Killer Fact! Reading the Following Post May Save Your Life!

As Buffy would say, Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic.

Death squads in the United States? Yet again the 1600 Crew are using the ticking bomb approach to amend or create executive orders. Newsweek reports that during a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, suggested that in certain circumstances the President could "order a killing on U.S. soil".

"Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances... Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a Qaeda suspect was holed up with a dirty bomb and was about to attack?"

Apparently this was an "academic discussion of theoretical contingencies", but are there not multiple levels of policing and law enforcement services from the local to the federal that can respond to any situation where there is reasonable suspicion of immediate danger? Certainly the Patriot Act has given all federal and local enforcement agencies broad powers. When the police encounter situations where they have evidence a crime is about to be committed or they catch someone in the act of committing a crime they are authorized to respond. There are procedures in place; they are permitted to use force if they believe a suspect to be a danger and they can use deadly force if the situation warrants. Why would the police not be able to cope with the theoretical terrorist bomber about to unleash a dirty bomb on the unsuspecting populace? Why should our government require death squads instead?
As for Flight 93, from what I understand, our Air Force could have been ordered to shoot those hijacked planes down on 9/11. The President would indeed have issued that tragic order but he does not need any special extra-constitutional privileges to give such an order. Well, I'm relieved that someone had the cojones to tell us what the 1600 Crew are likely already up to anyway--would we have known about the FISA go-round if someone hadn't blown the whistle?

(No lights-out this evening--Fixer and Gordon will be live-blogging during the Super Bowl--;P I think they intend to discuss the underlying structures of our society and the need to spend millions of dollars glorifying violence etc. They will also tell us which team has God on its side.)