New York Times: Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests

My feeling was always that, bottom line, Bush and Cheney simply wanted unfettered power, with no limits and no accountability. The legal stuff was just a smokescreen for that, or at best a hurdle to be cleared. If innocent people were rounded up alongside terrorists, better that they should just disappear than ever have the chance to tell their stories. Why else would Bush and Cheney have feared Habeas Corpus for prisoners? Don't we, a constitutional democracy that holds itself up as a role model for the world, care just a little whether people in prison are really who we suspect them of being? Their argument was always to put a label on them, terrorists, enemy combatants, unlawful combatants, and then say that such people weren't entitled to any rights. But they didn't even seem to care whether or not the label actually fit, begging the question. At least a large part of the reason that our Constitution gives rights to criminal suspects is that they might actually be innocent. Using labels that begged this question was a huge erosion of this principle, since increasingly anyone could be labeled and immediately placed outside of Constitutional protection.