The Rutherford Institute :: An Unbearable and Choking Hell: The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9/11
“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S.
government will lead the American people in — and the West in general —
into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October
2001), as reported by CNN
What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11,
2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have
gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a
representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a
freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.
What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has
snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against
government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been
terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of
compliance. The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time—Osama bin
Laden, Saddam Hussein and now ISIS—but the end result remains the same:
our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in
exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.
