"Terrorism must be crushed with an iron fist," snarls legal analyst Bruce Fein in an August 9 Washington Times op-ed column. This is why the United States "should follow the instruction of Great Britain in punishing speech likely to motivate terrorism," he contends. The Bush administration "should propose legislation making criminal the condoning or glorifying of terrorism against the United States whether uttered domestically or abroad." The threshold for government action, Fein asserts, should be "reasonable suspicion" of "sympathy with terrorism."

Note well that Fein, a Reagan-era Justice Department official, isn’t urging the enforcement of laws covering criminal conspiracy, or even the public expression of "subversive" sentiments, but the suspicion of harboring such sentiments. And he would relieve the federal government of the responsibility of drawing a plausible connection between those suspected sentiments and an actual terrorist conspiracy. "The correlation between excusing or justifying or championing terrorism and the creation of terrorists is not absolute," he admits. "But it is sufficiently close to justify punishing the encouragement."

Its inelegance of expression aside, Fein’s essay is a valuable contribution to public understanding, since it is a splendid specimen of the totalitarian mind at work. For those of that persuasion, the potentially lethal exercise of state power is always and everywhere an unalloyed good; it is the exercise of individual liberty that must be justified.

In this particular example, Fein is actually prescribing a standard of speech that could require not only the suppression of dissent, but also the prosecution of those who fail to express support for the Bush administration’s policy. Would those who refuse to display a "Support the Troops" auto decal, for example, be guilty of tacitly "excusing" or "condoning" terrorism? Are those who supposedly undermine military morale by denouncing the war in Iraq guilty of "encouragement" of terrorism?

Bruce Fein is not the only neo-conservative to endorse Great Britain’s new restrictions on speech. John Gibson of Fox News, who collapses into a girlish swoon at the thought of Britain’s counterterrorism police, is similarly enraptured with this latest authoritarian gesture by Tony Blair’s socialist government.

"Justifying or glorifying terrorism is an official offense in Great Britain now," observed Gibson on August 5. "Good. About time. And if the speaker of terror speech is already a Brit citizen, they’re going to put something called a control order on you."

In the United States, Gibson whines, many people bridle over the invasive searches performed at airports and in subways. In Great Britain, by way of contrast, "they’re going to look inside your skull to see if you even think about terrorists. I don’t hear much outcry even from the lefties."

Ironically, it was a British monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, who denounced the practice of "tearing windows into men’s souls." Advocates of democratic totalitarianism, on the other hand, see nothing amiss in peering "inside your skull" in pursuit of impermissible thoughts. And John Gibson has giddily endorsed the practice of pumping high velocity rounds into the skulls of people who turn out to be perfectly innocent.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is among the most militant proponents of a global democratic crusade, urges the public to accept the state’s impositions with docility. When a "liberal democratic society" is threatened, writes Krauthammer, it "must deploy every resource, including the repressive powers of the state, to deter and defeat those who would abolish liberal democracy."

Citing such repressive measures as Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and FDR’s internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, Krauthammer blithely writes: "Our history is clear. We have not slid inexorably toward police power. We have fluctuated between more and less openness depending on need and threat. And after the 9/11 mass murders, America awoke to the need for a limited and temporary shrinkage of civil liberties to prevent more such atrocities."

Once again we see the totalitarian formula at work: liberties are to be rationed as the state sees fit. Further, it’s hardly clear that the "shrinkage of civil liberties" Krauthammer describes would be "temporary," in light of the fact that the Bush administration has claimed that the "war on terror" (or whatever it’s called this week) could last a generation or longer. And the powers claimed by the Bush regime to detain, interrogate, and abuse innocent people are "limited" only by the imagination of its legal advisers.

During an August 9 judicial hearing in Brooklyn, Justice Department official Mary Mason argued (as paraphrased by the New York Times) that "foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food."

All of those offenses were committed by the U.S. government against Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was seized at JFK International Airport in 2002, detained incommunicado for weeks, then taken to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year. Arar has never been charged with a crime by any government. He has sued the Bush administration, which has invoked a spurious "state secrets privilege" to justify its claim that it has "secret" information tying him to al-Qaeda – this despite the fact, once again, that he was freed without being charged.

According to Mason, "Arar’s legal status meant he was not necessarily protected by all the rights in the U.S. Constitution." Here it is again – the despotic notion that the government allots rights to individuals, and can revoke them at whim. If the government decides that a passenger is an "inadmissible alien," Mason argued (again, in the New York Times’ paraphrase), "he remains legally outside the United States – and outside the reach of the Constitution – even if he is being held in a Brooklyn jail. Even if they are wrongly or illegally designated inadmissible … such aliens have at most a right against `gross physical abuse.’" (Emphasis added.)

Presumably, refined physical abuse would pass "constitutional" scrutiny under this standard, which supposedly permits the U.S. government to imprison, starve, and consign to torture perfectly innocent people who come into the United States legally, on the mistaken assumption that it remains a free country. (I leave it to minds subtler than my own to reconcile the Bush administration’s treatment of "inadmissible" legal aliens like Arar with that same administration’s indecent eagerness to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.) Nor is this treatment limited to foreign visitors, since the Bush administration claims the right to designate American citizens as "enemy combatants" and summarily imprison them without trial.

The Republican-aligned punditocracy has embraced the Bush administration’s quasi-fascist claims of executive power. In doing so they display a dreadful memory, and an even more dangerous lack of foresight.

Following the Oklahoma City Bombing a decade ago, the Clinton administration accused talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh of being "ideational co-conspirators" with Timothy McVeigh and the others responsible for that crime. Bill Clinton himself pointedly excoriated those who "think they can love their country but hate their government," accusing them of abetting terrorism. Just recently the National Abortion Rights Action League distributed – and then withdrew – an advertisement accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of being an "ideational" co-conspirator with abortion clinic bombers.

And while Limbaugh and his lessers in the Bush administration’s propaganda apparatus are hymning the virtues of a Republican-led Police State, the Southern Poverty Law Center (led by the resourceful fraud Morris Dees) and other leftist "watchdog" groups continue to keep "right-wing extremists" under scrutiny, patiently waiting their turn to wield the "Iron Fist" being forged by the Bush administration.