Power That Bush Can't Just Take
"why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
... There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.
The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom."
- posted by geoff @ #