Replies

The hell they can't. There are so many scenarios under which they could do just that. If a nuclear weapon gets smuggled into this country, you just watch how much "freedom" means then.

You're telling me that terrorists can decide to do away with the Constitution, and with our freedoms?

I don't know your educational background, but I know that many public schools have gone downhill over the years, and so the students they crank out these days may not have a fundamental understanding of our government, and so I'll try to assist you in your education about the Constitution and our government in general.

First off - terrorists don't decide the budgets nor the size and scope of our government - they can influence the budgets through death and destruction, but they don't decide on them. You have to be an American citizen and you have to be sitting in Congress or the White House to have that kind of power.

Second, just because the terrorists have killed Americans and keeping doing so in Iraq, doesn't mean they are automatically given control over the Constitution. In theory, making changes to the Constitution requires a lot of cooperation from Americans as well as Congress and the Supreme Court. A terrorist can't simply say "we killed five thousand Americans, now give us your Constitution so we can destroy it".

Third, and last but not least, the terrorists don't have the power to say "Okay, the FBI can now do this, the local police can now do that, the government can start monitoring this, and increase in size to handle that". It goes back to elected officials (for the most part), and for the American people tolerating it.

To complete this short little lecture, and hopefully this won't confuse you, I will say this: Terrorists can create an excuse for the politicians to step in and start destroying the Constitution. Again though, the American people would have to tolerate this, and the terrorists won't have any power to wield - only the politicians can try to wield that power.

"You're telling me that terrorists can decide to do away with the Constitution, and with our freedoms?"

Your post is so wrong, so misguided on so many points, that I won't spend too much time with you other than to say that yes, terrorists and other enemies both inside and outside our country do influence the freedom we enjoy here. If we allow them to use our liberties against us, if we allow them to hide behind technicalities, then our freedoms will never last. Our enemies will have the last word.

In fact, I'm quite suspicious about your level of education. Mine is pretty good. Good enough to have been taught that in every war we fought up through WWII we have had to temporarily suspend a small portion of our liberty in exchange for our own national survival. After each of those wars we came back freer than before.

I'm quite sure I understand and appreciate our system of government far better than you do. I know that if we don't act to protect it from totalitarian threats, one day I'll see a lot of people like you *really* screaming about your loss of freedom; not in the paranoic fashion you are now, but with real screams of fear.