In boasting that the Republicans alone are competent to fight terrorism, Cheney accused the Democrats of interpreting terrorism as a form of criminality. That is an unforgivable blunder, he went on to say, since we are actually engaged in a "war" where due process and other legal niceties must frequently be set aside. But the Bush administration's dismissive attitude toward "law," revealed in the infamous torture memos and elsewhere, is one of the major reasons why it has waged the war on terror with such stunning incompetence. "Law" is not simply an obstacle to executive-branch flexibility, as the Republicans claim. For one thing, a central purpose of law is to filter out disinformation, stemming from witness malice, and to ensure that decision making is based on double-checked facts. Cheney's and Bush's cavalier attitude toward law is based on their belief that, in the face of a potentially catastrophic terror attack, we need to unleash lethal force long before sketchy intelligence matures into trustworthy evidence.
Damn! This opinion piece by Stephen Holmes, a professor at the New York University School of Law, is some excellent reading! I'm filled with righteous indignation, and am afraid this article will be finding its way into the Inboxes of some conservatives I know...
Salon is SO worth it. Money (and time) well spent.
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