Few people are aware that every week the White House observes “Terror Tuesday”, where the US President personally approves people for death without any legal process at all. Indeed, if one trait has marked the so-called War on Terror, it is the unthinking abnegation of various long-settled human rights rules – among them, the right to due process and a fair trial – by politicians who seem immune to the lessons of history. Liberty is initially eroded at the margins, but in recent years long-developed principles have been washed away in the neap tide of populism.

Thus it was that we turned our collective back on the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture. Decades (or centuries) of evolving law were tossed aside by George W. Bush’s administration on the assumption that “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (EHT) would somehow obtain useful intelligence. The same methods had, of course, been used 500 years ago to induce women to confess that they were witches. Indeed, a reminder of what current “EHT methods” were called by the Inquisition can be revealing. While neither George W. Bush nor Donald J. Trump appears to believe that waterboarding, for example, qualifies as torture, the Inquisition was more honest, calling it tortura del agua (water torture). It was the Gestapo that called it verschärfte Vernehmung, which translates as “enhanced interrogation”. The right to due process and a fair trial, meanwhile, went overboard on the coast of Cuba, in Guantánamo Bay, and the idea that someone should legally be extradited from one country to another was overridden with a novel phrase – “extra­ordinary rendition” – which translates roughly as “transnational kidnapping”. And so forth.

But it is Terror Tuesday that has been my particular concern lately, with the suggestion that we are returning to the era of the Borgias, taking to assassination as a solution to our problems. It is especially troubling that this policy was adopted in 2010 by Barack Obama, the constitutional law professor turned President. He said he opposed rendition, and wished to close Guantánamo Bay, yet rather than kidnap people and hold them without trial, he chose to execute them without any legal process at all.

There…