To BM & Texpat:
Surely you are not blind to the potential danger in giving the government too wide powers, accepting some torture by redefining the meaning of it, denying some people their basic human rights (as given in the Geneva convention and in the UN declaration of Human Rights), by simply redefining the crime they are charged with.
Imagine this scenario (far-fetched, but bear with me) - in a few years time, you have tried to evade paying tax on some of your income, lets say you helped a neighbour paint his house, and he gave you some $$ for it.
One day four men arrive at the door, blindfold you and take you away. Your family is given no other information than that you are considered a threat to national security. You are kept in solitary confinement, beaten and tortured. Since you refuse (or rather are unable) to give the interrogators the information they want, this goes on for a while. When you demand to see a lawyer, you are told that you are a terrorist suspect, and thus are considered a enemy combatant (fifth column, if you'd like). When waterboarding and "mild" torture doesn't work on you (because you are basically innocent), the people detaining you decide to send you to North Korea (recently turned pro-western, but with plenty of handy "expertise in torture") for further processing. "He's a tough nut - make sure you break him", is the last you hear before you are bundled into a plane and flown out of the US. Your family will probably never see you again. You have no rights. You disappear into some hellhole, never to be seen again.
These things happened under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Saddam, hell, it was close to going that way in the US during the McCarthy period, only that time the bogyman was communism rather than terrorism. It happens today in totalitarian regimes all around the world.
In modern democracies, we have built up a defence against this blatant abuse of power, in order to protect the individual, and thus our freedom. This defence consists of elements such as free speech, the right to a trial, the right to elect our leaders, etc. Basically what we call human rights, much of which is included in most constitutions, including the US. It has taken a lot of time, blood and suffering to get to where we are today, and yet some leaders want to eliminate these rights with a pen stroke and leave it up to themselves to decide who are afforded these rights and who are to be denied them. The potential for abuse is huge, and if history is a yardstick these kind of privileges inevitably get abused. A good present day example would be Putin's Russia.
Your crime in my example above - well, you cheated on your tax, tax payers money go to pay the war on terror, so consequently you were against, even sabotaging, the war on terror.
Since you refuse to tell the interrogators what they want to hear, you are obviously not cooperating. They even have a witness saying that you have been talking about killing the president. That witness is the husband of the woman you have been shagging on the side for the last year, but since this case will never go to court, there will be nobody around to discredit the witness, who, besides have been given full anonymity.
Bye, bye!
