The Atlantic<\/a>
\nJune 8, 2013<\/p>\nLet\u2019s assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security.<\/p>\n
Say they\u2019ve used the power they\u2019ve claimed, the technology they\u2019ve developed, and the precedents they\u2019ve established exclusively to fight al-Qaeda terrorists intent on killing us, that they\u2019ve succeeded in disrupting what would\u2019ve been successful attacks, and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.<\/p>\n
Few Americans believe all of that to be so. Combining the people who didn\u2019t trust Bush and the ones who don\u2019t trust Obama adds up to a sizable part of the citizenry. But even if all the critics were proved wrong, even if the CIA, NSA, FBI, and every other branch of the federal government had been improbably filled, top to bottom, with incorruptible patriots constitutionally incapable of wrongdoing, this would still be so:<\/p>\n
The American people have no idea who the president will be in 2017. Nor do we know who\u2019ll sit on key Senate oversight committees, who will head the various national-security agencies, or whether the moral character of the people doing so, individually or in aggregate, will more closely resemble George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, John Yoo, or Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
What we know is that the people in charge will possess the capacity to be tyrants \u2013 to use power oppressively and unjustly \u2013 to a degree that Americans in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000 could\u2019ve scarcely imagined. To an increasing degree, we\u2019re counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils. Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant\u2019s checklist that they\u2019ve provided their successors:<\/p>\n
\nRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conor Friedersdorf The Atlantic June 8, 2013 Let\u2019s assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security. Say they\u2019ve used the power they\u2019ve claimed, the technology they\u2019ve developed, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}