The Media Aren't the Enemy in Iraq

[marct]

Hi Culpeper,

I couldn't agree with your more but America has used sedition acts to enforce the flow of information or conduct that could be counterproductive to a war effort, national security, or in the best interest of the government to prevent people from weakening the government depending on the circumstance.

I certainly agree with you that it has been done in the past. This doesn't, to mind, necessarily make it right. After all, the original Continental Congress was sedition as were many of the acts of your founding fathers. It strikes me that there is a balanceing line that floats somewhere between sedition, defined as destroying the social contract, and sedition defined as opposing the government.

Generally, I find myself opposed to the first, except in extreme circumstances (hey, I'm descended from United Empire Loyalists ). The second, however, I find myself supporting. I don't think that any group of people, and that's all a "government" is, has a monopoly on "truth" <shrug>. Honestly, I do think that a large part of this stems from the US having a de facto two party system where your head of state has to be a member of one of the parties.

The bottom line is that national security trumps any Constitutional rights.

Honestly, I can't agree with that. Your constitution is your social contract, and one of the few in the world's history that has ever been openly stated and debated. If it guarentees something as a right, then that must hold until your constitution is changed, otherwise you are destroying all of it.

"National security" means more than just a surface veneer of stability and "business as usual" - it means a security of the soul of the nation and, for the US, the soul of you nation is the constitution as it is held in the hearts and minds of your citizens. Changing your constitution from time to time is a necessary adaptation. Abrogating it is an abomination; it is literally selling your soul for short term "gains".

We learned this, or at least some of us did, when we interned Japanesse-Canadians. In 1939, Tommy Douglas, then leader of the CCF, tried to warn us of the cost it would have for our national soul, and the government of the time didn't listen. Our "national soul" wasn't built around a constitution but, rather, around a long and often painful history of developing toleration (it goes back to the documents of surrender of Quebec in 1760). We forgot that, and we are still paying the price for it. I would strongly urge you to learn from our mistake, and not make the same one.

Marc