Salon.com | Bush’s war on professionals:

“At the beginning of the Cold War, the National Security Act of 1947 authorized the creation of new institutions of foreign policy and intelligence, including the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. But Bush has built a secret system, without enabling legislation, justified by executive fiat and presidential findings alone, deliberately operating beyond the oversight of Congress and the courts, and existing outside the law. It is a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditions and domestic eavesdropping.

The arguments used to rationalize this system insist that the president as commander in chief is entitled to arbitrary and unaccountable rule. The memos written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, constitute a basic ideology of absolute power.”

The news just keeps getting worse. I’ll grant that some of the rhetoric in this op-ed piece is over the top. But for heaven’s sake – I never imagined that I would read officials of our government trying to justify why torture is not only acceptable but needful.

The latest bit of news that has been leaked out about the massive information sweeps being done to listen into US citizen’s private conversations being followed up by a decision of the President not to cease and desist but rather to punish the leaker and vigorously defend the practice is just a sign of how far we’ve gone down this path. I dearly hope there’s someway to work our way back to where we once were.

(Via Salon.)