while a case can be made for the necessity of a consolidation of executive powers in addressing and assessing what needed to be done post-9/11, what has changed, in comparison to the Civil War (with the suspension of the writ of habeus corpus), is that we are now in an ill-defined, deliberately vague "war" that has been used as an excuse, repeatedly, for the violation of constitutional rights and civil liberties -- and this spills over into other areas of executive power beyond war administration.
some examples: the administration's refusal to release the records of Dick Cheney's secret energy task force; the docuemtns witheld on pre-9-11 intelligence; the documents on Katrina preparedness; the use of torture and the global network of secret prisons; meetings between Bush and Abramoff and Ken Lay; who leaked Valerie PLame's name and why; the Downing Street Memo; the cherry-picked intelligenced gained through CIA intimidation to justify the Iraq Invasion; the no-bid contracts with Halliburton; the dangerous underestimation of the Iraqi insurgency; the NSA spying program -- and, how about the records from the first Bush administration that W sealed on his first day in office.
it's less that any one of these -- beyond torture and NSA, which are hardly inconsiderable -- is something unprecedented, but rather the consistent and deliberate application of claims of executive privillege connected, directly and indirectly, to the "global war on terror."