There's a Lot of Water to Carry

If you are looking for Darth Vaders of the systematic deterioration of civil liberties in the U.S., you could do worse than Benjamin Wittes. His boyish looks and "what me?" persona aside, probably no other human being has done more to perpetuate imprisonment at GTMO and lay the groundwork for indefinite detention; that would be a life time prison sentence without an indictment, a trial, or a verdict, which aside from being batshit insane and obviously inimical to anything resembling a free society, violates the 8th and more or less the entire 5th amendment. He is the go to source when you need a non-government official to say something supportive about detention - he openly advocates indefinite detention on the basis that the government says you are bad - and his only non-marketing skill seems to be a remarkable ability to convince himself that everything the government says is true. He wrote an entire book on GTMO out of the sentence: "the detainees are terrorists because the government says they are."

He has been around for some time, but I mention him after perusing the website he created with two other war-on-abstract-noun-dead-enders (which they have called lawfare, unironically and unselfawarely redefining a word used to to describe imperial legal manipulation to mean resistence to the same) and pause to note that in addition to his other useful qualities he does not understand what the word hypocrisy means.