Tom Dispatch: Todd Miller, Locking Down the Borders!

In the always good news category, a Monday front page New York Times piece by David Sanger and Thom Shanker, filled with obvious administration leaks, lays out another step in the White House's march out of American legality. As it has codified its drone assassination strikes, so it has been codifying and "legalizing" another new right of the Executive Branch, the right to launch preemptive cyber-attacks "if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, even if there is no declared war." Of course, the White House has already launched such a set of attacks against Iran's nuclear program, without even the excuse of a threatened "major digital attack." In other words, in total secrecy it initiated the planet's first state run cyber war, without notice to, or consultation with anyone, and keep in mind that someday, given the potential devastation cyber attacks could wreak on our highly electronic way of life, cyber weapons will surely be reclassified as weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime, with the Pentagon quickly expanding its new Cyber Command, the White House has taken another major form of potential aggression, and given itself the right to use it without the say so of anyone else. It is essentially codifying, and declaring legal a cyber version of George W Bush's post 9/11 doctrine of preemptive war and, for all we know, heading for Dick Cheney's infamous one percent doctrine. Even a one percent chance of an attack on the United States, went Cheney's thinking, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Yet here's the strange thing. Even when such news hits the front page of the newspaper of record, it somehow doesn't make much of an impression on us. As various forms of perpetual war are made legal by the White House, remarkably few find this worth the bother to discuss or debate, no less protest. Nonetheless, this week Tom Dispatch remains focused on the issue of legality or illegality, and our National Security Complex, as well as on the lock down of this country, since the two are so intertwined. On Sunday, Noam Chomsky explored why "the United States has the right to use violence at will,"and why, when it does, it's "legal."