George Bush has spent much of his presidency defending the concept of a "unified executive"--meaning that all officials of the executive branch have the same privileges as the PResident, since they are all acting as his agents. Congress therefore has no more right to restrict the actions of the lowliest member of the executive branch than it does to restrict the actions of the President directly.

Last week, however, when the destruction of videos of interrogations of alleged terrorists by the CIA was revealed by the New York Times, President Bush was quoted as saying that he will be very interested to see what the outcome of the various investigations will be.

If there is truely a unified executive, shouldn't Bush be held directly responsible for the actions of those who destroyed the tapes? Why the sudden posturing as a mere interested by-stander?

GPS systems for sex offenders make no sense.

The rage among the states is to require more and more sex offenders to wear active or passive GPS units. Aside from the obvious intrusive nature of these requirements--who is going to review all of the data which is generated.

Passive monitors dump the data about where a person has spent his day. To be useful, someone has to review this data shortly after it is dumped.

Active GPS units continually broadcast the wearer's location in real time. But again, broadcast to who? How many GPS units can a parole officer meaningfully monitor? Is sampling really effective? At what cost?