"A Bill Born Out of Fear"

Coleen Rowley:

Infiltrating and defeating terrorist networks requires reliable information; rough interrogation tactics such as waterboarding yield the opposite. We have already seen this play out: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured Al Qaeda operative, was tortured and falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein's government provided chemical and biological weapons training to terrorists. Months later, al-Libi recanted all his claims. The real-life consequences, however, cannot be understated: we are in Iraq based in part on bad intelligence obtained via torture.

And dismissing legal principles which have served America well for over two centuries does not make America safer; rather, it removes the moral authority America once held among nations, and diminishes what it means to be American.

This bill was born out of fear: George Bush's fear of being called to account. He was asleep at the wheel on 9/11. He was wrong about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, wrong about Saddam's WMD. His ill-conceived invasion of Iraq has been a failure, and last summer, Bush literally fiddled while New Orleans drowned. George Bush knows he cannot keep America safe, so he is illegally tapping our phones, indefinitely detaining those labeled as 'enemy combatants', and ignoring centuries of established legal precedent in the desperate hope that he will stumble on a magical formula for success. He's asked Congress to give him cover for his cowardice, and John Kline and the GOP-led Congress were only too willing to comply. They placed political expedience above the principles that made this country great.

Shame on them. And shame on all of us if we don't stand up and declare that we the people will not be frightened into violating those principles.

Rowley is an attorney and former FBI Special Agent and Chief Division Counsel who is running for Congress in Minnesota's 2nd District against John Kline, as a Democrat.