qotd

[jenk]

Is there something magical about having gone five and a half years without another 9/11? The administration has claimed that all the new legal authority it has grabbed in that time has been central to thwarting new attacks. Perhaps. But [...] the country is beginning to understand that if we are going to be at war with terror for the rest of our lives, we need to think very carefully about the freedoms we give up. And that in turn means engaging in a future-looking analysis of how and if the laws of war should change to accommodate a new kind of enemy. It means sorting out deliberately whether the last five years of coercive interrogation have yielded any real results and whether past policies of indefinite detention have had any merit. It means getting down to the business of crafting a legal regime based on clean rules, as opposed to blanket assertions of executive authority in a time of crisis.

- Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate.