A new semester and already the paranoia bug is spreading like wildfire in the bowels of the Student Union.
This letter is in response to your Jan. 20 editorial titled "Spy games hit home." Your editorial ignored several facts and makes it look like you would prefer another large terrorist attack to efficient intelligence gathering techniques.
Not only is President Bush's circumvention of the FISA court not without precedent, but it is also a gross exaggeration to claim that somehow our government is now "spying" on everybody to the left of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). As inept as he may have been at making decisions concerning national security (even President Clinton used the same approach to intelligence-gathering back in the 1990s) to date, no innocent people have fallen victim to any kind of "illegal spying."
What the author of the editorial also missed is that all the groups mentioned in the article could represent potential harbors for enemy agents. Investigating such groups has nothing to do with stifling dissent but with finding our enemies before they can harm us. Fact-based, intelligent dissent is essential to a healthy democracy, but many liberals have become so extreme and have fallen so deeply in love with so-called extreme Muslim or communist ideologies that they have come very close to being enemies of America themselves.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather not take any chances with such cases of near-insurgency.
