Even if Bush really is correct in that the constitution can be read to give him unitary executive authority, that only says that the constitution is illegitimate in that respect, not that such an authority must be respected simply because it is duly constituted. Even if it puts "Men" above the "Law", at least temporarily until the "Law" is fixed.

jojo++: As I understand it, Madison, who originally said the thing about government of law not of men, would have said about your example that if that were the case, that the Constitution needed to be fixed because it had imperfectly construed the Law. Laws in those days were like math theorems, they were discovered, not made.

But if we were to capture Bin Laden, or a top lieutenant, I don't see a moral issue with torturing them. In fact, I think it is immoral to avoid using every method available that could possibly get that information from them. If the extreme pain of one person can save thousands of lives, and the person in question is guilty of conspiring to kill them, that's an easy equation for me....Thing is, Bin Laden does not recognize the Geneva Convention.

Renegade Iconoclast: No. This is precisely the slippery slope. There are a lot of if's in your statement, you should consider refusing to contemplate impossibilities. If bin Laden is captured, it is precisely by using the Law that he is dealt with most permanently: If he were given a full trial in an impartial venue (e.g. The Hague), with every i dotted and every t crossed, his guilt could not be disputed by even the most ardent critic, and if he were treated justly, no one could dispute that those who captured him were a just people. Anything else, and you had better be damned certain that the number of lives you think you saved is greater than the number that will be lost to those recruited by his martyrdom.

As for the Geneva Conventions and whether he signed them, he is a criminal, only nations and territories sign the Geneva Conventions. The article I quoted above applies to him the minute he is in custody in any of the 194 signing countries, and it prohibits torture.

Sorry. My fists clench too when I think about him, but that doesn't justify doing the wrong thing.

Sorry to pick on you, but one more thing: In the film Torture: A Dirty Business, discussed earlier, one monitor on extraordinary rendition relates that since the U.S. and its allies relaxed their stance on the Geneva Conventions, there's been a clandestine, underground free-for-all of countries doing things like extraordinary rendition and torture in the name of fighting terrorism. In an international sense, we've done what SteveLG said: we've made our friends and neighbors torturers.

...why Sgt. Peppers was more important to so many people in 1967 than Mario Savio and Huey Newton, she doesn't understand 1967. It is possible that she could rectify that fact, but, as someone else two years before Sgt. Peppers put it, "its like tryin to tell a stranger 'bout Rock 'n' Roll." She's missed a lot of threads, so she doesn't understand the feeling, and probably never will. Write about something else, Gina.

In the land of eternal darkness the ship of the sun is pulled by the grateful dead.

On the one hand, the truth will out. No problem with that. But there has been a disturbing trend in modern society, on both the right and the left, in the center, and everywhere else, to confuse ideals with performance, to misrepresent myth as perverted science, and to constantly misbelieve that history can be written in the present.

These people are starting their break with Bush. We have decried and decried the practices and policies of this administration, but when it comes time to welcome the refugees, prisoners of war, defectors and asylees from the Bush army, well... all of a sudden the oh so pro-immigration and anti-racism liberals want pure-bred pedigree and a proven track record of being conscripts into the German army--unwilling servants to the Nazis, who never raised their arms in the crowd.

As with American history, and the American ideals, there are obvious gaps. Thomas Jefferson the man was a lot more compromised than Thomas Jefferson the hero of American liberty. That's as it should be, that's the difference between history and myth. And what these conservatives are trying to do is to come up with the new mythology, the one which repudiates George W. Bush. No, we shouldn't accept it as history. Yes, we should give them space to create their mythology, we need their support. Or have you forgotten that we won't get out of Iraq, let alone get rid of the raft of murderous policies and dangerous dismantlements without their support?

I've related this story before, but I had an art professor that used to tell us that the difference between Americans and other cultures was that our myths were of the future instead of the past. I was at Border's over the weekend, and the takeover of the Science Fiction section by what is called Fantasy is nearly complete. Our future has been assimilated, and what we have now is a lot of fairy tales and anti-science where the strange powers of the superheroes derive from ancient formulas known only to Druids and warlocks -- a mythology of the past.

It's devastating. Before you hold peoples feet to the fire, first decide what inside you wants them burned so badly.