By Any Means Necessary

Pavel Constantin, Romania

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority
to animals; they are without sin,
and you, with your greatness,
defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you
- alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
--Fyodor Dostoevsky
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It is illustrative of our national mindset that even the New York Times thinks it acceptable that Congress would not balk at killing terrorists (actually, Ranger doesn't balk at killing terrorists either, but that infrequently happens):

"The plan was never put into effect, apparently because it was unworkable. But it’s hard to imagine Congress balking at killing terrorists (Illegal, and Pointless.)"

When we talk assassination, we are scrapping the basic tenet of western jurisprudence: Innocent until proven guilty. This principle governed the Nuremberg trials and should remain the standard. The problem with assassins is, they are judge, jury and executioner rolled into one.

Think of all of those collected in the seine net with the Worst of the Worst in Guantanamo who were never proven to have any terrorist affiliation. Do we simply say "oops" and apologize when innocents are killed? Do we want out national dignity sullied by having assassins on our tax-funded payrolls?

Does anyone want a torturer or assassin living next to them? Do we even want these people in our society?

The editorial says, "President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks." This panic-stricken group think is a weakness of democratic governments. Panic cannot be the basis of any policy, whether financial, legislative, military or intelligence-related. When a president panics over an events like those which occurred on 9-11, it is clear this person is not leadership material.

The warrantless wiretapping was not an isolated case of breaking the law:

Once the Bush team got into the habit. . . , it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation’s intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge."

The U.S. leadership has developed a callous approach to the question of the value of a human life. The people so in favor of assassination and all the dark side stuff are also those that had their fingers on the nuclear weapons.

Disregard for individual life is alarming, but sitting on thousands of nuclear weapons that are armed and launch ready is terrifying. The U.S. is stuck on verbally attacking North Korea and Iran, when we ourselves pose a great danger to the world.

Forty years ago we put a man on the moon, and today U.S. troops fight in the lunar landscape of Afghanistan.

It really was but a small step for man.