Quote:
Originally Posted by Tam9  What you are saying is fine and dandy, however what would you do? How would you handle the Al Qaeda/terrorism problem? |
For domestic terror, I'd treat terrorists the same way I treat every murderer. A fair, public trial with the exercise of the law. Our justice system maintains its integrity only if it refuses to bend the rules in dispensing justice. By giving the most hated people rights, the system can show it has moral superiority. It is giving a message to the killer, "Though you do not respect rights, we do. Your punishment is in defense of those rights." Any other system sends the opposite message... There are no shortcuts.
For international, diplomacy need not be soft. But it must always be diplomatic. The terrorists do a fine job alienating themselves, until we step in to provide some justification for their rhetoric...
Quote:
|
Surely you don't believe that past wars and campaigns for freedom have been pure with only the transgressors paying the price! There is much naivitée going on here! War is ugly! To date, there has been no delicate or innocent way to obtain freedom. The road to gaining and maintaining freedom can be very ugly.
|
The road to maintaining freedom is not simple. It is not based on giving in to our base emotions of fear and wrath.
I am well aware that war is ugly. My father has been in one. When he returned, he was different. There was an emptiness behind his eyes. A glimmer of life that was gone. His instincts had changed. He was afraid. His stories showed, very clearly, the trauma he had gone through. It wasn't the details that revealed the damage. It was the calm way he would describe beheadings, or shrapnel wounds, or being under attack, as though they were no more than a story read casually in the Times. War is definitely ugly.
The question here, though, is not one of war. The war we went into in Iraq was utterly unnecessary. The war in Afghanistan, which may have been necessary, was blundered. But we are discussing personal liberties, not war. And the erosion of personal liberties does little to assist in war efforts. It provides less credible information than that obtained via intel efforts. It does nothing to keep prisoners from being a threat that a normal prison cell (or a max security, if we want to use that). And it ruins the reputation of the country, further radicalizing people who may otherwise help us. From both a moral and a political standpoint, it is just the wrong move.