Here's a quote from Douglas Reed, writing about the loss of freedom Germans experienced the night of the Reichstag fire.

When Germany awoke, a man's home was no longer his castle.  He could be seized by private individuals, could claim no protection from the police, could be indefinitely detained without preferment of charges; his property could be seized, his verbal and written communications overheard and perused; he no longer had the right to foregather with his fellow countrymen, and his newspapers might no longer freely express their opinions.

The Bush administration's 2001 anti-terrorism legislation, introduced using a similar ruse, effects the same changes in America, and is being copied in every country that has a popular or ethnic opposition to deal with.  It is a well-proven method: Roosevelt knew about, encouraged, and facilitated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, sending the Pacific Fleet there to act as a target, keeping the local military commanders in the dark, and proscribing all defensive action.  He then used the public's outrage over the attack to draw America into WW II and provide the American arms industry with an equal opportunity to share in the proceeds of that great conflict, along with its overseas competitors.
Where Hitler's Nazis employed first a gang of ruffians, the SA, and later a sophisticated organization of sadists, the SS, to intimidate the population into submission, the Bush administration useed its success on 9/11 to set up the Transport Safety Administration for the same purpose.

You may ask: What, if any, are the differences between Bush and Hitler?  Not many, but one stands out:  Hitler was elected to his office democratically.  Bush was installed against the will of the majority of US voters, through the machinations of his brother, the Florida Governor, and the Supreme Court judges appointed by his father.  Another important difference is that where Hitler, an insane megalomaniac, started a global war for ideological reasons--a war that he mercifully lost--Bush pursued and attained a much more pragmatic goal: the enrichment of America's owning class on a truly grotesque scale.  To help him in this endeavor, Bush (by his own admission not the brightest coin in the box) had the guidance of his father and the latter's Bush doctrine that stipulates that America should always have the capability to conduct two simultaneous wars, typically in the Middle East.  George H. W. Bush coined America's modern concept of war for profit.
By some calculations--taking into account not only inflation but also the costs of caring for the many injured service personnel that, thanks to modern medical science, survive to a life as invalids rather than die from their wouds--the small-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became more costly to the US than defeating Italy, Germany, and Japan in World War II.  This, obviously, is good news for the owners of contractors and suppliers to the Pentagon.
With the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, without reaching any of the stated objectives of those campaigns, the need for new enemies became pressing.  After a brief adventure in Libya, where new tyrants were installed to succeed Moammar Ghaddafi, America turned to the next countires on its list: Syria and Iran.  Again, the bold, official objective was regime change--installing rulers more sympathetic to America and the West--while the true, down-to-earth motive remained enriching America's rich at the expense of her tax-paying middle class.  To ensure that financiers got their share of the loot, the wars were again paid for with loans that the taxpayers then had to pay back with interest.  Just like in Nazi Germany, patriotic propaganda kept the population happy about being robbed of its wealth and seeing its youth killed and maimed for the benefit of the powerful.

There's a saying, attributed to George Santayana: Those who refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it.