Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, leader of the Haitian death squad FRAPH, has been in the United States for seven years, tenderly sheltered by the CIA even after his conviction on mass murder charges. In addition to your standard rape and pillage, FRAPH is also famous for its practice of "facial scalping" — peeling the flesh from a dying victim's face with a machete.

While employing these tactics to destabilize Haiti's government during the last Bush administration, Constant was also an agent for the CIA, which used his thugs to thwart Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The populist Aristide government was overthrown in 1991, ushering in a three-year "reign of terror" by Constant and other warlords. Bush pÏre first protested, then went back to business as usual with the face-scalping killers.

In 1994, with the U.S. regime temporarily in the hands of moderate forces, Aristide was restored to office. Constant threatened to use biological weapons against U.S. troops and urged his followers to kill Americans. Despite these appeals, Constant used his CIA connections to secure safe passage to the United States. He now lives comfortably in Queens, where he dabbles in real estate, investment consulting and openly plotting to overthrow Haiti's government again.

Constant was convicted in absentia by a Haitian court last year in a trial conducted by American-trained jurists, with international supervision to ensure fairness. But despite calls for his deportation, Toto remains under the protection of American security services, which operate outside the bounds of international law. Having failed in their bid to sabotage Aristide's return in 1994, they confiscated thousands of secret documents detailing FRAPH operations — including their own cozy love letters to Toto, no doubt — then cowed the administration of wobbly moderate Bill Clinton into blocking Constant's deportation for the usual "national security" reasons.

In the last few days of his term, Mr. Wobbly recovered enough of his always-intermittent nerve to ship the secret FRAPH documents back to Haiti, in hopes of kick-starting the extradition process. But the new Bush regime is openly hostile to Aristide, and most expect the U.S. security services to put up a stiff fight to protect their "honored guest." In fact, with his old Bush contacts riding high again, Constant is already picking out curtains for Haiti's presidential palace.

What's that sound we hear in the Port-au-Prince night? It's the steely zing of machetes being sharpened.

The president of the United States has assumed the power to order the murder of anyone on earth.

The Washington Post reports this week that George W. Bush has signed an executive order giving himself the right to issue death warrants for anyone he deems a terrorist or supporter of terrorists. These people will be killed secretly by the CIA, with no pretense of due process.

Such "targeted killings" — which have worked so well to make Israel the secure place it is today — could also include the financial backers of terrorism. Good thing this executive order was not in effect during the 1930s, when Bush's grandfather, Prescott, was one of the biggest backers of a terrorist organization known as Nazi Germany. Bush was in so deep with Hitler that he kept doing business with the Nazis even after U.S. soldiers were being ripped apart by German lead.

Ordinarily, this kind of thing might be called treason — but as we know, the niceties of law and morality don't apply to the Bushes of this world. Prescott's Nazi assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act — but it was all hush-hush. After all, he was a pillar of the Establishment, and had a good lawyer working for him: Allen Dulles, a founding father of the CIA.

Now the CIA — which operates out of a building named for Prescott's son — will be murdering the designated victims of Prescott's grandson. What lovely historical symmetry, eh?

Bush's license to kill leaves the meaning of "terrorist" and "terrorist supporter" deliberately vague. The definition is entirely up to the president: There is no legislative oversight, no judicial review, no public scrutiny. If he wants you dead, he can have you killed. It's as simple as that.

This acceptance of extra-judicial murder degrades the American government to the level of moral savagery. It is the same "principle" underlying all terrorist activity: A threat to a group's interests is arbitrarily defined by its leaders, who then act arbitrarily to eliminate it. It is the same principle invoked by bin Laden to defend Muslim lands from "infidels." It is the principle invoked by the Taliban when it executed moderate Afghan leader Abdul Haq last week, and by Ariel Sharon and his Palestinian doppelgangers as they trade "targeted killings" and civilian murders. It is the same principle invoked by Prescott's pal Hitler to defend Aryan "purity" by killing Jews.

It is the principle of evildoers, men of blood, murderers and beasts. And it is now a guiding light of the "civilized" world.