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Manifesto

I'm going to be the first to acknowledge my 7 week absence from the blog. It was a lot longer than I wanted. Hopefully I won't be gone for so long again. But in my absence, a lot has happened and I don't have time to catch up. But my take, everything is playing out like a bad episode of "24".

Take this headline from Newsweek: Can the President Order a Killing on U.S. Soil?

Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a Qaeda suspect was holed up with a dirty bomb and was about to attack? University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda empowered the president to kill 9/11 perpetrators, or people who assisted their plot, whether they were overseas or inside the United States. On the other hand, Sunstein says, the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.

I really don't even know how to comment. Due Process. We don't need no stinking due process. Look, nobody would fault the President for exceeding his authority in the most dire of circumstances, such as those described above. But that still doesn't mean that the President has authority to do this. The idea is to draw a line that is reasonable. Maybe it is a line that has to be crossed, but if the President is going to cross the line, he better have a damn good reason (see the above scenarios). The reason you don't give the President the inherent authority to do such things is because then he can go out and make people "disappear". In which case we are little different from the dictatorships and puppet regimes we've opposed for our entire lives. And if you don't agree with that, and you don't think President Bush would abuse this authority because he's a reasonable guy, just ask yourselves, if your biggest political enemy, Bill Clinton, has this power, would you feel comfortable?