Due-process-free: to a collapsing Empire, security is the ONLY cognizable value

glenn...

It will never cease to amaze me how acquiescent the country is to the seizure by this President of the extremist and warped power to target American citizens, far from any battlefield, for killing, all without a shred of due process. It's not just a profound assault on due process rights but also free speech rights.

Submission to this power is, I believe, based on three factors: (1) blind faith in political leaders of the type that led Americans to accept the due-process-free punishment at Guantánamo ("my President accuses this person of being a Terrorist and therefore it's true; I don't need a trial to know it's true"); (2) acceptance of anything done to a fellow citizen as long as he has a foreign-sounding, Muslim-ish name like "Anwar al-Awlaki," who dresses in white cleric robes and is in Yemen and is thus probably guilty of something or other; and (3) the automatic and enthusiastic embrace by America's Foreign Policy Community of the use of force in response to any problem...

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The government "needs to do all it can" in the name of Terrorism: even targeting its own citizens with assassination without a trial based on the mere suspicion that he's doing something criminal -- or invading other countries that haven't attacked us -- or dropping a continuous stream of missiles on people's homes who are purely innocent -- or locking people up for life without a trial. This is the sociopathic mindset of the security fetishist that dominates our political discourse -- Terrorism: the meaningless though all-justifying slogan -- and, more than anything else, this is what explains why something as radical and dangerous as the President's due-process-free assassination program aimed at American citizens triggers so little objection. "Washington needs to do all it can" -- no matter how violent and lawless -- "to reduce the risk of another attack." To a militarized, authoritarian, collapsing Empire in a posture of Endless War, security is the only cognizable value.

it's amazing to me that the house of cards is still standing...

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