Today’s Times has an arti­cle that the Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion real­ly was try­ing to kill Osama bin Laden in August’s cruise mis­sile attack against Afghanistan. This flat-out con­tra­dicts months of assur­ances that this was not a U.S. goal.

But even more wor­ri­some is that Pres­i­den­tial lawyers have con­clud­ed that this sort of polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion attempt does­n’t fall under the 1975 Exec­u­tive Order ban­ning polit­i­cal mur­der. The same Pres­i­dent who says sex isn’t sex is now say­ing that assas­si­na­tion isn’t assas­si­na­tion. He’s once again split­ting legal hairs and lying to the Amer­i­can peo­ple when caught.

Who Clin­ton sleeps with is his business.

But who he tries to assas­si­nate is the busi­ness of all of us. And it’s our busi­ness when he breaks U.S. law to do so. And our busi­ness when his Admin­is­tra­tion goes on a con­cert­ed, coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign to lie about a mil­i­tary mission’s goals. The bomb­ings ratch­eted up the anti‑U.S. anger in the world. It vio­lat­ed the sov­er­eign­ty of two nations. It cost over a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars. The Unit­ed States is a democ­ra­cy and the peo­ple need to be involved in mak­ing such far-reaching deci­sions. We need to be ful­ly informed.

The Pres­i­dent must be held account­able to U.S. law. And he must be told that cre­ative legal def­i­n­i­tions aren’t accept­able in a democracy.