From David Tell’s “The Specter of Terrorism” (on behalf of the editors of The Weekly Standard, and worth excerpting at length):

[…] There are other, vastly more important and productive questions to be asked about the post-September 11 performance of George W. Bush’s executive branch than ‘Does this mean we’re living in a police state?’ It should little relieve us that the correct answer is no, after all; we have a right to expect as much, at minimum. We also have a right to be disgusted that so many purportedly serious voices in our politics have repeatedly granted themselves leave to suggest the answer might be yes — and have thereby gone AWOL from their duty to make a substantive contribution to democratic deliberations about a national emergency. The president and his aides do not have a monopoly on wisdom about how best to prevent the next World Trade Center atrocity. They need — and should want — some real, detailed criticism of their ideas. They are manifestly not receiving it.

Last week Attorney General Ashcroft announced that the Immigration and Naturalization Service would soon implement a formal registration system for temporary foreign visitors traveling to America on passports issued by certain Middle Eastern countries known to export terrorism. Registrants will be fingerprinted and photographed at ports of entry, and required to notify the INS of any change of address they might make while here. Theoretically at least, it’s a perfectly sensible, legally uncomplicated program that hardly represents a dramatic break with past practice. In fact, the INS is supposed to be registering all non-citizens this way already — according to a law first enacted in 1952 and routinely enforced without controversy until the mid-1980s, when the Service decided it could no longer handle the logistical burden and quietly gave up tracking people visiting on temporary visas. Really, now: Why should permanent U.S. residents carrying green cards be forced to register with the INS, as still they are, when the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are not?

On the other hand, Ashcroft’s new system won’t actually capture the likes of Moussaoui and Reid, who came here on French and British passports, not on Middle Eastern ones. So maybe the plan, which promises to be an administrative nightmare in any case, should be targeted somewhat differently? This is the kind of question that fairly begs for extended and exhaustive public analysis. But no, reaction has been of a different character entirely. The ubiquitous James Zogby of the Arab American Institute: ‘The message it sends is that we’re becoming like the Soviet Union, with people registering at police stations.’ Ameena Jandali of the Islamic Networks Group, with a grotesquely inappropriate Holocaust analogy heard round the world: ‘What’s going to be next? Are all Muslims going to have to wear a yellow or green crescent or something?’ Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois: ‘It’s going to reach a tipping point if we’re not careful…and end up sacrificing many of the values of our country.’

You’d think, with a war on and all, that these people would try just a little bit harder to sound smarter than the average college sophomore at a campus sit-in, wouldn’t you? You’d think, for example, when the Justice Department releases a 24-page, single-spaced revision of its guidelines for FBI terrorism investigators, that a person would want to read the damn thing before ventilating about it to the newspapers. But you’d be wrong.

The ACLU says that under the new guidelines, ‘Any time you write a check, use a credit card, buy something on credit, make department store purchases, surf the web, use an E-Z pass to buy gasoline, or pay a toll, the FBI may be permitted…to purchase this information to build a profile on you.’ What the ACLU says is false — unless, perhaps, the FBI has demonstrable reason to believe that ‘you’ are someone who plans to fly a jetliner into the side of a skyscraper. The New York Times editorial page reports that federal agents have now been given ‘unbridled power’ to, for example, ‘show up at the doors of people who order politically unpopular books on Amazon.com.’ Which is similarly false. Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, warns that the Justice Department is preparing to ‘throw respect for civil liberties into the trash heap’ and return to ‘the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King.’ Also false.

Here again, of course, exactly how, to what extent, and with what authority the Bureau should conduct its domestic terrorism investigations seems to us a legitimate and wide open question that could not help but profit from rigorous national debate. But the Bush administration is so far conducting that debate pretty much all by itself — while the rest of the world plays imaginary French resistance to an equally imaginary Justice Department gestapo.

Somewhere in the vast expanse of reality between the president’s domestic security proposals and the hysterical juvenilia those proposals have occasioned lies the best possible solution to the terrorism crisis this country now faces. Surely we can’t afford to overlook that solution. Shouldn’t someone be looking for it?

Wonderfully, wonderfully articulated.

And timely, too — given that we’re about to be inundated with “concerns” over the treatment of this Padilla fucker, a guy who was working on a plan to detonate explosives laced with nuclear material on American soil (on behalf of an organization that has declared open war against us, and is bent on destroying our civilization).

Of course, we should listen to such “concerns” politely. And then we should ignore them unblinkingly.