[tivodan1116]

Quote by: Captain Cardio I don't agree with Bush, but what would you guys do to prevent another terrorist attack, if you were in charge?

Pull all troops from all bases outside of the United States immediately. With that many troops on the homefront, we could easily defend our borders from any terrorist or national incursions.
(example: Dividing our military manpower by the size of our borders and coastline, we could put either a land station or a boat with 4 soliders every 18 miles around the entire United States including Alaska and Hawaii. This does not include the manpower of any border protection agencies already attempting to do this. Impractical, but it shows the point)

Stop all foreign aid.

Tell all oil-producing countries they will provide us with oil at the fair price of $40 a barrel or they will cease to exist. That solves the problem of worrying about our "interests"

Tell Americans they travel abroad at their own risk.

Where is a good balance between security and liberty, given the current situation with the middle east?

Well the old Franklin quote about security vs. liberty is cliche, mostly because people don't LISTEN to it and it needs to be repeated.

Any time there is the slightest incursion upon our Constitutional liberty is not worth security. Especially because, as I have shown above, it is easily possible to ensure our security without infringing upon our liberty at all.

Quote by: xyzer Do you think that the fact they haven't been repeated since 9/11 shows that the avowed enemy have just given up.

Logical fallacy: Red herring (shaw did not say they had given up. What he precisely said was that our liberty-infringing efforts since 9/11 have not prevented further attacks. You did not address that point.)

Logical fallacy: Correlation not Causation.
Illustration:

The Simpsons Example

After a single bear wandering into town has drawn an over-reaction from the residents of Springfield, Homer stands outside his house and muses, “Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is working like a charm!”

Lisa sees through his reasoning: “That’s specious reasoning, dad.” Homer, misunderstanding the word “specious”, thanks her for the compliment.

Optimistically, she tries to explain the error in his argument: “By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.” Homer is confused: “Hmm; how does it work?” Lisa: “It doesn’t work; it’s just a stupid rock!” Homer: “Uh-huh.” Lisa: “... but I don’t see any tigers around, do you?”

Homer, after a moment’s thought: “Lisa, I want to buy your rock...”

Correllation does not imply causation. Just because two things occur together, does not mean that one caused the other. Homer argues that as the Bear Patrol vans are correlated with an absence of bears, the former must have caused the latter. Lisa, tongue in cheek, argues that as the presence of her rock is correlated with an absence of tigers, the former must have caused the latter.

At least Homer recognises that the two arguments are on a par, even if he fails to recognise that both are examples of the correlation not causation fallacy.

Appeal to fear is a pathetic description of reality.

Do you even understand what the logical fallacy of the Appeal to Fear is?

As I posted some here don't realize the fact that we have an enemy vowing to destroy us.

1) Because that "fact" has not been shown.
2) Because even assuming, arguendo, that "fact" had been shown, it has not been shown that trampling on the civil liberties of Americans and deposing and executing the only leader in the Middle East standing up to terrorists has reduced or will reduce the so-called efforts to destroy us.

We are at war!

Are we? With terrorists? Besides the Iraq War we started? Appeal to Fear (look it up).

Thus we need to exploit what intelligence we can get before the fact.

Why? You haven't shown how denying civil liberties will accomplish this.

Not sit on our duffs and bitch about civilian rights being violated when there is no evidence, as you admit, thAT ANY SUCH RIGHTS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED!

If the law exists that allows rights to be violated, that in and of itself is a violation of those rights.