re: #179 Walter L. Newton

Hey Stupid (I can call you Stupid, right). I don’t think this is a mater of us making anyone like us, it’s a matter of following the law and out constitution. Would you like me to repeat that again much s l o w e r ?

Once we started discarding parts of the constitution in order to fight the GWOT, the slide into this madness began. None of this is new, per se, it’s just that it’s getting particularly ugly of late. I’m speaking specifically of the torture memos, National Security Letters, suspending habeus corpus in terrorism cases, etc.

The sooner people realize that terrorism is and always was a law enforcement issue, and a massive one, domestically, the sooner we can begin to wind back the crazy. I don’t think people are prepared to to go there yet, sadly. People tried to say it, be they were angrily rebuked soon after 9/11. OBL knew that we would abandon our principles and mire ourselves in a crippling conflict. We reacted exactly as he wanted us to. He won. And he even got away with it. It SUCKS, but it is true.

Just because the scale of the crime is massive, and the damage catastrophic, doesn’t mean that we should have ever even considered weakening constitutional protections for the accused. It doesn’t mean we should have declared an unwinnable war (you can’t win when there are no definable terms of victory) on an ideology, rather than targeted those places which harbor training camps for terrorists specifically.

We went into Iraq, as part of the GWOT. Iraq was not part of the problem. The problem is that our intelligence agencies had fallen into disarray. The problem is and always was that you simply cannot always prevent people who don’t care if they survive the effort from doing terrible things. The problem is that we substituted revenge for mourning, as a country. The problem is that we labeled states as enemies after being attacked by stateless entities.

I expect I will be downdinged mercilessly for saying this, but it bears repeating. The source of this insanity is that we abandoned due process years ago as regards terrorism. We abandoned our own principles and the Geneva Conventions. Krauthammer, Yoo, etc, were instrumental in this.

What makes anyone think they would somehow re-embrace the principles that they abandoned years ago when it comes to this issue?