So when the INS told him it had grown close to closing time that day and he would have to come back on Dec. 19, he didn’t mind. He minded a little more when the computer connection to D.C. went down on that second visit too and he was again told to make the hour-and-a-half drive to return. For a routine process, this was taking a long time, he thought, but he willingly complied. And although on his third visit the computer did not crash, everything else in his world did.

On Dec. 23, the San Antonio INS office revoked his humanitarian parole visa without explanation and led him away in handcuffs. That was the last his family heard of him for three days. He’s been shuffled between INS-rented Texas jails ever since, though no one will tell him or his family why.

“Our lives have been torture one day at a time,” said his brother Hassan in an interview. “He’s never even gotten a speeding ticket. We don’t understand why they haven’t set bail or released him. I’ve been here 23 years, and I’ve gone through all the channels I can think of, and still no one will tell me why he’s being detained.”

Hashemi had gotten caught in the dragnet of the INS’s Special Registration program — a new initiative requiring foreign nationals from certain countries to annually report their whereabouts. While the Bush administration contends that the program is an essential tool in the war on terrorism, it has ignited yet another civil rights firestorm for the Ashcroft Justice Department — and critics argue it may not even be an effective anti-terrorism tactic.

According to Babak Sotoodeh, president of the Alliance of Iranian Americans (AIA) and co-counsel for a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Iranian detainees, Hashemi should never have been held in the first place.

What’s worse, one document on the INS Web site indicates that he may never even have had to register. Page 3 of “Questions and Answers (on Special Call-in Registration Procedures)” contains this passage: “What if I was paroled into the U.S.? Do I still have to register?” Response: “No. If your last entry into the U.S. was on or before September 10, 2002, for citizens or nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, and you were not inspected and admitted as a nonimmigrant, you are not subject to Special Registration.”

There are hundreds of Hashemis, according to Sotoodeh, each detention a variation on the theme of confusion and fear. And if the U.S. government keeps adding new countries to the list requiring Special Registration — as it did again last Thursday — there may well be hundreds more.

While in principle Special Registration is a straightforward way of monitoring visitors from certain countries, in practice it has been plagued by controversy from the start. Civil rights groups cite bureaucratic snafus, lack of procedural standardization and poor public outreach as evidence of the program’s failures.

Hashemi’s nightmare began with a speech by Attorney General John Ashcroft on June 6, 2002. “In this new war, our enemy’s platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods and public spaces … Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States.”

To shore up these holes in national security, Ashcroft announced a new program that day: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. There are three elements to that system: The first two, consisting of entry controls (fingerprinting and photographing at the border) and exit controls (removing illegal aliens) began without protest on Sept. 11, 2002. By 2005, every visitor to the U.S. will be registered upon entry or exit. It is only the third element — periodic registration of aliens who’ve stayed in the United States 30 days or more, otherwise known as Special Registration — that has evoked such apprehension.

Special Registration applies to students, businessmen and individuals visiting family members for lengthy periods — but only to “those individuals of elevated national security concern who stay in the country for more than thirty days,” according to Ashcroft in his June 6 speech.

The first group of such individuals turned out to include nearly all male citizens or nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, age 16 or older. The second was larger, consisting of men from 13 more countries. While deadlines for the first two groups have passed, another 14,000 men from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have until Feb. 21 to register. And on Thursday INS officials announced a fourth group: Foreign male visitors from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Kuwait will have from Feb. 24 to March 28 to register. Thursday the INS also announced a grace period for men who did not register in the first two groups.

Observers of the first registration reported widespread chaos, and activist groups estimate that 700 people were detained in L.A. alone — where the local INS boss had declared a policy of “zero tolerance” toward any infractions of INS rules. As the Dec. 16 registration deadline approached, one attorney for the AIA reported from L.A. that “I saw so many Iranians arrested that they ran out of handcuffs,” Sotoodeh says.

“We’ve heard of a lot of abuses,” says Kareem Shora, legal advisor for the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The L.A. folks were trapped at the last minute. They housed them with convicted criminals in city and county jails. They were not charged with and they definitely were not guilty of any crime. Yet they were treated as suspected criminals.”

Many blame a lack of outreach for the last-minute rush. According to Sotoodeh, most Iranians hadn’t even heard about Special Registration until days before the deadline. “If the INS went to the Iranian community to tell them what was happening, I don’t know who they went to,” he said. “We’re a national organization, but nobody came to us. They say they went to the mosques, but Iranians are Jewish, Christian, Bahai and Zoroastrian — not just Muslim. You can’t even find an Iranian mosque. I don’t know if there even is one around here.”

But not every region had problems. While Amy Otten, INS spokesperson for the Eastern region, was unwilling to compare the differences between West and East Coast implementation, she did say, “I can tell you that for the most part, it’s gone smoothly in the Eastern region offices. We didn’t have any unusual problems.”

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman from INS headquarters in Washington, speculates that the difference in regional detention ratios is based primarily on demographics. Where there are large numbers of immigrants who need to register, “I think we’re going to continue to see that possibly take place,” he said. “But we made some adjustments between the first and the second groups.” Although those adjustments were made to improve regional inequity of human resources, he denies that the recently announced grace period is an admission of error in how the first two rounds were handled. “This is a chance to ensure that everyone who needs to register has that opportunity to register without repercussions,” he said.

According to Shora, such statements are simply untrue. “The way the program is being implemented shows the inability of the INS as an agency — it’s not equipped to handle the deadlines. It’s not equipped to handle these numbers.” But he doesn’t blame the INS for this — instead he considers the Department of Justice to be at fault. “They told them to implement the program by a certain date, but they didn’t give them the resources to do that.”

Ashcroft has been getting a lot of criticism thus far. On Monday, Dec. 23, Sens. Russell D. Feingold, D-Wisc., and Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., sent a letter to the attorney general demanding that he suspend Special Registration. “It is imperative that you take steps to reassure Congress and the American people that this special registration program is not a detention program falling just short of widespread internment of Arabs and Muslims,” they wrote. On Dec. 24 a coalition of Muslim-American rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the attorney general and the INS. Protesters and human rights monitors have watched the more recent registration closely for signs of abuse. Given the logistical problems and growing political opposition to the Special Registration program, why is the INS continuing to expand its reach?

According to As’ad AbuKhalil, author of “Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s ‘New War on Terrorism’” and professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, the registration program represents blatant racial profiling. “The Justice Department is really ruled by strong right-wing Christian fundamentalist elements who have genuinely bigoted views toward Muslims and Arabs,” he says. Furthermore, he believes that the Justice Department has done everything in its power to create distrust, suspicion and fear among Muslims and Arabs. Another popular theory is that the Special Registration process is less interested in rounding up terrorists — who are unlikely to voluntarily show up anyway — than in coralling foreign nationals for immigration-rules violations. A third theory is that the registration is a warning to Arabs in the U.S. to not make waves, lest they be deported.

The INS dismisses such accusations as false and paranoid.

“It seems like in almost everything we do the INS gets accused of doing racial profiling,” says Strassberger, “and given the nature of our customer, if I can call them customers, they come from a variety of ethnic groups, nationalities and races, so it’s easy to say that.” But it’s not racial profiling, he says. “This is based on reaching national security objectives, to gather information on people who may present an elevated national security concern. This is not meant to create fear or anxiety. Rather, it’s more of a temporary visitor’s responsibility to comply with immigration law and to maintain their legal status while they’re in the U.S.”

But whether or not it’s meant to create fear, according to Robert Chala, a volunteer human rights monitor with the San Francisco INS Watch during the second round of registration, people are scared. “They don’t know what’s going on. It’s not a very orderly process, where if you go in with all your papers then you’ll get out.” He speculates that this may contribute to low turnout.

One side effect of such fear is that the detainees who’ve received the worst treatment may be too scared to talk about it. Many foreign nationals who have deportation hearings coming up fear retaliation from the INS if they say anything negative to the media. One Syrian man, who asked not to be named, said the whole thing has shaken his trust in the U.S. government. “I came here for a family wedding in 1995 and wasn’t planning to live here, but there’s such a big difference between here and the Middle East in terms of dignity, the way people are treated, that after a few months I did everything in my power to stay. I have a family visa application that was approved in May 2002 and I was just waiting for my green card.”

But that didn’t matter to the INS in San Francisco, he said. “After my first interview two officers came in, handcuffed me, and detained me without an arrest warrant. The INS said I’d overstayed my visa, even though I showed them a copy of my application approval.” He spent the weekend in jail, because it took his family two days to scrape together the $5,000 for bond. “They took us to the federal jail at 3 a.m. and strip-searched us eight at a time. Told us to get out of our clothes, bend over and cough. It was really humiliating.”

According to Mahvish Jafri, a Bay area Pakistani woman whose brother is active in Southern California protests, this is a common concern among the Arab American community right now. Although she was raised by activists and does not mind speaking out, “for a lot of people the idea is to keep your head down, don’t attract attention to yourself.”

Critics of Special Registration also argue that the program is simply ineffective as an anti-terrorism tactic. Says Shora of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “Just from a national security standpoint, it’s a dead argument. We’re thinking retroactively instead of proactively in fighting this war. Our enemies are very evil, but unfortunately they’re also very sophisticated and clever. They’re not going to use the same kinds of people they used during the first attacks. Let’s look at the suspects we do know about since then: Richard Reid, a British citizen, Moussaoui, a French citizen … you could have a German citizen in a terrorist organization and we wouldn’t even know.”

Furthermore, we’re angering our allies, says As’ad: “This is getting a lot of coverage in the Middle East. I am very worried. I feel less safe, and every American should feel less safe, because the actions of the government here and around the world have only increased the antipathy of many people.” Pakistan, in particular, sees this as an affront, and has complained to Washington that as a partner in the war on terror, Pakistan should be removed from the registration list immediately.

If the INS Special Registration program continues to expand into the world of our allies, it can only provoke more ire around the world and at home. INS statements have tried to steer away from the question of whether there will be additional nations added to the program’s list, or which nations they might be.

Asked directly whether the Special Registration program would add a fifth group of nations, Strassberger responds, “We’ve identified people that we have an interest in knowing something about, and more so just verifying that temporary visitors are here doing what they’ve said they’ve been doing.”

But as the government has continued to add new countries to its list, at some point it may outstrip the limited focus Ashcroft originally outlined when he stated that Special Registration “will only apply to those individuals of elevated national security concern.”

“Those who think that the violation of civil liberties and rights of Arabs and Muslims in America does not affect them should look carefully at the history of America,” As’ad says. “Remember, it was Japanese Americans in the Second World War. Now it’s Muslim Americans and Arab Americans. Who will it be in the future?”

Well, a lot of things. For one, criminal cases for finance-related wrongdoing are hard and complicated to prosecute. The Justice Department is stocked with a lot of people with experience defending financial institutions — including Attorney General Eric Holder, a former partner at Covington & Burling, which represents many of the worst of the mega-banks. Plus, curiously, a lot of Goldman executives and other Wall Street types keep donating lots of money to Obama! (Though less money than they gave him in 2008.) The simple answer is that Holder, and Obama, seem to think that while Wall Street did a lot of stupid, venal things that ruined everyone’s lives, those things were largely … legal. Obama said as much to Rolling Stone: “In some cases, really irresponsible practices that hurt a lot of people might not have been technically against the law.” He might be not entirely wrong! Lots of horrible finance industry practices were and are perfectly legal. But we’ll never quite know whether the line was crossed until we … actually investigate.

So it’s all the odder that Wall Street is so damn mad at Obama, right?

In the only slightly oversimplified narrative of the financial crisis and subsequent recession as you and I and most non-billionaires understand it, Wall Street blew up the world economy, then got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars, and then resumed being hugely profitable and irresponsible as everyone else suffered through foreclosures, massive debt and mass unemployment. In this narrative, the government, led at various points by members of both parties, did everything in its power to maintain the status quo on Wall Street, while offering primarily temporary relief and various ineffectual half-measures to everyone else. Eventually the Democrats passed some form of “financial regulation” that largely has not yet gone into effect and that will not do much to stem or reverse the financialization of our economy. (The SEC is way, way behind on implenting Dodd-Frank and seems in no great hurry to finish.) The president eventually began noting the existence of mass outrage toward the financial sector, but he did little to actually address that outrage beyond proposing a new tax bracket for millionaires.

So, based on all that, it is very hard to see what Wall Street is so mad about! But as I explained earlier today, most of these rich financial industry titans are also dumb, spoiled children. If anything, the president’s failure to treat the chicanery and fraud that led to the crisis as crimes worth prosecuting had the same effect that his failure to prosecute the architects of Bush’s torture regime had: It emboldened the wrongdoers, who are now convinced that they never did wrong. In this environment, the public’s real and justified outrage at Wall Street is wholly inexplicable to finance types, who blame it on the media and Obama’s occasional rhetorical populism. (He is making people hate bankers by pointing out that people hate bankers!)

Now, in lieu of subpoenas and indictments, we have mild criticism — Obama’s occasional off-message mentions of “fat cat bankers” or whatever — and those mild criticisms set off hysterical waves of paranoia and self-righteous fury. Because no one was hauled off in chains, the people who wreaked so much havoc think it’s actually been established that they did not do wrong.

So Obama has now not succeeded in cowing or placating Wall Street.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012,  to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit.  Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.

That’s a big if. Now a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff.”

One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.

The announcement comes amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.

Rep. Raul Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down.

“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said last week, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”

A few days later Rep. Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement this week that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”

On Monday, religious leaders from 14 mainline denominations called on the attorney general to release its findings and take “immediate action to quell the growing human rights crisis in Arizona,” a reference to Arpaio’s law enforcement regime.

Citizens for a Better Arizona, a new group, which organized the successful recall of Tea Party leader and former state Senate president Russell Pearce in November, organized a major turnout at the Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday to call for Arpaio’s resignation.

“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County  Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”

The 79-year-old sheriff has rarely failed to express disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration. Last week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his “Cold Case posse” investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”

Two years ago, after Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano had also announced her intentions to terminate the DHS cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Arpaio appeared on the Glenn Beck show and openly mocked federal authority.  Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allow him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared … whatever … if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”

The DOJ report concluded that Arpaio engaged in racial profiling.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”

The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”

Another law enforcement officer last week levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in  El Mirage, wrote an Op-Ed in the Arizona Republic declaring that ”Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”

Not that criticism or outrage has ever moved Arpaio to veer from the style that has made him a hero to some conservatives: his high-profile immigrant sweeps, his order that prisoners had to wear pink underwear, or his reality TV exploits. Last spring, he simply shrugged off  calls for his resignation over allegations of his department’s misuse of $100 million.

Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to “save this country” by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:

What was the ostensible purpose of all this killing? Saving the country of course. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” Thomas reportedly said. “When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die.” The FBI also alleges that “Thomas, Roberts and others discussed the need to obtain unregistered silencers and explosive devices for use in attacks against federal government buildings and employees, as well as against local police.”

The group also had a “bucket list” of politicians and members of the media that they planned to kill, which seems to be a misreading of the “bucket list” concept. Two of the men bought “what they believed was a silencer and and unregistered explosive” from an FBI informant, as well. They also — with the informant — drove to Atlanta to “scope out” IRS and ATF buildings.

The “good news,” I guess, is that now the Justice Department is carrying out the same ridiculous stings on old Christian guys that it regularly carries out on young Muslim guys. Because let’s be honest, we have no way of knowing whether these four guys would’ve actually acted on their anti-government beliefs if they hadn’t been led to action by the “informants.” They met at a Waffle House and called themselves “the covert group.” They range in age from 65 to 73. How much of a real threat could they possibly have been? How much of a role did the “informant” play in pushing the men toward formulating an actual terror plot instead of just grumbling fantasies of revolution over omelets?

They may have been able to manufacture ricin — one of the men “used to work as a lab technician for a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency known as the Agricultural Research Service,” according to ABC News — but it’s unclear how practical ricin is as a chemical weapon. A terrorist needs tons of ricin to kill people through mass dispersal. Ricin is what terrorists turn to when they fail to make anthrax.

This looks like the same “entrapment in all but name” approach to fighting terror that the Justice Department has been pursuing against American Muslims for years. What will be interesting to see is whether the entrapment defense works any better for a gang of four elderly white guys than it does for teenagers with names like “Hosam Maher Husein Smadi.”

This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney’s torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)

So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:

A little “yippee” emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values. He was allegedly a senior recruiter for al-Qaeda and was linked to the Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan as well as other attempted terror acts. Awlaki was not shy about his activities, and so they, not to mention his allegiance, were not in question.

But! This whole targeted killing of an American citizen thing is sort of problematic, according to the Constitution and “our founding ideals.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized Awlaki’s killing. But so far, the only politician of note to do so is Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate with a touching reverence for the Constitution as written. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes,” he exclaimed. Paul, though, gets dismissed as a constitutional kvetch.

I do not share Paul’s indignation, but I do his dismay. Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.

(This Barron guy and this Lederman guy are actually very prominent attorneys known, ironically, for their particularly sharp criticisms of the Bush administration’s abuses of presidential war powers, but I wouldn’t expect a man who’s had a political column at Washington primary newspaper for 35 years to actually know anything at all about what he writes about, ever.)

But the last line gives the game away: Richard Cohen finds the idea of the president having the power to unilaterally order the execution of an American citizen absurd on its face. This puts him in league with people like Ron Paul and the ACLU. He does not wish for that sort of company. So he is begging for some grown-up Washington person to explain why this is all totally OK. He would like the president to reassure him. Won’t somebody please reassure Richard Cohen that it’s OK for the president to assassinate people?