Reuters

THE main book market, in Baghdad's Mutanabi Street, was a hive of angry chatter this week. Bespectacled traders, complaining about new censorship laws, shouted, “This is not freedom of expression,” and talked of holding a demonstration like one last month, when journalists protested against new restrictions.

But would the booksellers dare? They said they were already worried that plainclothes policemen had been taking their names. Perhaps they should go instead to court and fight censorship with the help of lawyers. “Not a chance,” said one book-dealer. “This is the new Iraq.” Legal protections, he noted, count for little. “Power”, he added, “is held by the men with the guns.”

He had a point. The Shia-led government has overseen a ballooning of the country's security apparatus. Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state.

Old habits from Saddam Hussein's era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. In particular, they have been targeting leaders of the Awakening Councils, groups of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents and sympathisers, who have helped the government to drive out or capture Sunni rebels who refused to come onside. Instead of being drawn into the new power set-up, many of them in the past few months have been hauled off to prison. In the most delicate cases, the arrests are being made by an elite unit called the Baghdad Brigade, also known as “the dirty squad”, which is said to report to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

The American-sponsored judicial system was supposed to protect Iraqis' civil rights. But it is sorely overstretched, with some 1,500 people being brought into prisons every month as the Americans empty their own Iraqi jails. The number of Iraqis in American-run prisons has dropped to less than 9,000 from more than 21,000 a year ago, whereas the number in Iraq's own jails has risen from 35,000 in February probably to more than 40,000 today.

Moreover, sentencing is getting harsher, with more people sentenced to death. On a single day in June 19 people were hanged in Baghdad. In a recent report Amnesty International, a British-based group, says that more than 1,000 Iraqis face execution, often on the basis of confessions, which, it says, are sometimes made under torture.

Journalists are prominent victims of Iraq's judicial system. In July one was arrested for photographing a Baghdad traffic jam, after his pictures were deemed “negative” for mocking Mr Maliki's assertion that life in the capital was improving. Last year Iraq dropped to 158th place out of 173—its lowest ranking since the American invasion—in a press-freedom table drawn up by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based lobby, which detects a decline in freedom in many countries (see article).

The government recently announced plans to censor imported books as well as the internet, saying it wanted to ban hate screeds and pornography. But human-rights monitors fear this may presage a first step towards a wider web of censorship. Internet cafés face new rules that require them to register. Many bloggers and other e-mailers may lose protective anonymity.

Some Iraqis say they approve of this rush to reapply social controls. They see them as a good way to fight sectarian violence. But even if less freedom were to bring greater security, the new laws are part of a looming and potentially violent power struggle. The new establishment has yet to entrench a solid political system, despite endorsing two constitutions since Saddam was ousted. The Shia-led federal government in Baghdad wants a strong unitary state, whereas the Kurds and some other groups still seek a more federal one.

In any event, Mr Maliki and his friends are trying to secure as much control as they can over the levers of power in the run-up to a general election in January, all the more feverishly since a rash of big bombings in Baghdad in the past two months has badly dented his reputation as a guarantor of public safety. His government is also seeking to tighten rules to regulate political parties and independent associations (including charities), causing still more alarm. “This is not how you build a democracy,” says Maysoon al-Damluji, a liberal member of parliament.

It is too soon to say Iraq will revert to Saddam's heinous standards. Parliament is diverse and vigorous. The press still airs a range of opinion. The courts are not yet rubber stamps. But the trend is going the wrong way. “This will be a police state, no question,” says a Western diplomat with long experience of Iraq. “It'll take two or three years. But it's coming.”