From Yale law professor Jack Balkin's blog:

The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law. And all the while he insists that everything he does is perfectly legal, because, the way the law is designed, there is no one with authority to disagree.

It is a travesty of law under the forms of law. It is the accumulation of executive, judicial, and legislative powers in a single branch and under a single individual.

It is the very essence of tyranny.

Oh the irony. We remove an evil tyrant in Iraq and we threaten two others in Iran and North Korea, but in the meantime our country moves ever so much closer to that which we're threatening and removing.