Iraq, Ten Years Later: What About the Constitution? Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/03/iraq-ten-years-later-what-about-the-constitution.html#ixzz2NtAD9kAB

By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker

".....The dominant question that marked the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals—what did the President know and when did he know it?—no longer needs to be asked. We have a President who found a way, last May, to let the world—and, most importantly, those wavering independents in the months before last year’s election—know via the New York Times that he personally participated in discussions about which terrorist, real or suspected, was to be assassinated. The Times quoted John Brennan, then a senior Presidential adviser and now our newly confirmed director of Central Intelligence, as explaining that the suspects went through a checklist that included “the infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.” The question about all of these things that has yet to be asked—at a Presidential news conference or during Brennan’s confirmation hearing—is this: How many suspects on your list have been taken off the list because of unreliable intelligence or a conclusion that the “imminent” threat was no longer so imminent? The answer, according to people who know of such matters, is very few, if any. Meanwhile, we are creating more and more terrorists as we drone and predator along.....

Nothing succeeds in Washington like being tougher than the next guy. And woe to those who express doubt. In its article last May, the Times quoted retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama Administration’s first director of National Intelligence, who was replaced after just sixteen months on the job, as saying that the drone and predator strikes were talked about as “the only game in town”—in a way that “reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget."