NATIONAL SECURITY vs. CIVIL LIBERTIES

[WARNING: BORING PERSONAL POV PENNED LATE AT NIGHT without caffeine]

The removal of the Cold War’s us vs. them mentality meant easing of the paranoia that Mutally Assured Destruction imposed on US politics. The left-wing Democrats could no longer be accused of colluding with Soviet Communism, though over the decades, VENONA and other evidence from KGB files has recently revealed that Alger Hiss was not the only prominent US official to have been working under cover for the USSR.

But the left-wing Dems have a forgetfulness gene about the USA and a memory gene about the Old World. They forget that even during the 1920 Red Scare and the heights of the Joe McCarthy red-baiting, no serious infringement of American civil liberties has ever taken place except under the heated atmosphere of World War II with the Japanese internments and the Liberty Cabbage World War I harassment of some German-Americans.

On arriving at Ellis Island, the Dems on the far left carried their mental templates on civil liberties from Eastern Europe and other areas where there was a historical tradition of persecution of people with leftist or minority political ideas. And Cossacks did pogroms against shtetl Jews and Catholic Poles and other minorities in the old Tsarist Empire. So paranoia was not misplaced.

So their paranoia has historical roots, but is misplaced in the USA. However correct Christopher Hitchens may be about the clumsy incompetence of the NSA and FBI and CIA in their reliance on high-tech geegaws to intercept phone calls, these eavesdropping devices have only been misused occasionally and have been administratively or politically dealt with in an appropriate manner.

“The End is Near“ Gore crowd and the Chicken Little hysterics actually have a minor point, but their exaggerations and crying wolf really diminish the impact of their point.

Christopher Hitchens is correct as far as he goes in the following observation
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I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.

Here in Dave's World, I am rather disappointed that the national security aspects of the wiretapping have been submerged in the hue and cry of domestic politics. As a former Democrat, I realize that there is an anti-national-defense vibe in the left-wing dream palace of the Dems. It comes over as defeatism and they need to suppress it.

I’m also disappointed that the Committee for American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has come out against national security publically in a national battle against their terrorist co-religionists. At some point, another terror attack could spur retaliation against the Arab-American community like the German and Japanese precedents I cited above.

If another terrorist attack occurs on US soil, the American public may regard the Gore wing of the Democrats accountable for letting down our guard. And if that happens, the Gore wing will have weakened civil liberties in the longer run.