Do Americans still have the guts for democracy?

Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing: he plays the Sept. 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jaw-dropping falsehoods, and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U.S. Constitution.

If allowed to stand, Bush's actions will have taken the United States a long way down the road to military dictatorship. Indeed, that's essentially what his legalistic enablers, starting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Cheney, argue: that in wartime, the commander in chief can take any action he deems appropriate to protect the nation--bypassing Congress and the courts to assert the primacy of the presidency until declaring victory in the "war on terror."

As terrorism is not an enemy, but a tactic--a vile, cowardly tactic, but, by definition, not subject to being defeated--the metaphorical war against it could last indefinitely. And as long as it lasts, the commander in chief rules by fiat. Our constitutional rights exist at his sufferance.

If the president, any president, can unilaterally declare the Fourth Amendment (forbidding unreasonable search and seizure) null and void, why not the First Amendment protecting a free press? Why not the Second Amendment? We can't let terrorists have guns, can we?

Far-fetched? Today, maybe. Tomorrow, maybe not. This drugstore cowboy won't be president forever, you know. Anyway, I take it to be roughly those things Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran, meant when he emphasized that: "I took an oath of office to the Constitution. I didn't take an oath of office to my party or to my president."

But there are a great many Americans who either don't comprehend what's at stake, or cannot bring themselves to believe it. And there are many in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, who hesitate to order breakfast without consulting opinion polls. That's the reason for President Bush's calculatedly deceptive sound bite during a recent visit to an army hospital in San Antonio, where he claimed that the only communications the National Security Agency monitors are from foreign terrorist cells to the United States.

Adopting a pseudo-folksy tone that makes him sound as if he's reading "My Pet Goat" to third graders, Bush allowed as how "If somebody from Al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why... I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking."

Well, no kidding. No sane person opposes that kind of surveillance. A couple of years ago, I found myself receiving suspect messages emanating somewhere in the Middle East using a hijacked, defunct e-mail address. I went directly to the FBI. Who wouldn't? For that matter, I'm pressing the authorities to shut down my own pet stalker--a nameless coward making what he imagines are anonymous threats.

Of course, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court required by federal law to authorize wiretaps would issue a warrant in 30 seconds flat to monitor Al Qaeda-related communications--even several days after the fact. It's rejected roughly a half-dozen of almost 20,000 applications since it was set up in response to the Nixon administration's illegal spying upon war protesters, civil rights activists and political opponents.

Indeed, the White House had to "clarify" the president's remarks, which he repeated several times. Bush's illegal wiretaps are known to monitor both incoming and outgoing calls, but are exponentially larger in scope. As The Washington Post has reported, NSA has not only been "data-mining" millions of communications foreign and domestic, but passing on the results to other government agencies such as the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security.

The way TV news works, however, many Americans would only get to hear Bush's dishonest sound bite--as phony in its way as Bill Clinton's denial of "sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky," a technically truthful statement calculated to deceive.

See, there have to be reasons the administration kept its actions hidden. Right now, we don't know what they are. But we do know that Acting Attorney General James Comey, who'd personally prosecuted Al Qaeda terrorists, refused to sign off on the White House scheme, as, apparently, did former Attorney General John "Let the Eagle Soar" Ashcroft. It's up to Congress, the courts and a hitherto easily-intimidated free press to find out why.

Under Gonzales, the Justice Department now plans to investigate the whistleblowers who exposed President Bush's willful defiance of the rule of law. A more upside-down situation can hardly be imagined.

How can a few thousand stateless fanatics hiding in caves have brought this great nation to such a pass? Have Americans still got the guts for democracy? What ever happened, I wonder, to "the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.