In retrospect, I think I got part of this rant wrong: The worst thing about this situation is not the chilling effect of this President's witch hunt for the "traitor" who ratted him out. That's really kind of par for the course. One can only hope that anyone in the intelligence community who finks the chief executive has made appropriate arrangements.

The real cause for concern is the justification: that he has the power to do pretty much anything he wants to do while we are at "war". Now, this is an enormously weak argument, as there is nothing in the Constitution nor the congressional legislation authorizing the war in Iraq that gives the President blank-check amnesty from the rest of the legal code. And yet there are plenty of people who want to give him this one, saying he needs this to protect us from the terrorists. People who've never bothered to learn that he already had the power to tap 3 days before having to obtain a warrant.

Hmmm. Maybe that's the real cause for concern: that there are so many people who are willing to give up my liberties without bothering to read up on the issue.

I came across an interesting statistic the other day, maybe on Slashdot. The actual numbers related to causes of death in Britain, so I converted them, as best I could, to their approximate doppelgangers in the US. If you look at the statistics stored at the National Council for Safety, it shows that the odds of dying in any given year from any form of assault is something like 1 in 16,325. So what percentage of that might be attributed to terrorism?

Well, according to the FBI, between 1991 and 2001, 74 terrorist incidents were recorded in the United States. Of course, that all changed in 2001, when there were just south of 3000 deaths. That has, so far, been our high-water mark. In fact, I don't recall any significant terrorism since then, but let's just assume that becomes the norm. Now, with a current population in the U.S. of just south of 300 million, that puts the odds of being killed by a terrorist at around 1 in 300,000, or 3.3e-6 percent.

In other words, bar fights and wife beaters are a far greater danger to American lives, and I do mean "far", than terrorism. And yet, here we have a president who claims the authority to disregard law at will to protect us all from the 3.3e-6% chance of catching it from a terrorist.

I take bigger chances than that every time I get in my car (1:17,625). You know, at the cost of my civil liberties, my privacy, my due process, I think I can tolerate those odds. I'm just that brave.

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