The dark forces driving Bush’s absolute power

Gordon Brown’s speech last Thursday at Westminster University was striking for a lot of reasons. It has been a while since a Labour prime minister spoke so forcefully about a thing called freedom. Whether out of an attempt to regain the political initiative or because he has seen abuse of executive power up close, Brown homed in on one of the more worrying threats to liberty today: overweening executive power. Blair revelled in this power, as George Bush and Dick Cheney do on a far larger scale.

In Britain, most of the leading parties support greater parliamentary control over war powers, especially after the debacle of Iraq, a war whose mistakes were compounded by too tight a circle of executive decision-making. In America, congressional resistance to presidential power is nearing a historic nadir; and we live in a time of a resurgent imperial presidency. The attacks of 9/11 would doubtless have increased presidential power. Emergencies always do. But no one could have predicted the sheer scale of what has happened and the extreme to which it has now gone.

There is one core reason for this and his name is Dick Cheney. Many of us who were initially sympathetic to the Bush administration and sup-portive of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have spent the past six years trying to make sense of what appeared to be a series of inexplicable mistakes: the secret authorisation of torture against US law and the Geneva conventions; the use of false intelligence in waging war on Iraq; the construction of Guantanamo Bay and the imprisonment and torture of countless innocent people across the globe, some in secret black sites; and the repeated, express intent of the president to ignore laws passed that he had signed – because they allegedly violated his constitutional authority as president. The Sunday Times