My only quibble with this New York Times editorial is in the first paragraph:

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.

Some of us realized what was going on a lot sooner. Like when Attorney General John Ashcroft suggested habeas corpus be suspended indefinitely. He wanted this written into the original version of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was introduced to Congress on September 19, 2001.

At the time, I thought Ashcroft was just being hysterical. The alarm bells went off for me, however, when President Bush issued an executive order allowing former presidents to keep their presidential records sealed indefinitely. In this case “indefinitely” means that former president’s life plus the life of anyone designated by that former president to act in his behalf postpartum. Bush signed this on November 1, 2001.

I figured at the time he was up to something. I don’t see any reason why a future president couldn’t countermand that executive order, but still … Anyway, back to the New York Times.

Over and over again, 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. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The editorial then goes into more detail on the way Bush handled the Guantánamo Bay Prison —

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity. …

… The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American 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 — as military lawyers wanted to do — 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 American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

— and eavesdropping on Americans —

Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

The editorial concludes with an assessment of the cost of executive arrogance.

The president’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 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. 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. …

… To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ 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, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

The editorial also cites this article by Jane Mayer from the July 3 issue of The New Yorker on the “effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers.”

If you google “New York Times treason” you get no end of anti-NY Times calumniation, and not all from the Right. Today the righties are linking to a Little Green Footballs post titled “The Media Are the Enemy.” (I don’t link to lgf, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you really want to read it.) I gather from other rightie posts that a New York Times photographer took a photo of a Shiite militia sniper aiming at Americans, and the righties are outraged. Expect more calls for Times managers and staffers to be hunted down. And you know the bleepheads are taking their cues from the GOP and White House insiders.

I guess the Times editorial page just returned fire.

It’s a shame the reporting side isn’t so, um, uncompromised. Glenn Greenwald explains that the Times (and the Washington Post, and Time) mis-reported the Specter bill, making it sound as if the President were giving ground to Congress.

It wasn’t just the Post which fundamentally misled its readers about this bill. So, too, did Eric Lichtblau in his article in The New York Times (“The proposed legislation represents a middle-ground approach among the myriad proposals in Congress for dealing with the wiretapping controversy”).

Today’s editorial described the Senate hearings differently —

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came 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?

Today’s Washington Post carries amuch more docile article written by David Broder and Dan Balz titled “How Common Ground of 9/11 Gave Way to Partisan Split.” Instead of actually explaining how the common ground of 9/11 gave way to a partisan split, Broder and Balz delicately tiptoe around the elephant in the living room and blame, um, partisanship.

I say the effort is a waste of ink and paper, not to mention bandwidth. Joe Gandelman calls it a must-read, but I am not persuaded.

See also the Los Angeles Times, “License to Wiretap.”