With this hideous war and all the other abuses by the current administration, I guess I lost perspective of the very reason I chose Jeffersons Ghost as a DU name.
Let's see, there was some guy right after 9/11 who was willing to stand alone in DC to defend my freedom, as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. What was his name again?
He said these words:
"The civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are the most sacred rights that we hold as Americans. The Founders who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights exercised vigilance, even though they had recently fought and won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers and an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace.
Every American was shocked and saddened by the tragedy of September 11, and my first and most powerful emotion was a solemn resolve to stop these terrorists. And that remains my principal reaction to these events. But we must also exercise caution in our response. We must ensure that in our pursuit of justice we do not compromise the very freedom and way of life that we seek to protect. There have been periods in our nation's history when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what appeared at the time to be the legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: The Alien and Sedition Acts; the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War; the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II; the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era; and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War. We must not allow these pieces of our past to become prologue.
Protecting the safety of the American people is a solemn duty of the Congress; we must work tirelessly to prevent more tragedies like the devastating attacks of September 11th. We must prevent more children from losing their mothers, more wives from losing their husbands, and more firefighters from losing their heroic colleagues. But the Congress will fulfill its duty only when it protects both the American people and the freedoms at the foundation of American society. So let us preserve our heritage of basic rights. Let us practice as well as preach that liberty. And let us fight to maintain that freedom that we call America."
http://www.russfeingold.org/civil_liberties.php
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