[LeviBrawn]

Back in the day the Liberty Tree had great meaning to those in the colonies who were seeking freedom.

A symbol is a symbol, whether it's a Flag a Tree or whatever -- they're all an abstraction of thought & feeling.

The sancity of the Flag (capitalized to signify it's importance) has changed greatly over time -- as an example look at Olympic athletes draped with fOld Glory covered in messages from those back home. A few years back that would have been considered sacrilege -- and such actions upon the Flag are actually in Violation of the Flag Code .

***

LIBERTY TREE

by Thomas Paine
1775

IN a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way,
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.

Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate
Unvexed with the troubles of silver and gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.

But hear, O ye swains, 'tis a tale most profane,
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain,
To cut down this guardian of ours;
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,
Through the land let the sound of it flee,
Let the far and the near, all unite with a cheer, In defence of our Liberty Tree.

[Svatudjw]

Had "Old Rough and Ready" survived his term and shown up with gunboats off the coast of Maine to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 -- and the north decided to secede -- would you have a different view of secession? Would this have been the president behaving in an authoritarian mode and undermining Jefferson's founding principles?

Yes I would have, because like the basis for the Confederacy, I consider the Fugitive Slave Act immoral, an affront to a guiding principle of the republic - inalienable rights of all men.

Lincoln states explicitly in his first inaugural address that he will use force to collect taxes and property. Recall that Fort Sumpter at the time was a federal construction project which began following the War of 1812. Lincoln was inaugurated in March, a month after SC and 6 other states seceded, federal property having already been seized throughout the new Confederacy. A large part of the US Army was surrendered when Texas seceded. Both Lincoln and his predecessor, James Buchanan, considered secession illegal, but on the subject of slavery, Lincoln expressed his position in his 1858 run for the Senate: A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South. What I object to about this hypothesis of "Lincoln's War" is the implication that Lincoln engineered it with ulterior motives at the expense of innocent secessionists. The southern states believed that if not Lincoln, at some point in the future slavery would be abolished. The fight in the early republic was not the federal government vs, states' rights; it was a battle by both sides to control the federal government. Given the length of the terms, the Supreme Court that rendered Dred Scott was their only certainty for the foreseeable future

The Confederacy pushed the issue. Before the attack on Fort Sumter, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina rejected secession. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for volunteers from the states, and those 4 states refused, joining the Confederacy. West Virgina seceded from Virginia, and became a state. Then there's the violation of Kentucky neutrality.

One note on marshall law in Maryland: Look at a map. Virginia secedes. If Maryland follows, what happens to Washington DC?

[Fetowip]

I have to admit this is entertaining to see a kind of exhumation of the American Civil War all over again on this thread, with what ifs (I have several books on this already).

As an American Southern once corrected me, some don't call it Civil War here, but rather "War for Southern Independence." Since it is still alive and kicking in the 21st century, with bars and stripes on public buildings, and on the back of newly sold pickup trucks, it must have an incredible pull on the national psyche.

.

[Seiblybiozy]

^My Georgia-born ancestors still call it the War of Northern Aggression.

[KeettyGlots]

Some people are just sore losers.

[ëàìèíàò]

I have been away from the board for a week or so, and am just catching up. This is a great exchange and in my view epitomizes all that is best about this forum. I do not really have much to add to the discussion at this point other than to tell the principals how much i appreciate their perspectives, knowledge, debating skills and civility.

[mosypeSom]

...like the basis for the Confederacy, I consider the Fugitive Slave Act immoral, an affront to a guiding principle of the republic - inalienable rights of all men.

As do I. My main point is that "a guiding principle of the republic" holds "inalienable" the "right," the "duty" "of all men" "to throw off such Government."

I reiterate: the Confederate case may not have been just, but the democratic principle of secession remains so.


What I object to about this hypothesis of "Lincoln's War" is the implication that Lincoln engineered it with ulterior motives at the expense of innocent secessionists. I don't entirely disagree with your objection. Just that a war against secession by its very nature violated American principles. James Buchanan expressed just this sentiment in his 1860 State of the Union:
Without descending to particulars, it may be safely asserted that the power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution. Suppose such a war should result in the conquest of a State; how are we to govern it afterwards? Shall we hold it as a province and govern it by despotic power? In the nature of things, we could not by physical force control the will of the people and compel them to elect Senators and Representatives to Congress and to perform all the other duties depending upon their own volition and required from the free citizens of a free State as a constituent member of the Confederacy.

But if we possessed this power, would it be wise to exercise it under existing circumstances? The object would doubtless be to preserve the Union. War would not only present the most effectual means of destroying it, but would vanish all hope of its peaceable reconstruction. Besides, in the fraternal conflict a vast amount of blood and treasure would be expended, rendering future reconciliation between the States impossible. In the meantime, who can foretell what would be the sufferings and privations of the people during its existence?

The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force.


The fight in the early republic was not the federal government vs, states' rights; it was a battle by both sides to control the federal government. In practice if not in theory, before Lincoln, control of the federal government didn't confer an implication of boundless central authority backed by military coercion. The fundamental nature of the "compact" was altered by Lincoln's war to preserve the Union.


One note on marshall law in Maryland: Look at a map. Virginia secedes. If Maryland follows, what happens to Washington DC? Note the rich irony in that DC is located where it is due to southern opposition to one of Hamilton's federal debt centralization and taxation schemes.

From Wikipedia:
The selection of the area around the Potomac River for the new national capital was agreed upon between James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had a proposal for the new federal government to take over debts accrued by the states during the Revolutionary War. However, by 1790, Southern states had largely repaid their overseas debts. Hamilton's proposal would effectively mean that Southern states would be forced to assume a share of Northern debt. Jefferson and Madison agreed to this proposal but in return lobbied for a federal capital located in the South.[7]

Alexander Hamilton was every bit the authoritarian forefather of Lincoln.

[Brewpralgar]

Forced Consent

"Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent—that is, of submission to its will—it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others. And these are the uses to which most governments, our own among the rest, do put their people, whenever they have once reduced them to a state of consent to its will. Andrew Jackson said that those who did not consent to the government he attempted to administer upon them, for that reason, were traitors, and ought to be hanged. Like so many other so-called "heroes," he thought the sword and the gallows excellent instrumentalities for securing the people's consent to be governed. The idea that, although government should rest on the consent of the governed, yet so much force may nevertheless be employed as may be necessary to produce that consent, embodies everything that was ever exhibited in the shape of usurpation and tyranny in any country on earth.

It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty. It can have no place except as a part of a system of absolute military despotism. And it means nothing else either in this country, or in any other. There is no half-way house between a government depending wholly on voluntary support, and one depending wholly on military compulsion.

And mankind have only to choose between these two classes—the class that governs, and the class that is governed or enslaved. In this case, the government rests wholly on the consent of the governors, and not at all on the consent of the governed. And whether the governors are more or less numerous than the governed, and whether they call themselves monarchists, aristocrats, or republicans, the principle is the same. The simple, and only material fact, in all cases, is, that one body of men are robbing and enslaving another. And it is only upon military compulsion that men will submit to be robbed and enslaved, it necessarily follows that any government, to which the governed, the weaker party, do not consent, must be (in regard to that weaker party), a merely military despotism. Such is the state of things now in this country, and in every other in which government does not depend wholly upon voluntary support. There never was and there never will be, a more gross, self-evident, and inexcusable violation of the principle that government should rest on the consent of the governed, than was the late war, as carried on by the North. There never was, and there never will be, a more palpable case of purely military despotism than is the government we now have."—Lysander Spooner, from the December 1873 issue of The Word (Vol.2, No.8) edited by Stephen Pearl Andrews.

[ddxbovMQ]

Do Presidents Have the Right to Kill?

by James Bovard, Posted November 12, 2008

Should the president of the United States be exempt from both American and international law?

Few people would instinctively say yes. But, in actual practice, presidents of the United States have been legally untouchable for most of the past century for the foreign killings they ordered. Even when their orders resulted in the killing of vast numbers of innocent people, it was almost never suggested in this country that the president should face charges for war crimes.

That was true when Woodward Wilson intervened in Mexico and Haiti, and it was true of Republican interventions throughout Latin America in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt approved the carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women and children. Harry Truman approved the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But those were not war crimes because the victims lived under governments which the United States had publicly announced it must destroy.

In the Korean War, U.S. troops followed rules of engagement that ensured that large numbers of Korean women and children would be killed. Towns and villages were routinely flattened by U.S. bombers. But it was okay because they were fighting in a military campaign (or a “police action,” as Truman said) authorized by the president. The U.S. military in Korea formally defined “war crimes” as actions done by the Communists, not by the United States and its allies.

In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson approved preemptive attacks on villages and entire broad swaths of South Vietnam held by — or suspected of sympathizing with — the Viet Cong. He never faced the prospect of being charged with war crimes in the United States in part because he managed to sell his carnage to the American people as a necessary defense of freedom. The “better dead than Red” motto justified killing peasants to prevent them from becoming Communists.

Richard Nixon upped Johnson’s ante in Cambodia and Laos. But until he announced a massive invasion of Cambodia, his secret bombing of villages in that country spurred only a few newspaper stories. And all that the U.S. government had to do was deny the facts and the media would mosey along as if nothing had happened.

When Nixon was threatened with impeachment, it was not for the innocent civilians who had perished in his bombing escalations. Regardless of the number of victims, his policies were not treated as criminal offenses. Perhaps the Democrats did not want to imperil the prerogatives they expected to exploit when they recaptured the White House.

When Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, most of the American media went along for the ride, treating his unprovoked assault on Serbia as if it were little more than a U.S. effort to bring enlightenment to a dark corner of the world. The hundreds of Serb and ethnic Albanian women and children killed by American bombs and missiles rarely rated even an asterisk on the American political scene. As long as Clinton proclaimed his good intentions, his killings were simply proof of his devotion to humanity.

Killing foreigners seems to be a perk of the modern presidency — akin to the band’s playing “Hail to the Chief” when he enters the room. Yet, if a foreign ruler authorized killing Americans the way the U.S. president authorizes killing Somalis, or Afghans, or Pakistanis, Americans would almost certainly consider the foreign attacks acts of war.

This prerogative to kill civilians without consequence is especially dangerous now that George W. Bush is revving up his war threats against Iran. British newspapers reported that the Pentagon has a list of thousands of bombing targets. The White House and the Pentagon have engaged in saber rattling off and on ever since late 2003. Various news reports in May assert that administration officials are talking of attacking Iran by the end of the summer.

Almost no one claims that Iran poses a current threat to the United States. Yet few people in Washington seem willing to deny the president’s right to attack Iran. It is as if the presidential whim is sufficient to justify blasting any foreign nation that does not kowtow to the commands of the U.S. government — as long as the U.S. government also alleges that the foreign regime might possess weapons of mass destruction now or at some point in the next decade. Some Democrats have said they would oppose such a war but showed little enthusiasm for supporting legislation that would make it clear that the president had no authority to attack Tehran.

The fact that thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iranians might die seems to be irrelevant. Bush appears far more concerned about baseball statistics than the body counts compiled by the U.S. military abroad. The fact that many Americans could also die — either during the attack or from Iranian retaliation on U.S. forces in Iraq — doesn’t appear to be costing him any sleep.

Attacking Iran will put American civilians in the terrorist crosshairs, with little or no federal Kevlar to protect them. The key question is not whether terrorists will attack but how the American people will be likely to respond and how politicians could exploit the situation. David Addington, Dick Cheney’s top aide, told Jack Goldsmith, a former top Bush appointee in the Justice Department and now a Harvard Law professor, that the United States is one terrorist “bomb away from getting rid” of the court created to curtail the president’s wiretaps on other Americans.


Power and immunity

The Bush administration, like other administrations before it, could reap a windfall of new power if foreigners respond violently to unprovoked U.S. violence. Goldsmith observes in his book The Terror Presidency,
The president and the vice president always made clear that a central administration priority was to maintain and expand the president’s formal legal powers.And the power to attack foreign nations is one of the most valued prerogatives of today’s Republicans.

Bush’s top advisors — and especially Vice President Cheney — are devoted to a Nixonian view of absolute power for the commander in chief. After he was driven out of office in disgrace, Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”

This seems to be the attitude towards Iran of Bush and his war planners. Pentagon Deputy Assistant Secretary Debra Cagan told several British members of Parliament last year that “I hate all Iranians.” Perhaps Cagan got her position because of such prejudice towards nations that Bush formally designated as “evil.” At the same time that Congress is considering hate-crime legislation, ethnic hatred may be driving U.S. plans to slaughter Iranians.

The power that Bush and prior presidents have used has been buttressed by a corrupted notion of sovereign immunity. The essence of sovereign immunity is that “the king can do no wrong.” But as Jeremy Travis, a professor of criminology at CUNY, noted,
The oldest purported rationale for the immunity of the sovereign ... is a perversion of its historical intendment, which was that the king was privileged to do no wrong.As one English lawyer explained in the wake of James II’s fall,
When a king ... does wrong, he thereby ceases to be king.... God and the law are above the king.But, in the contemporary statist interpretation, a phrase intended to prevent kings from injuring subjects becomes a license for government abuses.

Launching an unprovoked aggressive war was recognized as a war crime at the Nuremberg tribunals in 1946, which declared that to “initiate a war of aggression” is not only an international crime; it is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” But the Nuremberg principles, like the Geneva Conventions, seem to be long out of fashion in Washington. A president is not considered to have launched a “war of aggression” as long as he publicly asserts some uplifting purpose at the time he commences killing.

No American politician has ever been sentenced to prison for ordering U.S. soldiers to kill innocent foreigners. But the fact that the carnage is inflicted beyond U.S. borders should no longer be sufficient to immunize the killing.

As long as politicians can order killings of innocent people without fearing for their own necks, the government has far too much power. America is long overdue for war crimes trials. The United States cannot act as if 96 percent of the world’s population have no rights — including the right to life — that the U.S. government is obliged to respect.

The president and his top officials should face the same perils and procedures common citizens face when they are accused of breaking the law. To investigate the president and his top aides will not imperil the American people. Seeing a president answer for his crimes would be uplifting. It is interesting to consider the subsequent course of American foreign policy if Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon had been tried, convicted in federal court, and publicly punished for committing war crimes.

Americans cannot expect to have good presidents if presidents are permitted to make themselves tsars. If an American president refuses to restrain himself in his foreign warrings, Americans should draw on the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes the threat of a Nuremberg noose is the best way to put government back on a leash.


James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

This article originally appeared in the August 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

[bortycuz]

Emphasis and links original.

*****

Glenn Greenwald
THURSDAY NOV. 13, 2008 07:41 EST

Post-partisan harmony vs. the rule of law

(updated below)

A Washington Post article today on the need to restore confidence in the Justice Department quotes former high-level Clinton DOJ official Robert Litt urging the new Obama administration to avoid any investigations or prosecutions of Bush lawbreaking:
Obama will have to do a careful balancing act. At a conference in Washington this week, former department criminal division chief Robert S. Litt asked that the new administration avoid fighting old battles that could be perceived as vindictive, such as seeking to prosecute government officials involved in decisions about interrogation and the gathering of domestic intelligence. Human rights groups have called for such investigations, as has House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.).

"It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," Litt said. "It would really spend a lot of the bipartisan capital Obama managed to build up."There is a coherent way to argue against investigations and prosecutions of actions by Bush officials: one could argue that they weren't illegal. Obviously, if one believes that, then that is conclusive on the question.

But that's not what Litt is arguing here. Instead, his belief is that Bush officials should be protected from DOJ proceedings even if they committed crimes. And his reason for that is as petty and vapid as it is corrupt: namely, it is more important to have post-partisan harmony in our political class than it is to hold Presidents and other high officials accountable when they break the law.

How is this anything other than a full-scale exemption issued to political leaders to break our laws? There's nothing unique about circumstances now. New Presidents are always going to have Very Important Things to do. And investigations and prosecutions of past administration officials are always going to be politically divisive. By definition, investigations of past criminality are going to be "distractions" from the Important Work that political leaders must attend to. They're always going to be what Litt perversely refers to as "old battles." To argue that new administrations should refrain from investigating crimes that were committed by past administrations due to the need to avoid partisan division is to announce that the rule of law does not apply to our highest political leaders. It's just as simple as that.

This brazen defense of lawlessness articulated by Litt is now as close to a unanimous, bipartisan consensus across the political establishment as it gets. This is what has been advocated by everyone from David Broder to top Obama adviser Cass Sunstein. There are few things more difficult than finding someone of prominence in the establishment that disagrees with this view. Our political class has decided that high political officials -- particularly the President and those closest to him -- are literally exempt from the rule of law.

In today's New York Times, Charlie Savage identifies the self-serving motive leading new Presidents to continuously uphold this lawbreaking license for their predecessors:
Because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor’s tenure. Mr. Bush used executive privilege for the first time in 2001, to block a subpoena by Congressional Republicans investigating the Clinton administration.In other words, by letting criminal bygones be bygones within the Executive branch (Ford's pardon of Nixon, the Iran-contra crimes, and now Bush lawbreaking), Presidents maintain their gentleman's agreement that they are free to commit crimes in office -- break our laws -- with total impunity.

Nobody believes that "policy differences" should be criminalized. That's a strawman -- an obfuscating term -- erected by those who are defending presidential lawbreaking license without having the intellectual honesty to admit they're doing that. This is about having laws in place that clearly and explicitly say that "X shall be a felony," only to then watch as the President does X, and thereafter have our political establishment announce that it's more important to avoid partisan anger than it is to hold high political officials accountable under the rule of law.

Here, X = "eavesdropping on Americans with no warrants," and "torturing detainees," and "destroying evidence relating to investigations," and "interfering in criminal prosecutions for political purposes." Those are crimes -- felonies -- in every sense of the word, not policy differences. And they are all actions in which Bush officials have clearly engaged.

But our political establishment venerates "centrism" and "bi-partisanship" as the highest religious concepts. Those terms are, in reality, nothing more than vehicles to insulate government officials and the political establishment generally from any accountability. Their only real meaning is that cooperation within the political establishment is paramount, regardless of political principles and the rule of law. Hence, investigations and especially prosecutions are scorned as terribly divisive and partisan, even when they involve crimes; good "non-partisans" and "centrists" eschew such unpleasantries, by definition.

In his 1776 revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, Thomas Paine famously declared that "so far as we approve of monarchy, the law is King." But the Robert Litts and Cass Sunsteins and David Broders have radically re-written that principle so that, now, "trans-partisan harmony is King," which means, in turn, that the President -- whose crimes should no longer be prosecuted due to fear of sowing "divisiveness" -- resides above the rule of law, and thus possesses one of the defining traits of a King.

As political scientists have documented, one hallmark of tin-pot tyrannies is the belief that political leaders should be liberated from the constraints of law as long as that helps to achieve good results. That's the defining mentality of those who crave benevolent tyrants -- our Leaders have so many Good and Important Things to do for us that they can't be distracted and weighed down by abstract luxuries like upholding the rule of law. That's now clearly the prevailing consensus of our political establishment.


UPDATE: One other point worth making: the very same Robert Litt urging that Bush officials not be investigated or prosecuted spent much of his career as a federal prosecutor, aggressively prosecuting and imprisoning all sorts of ordinary Americans. He was one of the most vocal advocates for prohibiting government-proof encryption technology in order to preserve the Government's ability to access people's computer communications as part of criminal investigations, and was part of a Clinton DOJ that very aggressively pursued even garden-variety drug cases and used mandatory sentencing guidelines to ensure harsher sentences for common criminals.

In other words, Litt isn't someone who is an advocate in general for exempting people from the rule of law. Instead, the lawbreaking license he defends is for high government officials only (and, presumably, for the large corporate-defendants and extremely rich individuals who can afford to retain Litt's current firm, Arnold & Porter, to defend them). What he's doing is expressing the core premise of America's two-tiered system of justice: we imprison more of our population than any other country on the planet and move increasingly towards ever harsher and more merciless criminal justice rules for them, while exempting our highest political leaders entirely from consequences for lawbreaking.


UPDATE II: Among the client matters included on Litt's Arnold & Porter page is this:
Represented several employees of intelligence agencies in connection with criminal investigations. None has been charged.
If the investigations and prosecutions which Litt is arguing against on policy grounds would include his own paying clients, then that's something The Washington Post should have mentioned (and it's something Litt should have disclosed to the reporter), as it would mean that he's not advocating as the objective analyst which The Post depicts him as being, but instead, is just shilling for his own clients.

I've emailed Litt to ask him if that's the case, though more generally, it's amazing how often that works in Washington: those who pose as "advocates" of a political view seem to have an undisclosed financial and/or personal stakes in the position they're defending.


UPDATE III: Litt replies via email:
I do not comment on client matters for the record. If you are willing to take an off the record answer as guidance I am willing to give you some.

And although I suspect that you are not going to agree with me on this, let me say that I enjoy your stuff.
Though I wasn't asking about specific clients, but rather generally whether Litt has clients who would benefit from what he is advocating, the response is not unreasonable. Lawyers typically refuse instinctively to answer questions about their clients. I'll follow-up with him and if there is anything to add after I do so that he's willing to put on the record, I will.


UPDATE IV: I debated exactly this issue earlier today on To the Point, along with two other guests -- former Reagan and Bush 41 OLC head and Pepperdine Law Professor Douglas Kmiec and former Reagan DOJ official Lee Casey -- both of whom argued against criminal prosecutions, and New York Times Magazine reporter Jonathan Mahler (who wrote this excellent article this weekend entitled "After the Imperial Presidency" and who took no position on whether Bush officials should be prosecuted).

It was a fairly lively and constructive debate, highlighting most of the key issues, and can be heard here (the debate begins at roughly 7:15 and my participation begins at roughly 13:00). Independently, I had several lengthy exchanges on these issues today via email with the aforementioned-Robert Litt, and will publish those if he consents.


UPDATE V: An amazing number of people -- including Bush opponents -- are now arguing (in comments and elsewhere) that all the Good and Important things that Barack Obama is about to do for all of us -- all the Big Problems he's about to fix -- outweigh the need to subject high political officials to the rule of law. Apparently, by this reasoning, unless we agree that our highest political leaders are free to break the law with impunity, then we'll lose out. I address this "reasoning" here.

I would also recommend that anyone who has this attitude -- "oh, we have too many Big Problems now to bother with this whole "rule of law' nonsense" -- read this post from conservative Daniel Larison as well as this one from conservative Conor Friedersdorf. Both of them understand -- much better than many Democrats, apparently -- the intolerable consequences from allowing high political leaders to break the law because we decide there is some material benefit to be had by giving them that license.

-- Glenn Greenwald