The response, from a right-wing reader was:


“We’re fighting for our lives.”


There’s obviously something to that. Portions of the National Intelligence Report declassified last week made it clear that the war in Iraq, in particular, has fueled the spread of jihadism, which may lead to more attacks. Those attacks must be prevented, and the debate has been whether we, in our quest to do so, must chip away at the bedrock principles of freedom itself.


Conservatives don’t see it in those terms, preferring to think that in this “fight for our lives,” extreme measures are necessary. And the legislation passed last week was extreme indeed; it vests in this president, and all future presidents, the authority to detain people indefinitely without charges, to “disappear” and torture them as the executive or the Pentagon sees fit. And all of this applies not only to foreigners, but U.S. citizens, as well.


Indeed, we have now created the legal framework by which dissent itself might be criminalized. Consider that if there’s another terrorist attack in this country, this president — or future Democratic presidents — could decide that criticism of the administration constitutes “material support” for terrorists. Open your yap and off to jail you might go, with no recourse whatsoever.


It’s a pretty tidy little system. If you’re into tyranny.


And if that sounds hyperbolic, perhaps you saw a letter to the editor of our local Lancaster New Era last week, in which a woman wrote that “What we need is a dictator for about 20 years, and that will solve a lot of problems the unappreciative Americans in this country have.”


Fascism? You’re soaking in it.


Last week’s legislation takes us a few ominous steps closer to that writer's feverish dream. Republicans seem to regard the laws upended, such as habeas corpus, as niceties we can no longer afford in the age of terror. But those laws exist to protect you, me, and everyone else. Wrote Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine in 1789, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”


But in this “fight for our lives” the old rules no longer apply. There is this sense — understandable in the light of Sept. 11 but exaggerated by the right-wing media machine and a Republican Party desperate to hang onto power — that our opponents are so strong, so nefarious, that we could in fact lose this “fight for our lives”; that we, who spend nearly as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, teeter on the brink of destruction.


And if so, aren’t extreme measures necessary to save the country? What’s out of bounds? And the answer is that nothing is out of bounds; if the fate of the nation itself hangs in the balance, the Constitution becomes a barrier to safety, the very values of civilization as we have defined and defended them over the course of generations become antiquated, even dangerous.


This is the mentality that has driven our foreign policy since Sept. 11. We are a nation that walks in fear, anxious to trade away anything, and ultimately everything, for the fleeing illusion of security.


This, it strikes me, may be exactly what Osama bin Laden had in mind on Sept. 11. He likely knew that no matter how much damage he might inflict, terrorists could never destroy us.


But we can destroy ourselves.


Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.