The Atlantic has a must read analysis of the erosion of rights and safeguards under Bush and Obama.
To an increasing degree, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils.
All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama by Conor Friedersdorf makes the compelling argument that we are becoming a nation of men not laws.
We are trusting our leaders to be ethical and lawful.
We have created a tyrant's checklist of precedents for any future president who dwells in the dark side of human nature.
* A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative review
* The power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial
* Ongoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027
* Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessing
* Normalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretations
* The permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killing
* The ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anything
* A torture program that could be restarted with an executive order
The conclusion is clear. The over reaction to terror is killing our Constitution.
The national-security state, loosed of the Constitution's safeguards, is a far bigger threat to liberty than al-Qaeda will ever be.
Imagine a Dick Cheney sitting in the oval office with a tyrant's checklist in his hand.