The Abyss

"If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", a well-known German thinker stated many years ago. The US appears to have been staring into the abyss of the so called "War on Terror", and basically legalised torture. When fighting an evil, one must take great care not to become that which one fights. There is no good coming from trading hard-won freedoms for an illusion of security. The Bush administration is fond of saying that the terrorists hate those that love freedom. Well, freedom just took a beating. The terrorist agenda has always been aiming at curtailing freedom. Andreas Baader wanted to bring about a revolution by forcing a revolt against a police state that would come about by the government removing one freedom after the other in response to random acts of terror. Twisted thinking, sure, but they came quite close to the police state, and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof was allegedly murdered by the police in their cells to avoid the messy rule of law.

So now the CIA is free to detain indefinitely without trial terrorist suspects. They can torture them, provided that they are not raped or that no biological experiments are conducted on them. Does this sound like the laws of a nation that values freedom and the rule of law?

Whilest the founding fathers are turning in their graves, I'm sure Andreas Baader is nodding approvingly in his.