Once again, while many Senators slept and some stayed on the campaign trail, one stood up and spared us the devastation of a direct assault on the Constitution. The first woman elected to both the U.S. House and the Senate, Margaret Chase Smith, was the catalyst that spelled the beginning of the end to the McCarthy era when she stood up to his witch hunts, saying:

“Surely these are sufficient reasons to make it clear to the American people that it is time for a change and that a Republican victory [for President] is necessary to the security of this country. Surely it is clear that this nation will continue to suffer as long as it is governed by the present ineffective Democratic Administration.

Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.

I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest”.

For six years now, every conceivable assault has been made on our Constitution by this Republican White House and almost every Republican in Congress. All of it because one underarmed, undermanned enemy spent many years planning to utilize our own technology and our own transportation vehicles in the shocking 9-11 attacks.

Due process has been destroyed, habeus corpus has been destroyed, our right to be secure in our homes and possessions has been destroyed, and our agreement to the Geneva Conventions has been destroyed. When the torture videos surfaced from Saddam Hussein’s favorite torture prison - Abu Ghraib - we were shocked again that American troops had taken up the practices of that monstrous man. And this administration assured us it was only the result of a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel. Even though the prison administrator insisted the barrel was poisoned by orders from above.

Osama Bin Laden didn’t destroy these foundations of our freedom. This Republican administration did. Repeatedly. And the longest lasting lies say ‘waterboarding is not torture’.

Scott Horton wrote last Saturday:

This resurrects the process of official cruelty under the Stuart monarchs in seventeenth century England. Persons accused of state crimes very frequently were interrogated with the use of specific techniques, including the rack, the thumbscrew, and waterboarding. King James I personally described the process in The Kings Booke (1606). He would, on the advice of his officers, “approve no new torture,” but he would certainly avail himself of the existing practices. In ascending order of severity they were: thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews.

That from the man who commissioned the King James Bible in 1611, the translation most Protestant religions in our country utilize today, nearly 400 years later. His verdict on waterboarding existed before the Mayflower Puritans arrived. The foundation for our US Constitution preceded him by another 400 years with the passage of the Magna Carta in 1215. That 792 year old document established the concept of Constitutional rule of law.

Osama Bin Laden did not attack the wisdom of the ages upon which democracy itself rests. He attacked the symbol of our global business strength and the symbol of our military might. His simultaneous symbolic attack on our federal government was thwarted by patriots in a plane over Pennsylvania when they got word of his intent midway.

They died defending the same government that has ever since been attacking our rights and freedoms, a government that again rides ‘the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear’, a government insisting we have to destroy the Constitution to save us from men who never built an airplane, nor a skyscraper, nor the Internet, nor the cellphone that warned the patriots over Pennsylvania.

For six years, the two men who never built nor ran a government, who never were elected by citizens of any nation nor state, whose power arose from weaponry designed and built by others, none of them their followers, have been forced into hiding from nations led by Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and secular non-believers. Not one nation on the planet declares itself an ally with the two men forced to hide because of the murders of nearly 4,000 they’ve caused over the past 15 years.

More will die yet by their plotting and planning. They may kill a few hundred here or there, but the only real weapon of mass destruction - a nuclear bomb - that they could overthrow a nation with remains well beyond their capacity to produce. They aren’t the first war criminals who have hoped to purchase such a weapon, nor will they be the last. Should they gain their improbable wish and utilize such a weapon, their lives and the region they hide in would be exterminated immediately, permanently ending their thin reign over our imaginations.

It is that thin, brief reign that gains them any power at all. Fear of what they might do is the only power of terror. And our current administration promotes their power, advances that fear and assaults our laws and rights and democratic foundations by insisting every standard must be aborted and abandoned, that innocents must be sacrificed within known and secret prisons while the hidden men exist. The powers this administration has seized, along with their political and economic fortunes, have been advanced ever since that dark September day. Some could understandably surmise that there’s little real motivation to find the two terrorists since their own power and wealth is advanced while the two men live.

I subscribe to no conspiracy theory but my cynicism is reasonable after six years of observing the actions of our government. They cannot find the anthrax killers who targeted Democratic lawmakers. They cannot find Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They can distort intelligence, destroy the careers of patriots, launch wars, pass out contracts to cronies. and break laws and treaties with impunity by maintaining a cloak of secrecy and by magnifying the only weapon of terrorists: fear.

Yesterday, Senator Dodd set aside his own political ambitions to stand in the way of the most outrageous claim yet of the fresh power to violate the law. The administration began wiretapping Americans BEFORE the 9-11 attacks. They asked several powerful telecom companies to join them in this lawbreaking in February 2001, when the Bush administration was less than one month old. . At least one refused to cooperate - Qwest - aware that the administration was acting outside any legal authority to do so.

This administraction now seeks to prevent an investigation or prosecution of the corporate lawbreakers who agreed to the criminal course BEFORE anyone’s actions were ruled by post-9/11 fears.

Christopher Dodd responded:

“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy,” Mr. Dodd said in a statement.

“The president should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens,” he said. “I thank all my colleagues who joined me in fighting and winning a stay in the rush to grant retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who may have violated the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

The House of Representatives stripped the bill of the retroactive immunity provision already, so thankfully Dodd’s not alone. But yesterday, with the assistance of Senator Russ Feingold, their commitment to their oaths to protect the Constitution proved the critical impediment to a rushed verdict that the White House promoted. Dodd commanded the floor for over nine hours before convincing the Senate to wait till January so a full discussion can take place about preserving our democracy from further destruction.

“I respect immensely the people who spend a lot of time on these issues. But this is a critical moment,” Dodd said. “This is one of these moments you need to be here for this, to engage in this debate and discussion. They don’t happen everyday, but this is an important one. This goes right to the heart of who we are. This isn’t about selling your soul, it’s about giving it away, in my view, if you don’t stand up for these rights.”

In doing so, Dodd did not take the risks of certain patriots in a plane over Pennsylvania six years ago. But he honored their aims, to protect our democratic government from a ruinous attack. And just as Margaret Chase Smith did 57 years ago, perhaps his will be the turning point against the climate of fear begun by two hidden men and promoted by an administration bent on extraordinary powers with its secrets equally hidden.

A democratic nation cannot long stand without legal foundations, stripping freedom and rights from the governed, hidden under a veil where the ‘Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear’ ride roughshod.

I join tens of millions of Americans in my gratitude for the efforts of Senators Dodd and Feingold. Franklin Roosevelt warned long ago that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ If fear can be defeated, we rob terrorist masterminds of their primary weapon. Reason and justice will always prove superior in the defense and advance of freedom. And the surrender of freedom is the course of cowards and men without principle who rot the entire barrel from the top.