Hats Off to Feingold. He reminded his colleagues that our Founding Fathers “wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties in times of war as well as in times of peace.” And he pointed out that “they did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies.”
Feingold was quite clear about the stakes involved: “There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. . . . But that wouldn't be a country in which we would want to live, and it wouldn't be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that country wouldn't be America.”
His final warning could not have been clearer: “Preserving our freedom is the reason we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without a shot being fired if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people in the belief that by doing so we will stop the terrorists.” [Privacy Digest]