Donīt like to get into politics here, but this is a basic human rights
isssue.
QUOTE
The Right Fright:
Fear and Terror
by Lawrence M. Hinman
Baltimore Sun, Op-ed, October 21, 2004
Those with no fear are fools, underestimating real dangers or
overestimating their own abilities. Those with too much fear see
threats as greater than they are, and they often underestimate their
ability to respond effectively to danger. They are afraid to risk life
and limb but fail to understand that these are often of less value
than honor, integrity, freedom and other similar values.
Our goal in life - and in foreign policy as well - is not to be
fearless but to have appropriate fears: to fear the right thing at the
right time, in the right proportion and in the right way.
Terrorism seeks to create disproportionate and distorted fear, and
terrorists gain power that would otherwise be far beyond their grasp
through the manipulation and distortion of our fears. They seek to
have us fear the wrong things, to do so in a way that is
disproportionate to the actual level of threat and to act in
inappropriate ways in response to those fears. In so doing, they gain
a control over our lives far beyond that justified by their actual
power.
Terrorists are seldom alone in the manipulation of fear, and one of
the great ironies of terrorism is that its power is often increased by
politicians and media who see the manipulation of fear as furthering
their own agendas. These politicians may join in exaggerating and
distorting our fears and then - here is where they part company from
the terrorists themselves - they depict themselves as the answer to
these inflated and distorted fears.
They exaggerate the seriousness of the threat in order to highlight
themselves as the answer to these growing concerns. News media,
concerned with increasing market share, ensure that this message
reaches the widest possible audience. Critics are often depicted as
out of touch with the real threats confronting a country, as leading
the country to an eventual cataclysmic disaster.
In this process, instigated by terrorists but amplified by local
politicians and news media, our appropriate fears are distorted. We
begin to fear the wrong things, to fear them in a way disproportionate
to their actual level of threat and to pursue courses of action that
respond to these misperceived threats. In the process, other important
fears either recede into the background or are attached to
inappropriate objects and ineffective patterns of response.
For example, we stop fearing the loss of civil liberties and instead
fear, in an exaggerated way, terrorist attacks. We fear that our way
of life is under attack, but then we curtail quintessentially American
freedoms in response to this fear.
We Americans need to recover our appropriate fears. We need to be
afraid of the potential damage that can be done by terrorists, but we
need to recognize that there are far greater threats to American life
and limb, threats that persist day after day.
Of the 208 terrorist attacks launched in the last year, only a handful
of them were directed against the United States; of the 625 people
killed in terrorist attacks, 35 were Americans. At the same time, many
other threats - depicted far less prominently in the news and
discussed far less frequently by politicians - have put more Americans
at greater risk, including threats to the environment, inadequate
health care resources and a reduction of funding for education. Yet we
largely have ignored those threats and have been indifferent to the
development of effective responses to them.
There is no shortage of greater threats. More Americans died from
traffic fatalities in September 2001 than in the attacks on the twin
towers. Every three days, tobacco kills the same number of people who
died in the World Trade Center attacks. About 195,000 Americans die
every year from avoidable medical mistakes - the equivalent of a 9/11
attack every six days.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself. But fear is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a
fitting and helpful response to genuine threats. The absence of fear
can lead to miscalculations and mistakes. But fear must be directed
toward the real threats and must be proportionate to the actual level
of danger.
When we allow our fears to be hijacked, to be distorted by the
terrorists and by politicians who manipulate those exaggerated and
highly selective fears for their own purposes, we no longer have
appropriate fears.
When we allow ourselves to embark on courses of action that exacerbate
the threats against us and trample some of our most precious freedoms
in the process, we allow a distorted and disproportionate fear to lead
us down a path that is ultimately destructive to ourselves and to our
most fundamental values.
We do not need to stop being afraid. We just need to be afraid of the
right things and in the right way.
UNQUOTE
http://ethics.sandiego.edu/Applied/Military/torture.asp
By fighting among yourselves, and being extremely hateful to each
other on these issues, you are giving the terrorists and the
politicians who would use the situation to control you, even more
power, and furthering their aims.
MC