Yeah a Liberal Environmentalist that doesn't know what ELF is. Riiiiiiiiight.
Jesus, man, get a hold of yourself. I've been posting here for *way* longer than you have. You obviously haven't read many of them.
You are so determined to arrest -- excuse me, detain -- every single Arab that you don't stop and consider the precident you are supporting: that of stripping a person of their rights for no reason besides suspicion of a crime. Do you *really* think that the government wont expand beyond Arabs when they expand every power given to them way beyond the original intent? Do you think *you* will be spared if the government does something you don't like and you speak out about it? Your only safety will be in agreeing with whatever the government does, no matter what it may be.
I don't consider Ashcroft's policies to be idiotic, but un-Constitutional. When you say that one group no longer has their God given rights (yes, I said *God* given, not given by Man), then you set up a situation when the government can pick and choose who is to be the recipient of those 'rights'. This, in turn, opens the door to the charge that if a right isn't universal, it's not a right at all. This finally leads to the idea that it isn't a right, but a privilage, and the government can take or give it at will.
But no, you don't want to debate me. You'd rather throw around insults (calling me a (modern) liberal is insulting) than addresss issues.
The cold truth is 3,000 dead is *nothing* compared to what would happen if the government turned into a truly tyrannical government. If this sparks us to turn into a police state, into a sort of government that our founding fathers would abhor with every fiber of their being, then those who died in the WTC would have died, not for nothing, but for all the wrong things... all the worst things.
If they died because they were free, then we should become more determined to be free than before, not more determined to be afraid and cowardly, doing away with our freedoms because they don't make us feel safe enough. If I had been one of the 3,000, it's not the way I'd want to be remembered. Three thousand dead and three hundred million shorn of their rights and protections under the Constitution.
But you just keep glibly supporting whatever the government does. You keep on supporting them holding people without charging them, restraining people while they check their homes for evidence, stopping people who have broken no law and demanding to see their identification, prohibiting people from publically supporting a candidate too close to an election, tapping their phones without a court order, monitoring people's on-line activities without any warrant: the list goes on and on.
Just make sure you obey at all times, and be a good slave.
Tuor