had the approval of the man who made him what he is today.

Get the rest here; and yes, it's free but don't be afraid.