When Americans go to war, we aren’t just fighting for love of country. We are fighting for the values that make us different as a nation: freedom, equality and the rule of law. Who would want it said that America protected those values in peacetime, when it was easy, but not in wartime, when it was hard?

The United States was attacked on September 11th because of our civil liberties. “If we are intimidated to the point of restricting our freedoms, the terrorists will have won.” “We well lose that war on terrorism without a shot being fired if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people in the belief that be doing so we will stop the terrorists.”

Individual rights are the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. An individual right is something everyone has in every country. They are also our civil liberties. The Constitution lays out what those liberties are. The Constitution gives every individual protection of their rights. Some of those rights are the right to own property and to be tried by a jury. The Constitution would have never been ratifie

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.

After the attacks on the United States on September 11th, the government felt pressured to take action to keep our country safe. They were so pressured that they didn’t even take the time to think how those actions would affect or even help the U.S. Once such action the government wanted to take was to make every U.S. citizen have a national identification card. These cards would be connected to a database that has information about every person on it. You would be required to show this card any time someone with the authority asked for it. That person would have access to all of your information including your back transactions. The government never took the time to realize that those cards would not solve anything. If a terrorist living in the country had a clean record, issuing him a card would not send up any red flags. In fact he would be able to avoid the highest levels of judgment because his record was so clean. Our government was ready and willing to violate our right to freedom by making everyone get national identification cards. Privacy advocate Robert Ellis Smith has described the cards as “a license to live.” If these cards were issued, a person would not be able to function freely without it. These cards would only be a stepping-stone for our government to violate more of our rights.

When our country is involved in any form of military conflict with someone, our individual rights must be put ahead of national security. Benjamin Franklin once said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The reason we are fighting the war on terrorism is to punish those that attacked us on September 11th. They attacked us because they do not like our freedoms and rights. If we let our government take away those rights, what are we fighting for? This statement by Senator Russ Feingold expresses my exact feelings toward the national security verses individual rights debate.

President George W. Bush has said that the war on terrorism is a war to preserve freedom. But, in the last year, he and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft have curbed civil liberties ore sharply than any administration in half a century, with little tangible proof that we are the safer for it.

Some topics in this essay:
, Arab Americans, PATRIOT Act, Russ Feingold, United September, Acts American, John Ashcroft, Middle Eastern, Terrorism Act, Scare McCarthy-era, individual rights, national security, civil liberties, september 11th, usa patriot act, patriot act, american people, due process, bush administration, usa patriot, war terrorism, conflict individual rights, world war ii, due process clause, attacked september 11th,