Above the law
The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail?If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws?Those are the final two paragraphs of Above the law, an op ed in today's Washington POst by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.For those who are movie buffs, that title might seem familiar, as it is also the title of a Steven Seagal movie where what is above the law is the CIA.
At one point this nation had decided that the intelligence apparatus should not be above the law - we had hearings in both the U. S. Senate led by Frank Church and the U. S. House led by Otis Pike which exposed the abuses of agencies like the CIA and FBI among others, and led to the establishment of ongoing committees in both chambers of Congress to oversee intelligence operations by the US Government.