What are we preserving?

Got into a shouting match over on plastic.com about this news item.

To sum up for those not willing to follow links, the news item was in response to some comments of the Justice Department (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Executive Branch), to the effect that:

Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States.

Notice the specific phrasing. "Terrorist suspects." Not "tried and convicted of the crime of terrorism." Not "caught in the act of terrorism." Just "suspects."

On top of the wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and Guantanamo detention, there now exists the possibility that masked ninjas may appear in your bedroom and just bump you off, on the government's order.

I was perusing the thread when I came across an assertion by the the increasingly fervent bush-humping gerrymander that the President had the authority to use military force. Specifically he said you're asserting that unless an enemy masses troops along the border, the President has no authorization to use military force within US borders?. He was responding to someone else, but I jumped on this immediately. As it turns out, the job of declaring war (which would be when we decide to use military force) falls to Congress, not the President.

Gerrymander replied with some dodge to a provision that Habeus Corpus may be suspended if public safety requires it - which set me off even more.

I put together a comment I'd seen elsewhere in the thread where Gerrymander asserted that the President's selection criteria of whom to kill were (apparently by right of his alone) invisible to the rest of us. That's in this scintillating gem of a comment.

Every time someone brings up civil liberties, one of these assholes flips a picture of the World Trade Center out as if there need be no other answer. I finally completely lost my happy thoughts over this when I realized that qualitatively there is no difference between a world in which there is a remote chance that I could be killed by a terrorist just because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a world in which I can be spied on, detained without apparent cause or recourse, and finally ordered specifically to be killed by a shadowy government official answerable to no one.

We used to pride ourselves in being U.S. citizens, and one of the reasons that we did so was offered up as a contrast to the imagined experience of a typical citizen of the Soviet Union -- who lived in fear of speaking his mind, was likely being watched by shadowy, unaccountable Thought Police, and could even be imprisoned and sent to Siberia or killed for his crimes against the State -- with no chance of appeal or recourse, let alone redress of grievances.

We held this model up as the way to live because it was best, because it represented the supremacy of both human liberty and dignity. We felt we could count on the mechanisms of our Constitution to safeguard us from tyrrany.

I don't ever recall a right to be secure from random acts of violence being enumerated in the Constitution, nor has there been any historic expectation thereof. Yet this is precisely the right that is held up in supreme arrogance by the defenders of the Administration whenever their increasingly intrusive and unconstitutional activities are questioned. My final response to gerrymander was that my Civil Rights were not his to bargain away out of fear that he might be the victim of a terrorist attack. I have written this blog entry to go further: if we are going to give up our liberties in order to safeguard our soft little pink asses, we should be thinking about what our liberties protect. Because I don't feel any safer knowing that I now run the risk of being mis-identified as an enemy of the state, spied on, detained without cause or recourse, or possibly murdered in my sleep by the order of an authoritarian thug. Not one fucking bit.