Other professional obligations have kept me from writing in this space for the last few months. During that time, my piece on the influence of Friedrich Hayek on modern political thinking made it from print to Dissent Magazine's online edition, so I can finally offer the link.

The inauguration and what it means, a week later:

Our first black president is not named, say, Colin, or Thurgood, or Clarence, or even the more exotic-sounding (although it is entirely of European origin) Condoleezza. Our first black president is named Barack. Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an immigrant. His paternal grandmother lives in a small village in Kenya, in a home surrounded by corn and cassava fields. This is instructive, and powerful. Coming just seven years after September 11, Obama's election speaks well of the American people. I was very glad that in taking the oath of office, he did not run away from his middle name.

It really is a new world, and in more ways than one. Standing about a hundred yards from the Washington Monument on the freezing day of the inaugural, I listened to Senator Diane Feinstein, speaking for the Inaugural Committee, remark on the glory of a peaceful, legitimate transfer of power. When I was here for the 2001 inaugural the transfer was not legitimate. A feeling of doom and outrage stalked the ceremonies. Bush's parade route was solidly packed with loud, infuriated protesters who almost managed to mob his car at one point, and scored a direct hit with an egg and a water bottle. The high school marching bands, soldiering on in the freezing rain, were booed. This last was disgraceful; but the 2001 inaugural should not have been a feel-good event for anyone, and it wasn't. With the possible exception of Bush, whose self-regard is as unshakeable as it is absurd.

On Inauguration Day in 2009, we had the satisfaction of seeing the usurper depart.

Minor disappointments hardly mattered. The speech could never have lived up to expectations, but I was surprised at its anodyne quality. A mediocre speech, well delivered. I am not the first to note the clumsiness and false contradiction of "...rising tides of prosperity and still waters of peace." Most of the speech was a to-do list, which is not the function of an inaugural speech. An inaugural is the time for vision, poetry, and the grand sweep of history. In laying claim to the unifying national myths that all presidents must profess, Obama was painfully glib: should one really honor the pioneers and say nothing of the Indians? The right-wing policy intellectual Abigail Thernstrom, watching the speech while waiting to say a fond farewell to Bush at Andrews Air Force Base, thought it a good sign that Obama recalled the travails of European immigrants but made no mention of the forced immigration of slaves; I disagree. And indeed, as even right-wingers have pointed out, it was not "for us" (that is, for future generations) that slaves "endured the lash of the whip." They endured the lash because they had no choice but to endure it, and it somehow minimizes the atrocity of slavery to suggest that, in doing so, they were investing in the future.

But here is the part of the speech that really matters, and that gives me hope that we will see meaningful change:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake... Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint... Guided by these principles once more..."

I like that "once more." This is the heart of the matter.

The bitter right-winger Jay Nordlinger wrote recently:

We've been reading a lot lately along the lines of, "Whoa, the Obama administration faces some extremely serious problems and threats: a nuclearizing Iran, a plotting al-Qaeda, a deranged North Korea, a financial meltdown . . ."

Oh, really? But they have been problems all along -- I mean, our real problems. Not the problems we've been reading about, such as, 'Bush is trying to take away our civil liberties, and he's listening in on our phone conversations, and he's torturing detainees, and he's flushing Korans down the toilet, and he's firing U.S. attorneys, and he's loading the water with arsenic, and he's lining the pockets of Enron and Halliburton, and he's removing the ozone layer, and he's whipping up hurricanes in order to torment black people, and . . .' Do you think mainstream liberalism will ever be ashamed of its behavior and expression during the George W. Bush years?

Well, no - because as usual, Nordlinger misses the point. We have been led for the last eight years by a rogue government.

I don't know anyone who would deny the serious problems that Nordlinger considers the only real ones. But the those he considers fantasy are also real. What Bush and Cheney and a few select henchmen in the Bush administration have done has severely damaged our democracy. Paul Krugman is right: There must be a reckoning. President Obama has said that he wants to "move forward" and not investigate these individuals' sustained attack on the constitution, and that just won't do. We don't necessarily need trials, although they would be deeply satisfying. But we do need a truth commission, for our own self-respect and for the democratic future of our nation.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin, 1775

This piece is of necessity short, so it cannot possibly attempt a comprehensive list of the Bush administration's many assaults on the rule of law. But what happened is not complicated in outline, although it is very complex in detail. After September 11, a small "War Council" around vice president Dick Cheney decided that the president was not bound by the Constitution. Cheney and his legal counsel and later Chief of Staff David Addington, a specialist in national security law, along with John Yoo, a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Timothy Flanigan, a Deputy White House Counsel, aided and abetted by Alberto Gonzales, who was White House counsel and then Attorney General, Bush's first Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's legal counsel William Haynes, and a small supporting cast, together simply made up the law to give the president virtually unlimited powers at home and abroad.

What came out of their diseased legal imaginations was truly stunning, and utterly at odds with American tradition. The president could hold anyone he deemed an "enemy combatant" for any reason for any length of time, in a secret "black" prison that could be hidden from the international Red Cross. People would literally disappear. The Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war were dismissed. Torture was embraced (John Yoo, the main author of the infamous "Bybee Memo", found it convenient to define torture as only those acts that could lead to death or major organ failure, and that even if these things occurred it still wasn't torture unless that had been the intent of the perpetrator; which is most assuredly not the accepted international definition of torture, to which the United States is a party), and untrained guards at American prison facilities abroad were informally instructed that anything goes. Terrorist suspects could be kidnapped and handed over to governments that would do our torturing dirty work for us.

The administration set up "military tribunals" at which the form but not the substance of justice would be respected, fora to which the president could send any captured combatant with no need to justify the decision, at which there was no presumption of innocence, no right of the accused to retain counsel or to see the evidence against him, no right of habeas corpus. At these tribunals a plurality of military judges could order the death penalty; the only appeal from the tribunals' judgments was to be to the president and the secretary of defense, who were also to act as prosecutors (Congress and American courts have resisted some of these measures.) The president was not to be bound by the War Powers Act of 1973, which formally restored to Congress its existing Constitutional prerogative of declaring war (see Section 8, "Powers of Congress") after Nixon's secret expansion of the wars in Indochina.

The president and his advisors secretly authorized warrantless wiretapping of suspects abroad and at home. When this came out, and civil libertarians objected, the right-wingers tried to portray the objectors as being soft on terrorism. But liberals were not against wiretapping terrorist suspects, and were not even opposed to doing so without first getting a warrant in extraordinary circumstances. The only thing that the rule-of-law crowd insisted on was that there had to be a warrant at some point, if only post-facto, and indeed the FISA - Foreign Intelligence Surveillance - courts were capable of handling this sort of emergency. What happens when a warrant is never required? The government can operate at will against the individual, in secret, without giving any reason to anyone at any time. That is not the limited power of a democratic government.

Cheney, Addington, and Yoo promulgated the radical rationale of a "unitary executive," the idea that the president can rule over the other two branches of government, rendering them virtually irrelevant if he feels the need to do so. This concept is nowhere to be found in the Constitution or any of the documents, such as the Federalist Papers, that illuminate it and put it in historical context. Our constitution was guided by the idea of checks and balances and informed by mistrust of the King.

Even worse than these actions was the secrecy and lack of consultation with which they were carried out. The collective wisdom and appropriate legal oversight of Congress, of the State and Justice Departments, of the White House legal apparatus, of seasoned professionals in all of the intelligence services and the military establishment, including the Judge Advocate-General Corps - all were cut out of the decision-making process by Cheney and Addington, who were convinced that they were the only ones with the mental toughness to take on terrorism. Cheney, a master bureaucratic tactician, had no trouble manipulating the lazy, juvenile president. Cheney controlled what the president saw, what he was told, sometimes made policy behind his back and sometimes simply lied to him. The president didn't care; like all small and weak men of poor character, the chance to play the tough guy was all he wanted, and the executive power gave him the chance to be even tougher than he was in that revealing moment when he openly mocked a defenseless woman whose life he held in his hands. Apparently he literally danced with joy when Cofer Black, of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, promised - and not metaphorically - to bring him the head of bin Laden.

When Congress explicitly refused to give Bush some of the powers he wanted - such as the ability to deploy the military on American soil - Cheney and Addington would simply present him with another secret finding to sign, by which he excitedly granted himself those powers, without informing Congress or the public. When the Cheney people got some pushback on some of their ideas about interrogation of suspects or their desire to ignore the Geneva Conventions from responsible officials - including officers from the Judge Advocate General Corps, officials of all branches of the armed services, intelligence and diplomatic professionals, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft - Cheney would stonewall them and rely on his control over Bush. Sometimes Cheney - whose famous outburst of profanity on the Senate floor was no aberration - just told them to fuck off.

Let's call it what it is: Torture went on at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where, as Seymour Hersh has found, it was certainly not a "few bad apples" doing bad things, but a calculated policy. It went on in "black" prisons in Poland and Romania. It went on in our name, in the name of the United States, in cells in Egypt and Pakistan and Jordan, often with US officials in the next room, overseeing the case but legally insulated because the men wielding cigarettes and chains and pliers and electric shock machines were not technically working for our government. It went on with no US officials in the next room in Syria, inflicted on individuals turned over by the United States to a regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Right-wing apologists for Bush, of course, claim that those who object to these things do so out of sympathy for terrorists, and that all of these things were necessary "to protect us," and that the vindication of the methods is obvious: no more attacks on US soil after September 11. These people consider themselves conservatives. Conservatives are supposed to distrust government power. Yet in the name of security, they were willing to sacrifice the deepest principles of democratic government: transparency, process, rule-of-law. The idea that the government cannot arbitrarily dispose of the physical existence of a person, any person. These things represent the recent state of a process of social and legal evolution that has taken millennia, are still lacking in many places, but were thought to be secure in the democratic West. When they are gone, they are not easily recovered. A democracy cannot use the tools of autocracy and still be a democracy. These tools corrupt individuals and institutions.

Are we such cowards that we would give up our way of life simply to be free from fear of terrorism? And if we accept this - if we passively accept a secret government with powers that are not only free from the restraint of law, but whose full extent is unknown to us, what can we possibly hope to win in the war - the real and legitimate and very serious war - on terror?

When Irene Kahn of Amnesty International described Guantanamo Bay as "the Gulag of our time," she was met with outrage by the Bush apologists. No, the comparison is not reasonable; but the difference is a difference of degree, not of kind. What the Gulag and Guantanamo have in common is the utterly arbitrary power of detention and the unrestricted, God-like power of the authorities to dispose of the imprisoned as they see fit, without restriction or oversight. The Gulag and Guantanamo are both products of the personal power of the ruler. It is, of course, no accident that Guantanamo stands on a leased base in Cuba, and the symbolism of its placement in a brutal dictatorship seems to have escaped Bush's admirers. Yet these admirers are pleased that it was intentionally put beyond the reach of US law.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others: We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power...

- Inner Party member O'Brien, in George Orwell's 1984

It is very hard to explain to people who do not understand intuitively what is wrong with torture why the practice is always corrupting; why we cannot torture even terrorists who might have valuable information that, if known, might prevent another attack. It is equally hard to explain to people who don't get it why the rule of law is important, why it can't be temporarily or in certain situations put aside, and then taken up again as if nothing has happened. The rule of law, like the prohibition against torture, is axiomatic. It is true in all cases or in none.

Professional interrogators have long known that, aside from any moral issues, torture does not even yield good information. The attacks on our system of government and on established principles of the rule of law in wartime were not even effective, did not serve the purposes by which a radical president's men justified them. They badly damaged our national interests. They were the best possible recruiting tools for radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill Americans; and torture itself has been known to create hardened radicals out of callow rebels (Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command and the theological brains of the operation, was broken and re-formed as a relentless ideological hater in Egyptian torture chambers, following a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.)

A recent bipartisan Senate Armed Services committee report went further in explaining how the torture policies of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzales and Yoo greatly aided Al Qaeda recruitment efforts. It quoted Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora: "[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq - as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat - are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo." Mora's opinion is widely shared throughout the professional ranks of the military and intelligence establishments.

One of the most unfathomable things about the apologists for torture and unaccountable presidential power - about people like Ralph Peters, James Robbins, Charles Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson - is that they consider themselves the hard-headed realists, the ones who know how the world works. In fact, the tactics they advocated have been disastrous. Have gotten Americans killed. Have made it harder to defeat terrorism and establish the rule of law in the countries in which terrorist subcultures and ideologies arise, which is the only way to defeat terrorism in the long run.

I am sure that Cheney and his associates were and are sincere in their desire to defeat terrorism, even at the curious cost of the Constitution. I am sure that they felt that the actions they took would help to do this. They justified their outrages by this genuine desire and belief, but it was not at the root of their motivation. Cheney had been publicly seeking the expansions of presidential powers he achieved for Bush for decades. Since at least the time of the Iran-Contra hearings he has been declaring that the president should be free of Congressional or legal oversight in his conduct of foreign affairs. This freedom was a long-term goal of a certain small section of the radical American right; I will not say "conservative" right because it is a profoundly un-conservative idea. Most of what Cheney and Addington brought about had been described and prescribed twenty years ago in Heritage Foundation wish lists. They didn't seize these powers simply because they thought them necessary to fight terrorism, although they no doubt did think them so.

They sought power for its own sake. Because they like power.

All of what I'm saying here has been extensively documented in books like Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror turned into a war on American Ideals; Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency: War and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration; Philippe Sands' Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values; Mark Danner's Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror; Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib; Bob Woodward's Bush at War series; John Yoo's own War by Other Means: an Insider's Account of the War on Terror; Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency; Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein's Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency; and many others. These aren't obscure issues.

Jay Nordlinger, the unofficial Bush flack quoted at the beginning of this piece, has convinced himself that Cheney is a good and kind man, a devoted public servant (Nordlinger also thinks that Bush is smart.) And, after all, he's got Cheney's word for it. That's good enough for Nordlinger, diligent journalist that he is. For the rest of us, reading is interesting, and a civic duty.

I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.

- President Barack Obama

I believe strongly that torture is not moral, legal or effective... Any program of detention and interrogation must comply with the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions on Torture, and the Constitution.

- Dennis C. Blair, President Obama's nominee for Director of National Intelligence

So this is what it means to live, once again, under the rule of law. It's like blinking in the sunlight after many years - maybe eight - buried alive in a tiny dungeon in some forgotten part of the world. One of President Obama's first acts in office was to set in motion the closure of Guantanamo, while providing for a secure and legal way of handling those of its remaining inmates who truly are dangerous. He went farther: He gave orders to close the "black" prisons, to stop the torture of suspects, and rescinded the CIA's authorization to hold prisoners forever without charge.

He also revoked every single one of the legal advisories, most of them secret, by which Bush officials had justified torture and secret detention. The speech to State Department officials in which he described these new policies is wonderful, crisp and no-nonsense and devoid of poetry, but far more important than his inaugural speech. The assembled diplomats responded with sustained and booming applause - and probably a few of them cried with gratitude and relief - when he announced that the United States is no longer a nation that tortures.

President Obama promulgated his policy changes after a review process that openly involved all the appropriate advisory agencies and officials, with the proper input from the military, the state department, the justice department, the Office of Legal Counsel, the intelligence community. He signed his executive orders in the presence of sixteen men of knowledge, wisdom and conscience, retired military officers who had warned against Bush's torture policies and their impact on America's security.

I believe that President Obama meant it when he said in his inaugural that his message to terrorists is "You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." We will have to take some risks in doing this. We will wage the war on terror relentlessly. We will have losses, and maybe some of these losses would not have occurred if we could have dispensed with the rule of law, if we were willing to accept a government that had the power to search and detain and torture anyone, with no oversight or accountability, a government that had no regard for the constitution and the way it apportions legitimate powers and the restrictions on those powers. But if we adhere to the constitution and the rule of law, we will win a victory that means something. The war with Islamic fanaticism is a civilizational clash that we in the democratic West must win, and we must not be apologetic about that.

But we must remain the democratic West.