Larry.org

Tough call in that we definately are less free in many ways, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect we are any safer. Of course the idea is we are supposed to be safer.. that's what governments always offer in exchange for freedom. In some cases it's a fair trade. I don't mind getting prodded and poked to get on an airplane. But when you starte talking about people being held without getting any opportunity to defend themselves in a public court...



I suppose it's easy to say that it's too big and too close to the events of last September for us to know if we're causing real long term damage to our freedom. Here are two interesting pieces of journalism that sure beg the question that title this entry:



From an article in Time magazine last week:

".. Congress passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which was designed "[t]o deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes." The legislation gave Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft a license to expand the scope of their authority, and they have used their new powers, plus a few old ones, to detain more than 1,200 people in the U.S., Americans and foreign nationals, in the name of the war against terrorism. Most were picked up on immigration violations, their hearings closed to the press and the public. About two dozen (including Padilla) were detained as material witnesses in grand jury investigations, a rare practice before Sept. 11. The courts are still trying to figure out whether it is legal. (A federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled last week that the secret deportation hearings were an unconstitutional attempt to put the government's actions "beyond public scrutiny.")"



Time Magzine's Lev Grossman

And from a Jim Lehr interview with Vice President Dick Cheney:

"JIM LEHRER: Are you concerned at all that the government in its role to react to this monumental event has maybe overreacted in terms of taking some freedoms away from Americans?



VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I don't believe that, Jim. I think - I don't think we've taken freedom away from Americans. We've tried to be very sensitive to that. We have tried to alert people to the dangers here, and my concern is that there will be another attack and we will find once that attack has occurred that there is something we could have done that might have prevented it but we didn't do it. "

I'm sure there's lots of harder hitting journalism on this topic out there. It's interesting that we are starting to see such obvious contradictions in mainstream press. I suppose I would agree that Time Magazine is less about news than 'stories' but you can't dispute that we've got many Americans being held without any recourse right now. How many don't we know about? How does their incarceration improve the security of our country and our freedom? How do we know these reasons are valid?



Is the idea that if we just give up some freedom so we can prevent someone from attacking us, as a justification for whatever infringments on our freedoms we have endured, directly in conflict with the our freedom if we don't know what this person would bring forward in his defense?



I suppose I've really already decided this is an indefensible position for our government to take up.