While we rightfully pay our respects to those who died on 9/11, let's also remember what this country stands for and what it should stand against. Human Rights Watch has issued a report titled "PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: Human Rights Abuses of Post-September 11 Detainees." It can be found at HRW report

As reported in today's New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof,
[quote] A new report by Human Rights Watch records the abuse of detainees such as Uzi Bohadana, a 24-year-old Israeli Jew (apparently the authorities find all Middle Easterners equally likely to be members of Al Qaeda). Mr. Bohadana was left with a group of inmates who had been told that he was a terrorist. Guards stayed away during the subsequent beating, which left Mr. Bohadana with a broken jaw and cuts on his right eye and lip that required stitches.

That's what happens when people are arrested secretly, when human rights groups cannot interview detainees, when proceedings are secret. We become China.

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The most common reaction to a threat is to trade personal freedom in exchange for feeling more safe.

The irony is, rarely is there any actual benefit gained from these supposed security gains. And it takes a lot longer to restore the freedoms once sold with this Trojan-horse trading technique.

It's similar to the idea of torture: most people approve when they deem their/country's security is at risk. But rarely does torture provide any reliable, new information. Most often, they will just provide any information they think will get the torture to stop. And after the crises, the authorities never come back to the public and say "Gee--we aren't in the same crises--here's your freedoms back!"

It's a very difficult sell to convince the rest of the world that we are the beacon on freedom and justice if we engage in many of the same institutional behaviors that we so rightly condemn in others. And when we apply them unevenly to the "bad guys," it only adds to the credibility gap created by our hypocrisy.

Learning from history, and not reacting in a knee-jerk fashion when a crises occurs, is what is going to allow us to continue our leadership in this "grand experiment in democracy."

Insightful comments Brent. I would add that torture is often thought of in extreme terms generally drawn from bad spy movies.

I suspect that the methods are more developed now and tend toward the psychological. The result however may be even more damaging to the personal freedom, privacy and security of innocent people.

I think it is a terrible error to try to separate this into a disagreement between liberal and conservative, etc. Nobody wins when these tactics are legitimized.