Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan, almost 700 in Guantánamo -- no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. The administration has argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called al-Qaida dirty bomber, that anyone who is considered a threat to national security, even a U.S. citizen, can disappear forever, never be charged with any crime, and never receive any legal representation.

There has been nothing like this system since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions after World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. The U.S. military embraced the conventions because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped the military's argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants." Rumsfeld extended this system -- "a legal black hole," according to Human Rights Watch -- to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Taguba report, gave orders to U.S. soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the Bush administration's strategy of invading with a relatively light force, itself a consequence of Bush's belief in the neoconservative fantasy that Iraq would be like France liberated from the Nazis. The gap in forces has been filled by private contractors, who provide not simply basic services like food but also military and intelligence functions. They are not subject to Iraqi law or the U.S. military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 military contractors on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British Army. It is hardly surprising that recent events in Iraq revolve around these contractors such as the four killed at Fallujah and the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. One of the companies implicated at the Iraqi prison, CACI International, is today advertising on its Web site for interrogators for Iraqi prisons who will be "under minimal supervision."

Under the Bush legal doctrine, we must create a system beyond the law to defend the rule of law against terrorism; we must defend democracy by inhibiting democracy. The law is there to constrain others, "evildoers." Who can doubt that we love freedom? But the arrogance of virtuous certainty masks the egotism of power. It is the opposite of American pragmatism, which always understands that knowledge is contingent, tentative and imperfect. This is a conflict in the American mind between two claims on democracy -- one with a healthy sense of paradox, limits and debate, the other purporting to be omniscient, even Messianic, requiring no checks because of its purity, and contemptuous of accountability.

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