Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

The administration contends it is still acting in self-defense after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, when it passed a resolution authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks."

"Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act," said one official who was briefed on the CIA's original cover program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. "It's an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

The interpretation undergirds the administration's determination not to waver under public protests or the threat of legislative action. For example, after The Washington Post disclosed the existence of secret prisons in several Eastern European democracies, the CIA closed them down because of an uproar in Europe. But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as "black sites" in classified documents.

The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.

"The executive branch will not pull back unless it has to," said a former Justice Department lawyer involved in the initial discussions on executive power. "Because if it pulls back unilaterally and another attack occurs, it will get blamed."

Which was just the conclusion I drew in this post. It may sometimes seem that GWB is mentally out to lunch, and in a lot of ways I think he is (particularly his childish glee at the grisly business of war, torture and nasty means of intelligence gathering,) but make no mistake, this guy was willing to do anything, violate any law, ignore any court and do whatever he had to do not to have a second 9/11 on his watch.

But isn't that what we want, you might ask? To be safe from terrorism at all costs? My answer would be "no." I'd rather have my country and its values and Constitution intact. I have enough faith in our armed forces and career intelligence professionals that they could follow the rules, clean up the problems in their operating procedures, and not get 9/11'ed again without turning the president into a king and the intelligence agencies and military into his secret police. I'm not the only one -- and not all of those who agree with me are Democrats (unless Phyllis Shclaffley and Bob Barr have suddenly changed sides.) Let's let conservative pundit Larry Sabato phrase it, shall we:

“The lesson is obvious, Mr. President: You're a lot closer to Nixon than you are to Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton. And that's not where you want to be. Nixon's second term ended rather badly, as you will recall.”