I would say there is a huge difference between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. That being that terrorists have attacked the USA continually both here and abroad (embassy bombings, etc.) for more than two decades. 3000 people dying on 9/11 was a very war-like outcome.
If it's not a war, what do you suggest? We handle each terrorist attack as a police case? I think that's what Holder and Obama suggested we do with the Gitmo detainees, before they decided to pardon them in the faux prisoner exchange.
This isn’t the terrorist watch list, this is the no fly list. They were implemented at the same time and excused by the same act, but other than that they have no relation to each other. Administered by different groups, people on one aren’t necessarily on the other. He might be on the terror watch list too, but that would just be an accident.
Really drug cartels kill a lot more people a lot more regularly in this country. Admittedly they mostly kill members of rival cartels, but they’re still doing a lot more killing of Americans than any terrorist group.
The problem is it’s a war against a noun that isn’t proper. Subsequently it has no definition. Wars should only ever be against proper nouns, because then the scope is defined. When we entered a war against Germany, Japan and Italy (The Axis) the scope was defined, we knew who the enemy was, where they were, what a victory would be, what a defeat would be. Same with the Korean War, Viet Nam War, even the invasions of Grenada and Panama. Terror never attacked us, there is no definable group that is terror. A terrorist organization attacked us, THAT is who we should have declared war against, the proper noun of Al-Qaeda. A definable war with declarable victory conditions. It’s instructive to how pointless and meandering a “war” this is that “mission accomplished” was declared over a decade ago and nobody has any idea, or has had any idea during that time, if we’re actually anywhere near winning the “war”. I mean sure we beat Al-Qaeda, but there’s still plenty of terror out there.
And, to bring it all back, that’s why we should be wholly unwilling to let our freedoms be impacted in this “war”. Without an end in sight it’s these infractions are permanent. Limiting certain freedoms while we were at war with Germany there was a definable point when those freedoms would be restored, because we would all know when the war was over. There is no victory point in the war on terror, there is no time to know the mission really has been accomplished and we can get our freedoms back. That’s unacceptable.