By Andrew P. Napolitano
The president's men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The national security state that has expanded in response to the Sept. 11 attacks will not shrink in the near future, even though al Qaeda's top leadership has been decimated and the U.S. government faces extreme budget pressures.
A sharply divided federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit challenging a controversial post-Sept. 11 CIA program that flew terrorism suspects to secret prisons.
As the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, much of President Obama's counterterrorism policies and his understanding of executive power closely hew to the last administration, which he criticized as a candidate for the White House.
A former CIA officer accused of revving an electric drill near the head of an imprisoned terror suspect has returned to U.S. intelligence as a contractor, training CIA operatives after leaving the agency, the Associated Press has learned.
"With the war on terror, there is a danger that the cyclical pattern of rights restriction and restoration has been broken, and we are moving in one direction only, toward the permanent enshrinement of emergency powers as a new normal," Mr. Wizner said.
Mr. Wizner noted that Franklin D. Roosevelt detained Japanese-Americans during World War II and Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in some cases during the Civil War.
