Allow me to bring this metaphor away from the kumbayah campfire and into the realm of reality. The image to keep in mind here is from the widely seen video from a t.v. program called something like "When pets go wild".

It starts out with a garden variety tabby being a little aggressive, hissing, snarling, taking largely inneffective swipes at the man trying to subdue it. All of a sudden the animal turns completely feral and launches itself at the man's crotch, sinking its fangs ferociously into the tender inner thigh muscle an then, with its hind legs ripping chunks of skin out, makes for even more tender parts.

Here kitty kitty.

S.L. Toddard makes wildly inaccurate charges against U. S. armed forces, such as: "Attempting to conquer two Muslim nations, it has slaughtered hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of them ...."

Publicly available estimates of the percentage of Iraqi casualties attributable to airstrikes range from 4 to 13 per cent. Even using the disputed figures from the highest total casualty estimate, that of the Opinion Research Business survey, and the highest airstrike percentage, this would put the figure of casualties due to airstrike at around 130,000. This includes combatants as well as non-combatants, and injuries as well as deaths. All studies agree that by far the biggest cause of violent death in Iraq is gunshot, and the New England Journal Of Medicine, using verified data from the independent Iraq Body Count organization, says most of these are executions, i.e. Iraqis killing other Iraqis. I find it revealing that Toddard casually tosses off the figure "millions" that our forces have "perhaps" killed: one who bandies about such fantasy numbers, whether from laziness or malice, and who never misses a chance to characterize American actions in the worst possible light, is, to put the best face on it, not to be taken seriously.

The enemy is scattered all over the world? An American's chances of being killed are infinitesimal? These were incredible statements to make even before Fort Hood. Now, it's insane. This enemy is all over our own country, and our chances of becoming a victim increase daily, and will continue increasing for the foreseeable future, as Rich noted.

Why do people continually charge the U.S. with provoking the hatred and attacks against it? E. g. it's all because we're "in a part of the world that clearly doesn't want us there." Come again? We should be killed because we do what every country does, try to secure the resources vital to its economy? We should be killed because we helped implement what was the consensus of the West, that after the holocaust, a safe home should be made for the Jews, in a land in which they had historical roots? One doesn't have to be a Zionist or dispensationalist, one only needs some of that old-time "don't tread on me" American spirit to hate being told by a bunch of savages from the sand dunes where one can go and who we are allowed to be friends with.

"What about an innocent civilian captured near no battlefield who is alleged, by our CIA, to be a terrorist . One abducted from a street in his hometown and held incommunicado for five years, in solitary confinement, with no access to counsel, while being tortured. Is there any doubt that making that official policy will only increase the resentment and hatred that breeds terrorists?"
Any doubt this policy may make a potential terr think twice? Put a little fear in his dim brain?

What difference does it make if some of the gunmen slaughtering, to speak in Toddardian terms, American troops, are "not religiously motivated fanatics"? So they're inbred halfwits who can't figure out - like certain Americans - that we are NOT occupying them, and that all they have to do is not shoot at us or hide bombs in the road or give aid and comfort to the people who do, and we'll be overjoyed to get on the next plane out? They still deserve to die, and keep on dying, until it dawns on them simply to let U. S. military personnel go about their business, which in no way concerns them (if they are indeed peaceful), and will, in fact, make their country a better place if allowed to proceed.

Neither the Barbary Pirates nor the Indians launched attacks upon U.S. cities or large population centers and or cause thousands of deaths or millions of dollars in damage doing so. Al Qaeda did. U.S. Presidents and Congresses routinely negotiated treaties with the Indians and ratified them and treated them like sovereign nations. Ultimatlely the American continent wasn't big enough nor would Washington tolerate other foreign nations upon the soil, whether they were European or Indian. Congress could have easily declared war on the Creek Nation or the Sioux Nation if it so wished to do so. It chose not to, probably because they assumed the nation would absorb such tribes into the nation as a whole in the future and did not want such a declaration to get in the way.

The U.S. could have declared war upon Mexico for Villa's raid but Villa did not represent the Mexican government and the raid led by Pershing was designed to either capture him or to present such a show of force that neither Villa nor any other bandit group with ideas of raiding border communities because Mexico had fallen into anarchy at that time would try such a thing again.

So many seem to be hung up on the dictionary definition of war as being between nation states. Is it so hard to imagine a resolution drafted saying the "Congress of the United States has Declared War Upon Al Qaeda and any state that willing harbor and support Al Qaeda (which would have meant Afghanistan at that time.)? Isn't it interesting we can unofficially declare ourselves to be at war against poverty, or war against drugs, or war against terrorism but yet find it hard to make it official through a two-thirds vote of our elected representatives? Hmmm? I'm sure the soldiers who are currently in Afghanistan and Iraq think they are at war. They've got the injuries to prove it. We've certainly spent a lot of money and a lot of lives going after this "rag-tag" group of terrorists and yet somehow have not brought them to heel.

If the argument is that the U.S. is not serious about the war, I would respond that if those who support it cannot bring themselves to call it such because of the quibble of a definition, then you're going to have a hard time making people believe it. You can scream "Doncha know there's a war on?" into you are blue in the face. But I assure you, if through a time warp we could bring a fellow from World War II into our own time and space and make him look around and see a nation at war, compared to own experience, he would be hard pressed to find one.

My point in my posts is that the biggest advantage that the neocons have are the useful idiots calling themselves conservatives whose support neocons can always count on when it comes to making war, including many so-called paleos. That is, that no matter how outrageous and incredible their anticonstitutional and socialist militarism is; they can always rally and count on the kneejerk militarists of the Republican Party, and as you must concede, who are mostly from the South, as if they're old warhorses hearing a bugle. Senator Graham of your state is never lacking in Southern support for more and more war, at $1 billion dollars per soldier a year. And when it comes to government medical care, the public option; there are no more zealous advocates of that type of system than the military advocates, a majority of whom seem to be in the South,as you know. The public option is alive and well; it is called the VA medical system along with its feeder system, the military medical system. I'm not a defender of the current administration with all its proposed spending and other left-wing ideas but they did not set about to grow the military "public option," as the previous one did, nor are they clamoring for more "boots on the ground" like conservative Republicans alsways do, even though militarism is the most fundamental form of socialism that there is.

You said at #8: "the U.S. can no longer distinguish between a citizen and a foreigner. Granting citizen’s rights to these foreigners, who should never have been in the country to begin with, is repulsive."

My point was that since we have asserted jurisdiction and sovereignty over the entire world, implicitly for many years but made explicit since 911, who isn't within our jurisdictional boundaries? We have created the conditions in which our government officials went overseas, and then effectively said: na na boo boo, our military and government is not constrained by the Constitution," and started detaining people, citizens and noncitizens alike, innocent and guilty, as if we're communists. And conservatives come out of the woodwork defending Dick Cheney and his neocon handlers, and the wars they started and there torture policies, taken right out of the communist's manuals.

Consequently, we need to demand that our government cannot detain people without allowing our captives the "right" to show that the government is holding them wrongly; that is not an unrealistic or "liberal" notion when appied to people living under our military rule, which includes people living in the US. One thing conservatives always take for granted is that citizenship is self evident so if some government official detains someone and asserts that they are aliens, then they are to have no "rights," assuming it could never happen to good American conservatives, who believe in gun rights, oppose abortion clinics, and give money to organizations that support each of those issues, even after guns are used for terrorist acts and abortion clinics are attacked. By the legal standard created by the last administration, that is "material support for terrorism," and few conservatives recognize the risk they have been put in by their own advocacy and "allies." Talk about useful idiots for the neocons.

You do take the position that "the denial of due process to anyone is a slippery slope since freedom consists ENTIRELY of restrictions that government has been forced to accept over a long, difficult, and uneven process of centuries."

That is the point here; not giving "terrorists" rights but maintaining restrictions on the government to prevent unlimited tyranny. Consequently, we shouldn't complain when some people living under our rule, regardless of what they're accused of or where it allegedly occured (because the entire globe is under our jurisdiction now, or so we assert) is given the minimum right to contest the right of the government to detain them. It seems that is what you are saying Mary Surratt was entitled to even though Sec. Stanton said she was a terrorist, and in rebellion against the government so that she had no rights.

No one, of course.

I agree with you, I hope you understand. I was merely illustrating the neoconservative/Fox News Right "argument". I never get used to the ability of the mainstream 'right' to chew, swallow and regurgitate the most illogical, self-contradictory arguments. These are people, don't forget (and I never tire of pointing this out), who sing loudly the praises of "small government" while demanding that same government rule over, lead and police the entire world.

The neocons would argue that they (the accused terrorists) are actually in a third category, and that individuals in that category have (under US law) no rights whatsoever, and that the power the federal gov't has over them is unlimited.