I do not understand why there is so much approval for the domestic mining of our media sources. If we give up our rights, even for something that seems as important as routing out terrorism, we are giving up the very ideals that supposedly we are trying to bring to Iraq...and once they have been usurped, they will be impossible to regain.
9/11 was NOT the first time America was assaulted by foreign agents. Pearl Harbor was an assault on American soil. We made sacrifices during the Second World War, but we never gave up the basic rights fashioned by the framers of the Constitution. Not as a whole. Yes, we committed unjust deeds on the whole of Japanese Americans...a fact that history reminds us. That stain is one we cannot remove from the ink blotter of America's tapestry. BUT we did not deprive the entirety of the Country of the rights that are our democratic brickwork.
Here we are sixty years later and without a squeal of protest we are blindly going to allow the rights that our Founding Fathers fought a monarchy to gain the right to be free and have the privacy they guaranteed us because the world is filled with evil people?
The world has ALWAYS been full of evil people that wanted to hurt us. We engaged in a prolonged Cold War with people that wanted to harm us. We fought a long and fruitless war in Viet Nam in the name of spreading the democracy that is at the core of our Country's existence.
During the fifties, many INNOCENT people were swept into the nightmare of McCarthyism. They were painted as traitors, pulled before Congress and grilled...in other words...they were put through a government sanctioned witch hunt.
We MUST live by the Constitution. There are AMPLE avenues for the government to monitor those they need to monitor without wiping out the very basic rights our government was fashioned on. There are limits...there are checks and balances...and they are important to protect. Without them, we no longer have a democracy. And if we don't have a democracy, what are we trying to spread in Iraq really?
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I am personally highly offended by the willingness of the phone companies to just hand over all our info to the goverment without a warrant. As a Verizon customer, I am one of millions who now know that big brother is watching. I am sickened by the fact that this current administration uses the war on terror as a kind of blank check for being able to do whatever they want even if it's not legal. And Bush keeps saying it's all within the scope of presidential powers.
Even in times of war, I do not think any other president has had such an unchecked amount of Presidential power. Bush and his administration just seem to keep changing the rules as they go along. It's time to stop and for me, the place to start is by holding those phone companies that just willingly handed over our information accountable.
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