It has to stop...

Generally speaking, I'm in agreement with most positions of the Wall Street Journal - fiscal/economic policy, immigration reform, and others. But on matters of national security, I have to wonder where the usual common sense and well thought-out policy voices have gone. They appear to have been evicted by a (hopefully) minority of neo-conservative hawks who feel that keeping America safe is worth any price. I respectfully disagree, and this is probably the chief reason I'm supporting John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

We are at war. With religious extremists who hate our way of life, possibly due to ignorance, possibly to a deep-seated cultural bias that has sapped any ability to harken back to the message of peaceful tolerance that is Islam. It doesn't really matter why, but we need to accept that fact that there are Muslim terrorists who wish to do us harm.

The culture of fear that was spawned by 9/11 allowed a few neocons to seize control of foreign policy, start 2 wars (one popular and righteous, the other a cluster-fu*k of the highest order), and began an assault on individual rights that continues to this day, witness:

• The snippet attached from the WSJ justifying torture (yes, waterboarding is torture) because we only used it on 3 terrorists - as if there's some magic number below which this atrocity is accepted
• Other WSJ articles that demand that a) we renew the wiretapping/surveillance powers which allow eavesdropping on our own citizens, and b) hold those companies who complied with earlier domestic surveillance requests blameless with respect to their participation

Because we are at war, we need to understand that we will suffer casualties. Some of those will occur abroad, and some will occur at home on native U.S. soil. We need to focus on protecting ports and facilities (nuclear power plants, etc.) that will cause massive deaths and economic destruction if attacked. We need to understand that there is no perfect protection against skilled adversaries who are willing to die to advance their cause. We need to adopt a mindset of sacrifice that is similar to that of our parents' generation during WWII. What we do not need to do is to allow our government to continue the assault on our civil liberties in the name of keeping us safer. We do not need to abandon a half-century of conventional wartime ethics guided by the Geneva convention by condoning the torture of our enemies, however loathsome those enemies may be.

I might be wrong, but you'll have damned difficult time convincing me otherwise. I always that that the saying "I love my country, but I fear my government" was a crackpot slogan of survivalists and white supremacists, sadly, they may be right.

clipped from online.wsj.com Tall Torture Tales February 6, 2008; Page A18 Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Abu Zubaydah was the mastermind of the foiled millennium terrorist attacks, which had Los Angeles airport as one of its targets. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed directed the September 11 attacks, and has claimed to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl. All three men were captured by the CIA in 2002 and waterboarded in the course of their interrogations. They are also the only U.S. detainees to have been waterboarded. That fact, publicly confirmed yesterday by CIA Director Michael Hayden, shreds whatever is left to the so-called torture narrative, according to which the Bush Administration has engaged in widespread, needless and systematic torture of detainees. Instead, we have sworn public testimony that the waterboarding was conducted against the three individuals best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities.