Put another way, this single C.I.A. program weakens the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, and the accountability of America's leaders to its citizenry. It weakens the separation of powers by diluting Congress' role in declaring war and shaping foreign policy, as the executive branch operates in any country it sees fit; it weakens the Bill of Rights insofar as it has targeted and will continue to target American citizens for assassination without any due process; and it diminishes the degree to which government is accountable to voters in three ways. 1) It vests substantial power in an opaque bureaucratic agency whose leadership is unaccountable to voters; 2) insofar as it diminishes the Congressional role in foreign policy, it also lessens the people's influence, especially as exercised through the House of Representatives; 3) by operating in secrecy, it prevents voters from having enough information to judge even the behavior of the president, who has an incentive to hide not just acts that are sensitive for national security reasons, but behavior that would hurt or inconvenience him politically.

It reflects poorly on Congress and the citizenry itself that we permit the executive branch to kill people, including innocents, sans the safeguards necessary to prevent illegal and immoral acts from being perpetrated in our names, or even demanding that we know what is being done. Our inattention is partly due to gross civic negligence -- we're okay punishing innocent civilians in other countries for the behavior of the authoritarian regimes they live under, but don't trouble ourselves to insist on knowing what exactly our government is doing -- and partly to cowardice, a feeling that we'll be safer if we continue to operate on what Dick Cheney called "the dark side," even if we aren't willing to fully confront what it means. In fact, America ought to affirm its ideals and its constitutional safeguards even if it makes us marginally more vulnerable to a terrorist attack, but it is far from clear that our present course does make us safer.

There are the unintended geopolitical consequences that involve state actors. "Because of the C.I.A. program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war," Mayer writes. "Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.'s program--last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan--it's unclear what the consequences would be." Our behavior is also normalizing drone use and targeted assassinations, neither of which is likely to enhance our security in the long run.

Nor is it difficult to see the potential for blow-back from non-state actors, though that potential is irrationally ignored in almost all of the public debates, insofar as there are any, about our policies.