Civil rights under assault like at no other time I can recall

The Pentagon is spying on antiwar activists.

A UMass Dartmouth student gets visited by agents because he requested "Quotations from Chairman Mao" at his library for use on a paper about fascism and totalitarianism.

Of course, we've got the huge National Security Agency wiretaps on international calls and emails, without warrants.

We've long since forgotten the number of American citizens and legal residents were swept up and incarcerated for long periods during the months right after 9/11.

Many Americans are beginning to accept the fact that the Bushlings jammed the Iraq War down our throats and made us wash it down with lies.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not aberrations. They are part of a pattern and a result of actual policies adopted at the top and tacitly approved of.

Don't forget the number of stories planted by secret contractors hired by the Pentagon to win support in Iraq and the Arab world for the Bush administration and its policies. And now we hear that Republican uber-lobbyist and soon-to-be jailbird Jack Abramoff had been paying high-tone, think-tank experts to write and publish op-eds supporting his clients' interests.

The administration has often done its own buying of truth, seeding journalists with money to plant favorable stories.

Bush's oft-repeated remark that the terrorists "hate us for our freedom" is getting a little ironic. What freedoms would those be, Mr. President, the ones you're violating at every turn?

A friend of mine and I have started a rather cryptic game of "What's next?" Given that torture and secret prisons, extraordinary renditions and disappearances are already taken, the only other shoe to drop — and, horrifyingly, the most likely — is death squads.

The natural extension of the unnatural rationale, authored by John Yoo and seconded in many ways by AG Alberto Gonzales, Timothy Flanigan and other Justice Dept. hacks, would be that the president has the authority as commander-in-chief to send secret teams in to kill people.

In El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and other trouble spots around the world we have called these death squads. Were Bush to undertake such a thing, wouldn't we have to call them death squads, too?

When these squads get discovered, heaven forbid, don't be surprised to hear the administration, in its defense, refer to them as "freedom squads."