Commentary:

What are our principles?

What are our principles?

Perhaps you should tell me, because I still go by what I was taught 28 years ago, when my Social Studies textbook opened with a story about how some folks were meeting some brave Hungarians at the airport who had to leave their homeland because the evil Soviets had invaded to suppress the indigenous movement towards freedom, liberty, and democracy and opposed secrecy, oppression, and secret prisons.

What exactly are freedom, liberty, and democracy?

I'm not sure I know any more, not after the recent Orwellian newspeak redefinition of terms.

What will the Social Studies texts fifteen or twenty years from now tell of the prisons maintained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where people can be held for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

What will the books tell about how the President asserted an authority to declare any American citizen an "enemy combatant" subject to imprisonment with no appeal to the judiciary in the United States, no right of habeas corpus, and no meeting with legal representation?

We were so ready to condemn the Soviet Union for taking measures that they said was for the protection of their "homeland".

Now, we are so ready to take measures we claim are aimed to protect our "homeland".

Secret search warrants.

The right for the FBI and other government agencies to conduct secret searches with no requirement for judicial approval.

Are we to the level of the former Soviet Union?

No.

Not yet...

But we do appear to be taking steps on the same path.

Are these steps truly consistent with our principles?

What are our principles?

Are we willing to fight for them, even if that fight is not on foreign shores but instead within our own political system?