Good job. :D

Well some decent ideas for terrorists on there lol. . .

You know, in one of the Tom Clancy Books well before 9/11 a terrorist flies a 747 into the Capitol building while congress is in session.

Okay... I wasn't sure how this applied to people or governments bringing legal issue against the US over the treatment of citizens or persons detained by US authorities. I was hoping a legal eagle could shed more light on the specific case boundries laid out by challenges or cases citing this Ammendment.

http://www.handykult.de/plaudersmilies.de//sad/suru.gif I read it...every word. I fear this is like Dickens and the Ghost of "America" future.
I honestly wish every single person could/would read this. I applaud your post.

Justamon does your fear of terrorists really extend to us losing our civil liberities?

I have yet to see anyone complain about going after terrorists, people just don't like the idea that tactics developed for terrorists are implied indiscriminately to American Citizens. Privacy issues are central to our nation.

I keep hearing the argument over and over again that most people will never feel the direct of effects of covert Big Brother, and that is true. Even in fully developed police states the average citizen got to live their life, work their job, eat their food, and fuck their significant other without direct governmental intrusion, but the atmosphere was oppressive.

Freedom is as much a state of mind as anything else, and when you start passing laws where every aspect of our lives are monitored on the off chance that it will protect us, it begin to erode the idea of freedom.

Actually, it was a Japanese pilot, upset about losing the war. This was done shortly after the US defeated Japan in a Pacific war. (Not WW II.) Just can't recall the title of the book, though. Jack Ryan gets appointed and sworn in as Vice President shortly before the attack and narrowly escapes getting roasted himself.

yeah but i am sure we would have called him a terrorist . . lol . . . it may have been a 727 too, but i wanted to void too much backstory.

I remember 9/11 thinking, hey they got that from Tom Clancy! I am surpirsed no one in the press brought it up.

Bingo! Well said, James. FDR once said "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

I happen to be one who is a World War II history buff, especially in the subject of the Third Reich. (Don't anyone get ANY ideas that I am a closet Nazi - besides, I don't meet their definition of 'Aryan' and my membership in Freemasonry would have been a guaranteed one way ticket to Dachau or Auschwitz.)

Sure, you got full employment, a decent cost of living and modern high-speed autobahns - but at what price? Subjugating and later exterminating Jews, eliminating any and all opposition to the Party? Being monitored by the block warden to see if you made your contribution to Winter Relief and attended the latest Party rally? Reading, listening and watching only what the government tells you to? Getting into a world war because you needed more living space?

For all intents and purposes, freedom as we knew it expired on the ashes of the WTC and the Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, PA. We now live in a world that preaches 'national security' and 'defense of our homeland' against the shadowy enemy called international terrorism. Living in fear of the next catastrophic terrorist attack won't help - all that will do is play our fears into al-Qaeda's hands.

Thats very well said. The main part of our freedom died that day, now we are fghting for the scraps.

The book is Debt of Honor. To be honest, not one of his more famous efforts. I had to go to the bookcase and look to remember the name.

The airplane was a 747.

So much to say in response-I know this will jump around, but it wasn't the individual sentences of the article, it was the full understanding of the impact of the "thought".

James-Freedom is as much a state of mind as anything else, and when you start passing laws where every aspect of our lives are monitored on the off chance that it will protect us, it begin to erode the idea of freedom.

This IS so true, and is what really bothers me.

Personally-
edited here----->This is said with exception to Viet Nam which to me was the most horrible facet of MY history, yet, it was "Over there".
I know we've had threads on how things have changed through the decades, but there was a pretty wonderful span of time between the air raid drills of the 50's and the revelation/realization of AIDS in the post 60's-70's sexual revolution.

In my mind, this is so much worse. One has faded from memory, or in the case of our younger members, was never experienced. The other, basically unnamed till around 1983, (and not feared by the general population till later) can be controlled by individual choice decreasing the possibility to close to nil. (Still have those incidents with random, tainted transfusions or rape for example.)

It's a feeling of being powerless.

Like the serial killers-child abduction-killed by a drunk driver or an earthquake taking down a part of the San Francisco Bridge. We have come accustomed to THESE possibilities-maybe "numb" is a better word. Will we become "numb" to this new threat, to a new intrusion? How will we modify our lives and what effects will that modification have? (I do not know)

We have so many societal ills we are dealing with as a culture. Things that have already put constraints on our young ones.
When Kris Kristoffersen wrote-"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Was it a truism beyond his original concept? I never dreamed this could become the reality of my children and their children. THAT is what makes me so very sad.