Letters to the Editor
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Have you stopped beating your wife?
The standard answer from the Bush Administration to any question regarding this sort of thing is something like, "Why would we want to give classified information to terrorists?" or "Why wouldn't we want to find out why terrorists are calling someone in the U.S.?" This seems a lot like Groucho Marx's "Have you stopped beating your wife?" They are framing the arguments with presumption of guilt. Unfortunately, they catch a lot of people off guard, who just agree. Why yes, it would be pretty silly to give a terrorist the means to commit more hideous acts, wouldn't it?
But how do we know that they are in fact guilty of these crimes? Are they guilty just because George W. Bush says so? He doesn't exactly have the best track record over his 5 1/2 years in office for being right all the time. Giving him the right to detain anyone he chooses indefinitely without a fair trial certainly doesn't sound like anything that was established in our constitution. Frankly, that sounds a bit more like something King George II would do. It's much too much power for any one man to possess.