The 'War Paradigm'

Here's the opening to Sidney Blumenthal's latest in Salon. The piece is worth the advertisement-based day pass if you're not a subscriber (while you're there, you can check out Andrew Leonard on the wacky world of GMO Soybeans).

June 1, 2006 | Something that senior officials call the "war paradigm" is the Bush administration's central organizing principle. They do not use the phrase publicly, just among themselves, but they bend policy to serve it. After Sept. 11, 2001, they instantly adopted the war paradigm without any internal discussion. George W. Bush, who proclaimed, "I'm a war president" and insisted that he made decisions "with war on my mind," assumed the war paradigm as his natural state and right. According to its imperatives, the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, in effect as a sovereign, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances. Some of the paradigm's expressions include Bush's fiats on the treatment of "war on terror" detainees, domestic surveillance, and international law and treaties, and his more than 750 signing statements appended to laws enacted by Congress that he claims he can implement as he chooses.