"Of course there have to be media guidelines. Hell, if we want to plant I.D. chips in people and torture their loved ones until they break, we will. I know the idea of governmental control over what the media can or cannot say during wartime may be an uncomfortable topic for some to digest, but it is a necessary fact of life when our enemies are trying to kill us." Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee)
You can read the whole AP article, dated April 3, 2006 here.
Lest you’ve forgotten, we’re at war and governments have always assumed extraordinary powers during wartime. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Senator Frist, in referring to the government’s "wartime" powers, is talking about Iraq. He's not. For one thing, we’re not a war WITH Iraq or with any other country at the moment. Not a single government in the world is ordering its soldiers into battle with our soldiers. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, regardless of how and why we got there, now we are there to assist the new governments (which we installed) get on their feet and govern.
No, the "wartime" to which Frist refers is the GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR. This is a war that will never end. It’s a war more enduring than the 50 year "Cold War" with the former Soviet Union. That war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which then made room for a whole new and bigger war to take its place. As long as there is a single person who desires to blow up Americans, and maybe himself, we will be at war with Terror. Our idiotic foreign policies around the world will guarantee the continual creation of new terrorists who hate us and are willing to die for their cause.
And so, where does all of this leave us–-We The People? It leaves us with ID chips implanted so that we can be tracked and identified wherever we go. It leaves us liable to be picked up in the middle of the night and whisked off to secret detention camps for interrogation and torture "until we break," or until our "loved ones break." as Senator Frist so delicately states. It leaves us without our Constitutionally guaranteed rights to privacy; it leaves the President free to break any law he sees fit in order to "protect" us. It leaves our media without its First Amendment free speech rights to question or report government actions because dissent, apart from being unpatriotic, might give aid and comfort to the enemy. It leaves me wondering how we let all this happen, and why we didn’t stop it while we still had the chance. It leaves me trying to figure out why so many people don’t seem to understand what the Global War on Terror really is--a domestic war on freedom and democracy.
(posted by Patti)
