The Bush agenda

The US President George Bush cemented his softly-softly approach to his old friend Vladimir Putin yesterday, admitting he would not be tackling him on the state of Russian democracy or Chechnya at the G8 summit.

That is a great idea seeing that the US has now got a bigger problem right in their own home. Al Qaeda released a video that reflects a significant change in how it operates which is to recruit ordinary American Muslims who might be offended, as many ordinary Americans are, by America's mistakes and moral failings in carrying out the war on terrorism.

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration's response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

The same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints particularly that of the Geneva Convention.

At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President George W. Bush's illegal actions - to amend the law to negate the court's ruling.

Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the U.S. military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of U.S. justice.

Retaliation is a result of provocation. They must accept that. They're guilty of provocation and no matter how much they always try to point their fingers at others, the truth is finally out.

It was embarassing when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of "civilized peoples," "judicial guarantees" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" do they find confusing?

The administration's intent to use the war on terror to buttress presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its wiretapping program. Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. They simply ignore the issue.

Bush's constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed September 11 is gone. The president had no need to go it alone - everyone wanted to go with him. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.

The horror of September 11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans' deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Civil liberties have been trampled. The nation's image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about. American agents "disappear" people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands.