Happy to endorse.

Editor,

The Bush/Cheney/Neocon crowd were just itching to bomb someone and show the world that the "sole remaining superpower" who "won the Cold War" were going to have themselves a "New American Century." Framing terrorism as warfare instead of a crime is inherently aggressive and was done to further the ambitions of a faction in our country in whose interest it was to have a "wartime president."

Referring to some schlub who was sold to the CIA by bounty hunters or by people with a grudge against his father as "the worst of the worst" without a proper trial or even a proper discovery process by a proper defense attorney is so fundamentally un-American it makes my blood boil.

Is the U.S.A. 18th-Century France, where the king can lock someone up in a dungeon forever -- and torture him for good measure? Or 18th-Century England, who our forebears fought a war to expel so that we could live in a nation with a legal system grounded in a Bill of Rights?

Just because someone says another person is a terrorist doesn't make it so. That's why we have a transparent judicial process. And canceling that out because of "national security" is just the sort of authoritarian garbage that Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin would happily endorse.

re: "Obama Team Is Divided on Tactics Against Terrorism" (3/29/2010)