As always, I deeply appreciate your work and research to make this resource available to me.
"Placing your discussion on a continuum of idealism to reality highlights problems with absolutist moral values."
It is facile to dismiss out of hand absolutism. Only after some layering of erroneous principles on factually demonstrable ones does this produce absurd results, so often cited (generally speaking. Not saying you do so). Certain principles must underlie every rational consideration. Gravity. The speed of light. Torture is evil.
I once had a conversation with a Baptist pastor (shortly after the Bush II administration issued a legal justification of torture publicly) that it was lawful to torture suspects because there were terrorists. The Bush legal publication declared that the President of the USA was lawfully authorized to crush the testicles of a child to facilitate interrogation of his parents.
This is absolutely false. It isn't provisionally false. It doesn't matter if you think there's a nuke in New York City sewers that will go off if you don't catch the terrorists. It isn't lawful to sexually mutilate a child. Nothing can ever justify it.
Today the propagandists have introduced the push to make vaccination mandatory, and have included both injection of tracking chips and DNA modification in association. It is simply not lawful to modify the DNA of a sovereign person. No disease, economic necessity, or any other sophistry can change that fact. It is absolutely unlawful and will always be.
This demonstrates why it is necessary to accept some universal absolutes, and why the Declaration of Independence rests on absolute principles, that are therein stated to be self-evident.
One essential absolute is that the authority of government, and thus the IC it can field, is delegated to it from sovereign persons. Those sovereign persons are not absolute tyrants. They don't have the authority to torture, surveil anyone they want, or undertake to poison or harm peoples at will. This means they can't delegate such authority to government, and the IC cannot derive therefrom any such authority.
It's absolute. Any assumption of authority that is not delegated voluntarily by informed sovereign persons to the IC is unlawful. It can't be otherwise, and it doesn't matter if it's presumed necessary to the defense of the American people.
Thanks!