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The issue of Marque and Reprisal was raised before Congress by Dr. Paul after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and again on July 21, 2007. Dr. Paul, defining the attacks as an act of “air piracy,” introduced the Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, which would have granted the president the authority to use Letters of Marque and Reprisal against the specific terrorists, instead of warring against a foreign state. Dr. Paul compared the terrorists to pirates in that they are difficult to fight by traditional military means.

Paulian nonsense.

First of all Congress authorized the POTUS to use military force, a de facto declaration of war. There is no constitutiinally mandated method of "declaring war", a brief "kick Iraq's Ass with the US Military" would suffice as a declaration.

Secondly, Letters of Marquee and Reprisal are not issued to a POTUS, they are issued to private citizens.

Presumably with Ron in charge, we would disband our intel services, ie: the CIA and FBI, and issue Letters of M&R to the local private eye and "soldiers of fortune" to fight our wars. Frank Church and Robert Toricelli would agree with Ron Paul on the deballing of our intel but I don't think many conservatives will.

Breathtaking stupidity.

As far as I can tell the CIA has been fully compromised by Soviet spies and criminal ever since WWII and is no asset to the United States. I suggest you read “Legacy of Ashes” before you defend the institution (though being written by a liberal, it fails to draw the obvious conclusions from the spectacular list of failures documented). More recently, the CIA was involved in helping Clinton cover-up the missile downing of TWA 800 and now seems to work full time at trying to make the President look like a fool. As far as I can tell, we’d be better off starting from scratch with a new agency.

And of course we wouldn’t use soldiers of fortune to “fight our wars”; we’d use the armed forces. Simplistic attacks on Dr. Paul do not contribute to reasoned discussion of the question whether it makes more sense to go after terrorists with the Army or smaller squads—like the Mossad.