This text has been published in french a few days ago. Grateful thanks to blogographe who helped me to translate it.
Did the 9/11 terrorists get what they were looking for ? According to sources like Capitalism Magazine or ACLU, laws enacted in order to prevent such new disasters, and known as “Patriot Act”, clearly constitute a big threat to civil liberties. Quote from Capmag:
Here are just a few of the more frightening provisions of Patriot 2. By definition in the bill, almost any American citizen can arbitrarily be designated a terrorist. Section 101 of this act will give the executive branch the power to declare any American a "foreign power" and therefore not a citizen. Those designated will be exempt from the protections of the Constitution.
France shouldn’t use these facts to feed its growing primitive anti American feelings. We also promoted such liberticidal laws, but we have to admit, even sadly, that other countries won’t care too much about our “internal security law”, which “only” harms French society.
Therefore, although Patriot Act could sound only like an internal US question, such a “soviet-like” evolution of the American society would be a genuine worldwide disaster. It should tend to prove that even the world’s most powerful nation can’t fight terrorism without totalitarian measures, and this will certainly delight every tyrant or bureaucratic zealot of security on the planet. But it is not only its homeland that American people has to protect, it’s its values and freedom that is endangered by terrorism. And nobody can protect liberties by clearing them away.
Furthermore, as long as the US will appear as the last barrier against tyrannies and totalitarianism, their interventions in order to protect and promote freedom worldwide, even with use of armed forces, will sound legitimate to a wide range of people in most countries except in France and its leftist media-biased opinion, but that’s another story -, but if everyone can see an authoritative glitch of US governments against their own citizens, this international backing of US actions will totally disappear.
So, as the European Community seems unable to build correct defensive forces, if we can’t call for the US protection against the new threats that terrorists are opposing to our democratic models, who will protect the free world against these new barbarians ? Certainly not MM. Chirac or Villepin.
Finally, a society where liberties collapse produces less wealth, as shows the recent history of the world. USA became the first world power thanks to their superior ability to spread and promote individual freedom. If their wealth should decrease, it could make some leftist organizations like ATTAC happy, but it wouldn’t be a good thing neither for the US people, nor for the whole world economy.
Fascists who launched 9/11 attacks against the USA were certainly looking for such results. Now we can only hope that American civil society, so prone to defend vigorously their fundamental values, will react strongly against the patriot act’s most controversial dispositions, and abrogate them, for the good of the USA first, of the entire world by extension.
Mr. Bush, don't give terrorists what they were looking for. Don't help them to kill your freedoms and ours. Don't shoot yourself in the foot, Kill Patriot Act.
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