President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying programme is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant. This is cynical. The nation’s guar-dians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group. The spying is part of a well-established pattern: when Bush doesn’t like the rules, he just changes them. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers.