Peace, order and good government, eh?: This is where I stopped reading

Since the title of Lawrence Martin’s column of yesterday is Pushing the limits of state surveillance, I would imagine he was going to go on to discuss the continuing assaults on civil liberties and privacy that have been part of the so-called War on Terror™. But I got disgusted at the end of the second paragraph and stopped reading. Ten years on, we are still presented with the insanity that sees a ragtag collection of terrorist twirps, pissants or whatever you want to call them holding hostage the world’s greatest military power. Washington got sucked right into their trap, colossally overspending on defence and driving the treasury into dire debt; starting a war with a non-guilty party on the basis of bogus information at an appalling cost of almost 5,000 American lives; building a surveillance state that erodes if not ravages once-cherished American freedoms. In the war on terror, is there any doubt who the loser has been? I’d say the losers are the Iraqis, who just got written out of the story completely. As a result of that "war with a non-guilty party", hundreds of thousands of them are dead and millions more were wounded, injured or displaced. If…

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