n 1: dominance through threat of punishment and violence [syn: absolutism, tyranny] 2: a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition etc.)

From Attytood via C&L:

I don’t know whether an Iraqi photojournalist named Bilal Hussein [..]– a member of the Associated Press team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for its breathtaking pictures of the fighting there — has any connection to the anti-U.S. insurgency there.

Neither does Powerline, Michelle Malkin, or any of the other right-wing bloggers so eager to convict Hussein, who has been held in captivity by the U.S. military for five months now without any charges lodged against him.

But the lack of any criminal charges — let alone much information about what Bilal Hussein did to merit five months behind bars — hasn’t stopped these wingers from convicting him, and the Associated Press along with it, of being a terrorist….read on

Also, see these articles:

NEW YORK -- The US military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

(AP) In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

This is just one example of the Bush administration's disregard for domestic and international law.  Recently, Bush came out and admitted that there are secret CIA prisons.  You know, the ones that he and his henchmen claimed didn't exist.  But now he has come clean and we are to believe that he has closed these prisons.  But, why would they start telling the truth now?  They wouldn't.

The prisons aren't closed according to this Wapo article:

The prisons "have not been liquidated or closed," said Michael Emerson, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

This is what we have become.  We have become that country.  The most worrisome aspect is not that the government is despotic, corrupt, and verging on totalitarian, but the fact that there are so many citizens here that are willingly going along for the ride.  Or worse, they equate the president and his policies with the country itself.  The mentality of, "if you are against the leader, then you are against the country" is the mentality of dictatorships, not democracies.  Bush didn't need to overthrow the government and install a dictatorship, he just needed to convince the people of this country that his version of democracy (read:dictatorship) is democracy.