Countdown: John Dean on the Release of Nine Bush Era Memorandum

Uhmm - you do realize that one of the freedoms and rights you have as a citizen is the fourth amendment? These memos literally meant that the President could deem any citizen of the U.S. a terrorist and that citizen would have no access to habeus corpus.You're okay with your president having the unsupervised ability to vanish any citizen, but you're worried about wiretaps?

Timmothy McVeigh was an US citizen and he did what he did with some help. What if some crazy militia did the same several times over? We would want them hunted down like dogs.

Bush forbid taking pictures of Americans returning from Iraq in COFFINS to avoid shocking people with the numbers of casualties. That I oppose because it would have shocked people and raised pressure on him to get out. That is the kind of things that happen when you restrict free press.

You're sort of making my point. Tim McVeigh was arrested, read his rights, and given access to an attorney and a chance to defend himself in court. So was Ted Bundy, the Theodore Kaczynski (the unabomber), Charles Manson...

Apparently, you're not familiar with how we do things here in the states. Citizens are entitled to be protected from a King who can just randomly decide to hide them in the dungeon for the rest of their lives.

Good points. But I wonder how well the system would work if instead of a handful of lunatics scattered throughout a decade we had dozens acting up every year. Handling terrorism is a law enforcement problem but it may be too much for US police.

In Spain they caught the Madrid bombers. They only caught a few alive, four or five more blew themselves up with their apartment. Could the US handle another Mumbay? 

I mean without handing the constitution over to shred out of sheer fear?