On June 22, top Bush appointees beat an undignified retreat from the administration’s previous claims — in classified memos that have been leaked recently — of virtually unlimited presidential power to authorize use of torture in wartime interrogations. Six days later, the Supreme Court rejected by 6-3 President Bush’s claim of total power to detain non-Americans at Guantanamo Bay without answering to any court. And eight justices rejected Bush’s denial of due process to Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen whom he has held virtually incommunicado in Navy brigs for more than two years, including 21 months without seeing a lawyer.

"The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons," President Bush vowed in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address. Two and a half years later, one member of the "axis of evil" that Bush denounced in the same speech, North Korea, may have as many as eight nuclear bombs and be on its way to making about a dozen a year, with every intention of selling them to terrorists and other willing bidders.