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The question: Do we fight terrorism or protect liberties?

The question: Do we fight terrorism or protect liberties?

Is that really the question?

In Hamlet, Shakespeare had the eponymous protagonist say, "To be, or not to be: that is the question." However, the tragic end of Hamlet's tale shows that asking the wrong questions may lead one astray more than a wrong answer to the right question.

According to many of the participants in the recent anti-terrorism conference held in Madrid last week, with the site chosen in commemoration of the train bombings in that city a year ago, the question itself (as reported by The Christian Science Monitor) is framed incorrectly, and instead we should start with the premise that "The best way to fight terrorism is to protect liberties."

Some will disagree with this premise on the face of it without thinking. However, look deeper:

"Compromising human rights ... facilitates achievement of the terrorist's objective, by ceding to him the moral high ground and provoking tension, hatred, and mistrust of government among precisely those parts of the population where he is more likely to find recruits," he added.

Scrupulous respect for the rule of law "wrong-foots the terrorists, forcing them to campaign not against a regime but against democracy itself, which means the rule of the people," agrees Phil Bobbitt, the US law professor who led the conference deliberations on democratic responses to terror. The terrorists can take on democracy, "but I think it's a losing strategy," he says.

Never forget, terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology. Do not succumb to the same fears that ruled when anarchists and communists first appeared. Rarely are wise decisions made when fear is the overriding factor.

I have said this before, and I will repeat it here, terrorism in and of itself is NOT an existential threat to the United States, certainly not in the way the former Soviet Union was a threat in our balance of terror, appropriately acronymed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), that we maintained for nearly 50 years.

While the Cold War was not terrorism in the way we currently define it, it was indeed a true balance of terror, even a cursory examination of the films put out by the Civil Defense Agency in the 1950s illustrates the terror in a way that is all the more eloquent for being in the same black and white photography that is associated with the "Greatest Generation's" war that ended in 1945.

Before I am proclaimed naive, I do want to point out that yes, terrorism has the potential to kill a lot of people, and that is a horrifying prospect, but terrorists can NOT kill the entire country, nor can they destroy our democracy though nuclear annihilation of every major city, as could the threat from the Soviet Union.

Only we can kill our democracy, and that will be from within, and to some extent we are doing exactly that in the slow poisoning of our democratic heritage arising from our reaction to the threat of terrorism.

While we are still far from the fascist state that some far-left-wingers in their fevered writings and proclamations decry with overwrought hyperbole, there is indeed a slow, subtle chipping away at freedoms that, while not necessarily directed and coordinated by some dark force like in Star Wars prequel movies, is indeed endangering our liberties and privacy nonetheless.

The far-right-wing, with their frenetic use of inflammatory rhetoric, denouncing anyone who questions actions that may limit freedoms with words such as "treason" and "traitorous", are of little help and in fact are serving as catalysts to destroy the very institutions they claim to want to preserve.

All hope is not lost, though, there is indeed still time to for a pause with a slow, deep breath, time to think before we take further steps down that road paved with good intentions, having nary a landmark, but leading directly to Hell.

A final note, the meeting in Madrid was not all pie-in-the-sky theorizing, with acknowledgment of reality as shown here:

He cautioned, though, that "intelligence cooperation is almost an oxymoron. Intelligence by its nature does not lend itself to cooperation."

In the end, though, we need to learn to ask the right questions to find the answers. The question is not "Do we fight terrorism or protect liberties?"

The question is "How do we protect liberties from dangers both external and internal?"

Ask that and strive for the answers, and if liberty and freedom are all that we say they are, the rest will follow.