Glenn Greenwald: The one common strain running through these historic civil liberties assaults is war. War almost always erodes political liberties. That has always been true. Cicero famously observed “inter arma, enim silent leges” (in times of war, the law falls mute). That fact – that wars maximize a political leader’s power – is a key reason they often crave war and why wars, under the Constitution, were supposed to be extremely difficult for presidents to start. As John Jay wrote in Federalist 4, “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”