The Bush crowd are running around Capitol Hill the past few days trying to get permission from Congress to torture people and tap your phone lines without a warrant.

The administration has always held all these things are legal, so one must assume they want to make them double legal.

Yesterday’s installation of Dan Froomkin’s "White House Briefing" in the “Washington Post” gives a fairly good idea of the arm-twisting Bush, Prick Cheney, and Karl Rove are resorting to.

Bush was busy telling people that “as long as the War Crimes Act hangs over their [interrogators’} heads, they will not take the steps necessary to protect Americans.”

Beware. The administration is breezily making the idea of torture and “protecting Americans” the same thing.

Wonder if FDR needed torture to win World War II?

Among some of the things they’d like is the suspension of “habeas corpus” a fundamental right for all detainees and the thing which separates from the likes of, let’s say, Saddam Hussein.

Froomkin quoted an article in the “Philadelphia Inquirer” by Yale Professor Bruce Ackerman:

“Consider the case of Jose Padilla. A few months after Sept. 11, the president declared him an ‘enemy combatant,’ and locked him up in a military brig for three and a half years. During all this time, Padilla was denied the right to challenge his detention before a military or civilian tribunal...

“This gives the presidency a terrible precedent for the next Sept. 11. We all hope that this attack won’t come for a long time. But the day after the next tragedy, the Padilla case will be invoked to support the president if he sweeps hundreds or thousands into military detention. After a year or two the Supreme Court may intervene on the side of freedom. But perhaps the vote will go 5-4 the wrong way.

“It can’t happen to me, we tell ourselves. Very few Americans have done anything to support the Islamo-fascists, whatever [p]resident Bush may mean by this dark term. But the next attack may be by home-grown terrorists. All of us are potential Jose Padillas, not a select few.”

What Ackerman means is that when Cheney says critics of his tragic war are aiding the terrorists, he may be marking those critics for the big roundup.

That scares the scribe and it should scare you, too.

Anyway, as of Thursday morning, not everything was going the [p]resident’s way with leaders from his own party showing a lack of interest in granting him carte blanche to trash what’s left of our democratic freedoms.

And the Bush crowd's penchant for using and discarding people came back to haunt them when former Secretary of State Colin Powell stepped into the fray and let the administration have it.

“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell wrote whoremaster Sen. John McCain (r).

The point here is that they are FOR TORTURE. The administration thinks it can make the Democrats look bad on national security in an election season by making them come out AGAINST TORTURE.

The choice is yours.