That's The Issue Here

What a great post! Not that the people who need to understand it, will. He's preaching to the choir and I'm humming harmony in the background.

Daily Kos: Open Letter to Libertarians & Conservatives: "Allowing anyone to break these laws means they can now spy on you and I. It means they can ship us off to be tortured. And we have no recourse, no oversight, no due process, no restriction on that decision or their treatment of us. So what ends up happening, and has happened, is people get rounded up in sweeps either by arbitrary allegation from a party who has a score to settle with the accused, or people get arrested who are completely innocent on as simple a screwup as having a similar sounding name as a known suspect.

Can you imagine? Arrested by secret police, carted off in the middle of the night with no charges filed or notice given, flown to some third-world shit-hole, and hooked up to a car battery with your feet in boiling water? No chance of due process, no trial, no requirement your family or employer is even notified what became of you: Because you had a similar sounding name to a bad guy or there was a neighbor down the street who was mad at you?

That's the issue here.

The individuals who wrote our Constitution were critically aware of the dicey balance between national security and freedom. They were acutely aware of the tendency for centers of power to grow in might. As best we can tell they were more worried about their own government in the long run than anything else. So they wrote the document including Bill of Rights. Holding as an opinion that an official can arbitrarily break the very articles he has sworn to defend is not only logically inconsistent in itself, it's a direct threat to our liberty more than that posed by any external enemy we currently face in the world.

That's the issue here

'9-11 changed everything' we're told? Does that really make sense? Our rule of law and constitutional chaperone of personal liberty survived presidential assassinations, two World Wars, the Holocaust, standing armies millions strong, and scads of thermonuclear tipped missiles pointed at out heads, and we're going to trash our traditions and Constitution because a cabal of religious fanatics with box-cutters trained in a stone-age country got lucky?

That's the issue here."

They got lucky and we didn't. The terrorists and the administration both benefited and continue to benefit from this debacle, the average American (those that don't donate to the party) isn't.

Decisions, decisions.