The Consortium -- Richard Milhous W. Bush

George W. Bush is fast building a political system of secrecy and snooping that Richard Milhous Nixon would have died for. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush has asserted broad powers to wiretap, spy on and imprison indefinitely people he deems a threat to national security – authority far beyond what was available to the famously paranoid Nixon.

Bush’s executive powers are already so sweeping they may be unprecedented in U.S. history. While some of Bush’s supporters cite prior suspensions of constitutional rights during the Civil War and World War II, those eras lacked today’s technology to pry into the most personal details of the lives of Americans.

When Nixon was president, opposition Democrats held the congressional levers that permitted investigations into Nixon's domestic spying. The national news media also approached its duties with far more professionalism. The federal courts, too, were less partisan and less likely to rubber-stamp White House assertions of national security.

Now, with all those checks and balances either gone or substantially weakened, there is little to interfere with Bush's consolidation of power or a return to Nixon-style abuses.

Attorney General Ashcroft testified to Congress last December that those who object to "phantoms of lost liberty" only serve to "aid terrorists – for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." According to Ashcroft, those who question the administration's policies "give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."

Some peace activists already find themselves blacklisted by federal agencies from flying on commercial airlines. Others say they are singled out for special searches and delays.

The machinery is quickly being moved into place for a crackdown on those Americans whom Bush may judge to be not with him and thus with the terrorists.