What explains the absence of a single international terrorist attack on United States soil in the more than seven years that have elapsed since Sept. 11, 2001?
Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard Cheney and many supporters and detractors insist the Bush-Cheney usurpations and abuses were key: warrantless surveillance targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); torture; detentions of enemy combatants without accusation or trial; military commissions combining judge, jury and prosecutor for the trial of alleged war crimes by noncitizens; extraordinary rendition; and secret kidnappings, coercive interrogation and imprisonments abroad shielded from legal or political accountability.
But the weight of the evidence indicates the Bush-Cheney lawlessness accomplished nothing that could not have been achieved by constitutional means and, in some respects, made the United States more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism.
January 29, 2009
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates Inc. and author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy.
