What has fear done to us?

The recently released torture memos have made one thing very clear: Fear is the terrorists' greatest weapon. A bomb can't change our values. A plane flying into a building didn't change what we hold most dear. Instead, the threat of it happening again changed our values. Even the mere thought of it happening again makes our threat levels yo-yo between frightening and terrifying. All as a plan to keep the populous in fear. To keep us wanting to be saved. To keep us looking to our government for solutions.

See compromise happened. Our nation compromised those truths that we hold self-evident. We compromised our belief that all men are created equal. That all have the right to fair trail and the law. We compromised our belief that we don't torture. We compromised our right to privacy and habeus corpus.

Thus terror won. Thus, the terrorists forced us to look to those who are ignoring our constitution for our salvation. Thus they forced us to reckon with the idea that our constitution isn't all we'd believed. That was then. In the here and now, it's time to reclaim our morals. Our dignity. Our belief in the human spirit.

The reason? Because we proved ourselves to be right. We created the greatest nation on the planet. And we created it by doing the right thing, not by compromising our beliefs. We created a democracy that is possibly one of the best social experiments the world has known.

We must return to that. We must believe again. If we don't believe, if we don't be who we are, that's when terror wins. When we stop being us. When we stop being Reagan's shining light on the hill. When we stop being American.

And if you still believe torture is worth it. If you still believe that in special cases, in those moments where we must find the dirty bomb, torture is worth it, then read the following article. Those who know how to get information, and actually got the information we needed, don't believe torture works.

Torture does tear things down. It tears us down. It tears down our democracy.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089/page/1

Presented without preface or comment: