This week the Obama administration declared that it has to right to kill you, and that you have no right to know why it wants to kill you or prove that it should not, because killing you involves state secrets. I don't need to explain why this isn't one of the major stories of the week: the answer is speechifying in Delaware, earnestly avoiding self-abuse and pathetically falsifying its educational achievements.

But it is worth pointing out that the administration's decision has Glenn Greenwald, Radley Balko, and the military heads at Fabius Maximus all sounding the authoritarian alarms. That's quite a group, and quite a range of thinkers thinking that we have a serious problem here. I agree. I am also certain that it won't be treated as such, ever, by the American public or the allied world at large. For three reasons.

The first two are obvious and American: the general belief by voters that our government only goes after people who deserve to die anyway, and the general unwillingness of voters to believe that our presidents would ever push their powers to ugly extremes. (Or, rather, the unwillingness to believe that "their" president would do so, but perfect willingness to believe that the other side's guy would — had Bush declared his right to murder Americans without trial, the left would have lost its collective marbles, for example —but no matter: the situation gives presidents of both parties little incentive to limit their powers. We're stuck with the unitary executive, in other words, until we agree as a nation that it threatens all parties equally.)

The third and perhaps more intractable reason this won't turn into a big deal is that our allies benefit from our assassination program. They won't admit it, their people generally despise what we're doing, indeed allied governments occasionally criticize us for doing it — but never too loudly. Because we are doing their dirty work for them. In the last few hours, an alleged Al Qaeda plot to attack multiple soft targets across Europe has come to light, akin to the Mumbai attacks of 2008. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the CIA has significantly increased its drone attacks in tribal Pakistan, the Al Qaeda homeland. Reports are that the two are directly connected: European intelligence agencies uncovered the plot, and our intelligence agency acted to disrupt it.

The globalization, if you will, of terrorism led to a mirror image response: the globalization of anti-terrorism. That has generally been seen as a good thing, especially on the issue of shared intelligence — more intelligence generally being better intelligence. But it also has had its downside in that it restricts the traditional freedom of our allies to differ with, to criticize, and in extreme cases of dissent, to withdraw from our joint efforts. Like it or not, the U.S. has often benefitted from the advice of its allies to change course. (And vice versa, of course.) The matter of presidential carte blanche to murder citizens is one in which a gentle reproach would have been welcome, and, in the past, even expected. But now that the spoils of our killings are shared, too, it's hard to imagine much criticism of the hunt.

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