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I would be fearful if Clinton were still President because he is a sociopath,
unfettered by legal strictures. I would be worried if Gore was in the Oval
Office because he is a potential dictator whose lust for power was exceeded
only by Clinton's.
Fortunately, though, George W. Bush is in power and he is surrounded by
people whose public statements on the new laws all reference the fact that
this nation is operating under wartime conditions, even if most people
haven't quite figured that out yet. I haven't heard a single Bush advisor
even remotely suggest we should toss out the Constitution's Bill of rights
for Americans; their concern are the foreign terrorists who lurk among us.
This is not to say I don't respect the fears conservatives and others
express. I do. We part company in their lack of faith in our leaders. We part
company in a failure to grasp that the US is not engaged in a war with a
nation that has attacked us. Instead, we are at war with a shadowy network of
terrorists, fanatical Islamists, who believe the US must be overthrown by any
means possible. They have taken advantage of our open borders, our issuance
of visas to anyone who wants to come here, and our indifference to the
millions of illegal aliens living among us. They have killed over 5,000 of
our countrymen.
The terrorists have lived among the large US community of Muslims, most of
whom came here after 1965 when the immigration laws changed, and who, unless
we choose to remain blind to their first loyalty, Islam, must be regarded as
suspect in their loyalty to the United States. Do I distrust all American
Muslims? No. Will some be inconvenienced? Yes. Will some, if here illegally,
be deported? Yes. Will some be subject to military tribunals? Possibly. We
are at war.
Our domestic enemies are not massing troops somewhere. They are living among
us as our neighbors. They pray in places where the most radical,
anti-American literature is available and where their religious leaders call
for our downfall. How many are loyal Americans? We simply do not know!
I remain utterly opposed to a National Identity Card. This is the symbol of
authoritarian governments. That said, we all carry identity cards with us. We
call them driver's licenses. They have been routinely used for this purpose
for years. Our credit cards, whose records can be subpoenaed, reveal our
every purchase. Our phone records likewise reveal who we called and when.
In a digital age, there is little about us our government cannot determine
within the existing limitations of the Constitution. We need to keep clearly
in mind that there are those who would replace our Constitution with a
council of imams or ayatollahs.
There are areas of privacy that require our vigilant protection. I am opposed
to the government's effort to have even greater oversight regarding our
financial records, requiring banks to reveal information, despite the
traditional confidentiality extended to our transactions. I am opposed to a
government takeover of our health care system through the issuance of similar
cards and giving power to bureaucrats to examine our personal health records.
Those Constitutional battles have been fought in Congress and, no doubt, will
continue to be fought.
Our law enforcement agencies need to determine who among us are our enemies.
Our intelligence agencies need to exchange information with our law
enforcement agencies. I have no doubt that the anti-terrorism laws extend the
government's reach. I know they do injury to lawyer-client privacy. And I
repeat. We are at war.
One thing is obvious. We did not know who the terrorists were who flew those
planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, nor did we know where they
were, nor did we have any idea what they intended to do. Now, we have to know
these things about suspected terrorists in our midst and we have to empower
the government to do this. We are at war.
I don't know who the jurist was who said "The Constitution is not a suicide
pact", but he was right. If we expect to be able to return to the full rights
it extends (the new laws have sunset provisions that will disable them in a
few years), than we have to free our law-enforcement authorities to do their
job. We need, in short, to trust them. I do. They are Americans. Our enemies
are not.
Alan Caruba is the author of "The Pocket Guide to
Militant Islam", for sale from the Internet site of The National Anxiety
Center, a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns at
www.anxietycenter.com.
Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2001
Published by permission.
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