Shorter NY Times: Alberto Gonzales is a bad man

whose chief concern is finding innovative ways to limit your freedoms.

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

This is interesting though:

"Everybody who was involved in this process had, in my mind, a white hat on," Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, said in an interview. "They were not out to be cowboys or create a radical new legal regime. What they wanted to do was to use existing legal models to assist in the process of saving lives, to get information. And the war on terror is all about information."

He's right, the war on terror IS about information. In fact more information is exactly what the American people need. What they DON'T need are misleading interpretations of information, massaged information, or just plain old disinformation. If we expect to win the war on terror then we better start being truthful with the American public. INFORM THEM. Let them know the true nature of the terror threat. What is the terrorists' intent? Who is their enemy? What goal do they aim to acheive? And let the American public know what they can do to help.

Terrorists want to incite fear. So long as our government continues to be vague about the threat there will remain a heightened sense of unease. If we continue to use the threat index disingenuously, rather than as a bonafide warning system, then malaise will continue to be a factor in public perception. If we continue to kill innocent men, women and children in Iraq, we will NEVER escape the cycle of violence associated with radical Islamic terrorism. Moreover, secret meetings held by administration officials with the express purpose of bypassing due process and granting unreasonable legal powers to the executive branch is not what the American public needed to keep them safe, but don't tell that to Gonzales' crew. And why do these guys habitually meet in echo chamber environments? In this instance without SoS Colin Powell, NSA Condoleeza Rice or consultation of Congress? Because dissenters are not welcome and opposing points of view be damned. They had a mission with an expected outcome, and nobody was going to interfere. Par for the course.