The Bush administration said that Abu Zubaydah was al-Qai'da; he was not. They said he helped bin Laden escape Afghanistan; he did not. They said he had intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq; he had none. Every justification they gave for his imprisonment and torture was either disproved or a simple lie, and yet they continued. In the end, their justification was simply, "He hates us, and we hate him."

This is a troubling basis on which to exercise military power. And once the executive arrogates for himself the power to place persons beyond the pale of domestic and international customary law, it's very hard to keep that demon in the box where you want him. To paraphrase, when all the laws lay flat, what will hide us from unjust power?

So it's hard for me to see Schmitt's theory as anything other than the normalization of the diktat to resolve political conflicts; if the state demands orthodoxy amongst its "friends," and the executive is empowered to punish deviant "enemies," and the executive's decision to impose an exception is unreviewable (which is a Schmittian prerequisite for executive power), then the state of exception essentially never ends -- as Germany found out with the Reichstag emergency.

What are your thoughts -- am I taking him too far? Can he be read a bit more kindly, perhaps as a more formal and rigid version of the old saw, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact?" Or was he, like Machiavelli, more descriptive than prescriptive in his assessments?

As I said, it's been years since I read Schmitt, but I found him to be, ah, bracing as a thinker, a kind of prebuttal to the concept of a negotiated society that would later preoccupy thinkers like Habermas. I'd just rather live in a Rawlsian or Habermasian world than one in which political disagreements are treated as a flashpoint for war.

Having said that, this mix of academic, positive right thinking, in the context of the abolishment of a state of law and civil society probably makes this all even more evil.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Agonistics-Thinking-Politically-Chanta... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Political-Thinking-Action-Chantal-Mouf...

As the article illustrates, we don't know the person is a threat to our national security. We'll never know with 100% accuracy. The only available options are to accept occasionally torturing people who are innocent or disagreeing with torture and not using it. Most of the civilised world has agreed that the danger of mistakenly torturing innocent people isn't worth it.

When we disagree we should answer. This is what I'm going try to do.

First, you say "If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us". That's not true. Those terrorist acts have politic goals.

Then, you say "So if the people who are on our side feel they need.." Here you assume that those people is in your side, and that they shouldn't be under control. Two assumptions that I recommend you to give more consideration.

> First, you say "If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us". That's not true. Those terrorist acts have politic goals.

Certain segments of the western Political scene very much want to believe this, but I'm skeptical. They said that Hitler wasn't serious about his rhetoric either, that it was all politics. In fact, he meant it all, and indeed went on to start the biggest war in history and slaughter millions.

They downplayed the extremism of the ISIS types, and look what we have there. Just what we've seen so far is quite bad enough, and we haven't even gotten a full look at the situation.

Do we not at least owe the enemy the respect of believing they really intend to do exactly what they say they want to do? And they most certainly are the enemy of everything that we in the West hold dear.

The explicit goal of ISIS is the creation of a caliphate. A caliphate is an area governed by a caliph that enforce their strict interpretation of the quran in their limits.

The terrorist acts that we suffer in the west have mainly two aims: terrorize the civil population so they force the governments to stop acting in the area and attract fighters to their cause.

If something, their ideal world is not one where they kill us all but where they convert us all.

Can you tell me where you heard/read that they want "to kill us all"? Is in the same place where they say that they just "hate our freedoms"?

And of course they do, because the implementation encourages it. Downvoting has no consequence, it allows people to express disagreement with zero effort, and they even get a chance to hide posts they don't like. If I were designing a site to be an echo chamber, reddit-style voting is the killer feature I'd want to have.

EVERY opinion is protected, unless it doesn't agree with the "masses"...