Calling Out Cowardice

Sometimes I just don't understand this country - particulary the part of it that agrees with me about things like the "war on terror."

I'm reading a Glenn Greenwald post about this documentary from PBS on the governments illegal domestic spying, and see this quote from John Yoo, one of the chief legal architects of our disregard for such trifles as habeus corpus and due process:

YOO: Look, there's no doubt that ah. . . there are important Fourth Amendment issues here. One is, is this a reasonable search and seizure? You can still have warrantless searches, but they have to be reasonable.

And then the second question is, does that restriction apply to wartime operations. We don't require a warrant, we don't require reasonable searches and seizures when the army, the military's out on the battlefield, attacking, killing members of the enemy.

HEDRICK SMITH: But that's usually abroad and it doesn't involve the American homeland and American citizens . . .

YOO: But this gets to my point, is do you want to make it more difficult for our government to try to stop terrorist attacks. The closer members of Al Qaeda get to the United States, the closer they get to striking our cities as they did on 9/11. You want to make it more legally difficult for the government to stop that? I don't think so.

Ok, where do I start? I could point out that it's entirely possible that while our constitutional protections from government overreach may complicate finding terrorists in specific instances, that the whole system helps foster a more dynamic and productive society that is better equipped to deal with terrorism in the long run, but I'd probably be told I don't have the balls to "stand up" to the bad men in the world.

What is almost no one in the anti-war/spying/throw-out-the-constitution wing of the country is doing is to point out that it's the very people who want to do all of this crazy stuff in the name of safety who are cowards.

Here we are with the most powerful military on earth, a vast intelligence network that has cooperation from most of the other powerful nations on earth (at least where terrorism is concerned), where attacks on our own soil are EXCEEDINGLY rare, and where we constantly talk about how great our freedoms are and how they should be exported around the world, and yet we are ready to give them up in the hope (not certainty) that we can prevent another attack that may or may not be in the workings.

Shit happens, people. Life is risky. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens die on our nations highways and roads every year. Our own choices (smoking and drinking) kill us by the hundreds of thousands every year. We profess to have the greatest respect and admiration for those who would lay down their lives in service of abstract principles of liberty, and yet we would give them up in fear of a movement who's latest great idea was to pass up all the soft targets in New Jersey and ATTACK AN ARMY BASE.

At least the guy who wanted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch didn't try to make a documentary about it beforehand. . .