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That Country Wouldn’t Be America Senator Russ Feingold december 2001 [Editor’s Note: On October 11, the Senate voted ninety-six to one in favor of an antiterrorism bill that severely infringes on our civil liberties. The only senator to vote against it was Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. What follows is an excerpt from his Xoor statement that day. On October 25, the Senate voted on the Wnal version of the bill. This time, it was ninety-eight to one, with Feingold again the odd man out.] There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists . If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications ; if we lived in a country where people could be held in jail indeWnitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists or would-be terrorists, just as it would Wnd more lawbreakers generally. But that wouldn’t be a country in which we would want to live, and it wouldn’t be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to Wght and die. In short, that country wouldn’t be America. I think it is important to remember that the Constitution was written in 1789 by men who had recently won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties in times of war as well as in times of peace. There have been periods in our nation’s history when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what appeared at the time to be legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: The Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the injustices perpetrated against German Americans and Italian Americans, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of anti-war protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War. We must not allow this piece of our past to become prologue. Preserving our freedom is the reason we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without a shot being Wred if we sacriWce the liberties of the American people in the belief that by doing so we will stop the terrorists. —Russ Feingold is the junior senator from Wisconsin. 24 part 1 championing civil liberties ...

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