The little ones here are so upset....but it's all been done before, children.
The debate over the US government spying on its citizens has so many people here on JU, and on other sites I've visited, in such a tizzy.
Is Bush responsible? Isn’t he? Our individual rights being assailed! Aren’t they? Privacy is paramount! Isn’t it? Part of what follows is from a post I left over on stevendaedalus’s thread. Please see the link.
So many in America today are all too quick to forget that so much that is so hotly debated and readily decried in our present war on terror has already been implemented and used previously, with no lasting impression on our rights as citizens. When the crisis had properly passed, everything was returned to normal. Somehow, we survived the assault on our freedoms. Extreme dangers call for extreme measures.
For example, in the Civil War, Lincoln's government kept a wide eye for Confederate sympathizers in the North, suspended Haebeus Corpus and managed the press.
I both WW1 and WW2, the government not only managed the press (with the willingness of the press itself), but openly encouraged spying on its own people, both by government agencies (FBI, OSS) and by the people themselves, who often gave tips to those agencies, whether they panned out or not.
They were constantly warned to be ever vigilant against the "Fifth Column". Sometimes this did work, as with the German saboteurs that came ashore somewhere in New England, I believe it was. And as I'm sure we're all aware, Japanese-American citizens were sent to concentration camps by the thousands, with no real evidence against them except their ancestry.
Also in WW2, the government even went, hat and flowers in hand, so to speak, to the Mafia in an effort to keep Axis spies off the waterfronts. Who controlled the waterfronts? The unions. Who controlled the unions? The Mafia.
So, they went to "Lucky" Luciano, at the time serving his sentence in Federal prison, and asked for his help. He agreed that Hitler was a menace that had to be stopped and, despite his somewhat adversarial situation, was willing to cut a deal. He sent a message to his "associates" to keep an eye out. It was done.
I’ve read of a similar suggestion, from arch-conservative radio host and author Michael Savage, for our present war. He advises that we could go to the street gangs, and the more "organized" criminals, in the big cities, and ask their help or advice in sorting (and even snuffing) out potential terrorist threats on their "turfs", I suppose you could say.
Hey…perhaps that was one last thing "Tookie" Williams could have done to prove his contrition? To earn his redemption?
If you’ll notice, though; these sorts of things all happened in an era or eras in which we still realized that common sense and national security had to take precedence over political expediency and whether or not someone was personally offended. After all, people….what good to us were individual rights if we’d lost the whole damn country in the name of slavishly guarding them?
In this war, we may not be in danger of losing "the whole damn country", but we could sure as hell lose a lot of lives. Lives that may have been saved if they’d been willing to give a little on their privacy rights. Once more, and with feeling: extreme dangers call for extreme measures.
Why should this war, in which we've already lost over 3,000 innocent people in a completely unprovoked attack, be any different from any others we’ve fought…and ultimately won?
"There is no substitute for victory".---General of the Armies, Douglas MacArthur