An Open Letter to Politicians

The measures you have so far taken in Washington in response to the 9/11 disaster are totally appalling. Only the bill to remove government-imposed obstacles to the arming of pilots resembles common sense, and even that isn't yet Law.

I will pass over the very obvious fact that you CAUSED the disaster, by pursuing an interventionist foreign policy for 100 years (read how).

Rather, my outrage is at what you've done SINCE it occurred.

  1. Instead of pausing to examine what might have been its cause and considering whether any provocation needs to be removed and a peace conference called, you immediately but falsely declared this to be an "unprovoked" attack that warrants full military retaliation. Unless that knee-jerk policy is abandoned, the survival of the human race now stands in peril. You have launched what may very easily escalate to a global, religious, nuclear war!
  2. Instead of pausing to consider that the murderers of 9/11 were (with a few minor exceptions) obeying every law you had already written until the moment they pulled their knives, you have scattered blame like confetti on all concerned except yourselves. Specifically:
    • the airport security guards carried out every check you had mandated for them, yet they are being blamed for letting the murderers board the aircraft! And the "blame" involves, very likely, the loss of their jobs and a replacement of their competitive industry by overpaid and faceless morons from some new government bureaucracy that will bring all the efficiency of the Post Office and the sensitivity of the IRS to the task of keeping airline customers safe.
    • you and members of your class in the States forced the passengers caught aboard the doomed aircraft to defend their lives with pencils and plastic forks instead of the firearms that the Second Amendment absolutely entitled them to carry. Yet even now, there is not a sign on Capitol Hill that you even dream of repealing the 20,000 laws that killed both them and the 5,000 victims on the ground. Air marshalls and armed pilots are better than the helplessness you created, but are pathetic substitutes for the real thing: freedom.
  3. You have with disgusting alacrity established a "Homeland Security" agency that eerily resembles the Gestapo and every other miserable destroyer of liberty since the bloodthirsty "Committee of Public Safety" established under Robespierre - whose dictum Tom Ridge now inherits: "Terror without virtue is bloody; virtue without terror is impossible."
    • you have detained nearly 1,000 people without trial and without charge, flagrantly violating Amendments 4, 5 and 6 as if you never even heard of them, let alone took a solemn oath to uphold and defend them; and have even publicly contemplated torturing some of them to loosen their tongues.
    • you have set about the task of systematically destroying what little privacy of communication remains in this country, whose founders sweated blood to secure it.
    • you have let loose thugs with an invented "right" to search homes, papers and persons without leave and without even a pretense of "reasonable cause", let alone the specific warrant signed by the foreman of a citizen jury which the Fourth Amendment requires.

And all of the above, you did in the names of "freedom" and America. Your utter hypocrisy is beneath contempt.

Jim Davies
11/7/2001