Just another cheerful reminder about the kind of country we’re living in:

Over the weekend, Congress passed an amendment to FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), the law that the administration apparently violated with one or more secret programs that wiretapped communications involving U.S. persons without a warrant. This secret program was the occasion of Fredo Gonzales’s dramatic visit to the hospital sickbed of John Ashcroft and has been the subject of ongoing Congressional inquiry.

All last week, Democrats in the House and Senate negotiated with the Bush administration to try to come up with a way to modernize FISA to give the National Security Agency the flexibility it says it needs to track terrorists’ communications. The administration ended up rejecting a compromise that it had apparently already agreed to.

Now, Bush has an approval rating below 30%. And Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress. But instead of either passing the Democratic version of the FISA amendment and daring Bush to veto it or at least insisting on significant White House compromises to protect civil liberties, the Democrats allowed the bill to pass both the House and the Senate over the weekend. Bush signed it yesterday, obtaining with very little public debate a set of broad eavesdropping powers that are not subject to judicial or legislative oversight.

Of course, the warrantless wiretapping that the government carried out before the law was changed is still, presumably, a felony. But don’t worry too much about that; Bush will twist the Democrats’ arms into retroactively legalizing it, as he promised in his statement accompanying yesterday’s bill signing:

When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In this breathtaking bit of euphemism, “those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001” doesn’t refer to firefighters or TSA screeners. Think instead “those who are alleged to have intercepted the electronic communications of American citizens and residents in violation of federal law” and you’ll understand why “allegedly” is important here. As Jack Balkin says, “My guess is that President Bush plans to award those who allegedly helped save the country with alleged medals.”

Meanwhile, the New Yorker this week has an outstanding piece of journalism by Jane Mayer about the CIA’s secret detainment and interrogation program. (Steve Clemons calls it building a case that could be used against Cheney.) While the military has claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were isolated instances of bad behavior by military personnel (the evidence says otherwise, but still), the CIA program amounts to a systematic use of torture that was authorized at the highest level.

Methods have included the now-familiar litany of “waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation,” with the goal of inducing near-complete psychic breakdown. Here’s a description of how the CIA transferred prisoners between its secret sites:

A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

And a characterization of the program:

“It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

Read the whole article. You should know what’s been done in your name.

Finding explanations is a discouraging task. Certainly one thing at work here is the continued virulence of the “War on Terror” as a conceptual framework. Faced with this powerful trope, what has been called the “bloody shirt of 9/11,” the Democrats happily grab their ankles, afraid of looking soft on terror or being held responsible for some future attack.

Another issue is the power of the presidency in the age of television, regardless of how unpopular the president is. Or is it that warmongering has a structural advantage here based on the political economy of the federal government or on the blockbuster-based military/industrial/entertainment complex? How far has our country moved to the right? How far right has it always been? Or is it that the electorate is so disengaged from the issues, or so alienated from the levers of power, that the CIA can get away with acting like the KGB?