Safer?

Newsweek's current cover story likens Bush Administration efforts to expand presidential power after 9/11 to similar moves by earlier presidents during times of war or national crisis: i.e., the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Civil War suspension of habeus corpus, the criminalization of certain forms of dissent during the First World War, Japanese internment during the Second, and the extrajudicial wiretapping carried out under presidents from F.D.R. to Nixon. And while the authors consider that the jury may still be out on the necessity and constitutional propriety of initiatives like the NSA's recently-revealed domestic spying program, they're willing to render verdict of history regarding prior lurches toward a more Imperial Presidency: "None ... made the nation appreciably safer."