Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.  

Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.  

Many families include people who have been forced by the conflict to flee their homes, leaving those left behind with the daily struggle of trying to make ends meet. A sustained economic crisis marked by high unemployment further aggravates their plight.

As the battle over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rages in Congress, civil libertarians warn that legislation sought by the White House could enable spying on "ordinary Americans." Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), counter that only those with an "irrational fear of government" believe that "our country's intelligence analysts are more concerned with random innocent Americans than foreign terrorists overseas." 

But focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps pose to a democratic society. Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can -- and repeatedly have -- abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters. 

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts -- and the presidents they served -- had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices -- even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often "collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action." 

Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler's phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures. (As New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer can attest, a single wiretap is all it takes to torpedo a political career.) 

In 1945, Harry Truman had the FBI wiretap Thomas Corcoran, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brain trust" whom Truman despised and whose influence he resented. Following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Stone the next year, the taps picked up Corcoran's conversations about succession with Justice William O. Douglas. Six weeks later, having reviewed the FBI's transcripts, Truman passed over Douglas and the other sitting justices to select Secretary of the Treasury (and poker buddy) Fred Vinson for the court's top spot. 

"Foreign intelligence" was often used as a pretext for gathering political intelligence. John F. Kennedy's attorney general, brother Bobby, authorized wiretaps on lobbyists, Agriculture Department officials and even a congressman's secretary in hopes of discovering whether the Dominican Republic was paying bribes to influence U.S. sugar policy. The nine-week investigation didn't turn up evidence of money changing hands, but it did turn up plenty of useful information about the wrangling over the sugar quota in Congress -- information that an FBI memo concluded "contributed heavily to the administration's success" in passing its own preferred legislation.

In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against "reverse targeting" Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they'd never do it. 

But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau "in a most untenable and embarrassing position," so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts. 

Johnson famously heard recordings of King's conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King's strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him "hours each night" to read the reports. 

Few presidents were quite as brazen as Nixon, whom the Church Committee found had "authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security." They didn't need to be, perhaps. Through programs such as the National Security Agency's Operation Shamrock (1947 to 1975), which swept up international telegrams en masse, the government already had a vast store of data, and presidents could easily run "name checks" on opponents using these existing databases. 

It's probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don't plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second. 

Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king -- something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance. 

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won't turn its "national security" surveillance powers to political ends -- well, it would be a first.

In a dramatic move Friday, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in with emergency funds to keep beleaguered investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. afloat. 

The move, during a week of worry about whether Bear could continue to meet its obligations, took the credit crisis to a new, more serious stage and was a reminder of how quickly an erosion of confidence can undermine even leading financial institutions. 

The involvement of the Fed -- coordinating with the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission -- made clear authorities were concerned about the risks to the broader financial system. Bear is the smallest of Wall Street's big five investment banks, but it is a significant player in markets for debt, particularly for securities backed by mortgages.

Senate Republicans yesterday blocked consideration of a bill designed to prop up the struggling housing industry, declaring that the Democratic-backed provisions would harm mortgage lenders and inflame the housing crisis.  

With a 48 to 46 vote, the Senate did not gain the 60 votes needed to halt a threatened filibuster on the housing package. . . .  

The housing proposal includes billions of dollars for local communities to buy up subprime mortgages and a controversial rewrite of bankruptcy laws to allow judges to slash interest rates for low-income homeowners. The mortgage industry has waged a stiff lobbying campaign against the bankruptcy provision.

Trying to calm jitters about the economy, President Bush conceded that the country obviously is going through a tough time. 

But, in a speech today to The Economic Club of New York, Bush said this is not the first time this has happened and said he's certain the economy will eventually ride out its troubles. 

The president said he speaks from the position of optimism.     

President Bush . . . cautioned against overreacting to current problems, saying such actions could cause longer-term problems.

Mr. Paulson said growing market problems were caused by a series of factors, including mortgage brokers who pushed risky loans on homeowners, conflicts of interest at credit-rating agencies, bond underwriters that loosened standards and financial institutions that failed to adequately grasp the riskiness of the instruments they were buying and selling.  

A report issued by an interagency group headed by Mr. Paulson also said that regulatory policies undertaken by the Bush administration had failed to adequately supervise the way financial institutions manage risk.

The dollar fell below parity with the Swiss franc for the first time on Friday as fears about more credit turmoil and a U.S. recession sparked broad selling of the U.S. currency.

President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant. 

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it. 

A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches. 

Still, the move, one year after The New York Times' disclosure of a secret program that allowed warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mail, caught Capitol Hill by surprise. 

"Despite the president's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill. 

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a special intelligence-gathering court had deemed protected by the First Amendment, according to two government audits released yesterday.

The episode was outlined in a Justice Department report that concluded the FBI had abused its intelligence-gathering privileges by issuing inadequately documented "national security letters" from 2003 to 2006, after which changes were put in place that the report called sound.

A report a year ago by the Justice Department's inspector general disclosed that abuses involving national security letters had occurred from 2003 through 2005 and helped provoke the changes. But the report makes it clear that the abuses persisted in 2006 and disclosed that 60 percent of the nearly 50,000 security letters issued that year by the FBI targeted Americans.

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

Economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey are increasingly certain the U.S. has slid into recession, a view reinforced by new data showing a sharp drop in retail sales last month. 

"The evidence is now beyond a reasonable doubt," said Scott Anderson of Wells Fargo & Co. 

The Commerce Department said [recently] that retail sales fell 0.6% in February; sales excluding the volatile auto and auto-parts categories fell 0.2%. The declines reflect a sharp slowdown in consumer spending, which accounts for more than 70% of U.S. economic activity, as Americans grapple with high gasoline and food costs and declines in home values and other asset prices. 

The survey marked a precipitous shift toward pessimism from the previous survey, conducted five weeks earlier. The economists now expect nonfarm payrolls to grow by an average of just 9,000 jobs a month for the next 12 months -- down from a previously expected 48,500. Twenty economists expect payrolls to shrink outright. On average, the economists predicted the unemployment rate will be 5.5% in December, up from the current 4.8%.

The US will avoid a severe and prolonged recession similar to Japan’s in the 1990s because US policymakers will do whatever it takes to avert such an outcome, the Federal Reserve believes. 

The central bank’s willingness to embrace unorthodox measures is reflected in its latest supersized liquidity operations, which involve lending financial institutions $436bn in one-month advances of cash and Treasuries.

The Economists Who Never Saw the Recession Coming Are Sure that it Will be Mild 

The Financial Times wants to reassure us. Of course, they neglected to mention that their experts never saw the housing bubble or the chaos that its collapse would create.