We’ve Lost the War on Terror

Danny Fisher has a post about waterboarding and our shameful (and now inevitable) Attorney-General-to-be, Michael Mukasey. Add waterboarding to extraordinary rendition and I think it’s fair to say we’ve left “American values” far behind us and perhaps we’ll never return. NBC Nightly News (or one of those shows; I get them confused) was in Culpepper, Virginia lately. It seems like a nice quiet town, but the general mood there, according to anchor Brian Williams (or somebody), was anxiety. And not anxiety over oil prices, internet predators, or the weakening dollar, but anxiety over how some Arab’s gonna blow up the schoolbus. Al Qaeda’s 9/11 strategy was brilliantly effective — since that day Americans living in small, safe towns — people who arguably live safer lives than anyone else anywhere in the world ever in history — live in constant fear (and anger) and that’s the way Osama bin Laden and Dick Cheney want it. We’re throwing away our economy and our young people in Mesopotamia. More than that we’ve discarded our ideas of liberty and fair-play out of a misguided wish, impossible to achieve, for complete security. We are grabbing foreign nationals off their own streets, taking them to hidden bases and torturing them so that we can be safe. (And we’ve known forever that torture doesn’t even work — people will say anything to end the pain.) We’re detaining people (Who are they? What did they do?) indefinitely in a prison colony in Cuba. And at home we live in constant fear. No matter what happens in Iraq, we’ve lost the War on Terror.

– Philip Ryan, Web Editor

PS – Look how bummed Feingold looks sitting between Schumer and Feinstein in the NYT link above.