Moment of clarity

My Canadian counterpart gets it. Its not about whether the folks in GTMO are legal or illegal combatants.

Despite what anyone tells you, anti-terror laws do not necessarily prevent attacks, they just make the investigations and subsequent prosecutions easier. And since the United States Supreme Court effectively destroyed the avenue of “enemy combatant” military prosecutions last week, civilian prosecutions are the only course remaining.

Even after the horror of 9/11, I was extremely reluctant to accept measures like the USA PATRIOT ACT and its foreign counterparts, particularly in nations like mine where collective rights has always taken precedent over individual freedom. My reluctance was based on two things; I am a traditional (as opposed to the newer brand) conservative and I understand how government works.

Traditional conservatives understand that the only way to secure freedom for everyone is to secure freedom for the individual. In an adversarial justice system, the rights of the defendant must always hold greater weight than the interests of the state. If controlling crime, or even suppressing insurrection, were the main priority of society, we would not require the police to obtain judicial warrants before they could enter your home or listen in to your private conversations.

If security were the only interest of the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment would never have been proposed, let alone ratified. However, modern American conservatives use the access to deadly weapons as the yardstick by which they judge the freedom of other countries, even as they justify the government’s extra-judicial eavesdropping in the convesrations of their countrymen.

Traditional conservatives understand that once government is given a measure of power, that power does not remain static. That power, as we have seen with the welfare state, only grows and metastasizes. If there is a vacuum in society, government will always move in to fill it if individual citizens don’t.

He is right on the money in pointing out that so called conservatives are really wearing sheep’s clothing:

As conservatives have lost their way over the last thirty years, they have pushed for the growth of state power at the expense of the individual every bit as much as liberals traditionally have. The only individual freedom that they fight for is financial, and even then they are dishonest. They budget government spending in a way that guarantees continuous government growth but do so with borrowed money, thinking that economic growth will eventually pay it back. As we have seen with previous large deficits, it doesn’t. Eventually, tomorrow’s taxes are always raised to pay for the spending of today.

Modern conservatives seem to have forgotten that government grows just as surely in security and criminal justice matters as it does in economic ones, and with much greater corrosive effects on a democracy. For the most part, they have forgotten that security without freedom is little more than totalitarianism. Modern conservatives have forgotten that government is not designed to contract its power, it constantly expands or it dies. They have essentially forgotten 4,000 years of human experience.

They support the Bush administration’s violation of the National Security Agency’s charter as they opposed an assault weapons ban. As a traditional conservative, I oppose both.