some things we need to keep in mind about torture etc: they were setting up from the highest levels a culture of abuse throughout the armed forces and intelligence services. it's not two guys. it's a whole system of abductions, detentions without representation or provision of evidence, abuse of detainees and of people in the field. now if you frame the thing very narrowly - should we be able to blast metallica at the world's worst person as the bomb ticks? - you seem a bit obsessive. but consider what you are setting up: a parallel penal system, spread around the world, in which no constitutional or geneva-convention type constraints have any application at all. you are constituting an absolute, unlimited, and completely arbitrary judicial power, and conferring it on the executive branch. now consider for a moment the potential for such power to be abused, the certainty that it will be (and was) abused: trained on the innocent without recourse, or (eventually) used for whomever anyone in a position of power wants gone, for any reason whatever. our system is based on the idea that power is subject to abuse, that arbitrary power is a terrible human problem: the essence of tyranny. i say you must, if you have any commitment to american values, expose and expunge every vestige you can find of such power. so the people who enthuse about this or want it concealed are not patriots, not defenders of democracy (as cheney claims of himself in every other sentence he utters). they are enthusiasts for tyranny; they are what the american revolution tried to destroy, only worse.