Finding the Freedom to Feel Secure

“Civil Liberties Take Back Seat to Safety” (March 10) seems to suggest that American citizens are losing their civil liberties, by making a point of how noncitizens are being detained for immigration violations and suspicion of being part of a terrorist network.

The reporters noted sympathetically how one student from an Arabic country was being deported for a visa violation, and how unfair it was, despite a previous Supreme Court ruling that judged otherwise. The short history lesson I got was that American citizens suffer more than their enemies when we try to protect ourselves against foreign threats.

The article states that “civil liberties have shrunk.” Well, yeah, 3,000-plus Americans were murdered by foreign terrorists on American soil on Sept. 11. That’s why we went to Afghanistan to kill the enemy.

Clyde Feldman

Sherman Oaks

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Your article claims that “the rights enjoyed by U.S. citizens have grown to an extent that the founding fathers probably never imagined.” The writers should have added, “and would not have approved.”

As the founding fathers understood rights, we have been steadily losing them, during times of both war and peace, for much of the last century. The founding fathers envisioned rights as guarantees of opportunity, not results. What has grown is a set of privileges, masquerading as rights, that guarantee results to members of special-interest groups.

Creeping erosion of the 2nd, 9th, 10th and parts of the 1st and 5th amendments to the Constitution have rendered them mere shadows of their former selves. The founding fathers would be horrified to see those rights, which they risked their lives to see recognized, treated with such contempt.

Mark Wallace

Los Angeles

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Thanks for putting some attention on our government’s ocean of silence concerning the Sept. 11 attacks (“Gains and Gaps in Sept. 11 Inquiry,” March 10). There are many unanswered questions about the rather odd sequence of events that occurred that day--and since. But even your article fails to address a rather obvious one.

If, as you say, there has been no (or little) information obtained about the middle management responsible for the planning and staging of the attacks, how can the administration be so certain that it all leads back to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda?

Kenneth Aaron

Los Angeles