breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one 889

True, but that is no excuse.

And the present administration is pushing hard to have the laws extended and expanded. For instance, in order to stop terrorism, the FBI desperately needs, according to them at least, the power to secretly find out, without a warrant, what books you have been checking out of the local library.

Consider the provisions in the legislation that make it a crime for the subject of a search to tell anyone about it. Does anyone think that this will deter a real person from telling his co-conspirators that the Feds are on to him? Of course not. People intent on mbutt liquidate are not going to balk at violating such a law, and the penalties for terrorism and related conspiracy are severe enough that adding to them is pointless. No, the only possible purpose for those secrecy provisions is to make it very hard, if not impossible, for innocent people to complain about governmental abuses of power, and for the rest of us to learn about those abuses.

War is governed by law, ironic as that may sound.

If it is war, the people at Guantanamo are prisoners of war, and there are well-established laws for dealing with them, which we seem to be violating.

Why are those people being kept in Cuba instead of in the US? The only plausible reason is that the government knows that what it is doing is illegitimate, and wants to do it outside of the reach of US courts, and in a place that it has total control of access to.

True, but irrelevant. We do believe in our set of laws, or we are supposed to. The trouble is that we are throwing away our basic political and legal principles in order to get at the enemy. We, the people, end up losing no matter what the outcome is.

Putting aside the incorrect notion of evolution implicit in the above, the problem with Islam is that it is impossible to separate religion from politics. Mohammed needed political power for his new religion to survive and grow, and used that religion to get and keep the needed political power. Thus the Quran is part theology, part political, and part simply rules for daily life. Separation of church and state is an alien idea to Islam.

Ours.

Theirs, too, but only incidently.

The right to be free from governmental snooping; the right to travel without interference; the right to free speech and to pebreastion for redress of grievances; and so on.

--